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From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: Table of Contents

From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (MIT Press, 2002)

At the controls of a Soyuz spacecraft, May 2004

Slava Gerovitch

Lecturer

Program in Science, Technology, and Society, MIT

“‘New Soviet Man’ Inside Machine: Human Engineering, Spacecraft Design, and the Construction of Communism,” OSIRIS, vol. 22 (2007) (PDF)

 

      

Education

  • 1985
    B.S. summa cum laude in Applied Mathematics
    School of Automation and Computer Technology, Gubkin Institute, Moscow

Teaching

Research

Fellowships

Grants

Professional Activities

Publications in English

Book

·        From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002, pb 2004).

Book Chapters

  • "Human-Machine Issues in the Soviet Space Program" in Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight, edited by Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius (Washington, D.C.: NASA History Division, 2006), pp. 107-140. (PDF)

  • “From Communications Engineering to Communications Science: Cybernetics and Information Theory in the United States, France, and the Soviet Union” (with David Mindell and Jérôme Ségal), in Science and Ideology: A Comparative History, ed. Mark Walker (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 66-96. (HTML)

  • “Striving for ‘Optimal Control’: Soviet Cybernetics as a ‘Science of Government,’” in Cultures of Control, ed. Miriam R. Levin (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000), pp. 247-64. 

  • “Writing History in the Present Tense: Cold War-Era Discursive Strategies of Soviet Historians of Science and Technology,” in Universities and Empire: Money and Politics in the Social Sciences During the Cold War, ed. Christopher Simpson (New York: The New Press, 1998), pp. 189-228.

Articles in Journals

  • “‘New Soviet Man’ Inside Machine: Human Engineering, Spacecraft Design, and the Construction of Communism,” OSIRIS, vol. 22: The Self as Project: Politics and the Human Sciences in the Twentieth Century, edited by Greg Eghigian, Andreas Killen, and Christine Leuenberger (2007): 135-157. (PDF)

  • “Love-Hate for Man-Machine Metaphors in Soviet Physiology: From Pavlov to 'Physiological Cybernetics,'” Science in Context, vol. 15, no. 2 (2002): 339-374 (PDF) (Russian version was published in Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki, no. 3 (2002): 472-506.)

  • “‘Russian Scandals’: Soviet Readings of American Cybernetics in the Early Years of the Cold War,” The Russian Review, vol. 60, no. 4 (October 2001): 545-68. (PDF)

  • “‘Mathematical Machines’ of the Cold War: Soviet Computing, American Cybernetics and Ideological Disputes in the Early 1950s,” Social Studies of Science, vol. 31, no. 2 (April 2001).253-87. (PDF)

  • “Perestroika of the History of Technology and Science in the USSR: Changes in the Discourse,” Technology and Culture, vol. 37, no. 1 (January 1996): 102-34. (PDF)

  • “Epilogue: Russian Reflections” (with Anton Struchkov), Journal of the History of Biology, vol. 25, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 487-95.

Encyclopedia Entries

  • “Cybernetics in the Soviet Union,” in Supplement to the Modern Encyclopedia of Russian, Soviet, and Eurasian History, vol. 7 (Gulf Breeze, Fl.: Academic International Press, 2006), pp. 159-164.

  • “Automation,” in Encyclopedia of Computer Science, 4th edition (Macmillan Reference/Grove Dictionaries, 2000), pp. 122-26 [reprinted in Concise Encyclopedia of Computer Science (Wiley, 2004), pp. 53-56].

Translations

  • Russian translation of Loren R. Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union (Moscow: Ianus-K, 1998).

  • Russian translation of Peter Galison, “Trading Zone: Coordinating Action and Belief,” in Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki, no. 1 (2004): 64-91. (HTML) (PDF)

  • English translation of Yuri Gagarin et al., “The Soviet Union Must Not Lag Behind the United States in Space” (1965), in Living Through the Space Race, edited by William S. McConnell (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2006), pp. 42-48.

Book Reviews

  • Review of Deborah Cadbury, Space Race: The Epic Battle Between America and the Soviet Union for Dominion of Space, in The Moscow Times Arts & Ideas Supplement: Context (5-11 May 2006): 4.

  • Review of Steven Usdin, Engineering Communism: How Two Americans Spied for Stalin and Founded the Soviet Silicon Valley, in The Times Higher Education Supplement, no. 1 (3 February 2006): 30.

  • Review of Alexander Vucinich, Einstein and Soviet Ideology, in Isis, vol. 95, no. 4 (2004): 739-740.

  • Review of David Mindell, Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics, in IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, vol. 26, no. 1 (January-March 2004): 71-73.

  • Review of Eduard Kolchinsky, ed., Essays on the Lives and Works of the presidents of the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg, 1725-1917 (English title), in Isis, vol. 94, no. 1 (2003): 125-26.

  • Review of James Harford, Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon, in Isis, vol. 89, no. 2 (1998): 365-66.

Dissertations

  • “Speaking Cybernetically: The Soviet Remaking of an American Science.” Ph.D. dissertation. Program in Science, Technology and Society, MIT, 1999.

  •  “The Dynamics of Research Programs in the Artificial Intelligence Field.” Ph.D. dissertation. Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Moscow, 1992.

