Breeding Soviet Progress
Résumés
L’article étudie une entreprise ambitieuse visant à donner corps à l’imaginaire du communisme atomique sur les confins méridionaux de l’URSS poststalinienne : le complexe nucléaire de Ševčenko (l’actuelle Aqtaw) sur le littoral de la mer Caspienne au Kazakhstan. Acclamé tant en URSS qu’à l’étranger et situé dans une ville vitrine moderne, ce complexe réunissait l’extraction d’uranium, un réacteur à neutrons rapides et le dessalement nucléaire de l’eau à grande échelle. L’auteur analyse l’émulation réciproque entre les secteurs politique et technoscientifique dans leur essor vers la modernité nucléaire soviétique et montre que leurs logiques opérationnelles divergentes n’étaient pas toujours en phase. Ce décalage se traduisait par une coexistence malaisée entre les visions technocrates de la période soviétique tardive et la modernisation à marche forcée héritée de l’industrialisation stalinienne. L’auteur démontre que ces contradictions correspondaient en grande partie à deux conceptions concurrentes du programme nucléaire soviétique. La première, qui s’appuyait sur un exceptionnalisme nucléaire visant à réaliser des progrès révolutionnaires grâce à une synergie entre la faculté mobilisatrice du système soviétique et le pouvoir transformateur de l’atome, privilégiait la quantité au détriment de la qualité. La seconde, basée sur un internationalisme nucléaire qui voyait l’URSS à l’avant‑garde du progrès technoscientifique mondial, en rivalité et en coopération avec des pays du bloc de l’ouest tels que la France et les États‑Unis et cherchant à améliorer l’efficacité et la sécurité de la production d’énergie nucléaire, privilégiait la qualité. L’histoire de Ševčenko donne un aperçu de ces deux tendances, qui, selon l’auteur, préfiguraient déjà les particularismes de la politique technologique actuelle de la Russie.
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A Message to the future from 1967
- 1 At the ceremony accompanying the opening of the capsule in 2017, officials claimed that the vision (...)
1In the autumn of 2017, workers in the city of Aqtau in Western Kazakhstan on the Caspian Sea unearthed a time capsule which had been buried there in 1967, on the 50th anniversary of Soviet power, by members of the Vladimir Lenin All‑Union Pioneer Organisation for the youth of the 21st century, to be opened on the centennial of the October Revolution. Addressing “those who are not yet among the living,” the authors identified themselves as representatives of an era of spaceflight and nuclear power. They described their current task as transforming the Mangyshlak peninsula, once a parched “country of nomads and cattle breeders,” into a hyper‑modern nuclear oasis, courtesy of a fast breeder reactor (FBR) and an atomic‑powered water desalination plant under construction in what was then the Soviet city of Shevchenko. Surely, they concluded their letter, those who would one day read this message would have long since transformed the whole desert peninsula into a flowering garden and would be in full control of both the climate and the weather. They would also live lives of material abundance and utmost intellectual fulfilment – and undoubtedly, they would still be proud heirs of Lenin and faithfully follow his timeless counsels.1
2What is remarkable about this letter – and typical of the post‑Stalinist Soviet Union – is how closely it intertwines technological and political visions of progress. This observation has inspired the central question of this article: how did political and technoscientific developments set each other’s pace in Soviet nuclear high modernity?
- 2 The distinction between “nuclear” and “political” histories is made here not to construe them as ne (...)
- 3 The first Soviet A‑bomb was detonated in 1949 and the first H‑bomb in 1953. David Holloway, Stalin (...)
- 4 David Holloway, “Science, Technology and Modernity,” in Ronald G. Suny, ed., The Cambridge History (...)
- 5 Gensek is short for general′nyi sekretar′, i.e. the General (or, at certain times, First) Secretary (...)
3At first glance, the USSR’s political and nuclear histories seem to mirror each other with near‑perfect symmetry.2 If Stalin is remembered for war and coercion, then fittingly, under his rule, the USSR mobilised its massive forced labour economy to bring itself into possession of both fission and fusion bombs in record time.3 Khrushchev replaced the assumption of inevitable war between the capitalist and the socialist camps with the idea of peaceful competition and sure enough, his term in office saw the USSR triumph in the field of peaceful uses of atomic energy, connecting the “first nuclear power plant in the world” to the grid in 1954 and spearheading development in fields such as breeder and fusion reactors (although the impulsive side of his personal rule was also reflected in the nuclear brinkmanship of the Cuban missile crisis.) The Brezhnev era, in turn, is commonly remembered for stability and stagnation. Fittingly, it witnessed the mass deployment of nuclear power plants throughout the USSR and many of its socialist “brother states,” but has also been associated with a loss of technoscientific momentum in the nuclear field. Finally, Gorbachev’s failed attempt at renewal initially relied heavily on the promise of the Scientific‑Technological Revolution (STR),4 but the Chernobyl disaster dealt this strategy a devastating blow, thereby ushering in the final crisis of the Soviet experiment in modernity. To each Gensek his own atom, as it were.5
- 6 On the concept of nuclear technopolitics, see Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France : Nuclear Pow (...)
- 7 Ibid. ; Gabrielle Hecht, ed., Entangled Geographies : Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold (...)
4Rather than taking this seeming synchrony between the USSR’s political and nuclear histories at face value, we are well advised to understand it first and foremost as a matter of representation and perception. As a product of Soviet technopolitics, it was actively produced by political actors assigning the nuclear a key role in fashioning their image as leaders, and nuclear technologists striving to cast their programme as a cornerstone of the larger Soviet project.6 However, a techno-political perspective reveals not only the synchronies and synergies, but also the many contradictions and tensions between political and technoscientific programmes. As Gabrielle Hecht has shown, nuclear technopolitics all over the world have invariably involved a broad range of political‑ideological, technoscientific, socioeconomic and ecological developments with diverging operational rationales and unequally paced chronologies.7
- 8 On sociotechnical imaginaries, see Sheila Jasanoff, “Imagined and Invented Worlds,” in Sheila Jasan (...)
5Specific features of Soviet history, I will argue in this article, further exacerbated the inherent tensions of nuclear technopolitics in the USSR, creating a technopolitical regime that was riddled with contradictions between voluntariness and coercion, expertise and improvisation, transsystemic collaboration and Soviet nuclear exceptionalism, notwithstanding the streamlined sociotechnical imaginary of “atomic‑powered communism,” which cast technoscientific progress in the nuclear field and socioeconomic progress towards communism as mutually constitutive and exclusive to the socialist system.8 For the purposes of this analysis, Shevchenko’s nuclear complex serves as a powerful lens, which magnifies these tensions as if under a looking glass, at the same time highlighting that they were not particular to the specific case, but characteristic of overarching inconsistencies in the post‑Stalinist remake of the Soviet project.
6In particular, I will elaborate on the following arguments: first, that in socioeconomic terms, the deployment of nuclear power across the USSR, although inseparably linked to the forward‑looking vision of “building communism,” remained focused on large‑scale, short‑timeframe projects in remote, underdeveloped regions in much the same way as the “construction of socialism” under Stalin, and consequently perpetuated rather than obliterated many of its problematic socioeconomic traits, including the mass utilisation of forced labour; second, that with regard to the international entanglement of the USSR, Soviet nuclear technoscience was both a beneficiary and an instrument of détente between the blocs in the late 1960s and 1970s, with important diplomatic, technoscientific and economic benefits for the USSR that resulted in trust building between the nuclear powers, an improved security culture in the Soviet nuclear sector and enhanced commercial opportunities for Soviet nuclear commodities and technologies outside the socialist bloc; and third, that with regard to system legitimation and elite loyalty, the Soviet nuclear power sector’s shift of emphasis from development to deployment in the late 1970s swelled the ranks of a loyal mid‑tier technical intelligentsia but led to disillusionment with the opportunities of Soviet science and technology and, by extension, the Soviet project as a whole among its upper echelons, drawing them into a process of gradual erosion of loyalty among a numerically small, but functionally important group of political, economic and technoscientific elites.
7As a result of such observations, I hope to facilitate a more robust and nuanced understanding of the extended middle phase of Soviet nuclear technopolitics between “Stalin’s bomb” and “Gorbachev’s Chernobyl” which invites us to reconsider some of the conventional periodisations of Soviet post‑war history as a whole and also points to a number of important, but rarely studied lines of continuity between Soviet nuclear technopolitics and their post‑Soviet successor.
8In what follows, I have singled out four interfaces between the USSR’s political and nuclear histories which provide insight into their constantly changing entanglement from a variety of perspectives: first, the imaginary of interlocking technoscientific and socioeconomic progress and its attempted enactment (“Past and Future”), second, the programme’s amalgamation of military and civilian priorities and modes of operation (“War and Peace”), third, the coproduction of Soviet nuclear internationalism and Brezhnev‑era foreign policy (“Confrontation or Convergence?”) and fourth, the question of how developments in the nuclear realm both reflected and contributed to the changing dynamics of “developed socialism” (“Momentum or Stagnation?”).
Past and future
- 9 On the concept of STR, see Stefan Guth, “One Future Only ? The Soviet Union in the Age of the Scien (...)
- 10 A.M. Petros′iants, “Nuclear Science and Technology at the 50th Anniversary of the Great October Soc (...)
9Exploring the asynchronies and contradictions of Soviet nuclear technopolitics requires that we first take a look at the quasi‑mechanical constancy with which socioeconomic and technoscientific progress were supposed to drive each other in socialist high modernity – a correlation that had been formalised in the concept of the Scientific‑Technological Revolution (STR) in the mid‑1950s but arguably enjoyed its greatest popularity in the technocratic zeitgeist of the Brezhnev period.9 On the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution, invocations of the unbroken vitality of the Soviet project relied heavily on the promise of the STR, and nuclear technologists took advantage of this dependence to place the imaginary of atomic‑powered communism squarely at the centre of political and public attention. As deputy atomic minister Andranik M. Petros′iants claimed in a lead article in 1967, half a century into the Soviet era, nuclear energy provided irrefutable proof of socialism’s commitment to fostering the application of science in the best interests of humankind – and of technology’s reciprocal capacity to contribute mightily to “creating the material basis of communism.” Shevchenko’s fuel‑reproducing and water‑desalinating fast breeder reactor (the BN‑350), earmarked to support a garden city in the desert once it became operational, was to be the brightest achievement yet along this path towards a radiant future.10
- 11 S. Perepletchikov, “The Atomic Energy Pavilion in the All‑Union House for National Economy in the U (...)
10Contrary to initial planning, the BN‑350 was not completed in time for the anniversary, but this did not prevent Soviet authorities from showcasing scale models of the novel reactor‑cum‑desalination facility, accompanied by visualisations of the new city under construction, to large domestic and international audiences at the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy (VDNKh) in Moscow and at the Expo 1967 world fair in Montreal.11 When the technological marvel at long last became operational in 1973, it finally provided the life‑size imagery to support the boastful STR rhetoric. Commenting on successive vistas of Mangyshlak’s parched steppe, the newly built city of Shevchenko and its futuristic reactor, the voice-over in the documentary The Atom at Work explained:
- 12 Rozhdeno naukoi [Born From Science], Tsentrnauchfil′m, 1977. Quotations are from reel II. Italics a (...)
The 130 000 inhabitants of the city of Shevchenko epitomize man’s challenge to the [surrounding] desert. The creation of Shevchenko’s nuclear power plant with a fast breeder reactor at its core has solved not only a major scientific and economic, but also an important social problem. […] 150 000 kW of electric energy, 120 000 tons of desalinated water are provided by the energy of uranium. The engineers at the complicated desks of the NPP control not only the lightning‑fast movements of elementary particles, but also the life of the city. Here, in this plant, the connection between science and human existence is particularly manifest. […] There is now more water at the disposal of every inhabitant of Shevchenko than in cities such as London, Leningrad or Paris. The International Union of Architects awarded the creators of Shevchenko a special prize for introducing life into the desert, for creating a habitat perfectly adapted to the needs of man.12
- 13 For the characterisation of Shevchenko as the “first city of the STR,” see S. Mukashev, “Mangyshlak (...)
