Eager to (let) know: knowledge production and dissemination in state socialist Eastern Europe

ABSTRACT

The Communist parties of Eastern Europe depended on gathering information, producing and accumulating knowledge, and curating and disseminating it to their citizens. Promising to establish a form of government that rested on rationality and science, these processes needed to be regulated and monitored to ensure they corresponded to the (supposed) party line at every step of the way. But how could individuals down the chain of command conceptualize the party line and what role did their subjectivity play in shaping their actions? How should we deconstruct knowledge-producing and -curating processes to better understand what the parties knew and what and how this knowledge was ‘handled’? Our dossier brings together case studies from various national contexts from Stalinist, post-Stalinist and late socialist contexts from Eastern Europe, where cadres and experts with different relationships with the ruling parties negotiated their various identities. In the introduction, we situate these case studies against the backdrop of a procedural view of knowledge, distinguishing between the stages of production, gathering, analysing, disseminating and employing knowledge, drawing on the framework proposed by Peter Burke. We argue that adopting the procedural view of knowledge questions the binary of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in following the party line effectively. Second, we draw attention to heterodoxies as spaces of resistance without the inherent intention of dissent. Thus, we introduce a new angle through which the constraints of individual knowledge-producing actors under state socialism can be investigated.

KEYWORDS:

• State socialism
• knowledge production
• Eastern Bloc and Yugoslavia
• state socialist expertise

According to a popular, not entirely unfounded Cold War motif which was weaponized against state socialism, citizens of socialist countries turned the pages of newspapers in vain in search for reliable information on current domestic or international affairs, for knowledge untainted by ‘ideology’ was not to be found in them – just carefully curated bits and pieces that often obscured rather than clarified things.¹ Connected to this notion was the presumption that only those skilled in the art of reading between the lines – including, of course, Western specialists – could see past the simplistic, purposefully formulaic and opaque discourse. Yet if socialist citizens had but a limited and precarious access to knowledge, a lot was known about them, as they could hardly avoid the gaze of the party state, to which they were subjected either through the use of advanced surveillance technology, the information supplied by family members, neighbours, co-workers and friends, or through everyday interaction with public institutions.² This asymmetrical system of power relations occupies an important role in how state socialism in Eastern Europe has been remembered and written about, even though it was by no means characteristic of state socialism alone.

Intellectual historians of state socialist Eastern Europe have produced a huge body of literature often touching upon the relationship between knowledge and politics, but have rarely made knowledge production a central point of their endeavours. Instead, intellectuals as producers of knowledge remained a privileged research topic. No wonder, because whether aware of it or not, intellectuals and experts negotiate professional and political-ideological aspects of their work.³ Political aspects of the intellectual history of state socialism have indeed been well recorded, be it on the level of biographies or prosopography, thematically or regionally focused analyses, or studies in specific disciplines and discourses. The recent transnational and global turn in historiography has been especially fruitful in that regard. Once studied within the framework of individual states or the supposedly monolithic ‘Eastern Bloc’ (Yugoslavia and Albania were, to an extent, outliers in that regard), socialist countries of Eastern Europe are again observed together, but now an increasingly complex picture of transsystemic and transnational cooperation and exchange is emerging. The freedom of circulation of people, knowledge and technology was at the same time an important trope of the Western propaganda arsenal even though they were effectively limited for strategical concerns.⁴ Yet various forms of transsystemic exchange persisted and gradually intensified throughout the Cold War years. That observation had prompted scholars to reconsider the Iron Curtain as a ‘nylon’ or a ‘carbon’ curtain instead.⁵

The intellectual history and the history of social sciences have (re)emerged as particularly prolific fields studying the production of knowledge either specifically in socialist countries, or in the broader Cold War context.⁶ By diversifying research questions and exploring a variety of experts and disciplines, the historiography on social sciences under socialism has further shifted the research focus away from the parties, although interest in the parties themselves remains.⁷ This shift was not entirely unwarranted. Much like ‘ideology’, the notion of Communist parties – regardless of how they were officially named – had indeed for a long time been used as a simplistic explanation for a wide range of phenomena, processes and events. When the agency of prominent individuals such as party leaders as representatives as well as creators and enforcers of party policies has been emphasized, it tended to come at the expense of understanding the inner workings of the parties and how the party was labouring towards implementing these policies in society.