Selected Publications in Russian

  • Human-Machine Metaphors in Soviet Physiology from Pavlov to 'Physiological Cybernetics'," Issues in the History of Science and Technology, no. 3 (2002): 472-506. (PDF)

  • "The Problem of Self-Organization in Cybernetics and Artificial Intelligence Research," in Conceptions of Self-Organization From a Historical Perspective, edited by Aleksandr Pechenkin (Moscow: Nauka, 1994), pp. 125-45.

  • "On the Classical and Non-Classical Conceptions of Self-Organization in Cybernetics. Conceptions of Self-Organization in Artificial Intelligence Research," in Conceptions of Self-Organization: The Emergence of a New Pattern of Scientific Thought, edited by Aleksandr Pechenkin (Moscow: Nauka, 1994), pp. 62-82.

  • "Cybernetics, Synergetics, Artificial Intelligence: Models of Self-Organization," in Metaphysics and Ideology in the History of Science, edited by Aleksandr Pechenkin (Moscow: Nauka, 1991), pp. 115-27.

Conferences/Lectures

  • “Engineering Truth: Memory, Identity, and Culture in the Soviet Space Program”; University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, Slavic Department, March 2007

  • “The Engineers Who Came in From the Cold: Stalin’s Rocket Designers Face Khrushchev’s Thaw”; AAASS annual meeting, Washington, D.C., November 2006

  • "The Technopolitics of Automation and Human Control in the Soviet Piloted Space Program"; Technical University of Eindhoven, April 2005

  • “Human-Machine Issues in the Soviet Manned Space Program”; NASA workshop on “Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight,” Washington, D.C., March 2005

  • “The New Soviet Man in a Man-Machine System: The Technical Intelligentsia, Automatic Control, and the Space Race”; conference on “Intelligentsia: Russian and Soviet science on the world stage, 1860-1960,” University of Georgia, October 2004

  • “Integrating Humans and Machines for Spaceflight: American and Soviet Approaches” (with David Mindell); SHOT annual meeting, Amsterdam, October 2004

  • “InterNyet: Why the Soviet Union Did Not Build a Nationwide Computer Network in the 1960s”; Tensions of Europe conference, Budapest, Hungary, March 2004

  • “Trusting the Machine: The Technopolitics of Automation in the Soviet Space Program”; American Historical Association 2004 annual meeting, Washington, D.C., January 2004

  • “The Human Link”: Defining the Function of Cosmonauts in Early Soviet Spaceflight, 1961-1965”; the 2003 annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia

  • “Human-Machine Interaction in the Soviet Space Program: The Cybernetic Context”; MIT, Mechanical Engineering Department Seminar, April 2003

  • “Human-Machine Issues in the Soviet Space Program: An Interactive History on the Web,” History and Sociology of Science Workshop, University of Pennsylvania, January 2003

  • Toward an Interactive History of Science and Technology: Reflections on the Dibner/Sloan Web Project; LXV plenum of the Russian National Committee of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, Moscow, May 2002

  • "Soviet Cybernetics and Computer-based Objectivity in the Khrushchev Era"; Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 2000

  • "'Russian Scandals': Soviet Readings of American Cybernetics in the Wake of the Cold War"; Russian/East-European History Workshop, Harvard University, March 2000

  • "Speaking Cybernetically: The Discourse of Objectivity in the Post-Stalin Era"; the 1999 annual meeting of the History of Science Society, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, November 1999

  • "From Analog to Digital via Ideological: Computing and the Anti-Cybernetics Campaign in the Soviet Union in the Early 1950s"; the 1999 annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology, Detroit, Michigan, October 1999

  • "Science in Transition from Stalin to Khrushchev: The Case of Cybernetics"; Boston Colloquium for Philosophy of Science, Boston University, May 1999

  • "From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: Soviet Cybernetics as a Vehicle of Reform and a Bandwagon"; Science, Technology and Society Program Colloquium, MIT, April 1999

  • "Computing and the Anti-Cybernetics Campaign in the Soviet Union in the Early 1950s"; Colloquium on Cold War Science and Technology, Carnegie Mellon University, February 1999

  • "A Vision of the Future: Soviet Cybernetics As an Interdisciplinary Project and a Social Movement"; Joint Seminar for the History and Philosophy of 20th Century Science, Harvard University, November 1998

  • "Speaking Cybernetically: A Great Scientific Fashion of the Khrushchev Era"; Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts, May 1997

  • "Negative Feedback: The Anti-Cybernetics Campaign in the Soviet Union"; the 1996 annual meeting of the Society for the History of Technology, London, England, August 1996

  • "Conceptual Bilingualism vs. Translation: An Example of Russian and American Strategies for Cross-Cultural Communication"; conference on "Culture, Conflict, and Difference," Princeton University, October 1995

  • "The Man-Machine Metaphor and Ideological Disputes in Soviet Science in the 1950s"; Joint Atlantic Seminar in the History of Biology, MIT, April 1994

  • "Artificial Intelligence with a National Face: A Comparative Study of American and Soviet Cognitive Styles"; the 1993 annual meeting of the History of Science Society, Santa Fe, New Mexico, November 1993

Radio Programs

Contact Information

e-mail: slava@mit.edu
http://web.mit.edu/slava/homepage
Program in Science, Technology and Society
E51-185, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139

 
© 1997-2007 Slava Gerovitch