Akademgorodok's "Big" History: Soviet Science Cities Historiography and Perspectives for Cultural History

The aim and genre of the article is historiographic analysis and reflection on the potential history of Soviet science cities through the case of Novosibirsk Akademgorodok. The author reviews different approaches and theories to find an appropriate one for a modern study of Akademgorodok and social history of Soviet/post-Soviet science. It is quite a difficult problem because Akademgorodok is a complex space in which different contexts and social subjects intersect. The interest of traditional historiography in both Akade-mgorodok and Russian/Soviet history of science is pretty often connected with institutional questions (history of organizations, state policy, political dissidence) or chronicles of discoveries. The author's view is that the shift of research interest in the urban space of Akademgorodok, in micropolitics within scientific organizations, in laboratory studies within STS could give historians new contexts for big problem sets in the USSR (e.g. restart of a communist perspective in Khrushchev's time) or even in the world (e.g. forms of the Big Science stage). The author's research methodology is based on a broad field of modern cultural studies of science (including traditional externalist approaches to the history of science and specific Bruno Latour's actor-network theory or Donna Haraway's cyberfeminist perspective). The article consists of two parts describing historiographic contexts of world and Soviet/Russian studies of science. In the first part, the author observes the connection between Russian/Soviet history of science and "big" social/political history and discusses two historiographic cases: (1) the case of Lysenkoism, which is the richest field of the Russian discipline that shows strong and weak sides of Russian history of science historiography; (2) the case of Akademgorodok and perspective research directions this field could initiate. The author proposes three possible contexts of new Soviet science cities history: (1) Akademgo-rodoks (not just in Novosibirsk but in Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Irkutsk) as "Big Science" late-Soviet managerial projects; (2) the social anthropology of Novosibirsk Akademgorodok, search for its social, gender, academic diversity; (3) the environmental history of Akademgorodok's forests and parks, and the entire role of the Siberian Academy in raising ecological issues since the 1960s (Baikal discussion). The second part of the article is a schematic description and discussion of world science studies trajectories from first semi-philosophical works to the field of cultural studies of science. Summing up, the author makes an emphasis in Russian that the history of science is a historical discipline, it should proceed from historiographic contexts of "big" history and change them by its own contexts. The author finishes the article with a brilliant example of the Obninsk digital project and its consequences for the renovation of history as a science; such studies of science reflect the position of an academic scholar and relation to his/her sources.

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