- 14 For Paustovskii’s vision, see his 1932 novel Kara Bugaz. On Kurchatov, see Josephson, “Communism,” (...)
- 15 Start v velikoe budushchee [Start into a Great Future], Tsentral′naia studiia dokumental′nykh fil′m (...)
11Dubbed the world’s “first city of the Scientific Technological Revolution,” Shevchenko was touted as an epitome of interlocking technoscientific and socioeconomic progress. As such, it compared favourably to Magnitogorsk, the paradigmatic hotspot of Stalinist industrialisation, highlighting how the country had advanced, within a single generation, from coal and steel to oil and uranium, from blue‑ to white‑collar jobs, from deprivation to affluence and from building socialism to the construction of communism.13 In short, Shevchenko illustrated and substantiated the revolutionary teleology in a way that was highly advantageous for the Brezhnev era. It could credibly be cast as realising earlier Soviet visions – from Lenin’s electrification plan to novelist Konstantin Paustovskii’s vision of the Caspian’s deserted eastern shore morphing into a mighty industrial region, from Stalin’s large‑scale irrigation projects to nuclear physicist Igor′ Kurchatov’s promise of transforming deserts into lush gardens by the power of the peaceful atom.14 But while ostentatiously applauding the prophetic quality of these earlier visions, Brezhnev‑era propaganda was also insistent on pointing out the difference between futuristic visions and actual achievements. As the voice‑over in another film about the city and its reactor claimed: “This movie avoids science fiction. We want to show the future – but the real, foreseeable future, which already exists today.”15 Brezhnev’s Soviet Union built what earlier periods had merely envisioned, the subtext read.
- 16 RGASPI (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial′no‑politicheskoi istorii), f. 17, op. 141, d. 171 (...)
12Presenting Shevchenko as a long‑envisioned, but only recently‑realised project allowed Soviet propaganda to embed it into half a century of Soviet revolutionary teleology – thereby portraying it as the product of cumulative advancement – and to cast it as an ex nihilo creation on a tabula rasa, and hence as a manifestation of the kind of rapid and all‑encompassing progress that remained quintessential to the Bolshevik imagination, and which I would like to label revolutionary progress, both to emphasise its antithetical relation to the idea of evolutionary change and to draw attention to its instrumental function in epitomising the sustained transformative clout of the Soviet project in the era of the STR. As Tutkabai A. Ashimbaev, first secretary of the newly created Party Oblast’ Committee, put it in his inaugural speech in 1973, Mangyshlak was transformed, within a few years, from a land of “savage and half‑savage” cattle breeders into a hotspot of industrial development, modern civilization and multi‑ethnic cohabitation – a development which he, as a representative of the periphery, claimed to wholeheartedly embrace.16
- 17 Ibid., l. 24 ; Natal′ia Zaderetskaia, Angelina Garkusha, Nezabyvaemoe : Stranitsy istorii Mangistau (...)
- 18 Robert Kindler, Stalin’s Nomads : Power and Famine in Kazakhstan (Pittsburgh : University of Pittsb (...)
- 19 See Anna Veronika Wendland’s contribution to this issue.
13From the perspective of the Soviet centre, this process was most commonly referred to as the “appropriation” (osvoenie) of Mangyshlak – an equivocal term which suggested both the conquest of hostile nature, as expressed in the atomshchiki’s self‑styled image of “pioneers” (pervoprokhodtsy) or even “discoverers” (pervootkryvateli)17 and, albeit more implicitly, the political conquest of a formerly insurgent region. Those in the know could easily decipher Ashimbaev’s reference to “savage cattle breeders” as an allusion to the Adai uprising in 1929–1930, which had marked one of the fiercest (and most brutally crushed) instances of resistance to Stalin’s sedentarization and collectivisation drive in Kazakhstan.18 In the reading that was implied, bringing Soviet techno‑scientific civilization to the region completed the local pax Sovietica and retrospectively justified its violent establishment. With regard to the bigger picture of late socialism, it is important to note that both dimensions of conquest were not specific to Mangyshlak, but applied to many other instances of Soviet internal colonization. To provide just one further example, the coeval atomic‑powered transformation of rural Western Ukraine was also depicted as a process in which the atomshchiki acted as pervoprokhodtsy conquering swamps and marshlands, and where nuclear colonization likewise marked the final appropriation of a region controlled well into the post‑World War II period by Ukrainian nationalist insurgents.19 Clearly, atomic‑powered frontier projects were particularly appealing to the Soviet imagination because they managed to combine the promises of cumulative advancement and revolutionary progress.
- 20 Marc Elie, Isabelle Ohayon, “Foreword,” Cahiers du monde russe, 54, 1–2 (2013) : 29–45 (39).
- 21 For a description of the Brezhnev‑era regime of temporality as a “perpetualised present,” see Stefa (...)
- 22 Elie, Ohayon, “Foreword,” 39.
- 23 Addressing the grave demographic losses inflicted upon the local nomadic population during Stalinis (...)
- 24 In retrospect, numerous representatives of the city’s technoscientific elites have claimed that the (...)
14Shevchenko was thus a prime example of how “[d]efining historical time was always a major preoccupation of the Soviet power structure.”20 As a paradigmatic chronotope of Soviet modernity, it was meant to convey the message that rather than settling for standstill in a “perpetuated present” or indulging in an exclusively retrospective historical imagination focused on revolutionary and wartime glory, Brezhnev’s USSR retained a strong forward‑looking component.21 And yet, the city did not escape what Elie and Ohayon have recently described as the crisis of (late‑)Soviet temporality.22 As early as the mid‑1960s, preservationist voices made themselves heard, expressing concern about the threat to Mangyshlak’s cultural and ecological heritage posed by brute‑force industrialisation, thereby suggesting that there was not only a bright future to be gained, but also a valuable past to be lost.23 Equally as significant, whispered conversations suggested that the blinkered gaze of technoscientific progressivism, fixed as it was on the future, not only overlooked valuable pre‑industrial heritage, but also turned a blind eye to the wicked Stalinist legacy of forced labour, which was once again harnessed for the industrial transformation of Mangyshlak from the 1960s to the 1980s, much to the disillusionment of many of those involved in the project.24 I will explore this aspect in more detail in the next part of this article.
- 25 Mukashev, “Variant.”
- 26 I. Mosin, “Ananasy dlia rabochikh. Reportazh iz zakrytoi zony [Pineapples for the Workers. A Report (...)
15Official discourse stemmed such critical voices to the very end. In 1985, a feature in Nauka i Zhizn′ showcased Shevchenko as a prime example of technology’s potential to accelerate Soviet socioeconomic development, which was then considered the essence of Perestroika.25 And as late as 1989, an article in Izvestiia marvelled at the nuclear oasis, musing that it was in places like this that Lenin’s vision for the country might still come true.26
War and peace
- 27 Stephen Lovell, The Shadow of War : Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the Present (Malden, MA : Wiley‑Bl (...)
16As important as the revolutionary theme remained for the grand narrative of the USSR until its end, Stephen Lovell has rightly pointed out that the experience of World War II was far more defining in shaping the post‑war USSR27 – all the more so since the onset of the Cold War perpetuated many of the wartime mindsets and economic arrangements for decades. However, neither should it be overlooked that the Soviet Union under Khrushchev explicitly abandoned Stalin’s belief in the inevitability of war between the socialist and the capitalist camps to embrace the concept of peaceful coexistence and that long stretches of its international relations were indeed characterised by détente. Further, the post‑Stalinist Soviet Union was also decidedly less violent domestically. Against this background, what can Shevchenko tell us about the relative weight of military versus civilian priorities, wartime versus peacetime modes of industrial‑economic operation and the reliance on forced versus free wage labour in the post‑Stalinist Soviet atomic project?
- 28 Mikhail F. Troianov, Moei sud′boi stal Fiziko‑ėnergeticheskii institut [The Institute of Physics an (...)
- 29 Ibid., 161–163.
- 30 In the footsteps of the BN‑350 followed a more powerful BN‑600 at the Beloiarsk NPP. A still more a (...)
- 31 According to the US Central Intelligence Agency, “[i]n the 1960s, [Soviet] defense spending grew ra (...)
- 32 On the Soviet shift towards an obliging nuclear internationalism, see below, and also the contribut (...)
- 33 On nuclear techno‑diplomacy, see part IV, “Momentum or Stagnation,” of this article. For the radian (...)
17With its beginnings in the late fifties and early sixties falling squarely into a period of growing Cold War tensions, military considerations loomed large among Shevchenko’s initial raisons d’être. Not only did the city owe its existence to the fact that uranium deposits had been discovered in the region in the 1950s and were exploited to cater to the nuclear weapons programme. Likewise, Shevchenko’s reactor had been explicitly commissioned as a breeder of weapons‑grade plutonium in 1960.28 But subsequent developments proved more ambiguous. Shevchenko’s transformation into a nuclear showcase, echoing Eisenhower’s Atoms for Peace programme, eventually relegated military considerations to second place. Atomic minister Efim Slavskii confirmed this metamorphosis in 1973, when, upon the launch of the BN‑350, he advised the reactor’s engineers to prioritise electricity generation over plutonium extraction.29 Admittedly, by that time, the operation of military graphite reactors had rendered the BN‑350 largely expendable as a source of weapons‑grade plutonium. But the interesting fact remains that even in the absence of cogent military motives, the Soviet Atomic Ministry Sredmash remained firmly committed to a cost‑intensive programme of FBR development, thereby foregrounding the importance of civilian applications – a readjustment of priorities which was equally manifest in the massive deployment of NPPs throughout the USSR and the socialist bloc in the 1970s.30 Undoubtedly, this development was facilitated by the fact that the conflict‑laden 1960s were followed by a protracted phase of détente in the first half of the 1970s. This allowed the Soviet leadership to cautiously shift resources from the military to the civilian sector of the nuclear programme, cashing in, as it were, on something of a small “peace dividend” avant la lettre.31 In the greater scheme of things, it also testified to a growing sense among the post‑Khrushchevian political leadership that in a context of military parity and mutually assured destruction between the blocs, diplomatic, economic and cultural factors played an increasingly decisive role for the outcome of Cold War system competition.32 In all these respects, foregrounding the civilian dimension of nuclear energy promised benefits that simply could not be reaped by focusing exclusively on military priorities – from enhancing the atomic‑powered radiance of the USSR domestically and abroad to building trust between the blocs and accelerating transsystemic knowledge exchange via the channels of nuclear techno‑diplomacy.33
- 34 Admittedly, intelligence about the Soviet atomic bomb project again prompted a reinvigoration of th (...)
- 35 According to Zubok, “[c]aptains of wartime industry […] returned to the feverish, sleepless lives t (...)
- 36 Sredmash’s history remains to be written. For a brief outline, see Sonja D. Schmid, Producing Power (...)