More recently, the research in economic, technological or energetic (co)dependency connected to globalization gained momentum; mutual transsystemic influences manifested in economic policies; or mobility of individuals, especially experts, have challenged the analytical value of time-honoured categories of ‘East’ and ‘West’. Maybe even more consequential than reconceptualizing East–West relations has been the inclusion of the Global South (known as the ‘Third World’ during the Cold War) into the picture.⁸ And if knowledge has played a somewhat subdued role in this body of literature, historians of science, medicine and technology dealing with the Cold War period have paid considerable attention to it because knowledge (primarily, though not exclusively in the sense of scientific knowledge) and technology had already emerged as most coveted resources in the immediate post-war period, and were seen as pillars of economic development and national security, in the West, East and South alike.⁹

Though knowledge has been featured in studies on intellectual history, we felt that focusing more explicitly on knowledge or, better still, knowledge-as-a-process, could provide new insights into how the party line was interpreted and put into practice. This dossier is a delayed result of a debate over a deceptively simple question: how did intellectuals, who engaged in ideologically sensitive professional work in a socialist country, know precisely what the party line was?¹⁰ How was this doctrine, binding to a varying degree, interpreted and put into practice, and how were the results assessed by the parties that supposedly articulated them in the first place? But also, how did the party know what it knew – about itself, the society it governed, and the world at large? Neither ideology and facts nor political voluntarism and expertise-based technocracy stood clearly opposed and delineated. How, then, did they interact in concrete everyday instances involving the party state apparatuses and policies? If knowledge is power, could a political entity that aspired to ‘total power’ have resisted acquiring ‘total knowledge’?¹¹ The hunger for information has by no means been characteristic of socialist countries alone, but it was there that knowledge, in a broad sense of the meaning, appeared explicitly connected to ideology, and many contemporary commentators (and some more recent) have considered it to be under the corruptive influence of Marxism and used as a means of indoctrination, bereft of political and societal checks and balances, and the innate plurality of liberal democracy. To answer these questions, the contributions approach the articulation, interpretation and implementation of the elusive party line from the perspectives of party activists, party officials at universities, social scientists specializing in issues such as the national question in multi-ethnic societies, academics acting as intelligence officers, and urban planners.

Treacherous paths: mapping the roads from information to knowledge

In subsequent discussions – especially after the ‘Communist Parties in East Central Europe: Frameworks of Knowledge Acquisition and Dissemination, 1945–1989’ workshop, held in April 2019 in Budapest, where this dossier started coming together – a certain convergence of topical foci and methodological proclivities crystallized in similar-yet-different case studies pertaining to Hungary, Poland, Romania, Soviet Ukraine and Yugoslavia between 1945 and the late 1980s. Additionally, recent developments in the field of the history of knowledge increasingly appealed to us and inspired us to reimagine knowledge-as-a-process and the relationship between information and knowledge, overlapping yet not identical categories, as we elaborate shortly. Thus, we set out to search for the place of the party line in this very process or as a contextual source of tensions.

Though hardly a new discipline, the history of knowledge has recently been undergoing a process of institutionalization in its own right.¹² One of the results was a lively conversation about fundamental issues regarding the field’s boundaries, especially in light of historical connections to intellectual history and the history of science, as well as the viability of the field’s emancipation given the complexity and breadth of the object of its study: knowledge. What does the history of knowledge not study?¹³ Critics have pointed out that the lack of conceptual and disciplinary boundaries erodes the field’s analytical value.¹⁴ ‘Having become fashionable, the history of knowledge is exposed to the same danger’ as the concept of culture, which had become ‘discredited by its indiscriminate application’.¹⁵ Historians of knowledge have embraced the relative vagueness of the notion and the variety of its forms.¹⁶ It is about ‘knowledges’, inherently in the plural, because, as Peter Burke suggests:

Even within a given culture, there are different kinds of knowledge: pure and applied, abstract and concrete, explicit and implicit, learned and popular, male and female, local and universal, knowing how to do something and knowing that something is the case.¹⁷

