Russian National Technological Symbolism: Under the Soviets and Beyond

Article

Abstract

[In English]

This article examines continuity and change in technological symbolism in the Soviet Union and Russia. Technology serves not only the ends for which it was created (a reactor, for example, to produce electricity), but ideological purposes of demonstrating state power and economic might, and serving to legitimate the state in the eyes of citizens. How did Soviet leaders use technology for these ideological purposes? How did these uses change over the course of Soviet history and into the history of the Russian Federation? Soviet leaders recognized that they might consciously use technological displays to educate the masses in the ways of socialism and patriotism. They unabashedly saw only good in modern technology, never its potential costs in human terms (new forms of unfamiliar labor, for example) or environmental impacts. Many of these characteristics may hold for the Putin administration as much as they did for the Stalin regime, as this analysis of Arctic conquest, nuclear power, and other technologies demonstrates.