18The second important matter with regard to the military–civilian dichotomy is the question as to what extent the Soviet nuclear industry managed to transition from a wartime to a peacetime mode of operation. In what follows, I will argue that this transition spanned at least a quarter of a century and even then remained incomplete, with important consequences for the sector’s organisational and security culture. Certainly, nuclear industries throughout the world emerged from the defence sector, but nowhere else was the wartime experience as defining for so long as in the USSR. Importantly, the peak phase of Soviet nuclear weapons development between 1945 and 1953 succeeded World War II rather than coinciding with it, as was the case for the United States.34 From the perspective of the Soviet military‑industrial complex, it amounted in many regards to a seamless prolongation of the previous war effort, perpetuating wartime mindsets and modes of industrial operation.35 A certain normalisation, reflected in a reorganisation of the atomic sector, was initiated only after the USSR had successfully exploded its first hydrogen bomb in 1953. From that point onwards, the newly founded Ministry of Medium Machine Building (Sredmash) set about the task of transforming the former military atomic project into a nuclear industry with military‑civilian double duties. But in view of conflicting priorities, the process proved difficult and resulted in an inconsistent merger of post‑war technocratic expert culture with an enduring wartime legacy of all‑out mobilisation, improvisation and coercion.36
- 37 On GSPI‑11, OKBM Afrikantov and Sredmash’s construction industry, see A.M. Petros′iants, A.V. Shege (...)
- 38 See Grabovskii, Ob′′ekt ; GAMO, f. 506, Mangyshlakskii atomnyi ėnergokombinat [Mangyshlak Atomic En (...)
19Shevchenko is a prime example of this. Nuclear contractors in other countries, in all likelihood, would have shunned the task of building an exceedingly complex nuclear power plant in a remote desert region with no pre‑existing infrastructure to speak of in a period of peacetime. But for Sredmash’s head planning institute GSPI‑11, whose institutional predecessor had earned its merits organising the wartime relocation of Soviet industries behind the Urals, this was a challenge playing right to its strengths of improvisation and unconventional problem‑solving. Likewise, OKBM (Afrikantov) in Gorkii, which was co‑opted into the nuclear programme having emerged from the war as the country’s largest artillery manufacturer, had proven its capacity to meet demanding targets and deadlines under excruciating circumstances, and the audacity and risk‑taking culture it had adopted in the process were certainly helpful when it came to manufacturing a largely experimental reactor and assembling it in less‑than‑ideal conditions on site. Finally, Sredmash’s construction trust, formed out of the remains of the NKVD’s Gulag‑based Glavpromstroi, was second to none in realising large‑scale, short‑timeframe projects in adverse conditions by whatever means required, including the mass employment of forced labour.37 Consequently, the construction of the Mangyshlak Atomic Energy Combine (1964–1972) was characterised by a cult of heroism and a pioneer mentality, constantly changing plans, a lack of coordination between more than 100 subcontractors and the large‑scale employment of unqualified construction soldiers and convicts which, among other things, resulted in shoddy workmanship and theft of construction materials.38
20The Bolshevik infatuation with revolutionary progress thus found its complement in a warlike culture of all‑out mobilisation, with which it converged in large‑scale, transformative frontier projects. It is worth remembering that this symbiosis dated back even further, to Stalinist industrialisation, which was itself rooted in World War I and the experience of civil war, but for the purpose of my argument, it is more important to focus on how far it extended forward into the post‑war peacetime era.
- 39 For a discussion of Soviet–French FBR collaboration, see below.
- 40 Viktor A. Sidorenko, Istoriia atomnoi ėnergetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii [A History of Nuclear P (...)
- 41 US Embassy Moscow to Department of State, Atomic Energy : Welding at BN‑350 and BN‑600 [March 29, 1 (...)
- 42 Sidorenko, Istoriia atomnoi ėnergetiki, vol. 5, 21–22, 63–64.
- 43 Gloria Duffy, Soviet Nuclear Energy : Domestic and International Policies (Santa Monica : Rand, 197 (...)
21It was only when Soviet reactor designers became involved in transsystemic cooperation with Western partners in the late 1960s and 1970s that they fully realised to what extent the organisational and manufacturing culture of the domestic nuclear sector was lagging behind Western quality and safety standards. For the Soviet breeder programme (the BN reactor series), increasingly close collaboration with the French Commissariat à l’énergie atomique from 1968 onwards revealed that the design and the construction of the BN‑350 had been rushed in comparison to its French counterpart, the Phénix, which was planned more thoughtfully and built from better materials to tighter tolerances.39 A similar learning process took place with regard to Soviet pressurised water reactors (the VVĖR series) when Finland commissioned two Soviet VVĖR‑440s for its Loviisa nuclear power plant in 1969, but enhanced them with Western safety technology. In the Soviet nuclear industry, this project is remembered to this day as a formidable challenge prompting fundamental adaptations for all the Soviet manufacturers involved.40 Sredmash subsequently undertook considerable efforts to transfer the lessons learned from international cooperation to the domestic nuclear sphere. In 1974, a British delegation returning from a visit to the construction site of the BN‑600 reported that workmanship on the reactor and the cooling circuits seemed “far superior” to what they had seen in the BN‑350.41 Similarly, the improved planning and quality control procedures developed for the Loviisa project were carried over to the domestic and socialist bloc VVĖR programme, even though this policy met with tenacious resistance on the part of many subcontractors, who found the new procedures overly demanding, time‑consuming and cost‑intensive.42 Among other things, Block 5 at the Novovoronezh NPP was outfitted with proper containment and a redundant emergency cooling system – both firsts in the USSR.43
- 44 Graphite‑moderated reactors were used extensively in the US Manhattan project for plutonium generat (...)
- 45 International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group [IAEA], INSAG‑7. The Chernobyl accident : Updating of I (...)
- 46 On the massive mobilisation of disaster “liquidators”, see Schmid, Power, 135–137 ; Kate Brown, Man (...)
22Such observations suggest that under the influence of transsystemic cooperation, the Soviet nuclear industry at long last shed most of its wartime engineering and organisational culture in the 1970s. However, this transition was never fully accomplished, as it did not encompass all branches of the Soviet nuclear industry equally. Unlike the VVĖR and BN reactor series, the Chernobyl‑type, graphite‑moderated RBMK series was never part of any collaborative efforts across the bloc divide, as it had no equivalent among Western commercial power reactors.44 Investigations into the causes of the Chernobyl accident in 1986 leave little doubt that the design choices, construction practices and operational procedures of RBMK‑based NPPs lagged far behind international best practice.45 The accident’s mitigation, leveraging an enormous amount of human and material resources, provided further evidence of the extent to which warlike mobilisational practices continued to coexist with a technoscientific expert culture in the Soviet nuclear sector until the end of the Soviet period, and how the former were often called upon to compensate for the latter’s deficiencies.46
- 47 See e.g. Viktor N. Kuznetsov, Zakrytye goroda Urala : Istoricheskie ocherki [Closed Cities in the U (...)
- 48 This conforms with recent findings by Marc Elie and Edward Hardy, but transcends the timeframe of t (...)
23A third indication of the profound militarisation of the Soviet socioeconomic system that must be discussed in this context is the regime of Soviet forced labour. While the Gulag system originated as a product of the USSR’s internal militarisation during the Civil War and under Stalin, and thus predated World War II, its inmate population soon became an important labour resource for the Soviet Union’s heavy and resource extraction industries, and hence a constituent part of the country’s military‑industrial complex, catering to the Soviet defence effort before, during, and – crucially – after the war, when it became one of the mainstays of the Soviet nuclear weapons programme. Most accounts suggest that forced labour was phased out in the nuclear industry and throughout the Soviet economy after the Gulag’s formal abolition in 1956,47 but the case of Shevchenko tells a different story in which the institution of forced labour quickly recovered from the initial blow of de‑Stalinisation and remained in operation throughout the remainder of the Soviet period.48
- 49 RGANI (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishchei istorii), f. 89, op. 16, d. 1, l. 12 ; GARF, f (...)
- 50 GAMO, f. 10P, op. 1, d. 9, l. 41–42.
- 51 Author interviews with Marat Shushakov in Aqtau, October 3, 2012, and with Gennadii M. Isakov in Mo (...)
- 52 On Vorkuta and Magadan, see Alan Barenberg, Gulag Town, Company Town : Forced Labor and its Legacy (...)
- 53 Grabovskii, Ob′′ekt, 15–19, 63 ; RGAĖ (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ėkonomiki), f. 4372, op. 6 (...)
- 54 Marc Elie found archival evidence of 1 million encamped convicts in the USSR in 1970. Elie, “Khrush (...)
- 55 Judith Pallot, “Forced Labour for Forestry : The Twentieth Century History of Colonisation and Sett (...)
- 56 A Kazakh author has recently suggested that it was precisely the decision to proceed to the “constr (...)
- 57 Oleg Khlevniuk, Simon Belokowsky, “The Gulag and Non‑Gulag as One Interrelated Whole,” Kritika, 16, (...)
24This was not a foregone conclusion from the outset. Rather, the Council of Ministers instructed Sredmash to replace its massive forced labour contingent with “free wage labour” in 1956.49 But the ministry’s attempts to do so ran aground in a dried‑up labour market and in view of the harsh living and working conditions offered at the remote sites of Soviet nuclear installations. In 1960, the Mangyshlak construction site began to receive large contingents of convicts,50 and alongside the city grew a complex of correctional labour colonies housing a total of approximately 10 000 persons at most times until 1991.51 Notably, unlike such camps‑turned‑cities as Vorkuta or Magadan,52 Mangyshlak’s camp complex was established on a clean slate well after Stalin’s death. Its inmates initially served the region’s nuclear construction sites and later also catered to Mangyshlak’s oil, gas and machine‑building industries.53 Scattered evidence suggests that similar developments occurred throughout the USSR, and that after the slump caused by de‑Stalinisation, the scale and importance of forced labour in the Soviet national economy continued to rise steadily from the early 1960s to the mid‑1980s,54 with resource extraction and infrastructural development projects representing particular hotspots.55 Focused on large‑scale, short‑timeframe frontier projects as it was, “building communism,” in much the same way as the Stalinist “construction of socialism,” required a level of ad‑hoc labour mobilisation to which Soviet peacetime society, despite all campaigns, would not respond in sufficient measure in the absence of massive terror.56 In these circumstances, the same observation continued to apply as in Stalinist times: “A sizable unfree labor contingent allowed the Soviet economy to maintain its mobilizing character.”57
25In sum, then, the case of Shevchenko indicates that the transformation of the Soviet Union’s quasi‑wartime atomic project into a peacetime nuclear industry (albeit with civilian‑military double duties) was a protracted, convoluted and ambiguous process. While initiated by the creation of Sredmash in 1953, it took full effect only in the 1970s – and even then remained incomplete. The transition was more comprehensively achieved on the level of purposes, as expressed in the fact that by the 1970s, alongside the nuclear weapons programme, a powerful atomic energy sector had come into existence. On the level of practices, however, it remained fragmentary, leading to a situation in which peacetime and quasi‑wartime modes of operation coexisted uneasily, juxtaposing voluntariness with coercion, expert culture with shock work mentality, and innovation and improvement with improvisation and muddling through.
Confrontation or convergence ?
26Both the deficiencies and the achievements of Soviet nuclear technopolitics become more sharply defined when studied in the context of international entanglement. The fact in itself that Soviet nuclear technoscience developed a network of transsystemic collaborations must count prominently among these achievements. Tracing the genesis of these contacts reveals nuclear technoscience to be both an eminent beneficiary and a significant facilitator of Brezhnevian foreign policy. Towards the end of the Khrushchev period, things had most certainly appeared rather different.
- 58 At that time, Brezhnev was not only the representative Soviet head of state, but also one of the ke (...)
- 59 Glenn T. Seaborg, “Cooperation between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. in the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Ene (...)