While not committing itself to the exciting ‘new’ field, the goal of this dossier is to explore the possibilities that the history of knowledge holds for historians dealing with state socialism in Eastern Europe. Especially important in that regard is the fact that we offer a procedural understanding of knowledge to complement more common practices of investigating coproduction aided by the circulation of ideas. The contributions of this dossier engage with different phases of this knowledge production process through various case studies spread across Eastern Europe, zooming in on expert and party work contexts. Whether writing about identifying and dealing with class-alien elements at Hungarian universities, researching interethnic relations and creating national policies in Yugoslavia, conceptualizing mass culture in Poland and Romania, using international scholarly cooperation as a means of information gathering for Hungary, or the dynamics of urban planning in Ukraine, the contributions to the dossier scrutinized how the party acquired, disseminated and employed ‘hybrid knowledge’ which ‘required both academic and political verification’.¹⁸

‘The socialist state apparatus was a systematic producer of knowledge’,¹⁹ and the party state appeared as an omnipresent and all-knowing entity, though increasingly incompetent – or unwilling – to act on the vast ‘knowledge’ it controlled in order to stop and reverse the economic and social decay that became so blatant by the 1980s.²⁰ Here an important distinction should be made between information and knowledge. As Stephen Kotkin remarked in the context of the Great Terror of the late 1930s, ‘The Soviet party-state was clumsy and pervasive, at its strongest in mobilization, suppression, and surveillance. The system gathered incredible quantities of information yet was often poorly informed.’²¹ In distinguishing information from knowledge, Peter Burke’s embrace of Claude Lévi-Strauss’ metaphor that ‘information [is] raw, while knowledge has been cooked’ could be useful, although with an important caveat Burke makes, saying that ‘information is only relatively raw, since the so-called “data” are not objectively “given” at all, but perceived and processed by human minds that are full of assumptions and prejudices’.²² According to Burke, ‘It is convenient to distinguish four main stages in the sequence that runs from acquiring information to using it: gathering, analysing, disseminating, and employing.’²³ Again, in the tradition of the history of knowledge, these stages appear ‘fluid rather than fixed’ categories.²⁴

With that in mind, the contributions to the dossier look into ‘coproductions’ of knowledge along several axes manifested in transfers or circulation of ideas: first, between parties and experts, i.e. intellectuals; second, among the parties, which reflects the internationalist nature of the socialist project and the structure of what was once perceived as a monolithic Soviet-led bloc; and, third, between the East and the West. The view on the party line that emerges is also one that challenges the idea of a single ‘originator of knowledge’ (e.g. the party driven by Marxism-Leninism), gesturing towards a multidirectional exchange instead. The fact that in the 1960s Yugoslav experts – social scientists working at independent though party-adjacent research institutions – were involved in studying as well as shaping and assessing the policies on an issue of such profound political importance for Yugoslavia – the national question and interethnic relations – was in itself a major departure from earlier positions of Yugoslav Communists. The contribution by Tomaž Ivešić brings to the foreground the relations between the federal centre and capitals of Yugoslavia’s constitutive republics. It discusses tensions as well as tactical alliances between social scientists and party leaderships, shedding light on the magnitude of debates and institutionalized work that was built into carefully worded, though now increasingly challenged, official proclamations.

A further justification for a procedural view of knowledge is the certainty of Communist parties in their ability to bring about communism supported by various forms of knowledge that rests on a system of gathering, storing and processing accurate information. ‘Knowledge’ has been one of the notions central to both Marxist theory and socialist practice, as well as to scholarly studies of the socialist project(s). Over the decades, its scholarly treatment corresponded to larger trends in historiography concerned with socialism, primarily emerging from Soviet studies. From the emphasis on ideology, scholarship’s attention turned first to social, and then to cultural historical explanations to interpret state socialist worlds, especially in Anglophone academia. But all these trends would suggest that knowledge was amply utilized to establish party control and identify, supress or eliminate domestic opposition both within and without the party, as well as in geopolitical confrontations, but it was also vital to the utopian and pragmatic aspects of the socialist project(s).

At a most fundamental level, Marxism-Leninism, an elusive body of political theory and the guiding principle in building socialism – and, for a while, in working towards communism – was believed to provide scientific understanding of the laws of society (and occasionally nature) through its dialectical method, categorical apparatus and everyday vocabulary. Knowledge was a transformative force, especially in light of the postulated principle of unity of theory and practice. Given the relative underdevelopment of, first, Soviet Russia and, later, Eastern Europe, a project emphasizing ‘overcoming backwardness’ through comprehensive and top-down modernization had both collective and individual implications. Socialist citizens were to become ‘cultured’ and active participants in socialist or, in Stephen Kotkin’s parlance, Stalinist civilization.²⁵ Culture and education were no less important vehicles of ‘democratic’ mass participation in ‘mature’ socialism during the 1960s and 1970s, as the contribution by Adela Hîncu and Agata Zysiak to this dossier shows. In that period, things were further complicated by the fact that the party line on mass culture was translated into policies, implemented and assessed by more heterogeneous groups that now included social scientists, too.

