Alexey Golubev
Research Description
This project examines the public communication of knowledge in the USSR during the Cold War, when the Soviet government made huge investments to build universal scientific, medical, political, historical, and other forms of literacy through public and workplace lectures, mass media, and popular literature. At the same time, the massive investments in the public communication of knowledge produced an autonomous network of people and ideas that was only superficially controlled by the state. This network undermined the public trust in officially sanctioned knowledge and contributed to the epistemic diversity in late Socialist societies.
Bio
Alexey Golubev is Associate Professor of History at the University of Houston where he teaches modern Russian and European history. His books include The Things of Life: Materiality in Late Soviet Russia (Cornell University Press, 2020) and The Search for a Socialist El Dorado: Finnish Immigration from the United Statesand Canada to Soviet Karelia in the 1930s (Michigan State University Press, 2014, with Irina Takala). He is currently working on a book project examining the public communication of knowledge in the Cold War USSR.
