CHORUS & hps.cesee global book talk: Economic Knowledge in Crisis: Economists and the State in the Late Soviet Union

CHORUS & hps.cesee global book talk: Economic Knowledge in Crisis: Economists and the State in the Late Soviet Union. Thursday, April 10, 11:00 am ET / 17:00 CET / 18:00 Kyiv, Zoom.

ABOUT THIS EVENT

Virtual platforms CHORUS (Colloquium for the History of Russian and Soviet Science) & HPS.CESEE (History of Science in Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe) are inviting you to the forthcoming discussion of a new book on the history of Soviet economics. Ewa Dąbrowska and Ilya Matveev will join Olessia Kirtchik to comment on her recent book: Economic Knowledge in Crisis: Economists and the State in the Late Soviet Union [1], in a discussion moderated by Slava Gerovitch.

Thursday, April 10, 11:00 am 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/LInm1rrqSzqQFiI0muwJzw or write to hps.cesee@gmail.com

[1] Economic Knowledge in Crisis: Economists and the State in the Late Soviet Union. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan 2024.

“This book aims to shed new light on the puzzle of the late Soviet conversion to the “market” and capitalism by revisiting the history of Soviet reform economics. Using a variety of sources, including interviews with economists, archival files, and published materials, it examines the social contexts in which economists employed in economic administration and research institutions could have played a crucial public and political role, the forms of their participation, and the social and political logic behind the selection of economic experts and their rise to power during perestroika and the “transition” period. It also compares the professional trajectories of these reformist economists and assesses the scope of this group’s influence in the post-Soviet period in order to conclude on the new state of economic expertise in Russia.”

Participants

Ewa Dąbrowska is a Postdoc in the Cluster “Contestations of the liberal Script” and at the Institute for East European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. She obtained her PhD from the University of Amsterdam with the thesis on ideas and policy change in Putin’s Russia. Her current research focuses on alternatives to the liberal norms and institutions in the governance of the Internet, data and the digital economy in Russia and the Global South. More information https://www.scripts-berlin.eu/people/Dabrowska/index.html 

Olessia Kirtchik is a sociologist and CNRS researcher, specializing in the sociology of science and technology. She holds a PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and has held academic positions in Russia, France, and Austria. Her research focuses on the history of cybernetics, AI, and the circulation of economic ideas. Notable publications include “The Soviet Scientific Programme on AI” (BJHS Themes, 2023) and “Computers for the Planned Economy” (Europe-Asia Studies, 2022). She is currently working on the IAction project, studying AI’s role in public administration in France. More information: https://cis.cnrs.fr/en/olessia_kirtchik/ 

Ilya Matveev is an independent Marxist researcher in Russian and international political economy. He is currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley and a member of the research group Public Sociology Laboratory. He is a founding editor of Openleft.ru. His recent publications include “From the Chicago Boys to Hjalmar Schacht: The Trajectory of the (Neo)Liberal Economic Expertise in Russia” (Problems of Post-Communism, 2024) and "When the Whole Is Less Than the Sum of Its Parts: Russian Developmentalism since the Mid-2000s." (Russian Politics 2023 with Oleg Zhuravlev). More information: https://berkeley.academia.edu/IlyaMatveev 

Slava Gerovitch teaches history of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He holds two PhDs: one in philosophy of science (from the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences and Technology in Moscow) and one in history and social study of science and technology (from MIT's Science, Technology and Society Program). He has written extensively on the history of Soviet mathematics, cybernetics, cosmonautics, and computing. He is the author of From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (2002), Voices of the Soviet Space Program (2014), and Soviet Space Mythologies (2015). More information: https://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage