A crisis often highlights features of a group that otherwise might be more difficult to define. Attitudes, interests, and behavior that, in normal times, seem habitual and almost unconscious become more focused when challenged by events. In early 1918 the technostructure in Russia, like the rest of society, was in crisis. In factories and mines all over Russia, committees of workers had seized control and were attempting to manage the enterprises. Uncooperative engineers were sometimes trundled away in wheelbarrows and dumped unceremoniously outside the gates by unfriendly workers, or even physically attacked and sometimes killed.³ More cooperative engineers found themselves...

In early 1918 the Bolsheviks actively began to court the technical intelligentsia in the hope of attracting their cooperation in the organization of a new society. The evidence below seeks to establish the ardor with which some of the leading Bolsheviks, with Lenin as chief matchmaker, wooed the technical intelligentsia in the early years of the Soviet system, and to show some of the results of that effort. In the years between 1918 and 1928 a match was struck between the Communist power structure and the prerevolutionary Russian technostructure, but the resulting relationship proved to be more a marriage of...

Nineteen twenty-eight marked the beginning of a major attempt to change the social composition and behavior of the Soviet technostructure. This attempt had two aspects: pressure on the old technostructure, and an effort to create a large, new group of technical specialists, qualitatively different from the older groups. Part 2 will focus on the relations between the old specialists and the Soviet power structure in the years 1928-1931, the beginning of Stalin’s “revolution from above,” which was intended to transform Soviet society fundamentally. Many of the issues that had been important to the technostructure since before the revolution came into...

In the history of Communist societies, the leadership has devoted a good deal of attention to the recurring tension between “expert” and “red,” that is, between the need for technical expertise and a certain unease with, and distrust of, technical and scientific groups by the regimes in power. An important theme in the early years of the Soviet system, this tension has reappeared in recent years.¹ In Communist Chinese society, in a different context and a somewhat different form, this conflict has also been apparent, and was a major theme during the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s.² Why has...

The reaction of industrial managers and the technostructure itself to the atmosphere created by the Shakhty and Industrial party affairs deserves some comment, particularly because it led to changes with major, long-term effects. Contemporary observers reported both negative and positive results. Opposition to some of the negative consequences developed among several interest groups. Such opposition was centered especially in two groups: the highest officials and industrial managers ofVesenkha, and representatives of the specialists themselves, particularly officials of the trade union sections that represented the technical intelligentsia.

Neither of these groups publicly protested the trials per se or questioned the...

In her memoirs of Soviet life in the 1920s and 1930s, Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of the Soviet poet, discusses an aspect of Soviet behavior little commented upon elsewhere. The wife of an important party official once asked her during conversation: “Whom do you go to see?” The questioner wondered who among the party leadership was the patron of the Mandelstams. When she passed this on to her husband, the poet assured his wife, “Everyone goes to see someone. There’s no other way. We go to see Nikolai Ivanovich [Bukharin].”¹ Nadezhda Mandelstam called this informal institution “transmission belts,” the manner in...

Fundamental to an understanding of the Soviet Union in the years from 1928 to 1933 is a controversy over the creation of a new technical intelligentsia. The issues involved are interesting for their own sake, but this controversy has implications that go beyond the immediate context of Soviet society in upheaval during the First Five-Year Plan. They touch on a more general question: the relationship between science, technology, and higher education in an industrializing society, particularly under a socialist system. This chapter deals with the specifics of this controversy and some of the more general implications of these events.

The...

Soviet records concerning the early Five-Year Plans are rich in statistics on the social composition of the student body in higher technical education. We must use these statistics with some caution, however, for we have no way of carefully evaluating how accurate they are, and we can only compare and analyze them for internal coherence. They tell us more about what the party and government attempted to do in their recruitment policies, or what they wished the general population to think they were doing, than they tell about the actual composition of the new technical specialists who finished higher education...

What happened to students once they were enrolled in higher technical education? This study has already focused on some critical policy conflicts and the recruitment of students into technical education, seeking insights into the relationship between industrialization, higher technical education, and Stalinism. It is appropriate now to shift the focus to an analysis of critical trends in the quantity and quality of such education during the first three Five-Year Plans, the years from 1928 to 1941. Among other things, such an analysis develops a setting for interpreting the relationship between the technical intelligentsia and the changing social structure of the...

The student environment in Tsarist Russia was important both for the development of the revolutionary movement and for the origins of professions in the Russian Empire. Before 1917, the halls, classrooms, and student quarters of higher technical education were filled not only with talk of technical studies, but with the arguments and rhetoric of social change, revolutionary and otherwise. Students in technical schools were active in a variety of revolutionary and reformist movements.

As students in higher technical education before 1917 had been a volatile and dynamic element in Russian society, and had provided part of the nucleus for revolutionary...

The role of the production specialist was probably the most difficult and risky of any filled by members of the technical intelligentsia. As one Soviet specialist active in these years put it, the production engineer had to be “able to walk a tightrope without an umbrella.”² Work at the production level subjected technical specialists to intense pressures, for which their educations had only partially and often poorly prepared them. Such work changed the lives and careers of many young specialists, drove some to drink or to prison and many others to seek a more prestigious or less dangerous role in...

The tendency for graduates of higher technical schools to avoid working directly in production was an old one in Russia, dating from well before the revolution and deeply rooted in the traditions of Russian engineering. I have already commented on the higher status and differing social origins of engineers employed in Tsarist ministries (chapter 1).³ The so-called “Ministerial engineers” were the first formally educated technical specialists in Russia, drawn largely from the nobility in the beginning, to staff technical departments of the central government concerned with the military, civil engineering, mining, and transportation networks such as waterways and railroads. Their...

Members of the technical intelligentsia who fled production for work in research and development found another set of problems in their new environment. While the conflicts and risks were somewhat different—their work was more removed from contact with the working class and from the pressures of fulfilling high quantitative targets—work in research and development had its own frustrations. Judging from contemporary accounts and memoirs, the greatest frustration was the difficulty of successfully introducing into production new inventions and processes worked out in research institutes and laboratories. The process of technological innovation required long lead times, and great patience...

Between 1933 and 1938 the Soviet Union attempted to set a number of world records in aviation. The flood of books, articles, posters, films, postage stamps, and folk art commemorating these events has now nearly faded from the memory of all but a few collectors, yet the significance of this episode in the history of the 1930s goes well beyond its purely technical importance. The argument developed below views these events in a more general context and attempts to develop a novel interpretation of their significance. It focuses on the relationship between technology and social change in a developing society....