Naukovedenie: Social Studies of Science in URSS and their international circulation

During the 1960s and 1970s – in the climate of the Cold War – a new interdisciplinary field of research emerged in the West that took the name of Science and Technology Studies (STS). But STS was not the first intellectual project that lay at the crossroads of epistemology, sociology, history, anthropology, and psychology of science. STS had an important intellectual ancestor: a field of study called naukovedenie (literally translated as “Science Studies)” in the USSR. In this article, we propose to reconstruct the evolution of this interdisciplinary research field by showing its main theoretical blocs and positionings. A cross-reading of the existing literature on the history of naukovedenie highlights the profound discontinuity that characterized its development. Although it emerged in the 1920s, the naukovedenie research program came to an abrupt halt in the 1930s and only re-emerged at the end of the Stalinist period, becoming consolidated as a scientific field during the 1960s. However, it would subsequently disappear in the 1980s. In this article we show that the evolution of this field can only be understood through an analysis of the transnational circulation of ideas from the perspective of international relations between Western and Eastern European countries.