27In October 1962, while the BN‑350 was under intensive development as a breeder of weapons‑grade plutonium, the Cuban Missile Crisis saw the world teetering on the brink of thermonuclear war for two weeks. Eventually, an all‑out clash between the US and the USSR was narrowly averted, but the realisation of how close they had come to mutual annihilation prompted the superpowers to rethink their nuclear strategies and explore new ways of détente. Within a year after the crisis, US nuclear scientist Glenn Seaborg met with Leonid Brezhnev in the Kremlin to discuss opportunities for civilian nuclear cooperation as a means to increase mutual trust and predictability.58 Plutonium‑breeding FBRs, which in the eyes of contemporaries had the potential to both revolutionise nuclear power generation and to further accelerate the nuclear arms race, played a key role in this scenario. The invitation for an American delegation to visit the BN‑350 construction site in Shevchenko in 1964, followed by the attendance of a high‑calibre Soviet delegation at an FBR conference in Detroit in 1965, were important signs of goodwill from the Soviet side to which the US replied with similar gestures.59
- 60 See e.g. GAMO, f. 506, op. 1, d. 362, and various other files produced by the sekretnyi otdel of th (...)
- 61 B.A. Semenov, “Soviet–French Collaboration in the Field of the Peaceful Utilization of Atomic Energ (...)
- 62 Ibid., 238.
- 63 See Guth, “Future,” 370–371.
28Contacts stalled temporarily in the second half of the decade against the background of new geopolitical tensions, but this was partially made up for by intensified cooperation with France, which had only recently become a nuclear weapons power in a bid to emancipate itself from the United States. In 1967/1968, France concluded two nuclear cooperation agreements with the USSR, and the fact that the French were pursuing a breeder project similar to the BN‑350 – the Phénix – rendered this cooperation very substantial, leading to regular meetings and comprehensive joint experiments on equipment parts and construction materials.60 Towards the end of the 1970s, both sides agreed to a full exchange of their respective FRB designs and to re‑calculate their partners’ designs on the basis of their own methodologies.61 In 1979, the journal Soviet Atomic Energy praised Soviet‑French nuclear collaboration as “an excellent example of mutually advantageous collaboration between governments with a different social order.”62 In technoscientific terms, East and West seemed headed for convergence, even though the notion remained anathema to the Soviet leadership for fear of its socioeconomic and political implications.63
- 64 For a reprint of the agreement, see James Mayall, Cornelia Navari, The End of the Post‑War Era : Do (...)
- 65 GAMO, f. 506, various files of the sekretnyi otdel ; US–USSR Atomic Energy Agreement : Fourth Sessi (...)
- 66 For a more detailed account of Soviet–French and Soviet–US FBR cooperation, see Stefan Guth, “Oasis (...)
29Cooperation with the US resumed during Richard Nixon’s presidency, further corroborating this impression. One year after the ratification of the Anti‑Ballistic Missile Treaty in Moscow in 1972, the Washington summit brought forth a substantial agreement on civilian nuclear cooperation between the US and the USSR.64 Nixon’s determination to commission the United States’ first large‑scale FBR at Clinch River lent significant momentum to this cooperation which, at its apex, included frequent mutual visits and plans to test‑run critical components (in particular steam generators) of the US reactor at Shevchenko’s BN‑350.65 Considerable effort was put into this collaboration until Jimmy Carter assumed office in January 1977 and ordered an immediate halt to the controversial US breeder programme, thereby also terminating US–Soviet cooperation in this field.66
- 67 The first half of the decade witnessed the Treaty on the Non‑Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) (...)
- 68 For a similar argument, based on research into joint Soviet–US efforts at system analysis and cyber (...)
- 69 This skepticism was heightened further by the reactor accident at the Three Mile Island NPP near Ha (...)
- 70 Duffy, Energy, 29.
30An examination of the political factors which first facilitated US–Soviet breeder cooperation in 1972 and then spelled its end a mere five years later is instructive. While the tides of superpower relations – détente in the first half of the decade and renewed confrontation towards its end67 – clearly played a role in opening and closing a window of opportunity for bilateral cooperation, they offer only a partial explanation. After all, nuclear techno‑diplomacy had specifically been designed to establish an alternative channel of superpower relations through which East and West interacted not so much as potential opponents in a nuclear war, but, ideally, as shareholders of a common technocratic rationality.68 But there was the catch: whereas US technopolitics of the Nixon presidency had by and large shared the positivist vision of progress that the Soviet leadership cherished, the Carter administration was characterised by a much more critical view of technoscientific progress which mirrored the rising scepticism vis‑à‑vis nuclear energy among broad strata of the American public.69 Under these conditions, the high‑modern technopolitical mind‑set not only ceased to provide a shared rationality, but on the contrary, became a matter of disagreement and contention. As a US analyst of the Soviet nuclear programme put it in 1979: “The Soviets are the inheritors of the technocratic progressivism so characteristic of the economic policies of the capitalist societies in the pre‑limits of growth, pre‑environmental consciousness era.”70
- 71 After the NPT had entered into force in 1970, the second significant event in this context was the (...)
- 72 China’s metamorphosis from a recipient of Soviet nuclear development aid into a competing nuclear w (...)
- 73 Duffy, Energy, iii. In 1979, Duffy estimated that Soviet enrichment services for the Western Europe (...)
- 74 Duffy, Energy, 14–21.
- 75 On Loviisa, see Karl‑Erich Michelsen, Aisulu Harjula, “Finland. Short Country Report,” HoNest. Hist (...)
- 76 GAMO, f. 506, op. 1, d. 715, l. 40–42, 125, 132. However, only Yemen actually purchased a desalinat (...)
- 77 GAMO, f. 506, istoricheskaia spravka [Historical Outline], vol. 2.
31Considered from a Soviet perspective, however, the dichotomy between “Western” reflexive modernity and Soviet progressivism was not yet quite as clear‑cut as the American commentator suggested. Rather, the Soviet leadership could easily persuade itself that the US had unilaterally jumped off the bandwagon of global technoscientific progress. For the time being, not only did Soviet cooperation with France continue unabated, but the Soviet Union even managed to enhance its network of transsystemic nuclear contacts under the impression of détente and within a reinforced framework of international non‑proliferation safeguards.71 Economic interests, which had long been eclipsed by non‑proliferation concerns, were now allowed to play a more prominent role in shaping Soviet nuclear exports.72 In an obvious, but rarely noticed parallel to increasing Soviet fossil fuel exports to Western Europe, the USSR replaced the US as the most important provider of enriched uranium fuel to Western European countries in the second half of the 1970s – potentially a billion dollar business.73 As a next step, Atomėnergoėksport (founded in 1973) set about the task of exporting complete nuclear power plants in an attempt to enhance Soviet profits and prestige.74 Finland’s willingness to purchase Soviet reactors for its Loviisa NPP offered the Soviet nuclear industry an instructive test case for this strategy, and the successful completion of the project in 1980 inspired hopes of more projects to follow.75 Shevchenko became part of the new export focus when Sredmash decided to enhance its product portfolio with nuclear water desalination facilities. During the 1980s, delegations from various Arab and North African countries – Libya, Algeria, Yemen – were invited to Shevchenko to interest them in the purchase of Soviet water desalination technology,76 and Soviet ambassadors stationed in sub‑Saharan countries were brought to the city in 1985 to acquaint themselves with the facility so as to better advertise Soviet technological prowess and its possible applications in Africa.77
- 78 See Sonja D. Schmid, “Of Plans and Plants : How Nuclear Power Gained a Foothold in Soviet Energy Po (...)
32In 1986, Soviet export hopes were dashed by the Chernobyl disaster. But despite their limited success at the time, studying these efforts is still instructive from a present‑day perspective, because it brings to the fore interesting continuities. In fact, Soviet export strategies of the late 1970s and 1980s already anticipated many of the elements of Rosatom’s current international expansion drive – from the choice of technologies offered (nuclear fuel, VVĖR reactors and nuclear desalination) to the countries targeted (i.e. Finland, East‑Central European countries such as Hungary and arid countries in the Near East, such as Turkey and Egypt etc.) and the suggested all‑inclusive business model on offer (today referred to as Build‑Own‑Operate or BOO).78
Momentum or stagnation ?
33In his memoirs, Mikhail F. Troianov, one of the masterminds of Soviet breeder development, fondly remembers the early 1970s as a time of great excitement:
- 79 Troianov, Sud′boi, 23.
This whole [start‑up] period [of the BN‑350] was very emotional. We understood that something extraordinary was happening – the first commissioning of the first large‑scale fast breeder reactor [in the world]. We had outstripped our colleagues and competitors in England and France; their [fast breeder] reactors would start up […] later, and the fact that we were leading the race filled us with a feeling of great pride.79
- 80 Simon Rippon, “Fast Reactor Progress in the Soviet Union,” New Scientist, 68, 978 (1975) : 570–572.
34Western observers at the time seemed to share this impression of Soviet primacy, one of them dramatically describing the start‑up of the BN‑350 as a “nuclear Sputnik shock.”80
- 81 While burn‑up rates in the BN‑350 were limited to 5.6 %, the French Phénix achieved 9.5 % in 1980, (...)
- 82 GAMO, f. 506, op. 1prod., d. 821, l. 1–7. (l. 4).
- 83 The original project for the BN‑600 was redesigned from the ground up after a thorough comparison w (...)
35A few years later, the mood had changed substantially. In the 1980s, Soviet atomshchiki complained that they were rapidly falling behind their European competitors. Design flaws and substandard construction materials meant that the BN‑350 used nuclear fuel less efficiently than its French or British counterparts and that it produced less plutonium during operation.81 The USSR now also trailed its rivals significantly when it came to fuel reprocessing and the development of a closed fuel cycle and hence the very technologies required to exploit FBRs’ unique selling point – their potential to multiply nuclear fuel stocks.82 Moreover, whereas the BN‑350 had been internationally admired as a pioneering Soviet design, the developers of its technological successor, the BN‑600, decided to take substantial cues from French breeder design.83 Between the two reactors, there was no denying the impression that Soviet nuclear technoscience was moving from the giving to the receiving end of transsystemic collaboration from the mid‑1970s onwards.
- 84 Paul R. Josephson, Red Atom : Russia’s Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to Today (New York : W.H. (...)
- 85 Lev A. Kochetkov to Dmitrii S. Iurchenko, August 24, 1984. GAMO, f. 506, op. 1prod., d. 821, l. 1–7 (...)
- 86 See Troianov, Sud′boi, 20, 165–166.
- 87 On the serial construction (potochnoe stroitel′stvo) of NPPs, see Schmid, Power, 34–40. On reactor (...)
36One way of explaining this loss of technological momentum – retrospectively adopted by some veterans of the Soviet atomic project – is to put the blame on the Soviet political leadership’s attempts to prioritise the standardisation and deployment of Soviet NPPs over continued research and development (R&D). Eager to finally reap the promised benefits of atomic power, political decision‑makers and planners expected the country’s nuclear industry to quickly transition from expensive experimental prototypes to cost‑efficient, mass‑produced reactors – a vision epitomised by the Atommash reactor factory, whose giant assembly lines were to churn out reactors at low cost, although this vision never fully materialised.84 Even FBRs, technologically still in their infancy, were not exempt from these discussions, despite warnings from within the industry that they were far from mature and still posed many unresolved economic, security and proliferation problems.85 Still, some exponents of the Soviet breeder programme believed that it was time to deliver turn‑key FBRs to the country and even recommended a nuclear energy strategy based predominantly on breeders.86 This strategy was eventually postponed, but in the last two decades of its existence, the USSR indeed embarked on the large‑scale deployment of nuclear power plants domestically and in its socialist brother states, at the cost of R&D investments.87
- 88 Analysts of technoscientific transition pathways have identified the Soviet big science/big technol (...)
- 89 Hanson concedes that in view of an economy which reacted ever more sluggishly to modernisation stim (...)
- 90 Stephan Merl, “The Soviet Economy in the 1970s – Reflections on the Relationship Between Socialist (...)
- 91 For nostalgic evocations of a time of glory and well‑being in Shevchenko, see the interviews in Bir (...)
