On January 25th, STS Center hosts an open seminar featuring a lecture by Elena Kochetkova (HSE, Saint Petersburg) and Pavel Pokidko (independent researcher) "Innovations in Post-War USSR: Power, Engineers, and Resources." The seminar will begin at 18:00 in room 210, 1 Shpalernaya St.
Soviet history provided a great number of technological achievements in physics, chemistry, space technology, military industry, and other fields. However, technological development of the USSR was not steady. Despite numerous attempts at modernization, such fields as timber industry were technologically backward and dependent on the transfer of technologies from the West until the very collapse of the Soviet Union.
Using the case of pulp and paper industry of Karelia, the lecturers will tackle the problem of transfer of inventions and rational proposals into innovations at pulp and paper plants and its impact on production in the post-war decade.
The authors will try to answer the following questions:
- How did innovation policies in the USSR develop and change between 1945 and the 1980s?
- What were the mechanisms of transforming industrial inventions and projects into innovations and what hindered this process?
- How did technological style affect the development of innovations?