The Two Faces of Soviet Technocracy: Engineer-Utopians and Apparatchik-Intellectuals, and What Happened With Their Ideas Later

Please join us for a talk with Ilya Kukulin (National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow).

In the 1990s, political and economic reforms in post-Soviet Russia neither absolutely failed nor turned out to be obviously successful. It is better to say that their results became unpredictable for their initiators, as well as for participants and witnesses. Among these unforeseen consequences are the authoritarian tendencies in Russian politics of the 2000s-2010s. Scholars and journalists have discussed a wide range of reasons for the authoritarian outcome of the democratization: paternalist habits of Russia’s population; insufficient support to the reforms by the West, and others. One underestimated but important reason is the governmentality (to use Michel Foucault’s term) of post-Soviet political elites.

In this lecture, Ilya Kukulin will look at the Soviet genealogy of post-Soviet governmentality. He traces it back to two influential social groups of the late Soviet society: 1) “middle-level” Communist party bureaucrats and 2) engineering and scientific professionals. Since the 1960s, two convergent processes were evolving in these groups, and both of them reflected the hidden erosion of Soviet ideology. The Party bureaucrats and “Party intellectuals” adopted an interpretation of Marxist-Leninist ideology as a basis for technocratic political management. Simultaneously, scientific and technical intelligentsia became more and more interested in ideas of social management and “cybernetical” or “physicalist” explanations of social processes. Both of these ideologies “repressed” the idea of an ethical responsibility having neither an interest to it, nor an idiom for its expression. In the 1990s, the perception of politics as a managerial technology rather than as a communication between elites and other social groups became a mainstream among political elites of new Russia, both pro-government and oppositional.

Ilya Kukulin is an associate professor of cultural studies at the National Research University Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Moscow. He has published widely on Russian literature, poetry, the history of education in the USSR, cultural practices of internal colonization in Russia, unofficial social thought in twentieth-century Russia, and political discourses of Russian social media. In 2015, he was awarded the Andrei Bely Prize for his monograph Machines of Noisy Time: How Soviet Montage Became an Aesthetic Method of Unofficial Culture (Mashiny zashumevshego vremeni. Kak sovetskii montazh stal metodom neofitsial’noi kul’tury), and in 2017, the Bella Prize for the year’s best article on contemporary poetry. In 2019, he published a collection of articles and essays about modern and contemporary Russian poetry, Breakthrough to an Impossible Connection (Proryv k nevozmozhnoi svyazi).