Across the Second World, education became intrinsically connected to social mobility and social stratification, and was envisioned as a comprehensive collective experience, not to be limited to schools and formal education alone, but to encompass the workplace and different forms of political education that would create socialist citizens in the first place and make them not only participants in socialist society, but its guardians too.²⁶ The belief in scientific facts prompted analysts to conclude that Soviets (and, by extension, their Eastern European allies) ‘endowed science with the authority of religion’.²⁷ This did not preclude numerous confrontations between the scientific community and the party though, and among other controversies, the planning and maintenance of the planned economy became a major site of contestation.²⁸

Planned economy, which held the promise of increasing efficiency, reducing waste, leapfrogging into industrialized modernity and bringing about a society of abundance, was fundamentally dependent on a timely circulation – gathering, processing, exchanging – of information and, subsequently, knowledge.²⁹ Despite many similarities, concerns about rationality took different forms in the East and the West. This in large part reflected different ‘knowledge infrastructures’ that were set up, including closer cooperation between civilian sectors in the West and stricter separation in the East.³⁰ Economic problems were largely seen as information problems, and ‘Soviet bureaucrats came to understand that at its heart, Soviet economic planning was a cybernetic process’.³¹

For a while, a wide array of social activities beyond the economy were supposed to be governed according to a plan, too. Hîncu and Zysiak offer a comparative study of the reconceptualization of mass culture in Poland and Romania during the ‘long 1960s’ through the prism of three converging processes: policies calling for a more democratic mass participation in culture (including education), the growth of socialist consumerism and, importantly, a political decision to allow social scientists to take part in studying the new socialist culture.

Urban planning as a means of showcasing socialist rationality and improving the standard of living has become a privileged subfield in studies seeking to understand the logic of planned economies.³² Natalia Otrishchenko zooms in on Lviv in the late socialist period and follows a group of prominent urban planners in their encounters with local party officials and state-party apparatus in general. By examining the strategies which they employed to position themselves professionally (and politically), she also reveals the central role of knowledge in this process, since urban planners thought of themselves as ‘people who own the territory’ by virtue of their intimate knowledge of the local conditions and their ability to negotiate that level with larger professional and political concerns.

Guessing games? The party line

Despite the party line being widely propagated in various forms, ranging from catchy slogans to dense scholarly works, countless instances remained outside the established interpretative framework, but still needed to be positioned in relation to it. How was the dissemination of politically pertinent knowledge facilitated and obstructed – often at the same time? How were the ideological prescriptions utilized in learning about individuals and deciding their vocational (and political) futures? Which actors outside the party elites were involved in articulating highly sensitive policies, or in providing information in a manner more reminiscent of security agencies? Why did they engage in these encounters and how did they behave?

The case studies cut across party hierarchy and address instances involving the top party echelons, mid-level apparatchiks, affiliated and semi-dependent experts possessing knowledge and skills vital to policymaking and implementation, rank-and-file party members and would-be members alike. These segments of society were supposed to enjoy a privileged insight (some more than others) into this sort of politically pertinent knowledge and apply it not only to their public work, but in their private lives as well.³³ Yet the very actors who were supposed to enforce the party line were often anxious, as they felt abandoned and left to their own devices in politically potentially dangerous situations, as Petra Polyák’s work on the activities of university party organizations in Stalinist Hungary reveals. The supposed ‘class instinct’, as she shows, was a woefully inadequate tool. Over time, the increasing ossification of the authoritative ideological discourse further complicated the interpretation of something supposedly self-evident.³⁴ The thaw in domestic and international affairs did not fundamentally change things in this regard. Here we see ‘imperfect knowledge’, as a variation on ‘not-knowing’, at play: party activists and officials at universities, policy makers, urbanists and social scientists enforcing and (re)shaping it through their work, uncertain as how to translate the party line into policies and actions. They needed to take into consideration the wider political implications of their actions, often facing a gap between the prescribed outcome and the situation on the ground, but were occasionally also empowered by this ambiguity.³⁵

