Authors

Discussion

This paper examines how the Scientific-Technical Revolution (STR) was conceptualized and popularized in the Soviet Union, focusing on its representation in popular science magazines of the 1950s–1991. At its ideological core, the STR promised that rapid scientific and technological progress would fulfill the ultimate goals of the socialist revolution: automated production, perfect planning, and the liberation of human beings from manual labor, alienation, and industrial-era constraints. By the 1970s, cybernetics had become a central symbol of knowledge-driven governance and holistic management, capturing the imagination of both policymakers and the public. It rendered all social relations computable, opening the path toward economic optimization through precise calculations and vast projects such as a nationwide civilian computer network for real-time planning or a paperless economy, echoing Karl Marx’s anticipation of a moneyless society. While such projects remained unrealized, the STR and cyberspeak cultivated several generations of Soviet techno-optimists. Relying on conceptual history and employing qualitative discourse analysis of three popular science magazines, Technology for the Youth, Science and Life, and Knowledge is Power, this paper seeks to reconstruct how the STR was communicated to Soviet audiences: How was the STR defined? What stages and outcomes were envisioned? Who were its main actors and mediators? These magazines served as hybrid platforms, translating complex scientific concepts into accessible narratives that fused technological possibility with communist aspiration, often blending science fact and science fiction. In doing so, they blurred the boundaries between reality, planning, and imagination, presenting innovative technologies and speculative futures as evidence of science’s potential to build a better communist tomorrow. This paper highlights the endurance of techno-optimism even amid growing disillusionment with the Soviet system during the last Soviet decades. The discourse of the STR not only sustained socialist hopes in late socialism but also laid the imaginative groundwork for technocratic capitalist futures in the post-Soviet era.