- 92 On foregrounding consumption over investment, see Hanson, Rise and Fall, 99, 134, 139–143.
37It does, however, seem just as convincing to invert the causality between accelerating deployment and flagging innovation, arguing that at a time when the Soviet model of R&D produced constantly diminishing returns,88 a shift of available resources from R&D to deployment seemed like a perfectly rational decision to take in economic terms.89 This also made eminent sense with regard to legitimising the Soviet project in the eyes of the general public: no longer able to stun the populace with pride‑inspiring breakthrough technologies, the regime could instead demonstrate its commitment to placing modern technology at the service of the population at large. Soviet public opinion, to the extent that it can be traced, justified this course, as until the late 1970s the majority of Soviet citizens apparently perceived their living standards to be steadily rising.90 If fond nostalgic recollections are any indication, the well‑provided city of Shevchenko with its first‑rate infrastructure certainly endeared its inhabitants to the amenities of the late‑Soviet way of life.91 Considered this way, the shift from innovation to deployment and from investment to consumption paid off for the political leadership, at least in the short term.92
- 93 This is stressed in the introductions to all recent volumes and topical issues on the Brezhnev peri (...)
- 94 This chronological spread is noted by Elie, Ohayon, “Foreword,” 31–32. Scholars point to the follow (...)
38What can these observations contribute to recent scholarly engagements with the paradigm of Brezhnevian stagnation? Over the last few years, a broad consensus has formed according to which the stagnation moniker cannot be aptly applied to the Soviet Union under Brezhnev in its entirety, because it dismisses the initial reform‑mindedness of the period and turns a blind eye to the fact that late Soviet social and intellectual life developed considerable momentum of its own.93 However, there is also widespread acknowledgment that the Soviet experiment in modernity, understood as a purposeful political project, indeed experienced a loss of dynamism between 1968 and 1979 and that this deceleration was most acutely felt among (parts of) the Soviet elites. Given the differently‑paced inner dynamics of political, economic, cultural and technoscientific developments, it seems noteworthy that disappointment across a broad spectrum of political and functional elites coincided within a comparatively tight chronological frame of roughly a decade, suggesting a broadly shared perception of overarching problems related to Soviet political decision‑making, economic performance etc.94 But this still raises the question why elites in some fields perceived most of the 1970s as stagnant, while others apparently continued to experience the better part of the decade as highly dynamic.
- 95 Until the late 1970s, the improvement of East–West relations stood out as one of the most important (...)
- 96 On space flight, see Isabelle Gouarné, “Dépasser les tensions Est‑Ouest pour la conquête de l’espac (...)
- 97 Philip Hanson, “The Soviet Union’s Acquisition of Western Technology After Stalin. Some Thoughts on (...)
39Focusing on nuclear technologists, my case study suggests that it was the momentum generated by foreign policy – clearly the most energetic field of policy‑making at the apex of the Brezhnev era, particularly when set against the backdrop of more conservative domestic and intra‑bloc politics – which stalled the perception of standstill in those fields that came to be actively involved in it, as it opened up unprecedented opportunities for transsystemic cooperation and exchange.95 As has been shown, nuclear technologists eagerly embraced these opportunities and derived important stimuli from them, and the same seems to hold true, to varying degrees, for a broader spectrum of technoscientific elites involved in fields such as spaceflight and cybernetics.96 Similarly, increasingly lacklustre developments in technologically less advanced sectors of the Soviet economy such as the automotive, chemical and hydrocarbon industries also derived important dynamising effects from transsystemic collaboration and exchange.97
40Explaining the technoscientific elites’ measured optimism in the mid‑1970s as a consequence of increasing transsystemic collaboration also provides a key to understanding why it faded towards the end of the decade. By that time, not only was cooperation across the bloc divide dwindling in a climate of renewed geopolitical tensions, but the opportunity to closely compare Soviet technological momentum against Western performance had also revealed an increasing Soviet backlog in many fields and, even more crucially, produced the insight that Western societies and polities had embarked on a gradual departure from the high‑modern paradigm of big science/big technology‑based progress in which the USSR remained heavily invested.
- 98 On commitment, see e.g. Schmid, “Organizational Culture,” 106–107.
- 99 See e.g. Fainberg and Kalinovsky on the memoirs of high‑ranking Soviet reformers such as Arbatov, C (...)
- 100 This paradox has been formulated as such by Jörg Baberowski, “Criticism as Crisis, or Why the Sovie (...)
41In view of the significant interpenetration between the country’s technoscientific and political elites and the amalgamation of socioeconomic and technoscientific narratives of progress, there can be no doubt that the (nuclear) technologists’ joining the camp of disillusioned functional elites contributed significantly to the overall loss of confidence in the Soviet project. However, this observation must be qualified by acknowledging that perceptions were rather different at lower levels of the technoscientific intelligentsia’s professional pyramid. Judging by all available evidence, mid‑ and lower level engineers, reactor operators and the like in Shevchenko, Pripiat′ and elsewhere remained highly committed to atomic‑powered progress right up to the Chernobyl accident, with their sense of purpose largely untainted by the knowledge of problems which, in the tightly compartmentalised Soviet information space, was accessible only to the top brass.98 To all appearances, the late‑Soviet technocratic regime was highly successful at keeping these mid‑tier representatives engaged in the Soviet project (even more so than it was at maintaining a moderate level of satisfaction among its citizens at large), all the while slowly alienating its top‑tier elites. This disparity of perceptions, then, contributes to an impression which has been variously expressed in passing, but still awaits a more systematic analysis: namely that potentially disruptive disappointment with the Soviet project proceeded from the top down rather than from the bottom up or out of the middle of the Soviet social pyramid.99 Further investigations into the crisis communication circulating among a broad spectrum of late‑Soviet functional elites may help resolve the seeming paradox of a political leadership with Mikhail Gorbachev at its helm frantically reforming a socioeconomic system that most of the general populace apparently still perceived to be supremely stable and tolerably liveable.100
The end – And new beginnings
- 101 I reflect on the reasons for this “nuclear renaissance” in the conclusions to Guth, “Oasis,” arguin (...)
42It is not without historical irony that today nuclear technology, whose failure in Chernobyl contributed decisively to the final crisis of the Soviet Union, is once again considered a prime source of legitimacy and power by the post‑Soviet elites.101 Against this background, what conclusions can be drawn from analysing Soviet nuclear technopolitics through the prism of Shevchenko? Two conflicting strands of developments in particular appear to have sustained relevance to the present.
- 102 On miniature utopias see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State : How Certain Schemes to Improve the H (...)
43First, as a product of the 1960s, Shevchenko epitomised a triumphant exceptionalism of Soviet nuclear technopolitics, revealing important aspects in which the Soviet nuclear programme historically differed from its Western counterparts. Projected onto the canvas of a state territory that was still largely perceived as a tabula rasa, the perpetualised revolutionary vision converged with an institutionalised mind‑set of warlike mobilization in a sociotechnical imaginary of nuclear‑powered progress that was both particularly comprehensive and profoundly transformative. Shevchenko highlighted both aspects: as a large‑scale, short‑timeframe frontier project realised on the USSR’s underdeveloped periphery, courtesy of the seemingly unlimited power of the atom and the brute‑force approach of all‑out mobilisation, it expressed the Soviet leadership’s obsession with catapulting backward regions into modernity, and once completed, it anticipated the all‑encompassing technoscientific and socioeconomic promise of atomic‑powered communism in a miniature utopia that could readily be showcased and replicated.102
- 103 Most prominently Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela et al, eds., The Shock of the Global (...)
- 104 Charles S. Maier, “Two Sorts of Crisis ? The ‘Long’ 1970s in the West and in the East,” in Hans Gün (...)
44Second, as a focal point of transsystemic nuclear cooperation in the 1970s, Shevchenko foregrounds a pivotal phase of transformation for Soviet nuclear technopolitics in the course of which, under the influence of international entanglement, the previous post‑war practices were critically reviewed and significantly adapted. An increasing number of scholars have recently singled out the 1970s as a watershed period during which comprehensive reconfigurations of the global economy and the international order took place.103 These reconfigurations presented the USSR with important opportunities and challenges, facilitating, among other things, an unprecedented level of transsystemic exchange and collaboration in science, technology and trade. At the same time, the double crisis of industrial societies in East and West rendered visible the need for comprehensive readjustments to the existing socioeconomic models on both sides of the bloc divide, foregrounding the question of how progress should be envisioned and enacted in the future.104 Nuclear history provides important insights into how the Soviet Union dealt with these opportunities and challenges. Over the course of the 1970s, comprehensive transsystemic exchange with French, US, Finnish and other partners led Sredmash to introduce significant improvements to the BN and VVĖR (but not the RBMK) series of reactors. Growing confidence in transsystemic cooperation and international non‑proliferation safeguards also induced Soviet decision‑makers to reconsider their previous reservations regarding the sale of nuclear equipment and fuel abroad, prompting an export strategy focused on enriched uranium, turn‑key reactors and auxiliary technologies such as nuclear desalination facilities. Soviet nuclear technopolitics thus became significantly more international than they had been before.
- 105 The USSR ramped up the domestic deployment of nuclear power at a time when Western countries such a (...)
- 106 On late‑Soviet atomogrady, see Anna Veronika Wendland’s contribution to this issue.
45However, it is important to note that these transformations remained incomplete, again in part for reasons connected to the international context. Towards the end of the decade, transsystemic cooperation dwindled under the impression of renewed nuclear confrontation in Europe. Still more importantly, a growing gap opened between Western societies becoming increasingly wary of the risks associated with nuclear energy and the Soviet leadership – always confident that a technological fix could be found for all technology‑induced problems – embracing its opportunities all the more vigorously.105 This weakening of transsystemic ties again strengthened the relative weight of domestic engineering and organisational cultures, partly re‑establishing international isolation. At the same time, intrinsically domestic rationales also played an important role in perpetuating a culture of national nuclear exceptionalism. The less technoscientific momentum it could muster, the more unwilling the Soviet leadership ultimately was to abandon internal nuclear colonisation as one of the few remaining vehicles of revolutionary progress. Late‑Soviet atomogrady (NPP towns) such as Chernobyl, hastily erected as a lighthouse project of economic development in rural Polesia around a specifically Soviet reactor type lacking state‑of‑the‑art safety features, testify to this strategy106 in which conflicting cultures of technoscientific optimisation and warlike mobilisation continued to coexist.
- 107 For instance, a VVĖR 1200 reactor, representing a significantly updated version of the Soviet PWR d (...)
- 108 That is, except for the fact that “communism” has been replaced by authoritarianism. See e.g. Vladi (...)
- 109 See the chapter on nuclear energy in Paul Josephson, Putin’s Projects (forthcoming) ; Tatiana Kaspe (...)
- 110 Ingard Shul′ga, Iuliia Gileva, “Pliusy iz minusov [From Negative to Positive],” Atomnyi ėkspert, 9 (...)
- 111 Even a staunch proponent of FBR technology admits that although “several countries have stated vagu (...)
