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Оттепель научно-технической координации в СССР
The turn towards coordination in the governance of Soviet science and technology which took place in
the second half of the 1950s is examined at the discursive and institutional levels. This was not the first
attempt to link socialist science and technology into a cycle of implementation. But it was produced
for the first time under the conditions of a sharp growth of scientific and technical organizations, the
strengthening of science, a radical technocratic shift and the weakening of ministries. Describing the
shift towards coordination in terms of a thaw, the author emphasizes two points. Firstly, the request for
the dismantling of directive interactions and the governing the increasingly complex worlds through
the achievement of new coherence is inscribed in the political and communicative agenda of the
thaw. From this perspective, the field of science and technology that experimented with coordination
appears to be the cutting edge of de-Stalinization, the testing ground for global connectivity, and the
techno-social lab of socialism, where new governmentality architectures were invented. Secondly,
experiments with the institutionalization of scientific and technological coordination, including the
search for the limits of decentralization, the accumulation of small institutional changes, the invention
of organizational forms and the strengthening of the agency of participants, are a vivid example of
the institutional transformations of the thaw recorded by economic historians. This interpretation
allows us to rethink the contribution of short-lived and underestimated operators of scientific and
technical coordination — from committees under the Council of Ministers of the USSR to temporary
brigades — to the formation of the late Soviet governmentality. Between 1955 and 1961 the semantic
and functional extension of coordination not only turned it into a figure of consistency, but ensured
the processing of technical policy into scientific and technical, and the discursive formation of “new
technology” into RDI.