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The collapse of the Soviet Union let loose a flood of information about the history of the tsarist and Soviet periods. In the years since, scholars have produced much valuable work based on that new information, as the pages of Voprosi Istorii Estestvoznaniia i Tekhniki (Questions in the history of science and technology) attest. Cooperation and communication among researchers are far easier and faster than they were, aided immensely by the internet and the worldwide web. In Russia, the community of historians of science and technology is healthy if not yet fully robust.1 It seems to be a good time to pause and take stock. What have we as historians of science and technology learned in the past fifteen or so years? A recent conference on Russian and Soviet science between 1860 and 1960 at the University of Georgia gathered academics from seven countries whose major problem was securing funding, not visas.2 It served to demonstrate [End Page 623] that in many ways, studying Russia is now like studying any normal European country—by which I mean a less blatantly ideological environment, few travel restrictions, easier access to materials and fellow scholars, and not viewing one's own history as standard and everyone else's as "abnormal." The conference provided an opportunity to step back, look at the tsarist and Soviet periods as a whole, and ask (or re-ask) several important questions. How accurate and comprehensive was our pre-glasnost understanding of Soviet science and technology? How did Communist rule and the cold war reshape Russian science and technology? Why has the Russian environment proved so inhospitable to technology—forcing so many scientists, engineers, and inventors to emigrate and frequently inhibiting technological diffusion within the country itself? Does it make sense that studies of industrialization and modernization now routinely lump Russia with "the rest" instead of the West? How has the institutional framework of Russian science and technology shaped their evolution? Why have efforts to reform the Academy of Sciences and promote closer links between science and technology failed? Are newly available sources of information primarily allowing us to fill in the many gaps in our knowledge, or are our conceptual models and essential understanding of science and technology in Russian history changing? Should they change? Where should the history of Russian science and technology go from here? Overall, the pre-glasnost record holds up reasonably well. Its main shortcomings, reflecting both the lack of access to information and ideological bias, are a tendency to view controversies as emanating from the top down instead of locally; an insufficient appreciation of the slow and incomplete diffusion of technologies within the Soviet Union; and a failure to grasp the importance of the interplay of science and the public.3 Still, our understanding and knowledge have grown in many areas. Researching the history of Soviet science and technology brings to mind the parable of the elephant and the blind men. In recent years, we have been able to touch more of the animal, if not yet all of it. Individuals and organizations have made numerous efforts to collect and publish archival and other information.4 As Loren Graham has noted, Russian researchers have [End Page 624] "detailed the ideological distortion of fields as diverse as psychology, geology, physiology, mathematics, public health, agriculture, astronomy, physics, education, chemistry, and medicine" as well as the better-known areas of genetics and cybernetics.5 Studies on specific industries and projects have provided wonderful cases to compare with other countries.6 Perhaps the most spectacular advances have been in two areas closely tied to national defense and prestige: nuclear weapons and space. Recent publications have provided a wealth of information on nuclear weapons and strategy.7 We are light-years ahead in our understanding of the Soviet space program and its effects...
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