46Attention to both these domestic specificities of the Soviet nuclear programme and the formative influence of international entanglement is crucial in providing a comprehensive prehistory of Russia’s present nuclear renaissance, revealing important continuities that might otherwise go unnoticed. Today, Rosatom’s ambitious strategy of international expansion builds on networks developed, practices assimilated and lessons learned in the 1970s – from the geography of contacts to the technologies favoured, the business models chosen and the cultivation of an obliging internationalism. The safety standards and quality requirements of the global market also have halo effects for NPP projects realised within Russia.107 But at the same time, domestic development plans remain largely characterised by a triumphant nuclear nationalism that is reminiscent of atomic‑powered communism108 – from the unabated fascination with radical progress permeating these visions109 to unrealistically ambitious targets for increasing installed capacity and controversial plans for the establishment of a closed nuclear fuel cycle based on a large fleet of FBRs to be built within a short timeframe.110 The last point is particularly worrying in view of the fact that most countries have abandoned or mothballed their breeder programmes, not least for safety considerations, which leaves the Russian FBRs without operational Western counterparts – thereby potentially replicating the earlier isolation of the RBMK programme.111
47Ultimately, if we adhere to the premise that in view of entrenched military, economic and technoscientific interests, nothing short of another major accident is likely to stop Russia’s nuclear programme, much comes down to the ratio in which the traditions of national nuclear exceptionalism and international entanglement will codetermine the future course of Russian nuclear technopolitics. Current developments suggest that after a phase of intensive absorption of international inputs, the Russian nuclear programme is taking another turn towards isolation.
Notes
1 At the ceremony accompanying the opening of the capsule in 2017, officials claimed that the vision of the 1967 pioneers was not too far off the mark. Although the city’s nuclear industries had collapsed after 1991, the region’s abundance of oil had facilitated its economic survival and even inspired an ambitious urban expansion project yet to be realised. “V Aktau vskryli zapasnuiu kapsulu vremeni i zachitali poslanie [Spare Time Capsule Unearthed and Its Message Read in Aqtau],” Tengrinews (December 2, 2017), https://tengrinews.kz/kazakhstan_news/aktau‑vskryili‑zapasnuyu‑kapsulu‑vremeni‑zachitali‑poslanie‑332331/ [January 11, 2018]. The quotation in the title of this paper is also taken from the time capsule message.
2 The distinction between “nuclear” and “political” histories is made here not to construe them as neatly delineated from each other, but rather to frame the interconnections between the two fields.
3 The first Soviet A‑bomb was detonated in 1949 and the first H‑bomb in 1953. David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb : The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy 1939–1956 (New Haven – London : Yale University Press, 1994).
4 David Holloway, “Science, Technology and Modernity,” in Ronald G. Suny, ed., The Cambridge History of Russia, 3 vols., vol. 3 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2006), 549–578 (574) ; Seweryn Bialer, Joan Afferica, “The Genesis of Gorbachev’s World,” Foreign Affairs, 64, 3 (1985) : 605–644.
5 Gensek is short for general′nyi sekretar′, i.e. the General (or, at certain times, First) Secretary of the CPSU.
6 On the concept of nuclear technopolitics, see Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France : Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II, 2. ed. (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2009).
7 Ibid. ; Gabrielle Hecht, ed., Entangled Geographies : Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2011) ; Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear : Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2012).
8 On sociotechnical imaginaries, see Sheila Jasanoff, “Imagined and Invented Worlds,” in Sheila Jasanoff, Sang‑Hyun Kim, eds., Dreamscapes of Modernity : Sociotechnical Imaginaries and the Fabrication of Power (Chicago – London : University of Chicago Press, 2015), 321–341. On atomic‑powered communism, see Paul R. Josephson, “Atomic‑Powered Communism. Nuclear Culture in the Postwar USSR,” Slavic Review, 55, 2 (1996) : 297–324.
9 On the concept of STR, see Stefan Guth, “One Future Only ? The Soviet Union in the Age of the Scientific‑Technical Revolution,” Journal of Modern European History, 13, 3 (2015) : 355–376.
10 A.M. Petros′iants, “Nuclear Science and Technology at the 50th Anniversary of the Great October Socialist Revolution,” Soviet Atomic Energy, 23 (1967) : 1135–1149 (1135, 1139–1141, 1143).
11 S. Perepletchikov, “The Atomic Energy Pavilion in the All‑Union House for National Economy in the USSR in 1967,” ibid. : 1250–1252 ; V. Mikhailin, “Atoms for Peace at Expo 67,” ibid. : 1125–1126.
12 Rozhdeno naukoi [Born From Science], Tsentrnauchfil′m, 1977. Quotations are from reel II. Italics are mine.
13 For the characterisation of Shevchenko as the “first city of the STR,” see S. Mukashev, “Mangyshlakskii variant [The Mangyshlak Variant],” Nauka i Zhizn′, 2 (1985) : 34–35. For explicit references to Magnitogorsk, see ibid. and L.I. Artamonova, “Gorod‑sad v pustyne [Garden City in the Desert],” Zdorov′e, 11 (1977).
14 For Paustovskii’s vision, see his 1932 novel Kara Bugaz. On Kurchatov, see Josephson, “Communism,” (302–303).
15 Start v velikoe budushchee [Start into a Great Future], Tsentral′naia studiia dokumental′nykh fil′mov, 1980. Citation from reel II, min. 2 :55–3 :10.
16 RGASPI (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial′no‑politicheskoi istorii), f. 17, op. 141, d. 1713, l. 9.
17 Ibid., l. 24 ; Natal′ia Zaderetskaia, Angelina Garkusha, Nezabyvaemoe : Stranitsy istorii Mangistau. Ėntsiklopediia Mangistauskogo TPK [Unforgettable : Pages from the history of Mangistau. An Encylopedia of the Mangistau Industrial Complex], (Almaty, 2014), 6.
18 Robert Kindler, Stalin’s Nomads : Power and Famine in Kazakhstan (Pittsburgh : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018) ; Zhaugashty Nabiev, Stepnaia tragediia. Adaiskoe vosstanie 1929–1930 [Tragedy in the Steppe : The Adai Uprising, 1929–1930], (Almaty : Arys, 2010).
19 See Anna Veronika Wendland’s contribution to this issue.
20 Marc Elie, Isabelle Ohayon, “Foreword,” Cahiers du monde russe, 54, 1–2 (2013) : 29–45 (39).
21 For a description of the Brezhnev‑era regime of temporality as a “perpetualised present,” see Stefan Plaggenborg, Experiment Moderne. Der sowjetische Weg (Frankfurt a.M. – New York : Campus, 2006), 98–105. On the cult surrounding World War II, see Nina Tumarkin, The Living & the Dead : The Rise and Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia ((New York : Basic Books, 1994).
22 Elie, Ohayon, “Foreword,” 39.
23 Addressing the grave demographic losses inflicted upon the local nomadic population during Stalinism remained strictly taboo, however, until the end of the Soviet period. See the introduction to Nabiev, Tragediia. As for Mangyshlak’s cultural heritage, articles on the topic in Pravda include “Drevnii khram pod zemlei [An Ancient Subterranean Sanctuary],” (December 16, 1966) : 6 ; “Samye drevnie [Most Ancient],” (January 24, 1969) : 6 ; “Sokhranit′ na veka [Safeguard for Eternity],” (March 11, 1980) : 6 ; “Nashli arkheologi [Archeologists Found],” (December 3, 1980) : 6 ; “Tol′ko fakty [Nothing but Facts],” (December 18, 1980) : 6. Archaeologists maintained that Mangyshlak hosted one third of Kazakhstan’s cultural heritage sites. GAMO (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Mangistauskoi oblasti), f. 330, op. 1, d. 1624, l. 12–13. Many of them suffered from or were destroyed by the region’s ruthless industrialisation. “Bol′shoi forum uchenykh [A Great Convention of Scholars],” Ogni Mangyshlaka, no. 1206 (1989) : 1.
24 In retrospect, numerous representatives of the city’s technoscientific elites have claimed that they perceived the mass deployment of forced labour as a glaring anachronism which undermined their faith in Soviet progress. See e.g. Mikhail P. Grabovskii, Puskovoi Ob′′ekt [Preparing for Startup] (M : Nauchnaia kniga, 1999). In Soviet times, only dissidents dared to openly address the topic. See Viktor V. Sokirko, Lidiia N. Tkachenko, “Ustiurt–84,” (M., 1984), <http://www.sokirko.info/Part1/Ustjurt/index.html> [December 21, 2017].
25 Mukashev, “Variant.”
26 I. Mosin, “Ananasy dlia rabochikh. Reportazh iz zakrytoi zony [Pineapples for the Workers. A Report from the Closed Zone],” Pravda (November 10, 1989) : 4.
27 Stephen Lovell, The Shadow of War : Russia and the USSR, 1941 to the Present (Malden, MA : Wiley‑Blackwell, 2010).
28 Mikhail F. Troianov, Moei sud′boi stal Fiziko‑ėnergeticheskii institut [The Institute of Physics and Power Engineering Became My Destiny] (Obninsk : FGUP “GNC RF – FEI”, 2007), 161.
29 Ibid., 161–163.
30 In the footsteps of the BN‑350 followed a more powerful BN‑600 at the Beloiarsk NPP. A still more advanced BN‑800 was also planned, but not commissioned before 2014. The cumulative cost of the Soviet breeder programme has been estimated at 12 billion US dollars. Thomas B. Cochran, Harold A. Feiveson, Walt Patterson et al., eds., Fast Breeder Reactor Programs : History and Status, Princeton, The International Panel on Fissile Materials, 2010, 67–68.
31 According to the US Central Intelligence Agency, “[i]n the 1960s, [Soviet] defense spending grew rapidly […]. Thereafter, the growth of defense subsided as procurement increased less rapidly in 1970–74 and then leveled off in 1975–84.” CIA, “Analyzing Soviet Defense Programs, 1951–1990,” <https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB431/docs/intell_ebb_009.PDF> [February 22, 2018], 3. See also Philip Hanson, The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Economy : An Economic History of the USSR 1945–1991 (London : Routledge, 2014), 140.
32 On the Soviet shift towards an obliging nuclear internationalism, see below, and also the contributions by Roman Khandozhko and Fabian Lüscher to this issue. For an overview of the tectonic shifts in superpower relations that prompted such adaptations, see Odd Arne Westad, “The Cold War and the International History of the 20th Century,” in Odd Arne Westad, ed., The Cambridge History of the Cold War, 3 vols., vol. 1 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2010), 1–19.
33 On nuclear techno‑diplomacy, see part IV, “Momentum or Stagnation,” of this article. For the radiance metaphor, see Hecht, Radiance.
34 Admittedly, intelligence about the Soviet atomic bomb project again prompted a reinvigoration of the US nuclear weapons programme after only a short post‑war interim. See Kate Brown, Plutopia : Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2013) 124–132, particularly 128. However, these efforts now proceeded in a peacetime economic environment, unlike the Soviet programme, which unfolded in a war‑ravaged country in immediate continuation of the war.
35 According to Zubok, “[c]aptains of wartime industry […] returned to the feverish, sleepless lives they had experienced throughout the war with Germany. Many participants compared it to the Great Patriotic War.” Vladislav M. Zubok, A Failed Empire : The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev (Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 27.
36 Sredmash’s history remains to be written. For a brief outline, see Sonja D. Schmid, Producing Power : the Pre‑Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 2015), 49–57. In 1966, responsibility for most Soviet NPPs was transferred from Sredmash to the civilian Ministry of Energy (Minenergo), but warlike mobilisation and shock‑work campaigns remained common practice during the construction and operation of Soviet NPPs. Ibid. Being an experimental reactor, Shevchenko’s BN‑350 remained under the purview of Sredmash rather than being transferred to Minenergo.
37 On GSPI‑11, OKBM Afrikantov and Sredmash’s construction industry, see A.M. Petros′iants, A.V. Shegel′skii, A.K. Kruglov, et al., eds., Iadernaia industriia Rossii [Russia’s Nuclear Industry], M. : Ėnergoatomizdat, 2000, 128–143, 171–193, 810–871.