Many experts had a formal affiliation with the Communist party that was part of their identity as much as their professional habitus and expertise. While emulation or superficial adaptation indeed captured important characteristics of these political environments, focusing solely on these strategies obscures, on the one hand, genuine attempts at engaging with Marxist-Leninist thought in a personal or professional capacity and, on the other, downplays the tensions arising from the fear of misunderstanding or conveying political messages incorrectly within this semantic framework. Accounting for instances of miscommunication and lack of clarity in a changing political climate, the case studies presented in the dossier expose and problematize the ephemeral nature of the party line and the vulnerability of those who depended on its flawless internalization. Going beyond the idea of simply switching group identities as convenient in given circumstances, new investigations could shed light on the role of emotions, inquiring about these actors’ conduct when experiencing a conflict of the perceived party line and their role and knowledge as experts.

Szabolcs László thus explores Hungarian artists and scientists who engaged in trans-systemic communication in the 1960s and 1970s, and the way in which they were selected, underwent an ‘orientation’ in order to ‘inoculate them against enemy agendas’, and how the state security apparatus tried to recruit them. László treats travel reports that the Hungarian ‘privileged travellers’ submitted upon their return to foreign countries, especially in the West, not merely as a manifestation of ‘formalised and institutionalised curiosity’, but as an inherently ambiguous bureaucratic genre that, among other things, relied on domestic categories to describe and categorize foreign political and cultural circumstances. Much like their authors, the reports were considered both unreliable and indispensable tools in the country’s attempts to benefit from intensifying transsystemic communication.

Multifaceted strategies: ‘other resistances’ and conformism

Previous scholarship often prioritized various forms of resistance, suggesting that they challenged a presumably homogeneous orthodoxy. The procedural view of knowledge casts this view as a way of decontextualization. Instead, we suggest keeping heterodoxies and the loci of resistance more open to interpretation, maintaining the opportunity to interrogate various motivations and dilemmas at the level of the individual. This enables a fuller understanding of the circumstances under which actors needed to make decisions.

Drawing on Burke again, “a system of knowledge includes the roles available for individuals to perform, the criteria for a good performance, and the way in which different kinds of knowledge are transmitted.” Such a system “may be imagined as a network of opportunities and constraints, opportunities and constraints that are not always visible to the agents.” It is important to keep in mind that “different systems offer more or less space for individual agents to do things their own way, just as they offer more or less space for innovation.”³⁶ Burke continues:

The constraints of the ‘party line’ were obvious enough to both insiders and outsiders. All the same, some creative individual academics were able not only to survive in the system, in spite of the obstacles to the careers of nonconformists, but also to produce work that won them respect in other countries, not only in the natural sciences, where there was less political interference with research, but in the humanities as well.³⁷

He concludes by saying that ‘[e]ven systems of knowledge that appear to outsiders to offer agents no room to manoeuvre have such spaces, just as systems that appear to offer great freedom may include constraints’.³⁸ Adopting these concerns does not mean that the dossier would seek to downplay resistance practices. Instead, we caution of (unintended) simplifications and emphasize that intellectual history and the study of state socialism in a broader sense should not privilege these sets of knowledge or practices on moral or other grounds if that means rendering all other forms of knowledge and practice invalid.

Instead of taking the Communist parties at face value as omnipotent and omniscient entities, the contributions examine ‘how the parties learned’ from experts and non-experts alike and, in turn, informed the knowledge of the latter categories – while not treating the parties as ‘impersonal collective actors’, monolithic and possessing a singular will, but rather ascribing agency to a variety of actors within and without the parties. In doing so, the contributions offer an insight into the inner workings of Communist parties across Eastern Europe between the mid-1940s and the late 1980s, bringing uncertainties and conflicts among various actors to the foreground, and pointing to the political implications of the knowledge process – without relativizing the hegemonic position of the parties. This is particularly important in light of the fact that the contributions (and their authors) operate at an intersection of ‘international’, largely Anglophone and ‘national’, Eastern European scholarly communities. Despite a proliferation of subdisciplinary approaches to studying socialism, there are still influential segments of historiography across the region that subscribe in their vocabulary³⁹ – sometimes by mere inertia, sometimes as a result of carefully construed memory politics – to the ‘totalitarian paradigm’.⁴⁰ Fitzpatrick argued that the actual political stakes for Western (post-) revisionists practically disappeared as the Soviet universe collapsed, which has not been the case in professional circles in the region.⁴¹

