CHORUS & hps.cesee global book talk: Pictures from the exhibition. Science and technology in the early USSR

CHORUS & hps.cesee global book talk: Pictures from the exhibition. Science and technology in the early USSR. Thursday, March 13, 12:00 pm ET / 17:00 CET / 18:00 Kyiv, Zoom.

Virtual platforms CHORUS (Colloquium for the History of Russian and Soviet Science) & HPS.CESEE (History of Science in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe) are proud to present their forthcoming book talk on a new publication on history of science exhibitions. Douglas Weiner and Nikolai Krementsov will join Olga Elina to comment on her recent book: Kartinki s vystavki. Nauka i tekhnologii v rannem SSSR (po materialam Vserossiiskoi vystavki 1923 goda) [Pictures from the exhibition. Science and technology in the early USSR (based on the materials of the All-Russian Exhibition of 1923)] (2024) [1], in a discussion moderated by Eglė Rindzevičiūtė.

Thursday, March 13, 12:00 pm ET / 17:00 CET / 18:00 Kyiv, Zoom.

The meeting is free and open to the public. To receive the Zoom link, please register here: https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/Gi8_j7tsTBaKXOaK024MyQ or write to hps.cesee@gmail.com

[1] Ольга Елина, Картинки с выставки. Наука и технологии в раннем СССР (по материалам Всероссийской выставки 1923 года) (Рутения, 2024)

“The book is devoted to the history of the First All-Russian (All-Union) Agricultural and Craft-Industrial Exhibition with a Foreign Section, which took place in Moscow in 1923 and became the prototype of the All-Russian Exhibition of Economic Achievements (VDNKh).

Elina focuses on the scientific-educational and technical-technological components of the exhibition. Using a wide range of sources, she studies various subjects of the show - the tasks set by its organizers; the role of scientists as experts and exhibitors of the exhibition; the purpose, content and appearance of the expositions themselves; ‘workdays’ and holidays of the exhibition. At the same time, the exhibition is presented as an instrument of ‘scientific diplomacy,’ an as an agitation and propaganda campaign aimed at the peasantry.”

Participants

Olga Elina is doctor of Historical Sciences, Candidate of Biological Sciences, Chief Researcher of the Department of Historiography and Source Study of the History of Science and Technology, IIET RAS. She recently coedited The Art and Science of Making the New Man in Early-Twentieth-Century Russia (with N. Krementsov and Y. Howell, 2021) and The Lysenko Controversy as a Global Phenomenon (with W. DeJong-Lambert and N. Krementsov, 2017)

Nikolai Krementsov is a professor at the University of Toronto's Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, specializing in the history of science, medicine, and technology, with a focus on Russian history. Among his notable works are Stalinist Science (1997), and With and Without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the Fate of Eugenics in Russia (2018)

Eglė Rindzevičiūtė is an Associate Professor of Criminology and Sociology, the Department of Criminology, Politics and Sociology, Kingston University London, the UK. She is the author of The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World (Cornell University Press, 2016) and The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future through Science (Cornell University Press, 2023).

Douglas R. Weiner is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at the University of Arizona, specializing in Russian and Soviet environmental history. Among his significant works are Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (1988), which examines early Soviet conservation efforts, and A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (1999), exploring environmental activism during the Soviet era.