38 See Grabovskii, Ob′′ekt ; GAMO, f. 506, Mangyshlakskii atomnyi ėnergokombinat [Mangyshlak Atomic Energy Combine].
39 For a discussion of Soviet–French FBR collaboration, see below.
40 Viktor A. Sidorenko, Istoriia atomnoi ėnergetiki Sovetskogo Soiuza i Rossii [A History of Nuclear Power in the Soviet Union and Russia], 5 vols. (M. : IzDat, 2001–2004), vol. 5, 21–22, 63–64.
41 US Embassy Moscow to Department of State, Atomic Energy : Welding at BN‑350 and BN‑600 [March 29, 1974], in : Wikileaks, <https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1974MOSCOW04562_b.html> [February 28, 2018].
42 Sidorenko, Istoriia atomnoi ėnergetiki, vol. 5, 21–22, 63–64.
43 Gloria Duffy, Soviet Nuclear Energy : Domestic and International Policies (Santa Monica : Rand, 1979), 16–17.
44 Graphite‑moderated reactors were used extensively in the US Manhattan project for plutonium generation and within a few years, the Soviet nuclear weapons project replicated this application. However, due to their negative void coefficient (the fact that a loss of coolant leads to a power excursion), graphite‑moderated, water‑cooled reactors were deemed unsafe at the size required for large‑scale electricity generation in Western countries. By contrast, Soviet nuclear engineers at the Kurchatov Institute considered the risk manageable. Prior to the Chernobyl disaster, the RBMK’s designers took pride in the fact that the development of graphite reactors into large‑scale power reactors was a “uniquely Soviet” achievement. Schmid, Power, 125.
45 International Nuclear Safety Advisory Group [IAEA], INSAG‑7. The Chernobyl accident : Updating of INSAG‑1 (Vienna : IAEA, 1992). On how this report resulted from discussions inside the Soviet nuclear sector, see Schmid, Power, 137–150.
46 On the massive mobilisation of disaster “liquidators”, see Schmid, Power, 135–137 ; Kate Brown, Manual for Survival : A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (New York – London : Norton, 2019), 59 ; Adam Higginbotham, Midnight in Chernobyl : The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster (New York : Simon and Schuster, 2019), 239–260. On disaster mitigation as a warlike effort, see ibid., 240 ; Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West : Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (New York : Columbia University Press, 2000), 215.
47 See e.g. Viktor N. Kuznetsov, Zakrytye goroda Urala : Istoricheskie ocherki [Closed Cities in the Urals : Historical Outlines] (Ekaterinburg : Poligrafist, 2008), 85 ; Sonja D. Schmid, “Organizational Culture and Professional Identities in the Soviet Nuclear Power Industry,” Osiris, 23 (2008) : 82–111 (90).
48 This conforms with recent findings by Marc Elie and Edward Hardy, but transcends the timeframe of their investigations, which are limited to the Khrushchev period. Marc Elie, “Khrushchev’s Gulag : the Soviet Penitentiary System after Stalin’s Death, 1953–1964,” in Denis Kozlov, Eleonory Gilburd, eds., The Thaw : Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s (Toronto : Toronto University Press, 2013), 109–142, Jeffrey S. Hardy, The Gulag after Stalin : Redefining Punishment in Khrushchev’s Soviet Union, 1953–1964 (Ithaca – London : Cornell University Press, 2016).
49 RGANI (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishchei istorii), f. 89, op. 16, d. 1, l. 12 ; GARF, f. R‑9401, op. 2, d. 498, l. 393–394 ; see also Petros′iants et al., Industriia, 815.
50 GAMO, f. 10P, op. 1, d. 9, l. 41–42.
51 Author interviews with Marat Shushakov in Aqtau, October 3, 2012, and with Gennadii M. Isakov in Moscow, December 3, 2012 ; Tamara Pavlenko, Zolotye rossypi pamiati : Prikaspiiskii gorno‑metallurgicheskii kombinat [Gold Dust of Memory : The Caspian Metallurgical Mining Combine] (Aktau : TOO "Aktau - Lada TV," 2013), 100.
52 On Vorkuta and Magadan, see Alan Barenberg, Gulag Town, Company Town : Forced Labor and its Legacy in Vorkuta (New Haven : Yale University Press, 2014) ; Mirjam Sprau, Kolyma nach dem Gulag : Entstalinisierung im Magadaner Gebiet 1953–1960 (Berlin : De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2018).
53 Grabovskii, Ob′′ekt, 15–19, 63 ; RGAĖ (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ėkonomiki), f. 4372, op. 66, d. 953, l. 87 ; RGASPI, f. 17, op. 150, d. 2106, l. 17.
54 Marc Elie found archival evidence of 1 million encamped convicts in the USSR in 1970. Elie, “Khrushchev’s Gulag,” 113. A CIA estimate suggests 2.5 million for 1983 (but includes 0.7–1 million non‑encamped prisoners with work assignments). Directorate of Intelligence, “Soviet Forced Labor. An Update,” Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room (March 1985), <http://www.foia.cia.gov/sites/default/files/document_conversions/89801/DOC_0000109013.pdf> [September 3, 2018].
55 Judith Pallot, “Forced Labour for Forestry : The Twentieth Century History of Colonisation and Settlement in the North of Perm′ Oblast′,” Europe‑Asia Studies, 54, 7 (2002) : 1055–1083, Jeronim Perović, “‘The Key is in Our Hands’ : Soviet Energy Strategy during Détente and the Global Oil Crises of the 1970s,” Historical Social Research, 39, 4 (2014) : 113–144 (120) ; Johannes Grützmacher, Die Baikal‑Amur‑Magistrale. Vom stalinistischen Lager zum Modernisierungsprojekt unter Brežnev (München : Oldenbourg, 2012), 236–237 ; Esther Meier, Breschnews Boomtown. Alltag und Mobilisierung in der Stadt der LKWs (Paderborn : Ferdinand Schöningh, 2016), 243, annotation 109 ; Barenberg, Gulag Town, 159.
56 A Kazakh author has recently suggested that it was precisely the decision to proceed to the “construction of communism,” as confirmed in the 1961 Programme of the CPSU, which reaffirmed the return to forced labour after a five‑year period in which its eventual abolition had seemed likely. Serik K. Bastemiev, Ispravitel′nye uchrezhdeniia Kazakhstana. Istoriko‑pravovoi aspekt [Kazakhstan’s Correctional Facilities : Historical and Legal Aspects] (Pavlodar : Kereku, 2009), 117–118.
57 Oleg Khlevniuk, Simon Belokowsky, “The Gulag and Non‑Gulag as One Interrelated Whole,” Kritika, 16, 3 (2015) : 479–498 (489).
58 At that time, Brezhnev was not only the representative Soviet head of state, but also one of the key figures in Soviet military‑industrial decision‑making, and was soon to become Secretary General of the CPSU. Susanne Schattenberg, Leonid Breschnew : Staatsmann und Schauspieler im Schatten Stalins. Eine Biographie (Köln – Weimar – Wien : Böhlau, 2017), 251.
59 Glenn T. Seaborg, “Cooperation between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. in the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy,” in Idem, ed., A Scientist Speaks Out (Singapore : World Scientific Publishers, 1996), 409–430 (421) ; Troianov, Sud′boi, 18.
60 See e.g. GAMO, f. 506, op. 1, d. 362, and various other files produced by the sekretnyi otdel of the Mangyshlak Atomic Energy Combine (MAEK) ; Troianov, Sud′boi, 106.
61 B.A. Semenov, “Soviet–French Collaboration in the Field of the Peaceful Utilization of Atomic Energy,” Soviet Atomic Energy, 46 (1979) : 236–238 (237).
62 Ibid., 238.
63 See Guth, “Future,” 370–371.
64 For a reprint of the agreement, see James Mayall, Cornelia Navari, The End of the Post‑War Era : Documents on Great‑Power Relations 1968–1975 (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1980), 179–182.
65 GAMO, f. 506, various files of the sekretnyi otdel ; US–USSR Atomic Energy Agreement : Fourth Session of Joint Committee, (December 16, 1976), <https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/1976MOSCOW19620_b.html> [June 28, 2017].
66 For a more detailed account of Soviet–French and Soviet–US FBR cooperation, see Stefan Guth, “Oasis of the Future. The Nuclear City of Shevchenko/Aqtau, 1959–2019,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 66, 1 (2018) : 93–123 (111–115). For detailed chronologies of these contacts, see Petros′iants et al., Industriia, 1004–1009, 1111–1116.
67 The first half of the decade witnessed the Treaty on the Non‑Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in 1970, SALT I in 1972 and the Helsinki Conferences on Security and Co‑operation in Europe in 1972–1975, whereas towards its end, East–West relations were overshadowed by the USSR’s and the United States’ deployment of tactical nuclear missiles in Europe. For a nuanced account, see Leopoldo Nuti, “The Making of the Nuclear Order and the Historiography on the 1970s,” The International History Review (2017) : 1–10.
68 For a similar argument, based on research into joint Soviet–US efforts at system analysis and cybernetics undertaken at the International Institute for Applied System Analysis at Laxenburg in Austria, see Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, The Power of Systems : How Policy Sciences Opened up the Cold War World (Ithaca – London : Cornell University Press, 2016), 53.
69 This skepticism was heightened further by the reactor accident at the Three Mile Island NPP near Harrisburg in March 1979.
70 Duffy, Energy, 29.
71 After the NPT had entered into force in 1970, the second significant event in this context was the Soviet Union’s joining the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) as a founding member in 1974. See Isabelle Anstey, “Negotiating Nuclear Control : The Zangger Committee and the Nuclear Suppliers’ Group in the 1970s,” The International History Review, 40, 5 (2018) : 975–995.
72 China’s metamorphosis from a recipient of Soviet nuclear development aid into a competing nuclear weapons state had led the Soviet leadership to pursue an extremely cautious policy of nuclear assistance (including the provision of NPPs) even towards close allies throughout the 1960s. See Zhihua Shen, Yafeng Xia, “Between Aid and Restriction : The Soviet Union’s Changing Policies on China’s Nuclear Weapons Program, 1954–1960,” Asian Perspective, 36, 1 (2012) : 95–122. It was not until the 1970s that the deployment of Soviet NPPs to the socialist countries in Central and Eastern Europe was ramped up. Sonja D. Schmid, “Nuclear Colonization ? Soviet Technopolitics in the Second World,” in Hecht, Entangled Geographies, 125–154.
73 Duffy, Energy, iii. In 1979, Duffy estimated that Soviet enrichment services for the Western European nuclear power industry had a potential volume of approximately one billion US dollars per decade. Ibid., 19. On Soviet fossil fuel exports, see Perović, “Key”. For a thought‑provoking prehistory of Soviet involvement in international trade, see Oscar Sanchez‑Sibony, Red Globalization : The Political Economy of the Soviet Cold War from Stalin to Khrushchev (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2014).
74 Duffy, Energy, 14–21.
75 On Loviisa, see Karl‑Erich Michelsen, Aisulu Harjula, “Finland. Short Country Report,” HoNest. History of Nuclear Energy and Society (November 2017), <http://www.honest2020.eu/sites/default/files/deliverables_24/FI.pdf> [February 6th, 2018], 41–51 ; Sidorenko, Istoriia atomnoi ėnergetiki, vol. 5, 21–22, 63–64, 200–202, Petros′iants et al, Industriia, 1016–1017.
76 GAMO, f. 506, op. 1, d. 715, l. 40–42, 125, 132. However, only Yemen actually purchased a desalination plant in 1988 and combined it with a conventional power plant. Ibid., d. 117, l. 77, 96–116.
77 GAMO, f. 506, istoricheskaia spravka [Historical Outline], vol. 2.
78 See Sonja D. Schmid, “Of Plans and Plants : How Nuclear Power Gained a Foothold in Soviet Energy Policy,” Jahrbücher für die Geschichte Osteuropas, 66, 1 (2018) : 124–141 ; Stefan Guth, “Atomstaat Russland,” Religion und Gesellschaft in Ost und West, 44, 4 (2016) : 24–27.