It is safe to say that in Eastern European historiography the distinction between the descriptive and the analytical application of the notion of totalitarianism became gradually discernible. For the descriptive approach, the privileged focus had been on the previously mentioned resistance or resilience, implying a pushback of the guild of scholars and experts that helped the survival of academic and professional standards after the Second World War. This, on the one hand, suggested that (semi-)autonomous scholarly action existed and sought to undermine state socialist knowledge production as it was prescribed and practised. Thus, it has left little space for the understanding of the deeds of genuine enthusiasts, who aimed to perfect the institution instead of replacing it. On the other hand, this trend had presumed the existence of a well-defined academic and professional standard in interwar scholarship and expert cultures, which the Communist takeover eradicated.

Totalitarianism as a fully fledged analytical framework, meanwhile, had been largely abandoned, giving way to a mere usage of the notion of totalitarianism/totalitarian as a shorthand. Thus, the residues of a formerly influential paradigm are frequent invocations of its central notion, without robust arguments that would advocate for a Communist dictatorship’s totalitarian nature. This attitude results either from historians being content with calling Communist regimes totalitarian (also as a way of self-positioning), or the conviction that describing these entities as totalitarian does not require further verification.⁴²

Accompanying the readers through the process of information gathering, its procession, analysis and employment in the context of Eastern European state socialist regimes, the contributions both address common trajectories and locally specific experiences, and this they do without putting forth a claim for a uniform timeline.

Based on meticulous archival work, the contributions dissect (inner) conflicts, contradictions and anxieties that emerged from the insecurity prompted by the ephemeral nature of the party line. Taking both instances of dissent and ‘dissensus’ seriously – the latter constituting an unresolved disagreement among experts⁴³ – the dossier is not an account of subversive knowledge production practices. Instead, we advocate for a nuanced treatment of low-ranking cadres and experts as they navigated their political and professional identities under dictatorship, while not making a sharp distinction between the two groups.

The dossier intends to enrich the discussion about the situatedness of state socialist knowledge production practices and by offering actor-centred accounts, ones that rely both on the extensive area studies literature providing a macroscopic perspective, as well as dominantly locally produced, empirical studies. By extoling the importance of anxiety as a key emotive feature of producing knowledge under state socialism, both in its paralysing and incentivizing effects, we hope to pave the way for further investigations into this subject, dominated by the nascent yet influential field of the history of emotions.

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the Central European University for their generous funding of the “Communist Parties in East Central Europe: Frameworks of Knowledge Acquisition and Dissemination 1945–1989” workshop that took place on 26 April 2019, at CEU’s campus in Budapest.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Réka Krizmanics

Réka Krizmanics is a Walter Benjamin Postdoctoral Fellow and Akademische Rätin at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. She holds a PhD in Comparative History 1500–2000 from the Central European University (Budapest/Vienna). Her main focus lies in the recent history of Eastern and Southeastern Europe in a global context. After researching and publishing on intellectual history and memory politics, she has been exploring how the history of globalizing Eastern Europe might be written as a herstory.

Vedran Duančić

Vedran Duančić is a senior scientist at the Department of Science Communication and Higher Education Research, Faculty of Social Sciences, at the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt, Austria. He holds a PhD in History and Civilization from the European University Institute in Florence. He specializes in modern intellectual history and history of science. He has published extensively on the history of geography in Yugoslavia and currently focuses on the post-1945, socialist period, exploring the history of science, medicine and technology at the Cold War (semi-)periphery.

Notes

1. For a classic critique of totalitarian propaganda, see Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 341–64. For an insightful study on how political culture in socialist countries and Eastern and Western discourses on ‘truth’ and ‘lies’ influenced each other, see Feinberg, Curtain of Lies, where she extensively discusses various media outlets.

2. Verdery, Secrets and Truths; Gieseke, The History of the Stasi; and Bijsterveld, “Slicing Sound.”

3. Sommer, “Towards the Expert Governance”; and Iacob et al., “State Socialist Experts in Transnational Perspective.”

4. John and Tworek, “Publicity, Propaganda, and Public Opinion”; and Daniels and Krige, Knowledge Regulation and National Security.

