Alexey Golubev

University of Houston
Knowledge Propaganda: Soviet Socialism as an Epistemic Project
My current book project, titled Knowledge Propaganda: Soviet Socialism as an Epistemic Project, explores the ambitious Soviet effort in public communication of knowledge as a modern propaganda campaign. During the Cold War, the Soviet government established the largest knowledge popularization system of the twentieth century, enlisting hundreds of thousands of public lecturers to disseminate scientific knowledge to lay audiences throughout the USSR and producing an immense corpus of popular science literature. This model of science communication was exported to other socialist countries and influenced global efforts to popularize science. At the same time, it also produced an autonomous network of people and ideas that contributed to the epistemic diversity in Soviet society despite the efforts of the Soviet establishment to uphold ideological dogmas. I am applying for a CHSTM Research Fellowship to examine archival materials related to the international outreach and implication of the Soviet knowledge communication campaign.