79 Troianov, Sud′boi, 23.
80 Simon Rippon, “Fast Reactor Progress in the Soviet Union,” New Scientist, 68, 978 (1975) : 570–572.
81 While burn‑up rates in the BN‑350 were limited to 5.6 %, the French Phénix achieved 9.5 % in 1980, and when British PFR breeders achieved burn‑up ratios of 12–16 %, the Soviet BN‑600 was still limited to little more than half that value in 1988. GAMO, f. 560, op. 1, d. 600, l. 57–60 (l. 58) and ibid., d. 1117, l. 39–57 (l. 57).
82 GAMO, f. 506, op. 1prod., d. 821, l. 1–7. (l. 4).
83 The original project for the BN‑600 was redesigned from the ground up after a thorough comparison with the French Superphénix, so as to more closely match the operational parameters of the French reactor which the Soviet specialists conceded were more realistic and considerably safer. Troianov, Sud′boi, 18–19.
84 Paul R. Josephson, Red Atom : Russia’s Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to Today (New York : W.H. Freeman, 2000), 81–108.
85 Lev A. Kochetkov to Dmitrii S. Iurchenko, August 24, 1984. GAMO, f. 506, op. 1prod., d. 821, l. 1–7 ; Viktor V. Orlov, “Za bystrymi reaktorami – budushchee ! [The Future Belongs to Fast Breeder Reactors !] [Interview conducted by E.A. Karandina],” NIKIĖT (January 14, 2005), <http://web.archive.org/web/20050209011528/http://www.nikiet.ru/rus/news/2005/orlov75.html> [April 8th, 2017].
86 See Troianov, Sud′boi, 20, 165–166.
87 On the serial construction (potochnoe stroitel′stvo) of NPPs, see Schmid, Power, 34–40. On reactor exports to socialist countries, see Schmid, “Colonization.” For a table of reactors built abroad, see Sidorenko, Istoriia atomnoi ėnergetiki, vol. 5, 419.
88 Analysts of technoscientific transition pathways have identified the Soviet big science/big technology approach to research and development as an impediment to niche innovation, which rapidly gained importance in capitalist countries in the age of information technology. See Frank W. Geels, Johan Schot, “Typology of Sociotechnical Transition Pathways,” Research Policy, 36 (2007) : 399–417.
89 Hanson concedes that in view of an economy which reacted ever more sluggishly to modernisation stimuli, prioritising consumption over investment was a strategy “not self‑evidently foolish”. Hanson, Rise and Fall, 143.
90 Stephan Merl, “The Soviet Economy in the 1970s – Reflections on the Relationship Between Socialist Modernity, Crisis and the Administrative Command Economy,” in Marie‑Janine Calic, et al., eds., The Crisis of Socialist Modernity : The Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the 1970s (Göttingen : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 28–65, 54–56.
91 For nostalgic evocations of a time of glory and well‑being in Shevchenko, see the interviews in Birgit Schlieps, Rohmodelle : Raw Models (Frankfurt a. M. : Revolver, 2005).
92 On foregrounding consumption over investment, see Hanson, Rise and Fall, 99, 134, 139–143.
93 This is stressed in the introductions to all recent volumes and topical issues on the Brezhnev period. See Elie, Ohayon, “Foreword” ; Dina Fainberg, Artemy Kalinovsky, “Introduction : Stagnation and Its Discontents : The Creation of a Political and Historical Paradigm,” in Dina Fainberg, Artemy Kalinovsky, eds., Reconsidering Stagnation in the Brezhnev Era : Ideology and Exchange (Lanham : Lexington Books, 2016), vii–xxii ; Boris Belge, Martin Deuerlein, “Einführung : Ein goldenes Zeitalter der Stagnation ? Neue Perspektiven auf die Brežnev‑Ära,” in Boris Belge, Martin Deuerlein, eds., Goldenes Zeitalter der Stagnation ? Perspektiven auf die sowjetische Ordnung der Brežnev‑Ära (Tübingen : Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 1–37.
94 This chronological spread is noted by Elie, Ohayon, “Foreword,” 31–32. Scholars point to the following dates as important tipping points between optimism and pessimism : the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 for large parts of the cultural elites, the end of meaningful economic reforms in 1971 for economists and planners, the sclerosis of the CPSU leadership after Brezhnev’s stroke in 1974 for the younger generation of Party cadres, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, followed by a rapid deterioration of superpower relations, for any remaining optimists. See ibid. ; Merl, “Soviet Economy” ; Fainberg, Kalinovsky, “Introduction,” xii–xiv ; Klaus Gestwa, “Von der Stagnation zur Perestrojka. Der Wandel der Bedrohungskommunikation und das Ende der Sowjetunion,” in Boris Belge, Martin Deuerlein, eds., Goldenes Zeitalter der Stagnation ? Perspektiven auf die sowjetische Ordnung der Brežnev‑Ära (Tübingen : Mohr Siebeck, 2014), 253–311 (particularly 261–270).
95 Until the late 1970s, the improvement of East–West relations stood out as one of the most important achievements of Brezhnev’s reign. See Zubok, Empire, 192–226 ; Donald J. Raleigh, “‘Soviet’ Man of Peace : Leonid Il′ich Brezhnev and His Diaries,” Kritika, 17, 4 (2016) : 837–868. Zubok, Empire, 220, confirms that revitalising the Soviet economy by means of transsystemic cooperation was one of the primary motives of Soviet détente policy. See also Joseph S. Berliner, “Some International Aspects of Soviet Technological Progress [first published in 1973],” in Joseph S. Berliner, ed., Soviet Industry from Stalin to Gorbachev : Essays on Management and Innovation (Aldershot : Edward Elgar, 1988), 212–221.
96 On space flight, see Isabelle Gouarné, “Dépasser les tensions Est‑Ouest pour la conquête de l’espace. La coopération franco‑soviétique au temps de la guerre froide,” Les Cahiers Sirice, 16, 2 (2016) : 49–67, on computer modelling, see Rindzevičiūtė, Power.
97 Philip Hanson, “The Soviet Union’s Acquisition of Western Technology After Stalin. Some Thoughts on People and Connections,” in Sari Autio‑Sarasmo, Katalin Miklóssy, eds., Reassessing Cold War Europe (London : Routledge, 2011), 16–32 ; Sari Autio‑Sarasmo, “Knowledge through the Iron Curtain : Soviet Scientific‑Technical Cooperation with Finland and West Germany,” in ibid., 66–82 ; Perović, “Key.” Interestingly, Hanson, Rise and Fall, 130, assumes that transsystemic exchange had a disillusioning effect on the Soviet technoscientific elites from the very beginning, allegedly creating a “perception that the USSR did not […] independently propel its own technological progress.” However, there is evidence to the contrary, suggesting that initially at least, even technology imports were seen as an opportunity to catch up with the West in fields where the USSR traditionally trailed it. See e.g. Meier, Boomtown, 40–42.
98 On commitment, see e.g. Schmid, “Organizational Culture,” 106–107.
99 See e.g. Fainberg and Kalinovsky on the memoirs of high‑ranking Soviet reformers such as Arbatov, Cherniaev, Brutents and Iakovlev. Fainberg, Kalinovsky, “Introduction,” xiv.
100 This paradox has been formulated as such by Jörg Baberowski, “Criticism as Crisis, or Why the Soviet Union Still Collapsed,” Journal of Modern European History, 9, 2 (2011) : 148–164. For the perception of stability among the general public, see Alexei Yurchak, Everything was Forever, Until It Was No More : The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 2006). Closer study of the crisis communication among political and functional elites has been urged by Manfred Hildermeier, “‘Well said is half a lie’. Observations on Jörg Baberowski’s ‘Criticism as Crisis, or why the Soviet Union still Collapsed’,” Journal of Modern European History, 9, 3 (2011) : 289–297, and Gestwa, “Von der Stagnation zur Perestrojka,” 261–270.
101 I reflect on the reasons for this “nuclear renaissance” in the conclusions to Guth, “Oasis,” arguing that it has much to do with a predilection of authoritarian modernisation models for big science and technology.
102 On miniature utopias see James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State : How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven – London : Yale University Press, 1998), 4.
103 Most prominently Niall Ferguson, Charles S. Maier, Erez Manela et al, eds., The Shock of the Global : The 1970s in Perspective (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2010). With a specific focus on the nuclear order, see Nuti, “Making of the Nuclear Order.”
104 Charles S. Maier, “Two Sorts of Crisis ? The ‘Long’ 1970s in the West and in the East,” in Hans Günther Hockerts, ed., Koordinaten deutscher Geschichte in der Epoche des Ost‑West‑Konflikts (München : Oldenbourg, 2004), 49–62.
105 The USSR ramped up the domestic deployment of nuclear power at a time when Western countries such as the US and Germany effectively halted the construction of new NPPs. However, the massive build‑up of nuclear power generation capacities in France highlights that the dividing line between nuclear optimism and nuclear scepticism did not always coincide with the bloc divide. Still, the fact that in 2010, installed global nuclear capacity was only about one‑tenth of what had been projected in the early 1970s gives an idea of the extent to which numerous countries scaled back their respective ambitions. Cochran et al., Fast Breeder Reactor Programs, 1.
106 On late‑Soviet atomogrady, see Anna Veronika Wendland’s contribution to this issue.
107 For instance, a VVĖR 1200 reactor, representing a significantly updated version of the Soviet PWR design and considered the world’s first generation III+ reactor, was commissioned at the Novovoronezh II NPP in 2017, not least to provide proof of technology to potential foreign customers.
108 That is, except for the fact that “communism” has been replaced by authoritarianism. See e.g. Vladimir Gel′man, ed., Authoritarian Modernization in Russia : Ideas, Institutions, and Policies, (London – New York : Routledge, 2017).
109 See the chapter on nuclear energy in Paul Josephson, Putin’s Projects (forthcoming) ; Tatiana Kasperski, “Nuclear Dreams and Realities in Contemporary Russia and Ukraine,” History and Technology, 31, 1 (2015) : 55–80.
110 Ingard Shul′ga, Iuliia Gileva, “Pliusy iz minusov [From Negative to Positive],” Atomnyi ėkspert, 9 (42) (2015) : 26–36.
111 Even a staunch proponent of FBR technology admits that although “several countries have stated vague objectives about a likely high number of fast reactors by mid‑century, Russia is really the only country that has forged ahead with them”. Apart from Russia, only China and India are building new FBRs, but are struggling to bring them online and are technologically less advanced than Russia. Ian Hore‑Lacy, “Fast Reactors are Alive and Kicking,” Energypost (December 22, 2016), <https://energypost.eu/fast‑reactors‑alive‑kicking/> [August 24, 2018]. The poor safety and reliability track record of FBRs is the main reason why Western countries have mothballed their breeder programmes. Due to lengthy shutdowns for repairs, France’s Superphénix, Japan’s Monju and the UK’s Dounreay FBRs generated only a fraction of the electricity they were supposed to deliver. By contrast, Russia’s BN‑600 has experienced a respectable capacity factor “but only because of the willingness of its operators to continue to operate it despite multiple sodium fires.” Frank von Hippel, “Overview : The Rise and Fall of Plutonium Breeder Reactors,” in Cochran et al., Fast Breeder Reactor Programs, 1-15 (10).
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Stefan Guth, « Breeding Soviet Progress », Cahiers du monde russe, 60/2-3 | 2019, 281-308.
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Stefan Guth, « Breeding Soviet Progress », Cahiers du monde russe [En ligne], 60/2-3 | 2019, mis en ligne le 01 janvier 2023, consulté le 07 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/monderusse/11209 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/monderusse.11209
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