Overview

Maria Rogacheva’s Soviet Scientists Remember gives voice to one of the most prominent and educated groups in the late USSR: scientists. Lifting the veil of secrecy that covered scientists during the Cold War, this book brings together six first-person accounts of residents of the formerly closed scientific town of Chernogolovka. In their interviews, scientists talk about growing up in Stalin’s Russia and surviving the Great Patriotic War, their decision to join the scientific intelligentsia, and the outstanding opportunities that were available to them in the heyday of the Cold War. They reflect on their daily lives in a privileged scientific community and their relationship with the Soviet state and the Communist Party. Soviet Scientists Remember sheds light on how ordinary people experienced the transformation of Soviet society after Stalin’s death, as well as its tumultuous transition to the post-Soviet era in the 1990s.

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9781498574341

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Influential, highly educated, and critically minded, Soviet scientists represented an elite cohort in the Soviet Union after World War II, yet their lived experiences under a system that exacted total loyalty remain woefully understudied. Drawing on oral history methodologies, Maria A. Rogacheva helps fill this gaping hole in the literature with this fine collection of illuminating personal narratives. These stories aid us in comprehending not only how big science functioned in the Soviet Union during the Cold War, but also how individuals' personal encounters with Soviet power shaped their attitudes toward critical social, political, and economic issues. Wide-ranging, their views reflect the Soviet state's capacity to empower-and to constrain. Soviet Scientists Remember: Oral Histories of the Cold War Generation is a must-read for anyone interested in the Soviet intelligentsia, science, and daily life under late socialism and afterward. -- Donald J. Raleigh, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Author Information

Maria A. Rogacheva is professor at George Mason University.

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