5. Péteri, “Nylon Curtain”; and Matyska, “Transnational Spaces Between Poland and Finland.”

6. Bradatan and Oushakine, eds., In Marx’s Shadow; Düppe and Boldyrev, eds., “Economic Knowledge in Socialism, 1945–1989”; Hîncu and Karady, eds., Social Sciences in the ‘Other Europe’ since 1945; Koleva, Totalitarian Experience and Knowledge Production; Poenaru and Petrovici, “Antinomies of Knowledge Production and Social Sciences During Socialism”; and Solovey and Dayé, eds., Cold War Social Science.

7. Bergien and Gieseke, eds., Communist Parties Revisited.

8. Westad, The Global Cold War; Mark, Kalinovsky, and Marung, eds., Alternative Globalizations; Mark et al., 1989; and Calori et al., eds., Between East and South.

9. Hecht, ed., Entangled Geographies; Oreskes, “Science in the Origins of the Cold War”; and Reynolds, “Science, Technology, and the Cold War.”

10. For a conceptually and methodologically innovative approach to historians’ dilemmas see: Oates-Indruchová, Censorship in Czech and Hungarian Academic Publishing, 1969–89.

11. Holquist, “Information is the Alpha and the Omega of Our Work.”

12. Dupre and Somsen, “What is the History of Knowledge?”; Sarasin, “More Than Just Another Speciality”; Östling and Heidenblad, “Fulfilling the Promise of the History of Knowledge”; and Burke, “Response.”

13. Daston, “The History of Science and the History of Knowledge.”

14. Suzanne Marchand suggested it was merely ‘new wine in slightly stretched old wine skins.’ Marchand, “How Much Knowledge Is Worth Knowing?” 127, quoted in Östling and Heidenblad, “Fulfilling the Promise of the History of Knowledge,” 1.

15. Muslow and Daston, “History of Knowledge,” 179.

16. Felten and von Oertzen, “Bureaucracy as Knowledge,” 7.

17. Burke, What is the History of Knowledge? 7; cf. Sarasin, “More Than Just Another Speciality,” 2.

18. Birkás, “Party Historiography,” 90; and cf. Sarasin, “More Than Just Another Specialty,” 3.

19. Poenaru and Petrovici, “Antinomies of Knowledge Production and Social Sciences During Socialism,” 31.

20. Kotkin and Gross, Uncivil Society; Glaeser, Political Epistemics; and Mark et al., 1989.

21. Kotkin, Waiting for Hitler, 440.

22. Burke, A Social History of Knowledge, 5.

23. Burke, What is the History of Knowledge? 46.

24. Ibid.

25. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain; for a critique, see Krylova, “Soviet Modernity.”

26. Fitzpatrick, Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union; and Tromly, Making the Soviet Intelligentsia.

27. Ashby, Scientist in Russia, 202. For the relations between science and religion (and a broad category of ‘superstitions’), see Betts and Smith, eds., Science, Religion and Communism.

28. For an instructive overview of instances of East–West cooperation involving planning during the Cold War, see Christian, Kott, and Matějka, eds., Planning in Cold War Europe.

29. Beissinger, Scientific Management, Socialist Discipline, and Soviet Power.

30. Erikson et al., How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind.

31. Peters, How Not to Network a Nation, 59; and cf. Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak.

32. DeHaan, Stalinist City Planning; Lebow, Nowa Huta; and Le Normand, Designing Tito’s Capital.

33. Gieseke, “The Successive Dissolution of the ‘Uncivil Society,’” 111; and Studer, “Communism as Existential Choice.”

34. Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More.

35. Burke, “Response,” 4.

36. Burke, What is the History of Knowledge? 119.

37. Ibid.

38. Burke, What is the History of Knowledge? 119; and cf. Burke, A Social History of Knowledge, 226.

39. Tismaneanu and Iacob, eds., Ideological Storms.

40. Neumayer, The Criminalization of Communism.

41. Fitzpatrick, “Revisionism in Retrospect,” 697; cf. Connelly, “Totalitarianism”; and Geyer and Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism.

42. Similar agendas are pursued by Polish, Czech, Hungarian and other regional institutes that were founded in the course of the past two decades and have quite cordial ties to rightwing political parties (currently in government in Poland and Hungary). The Institutes of National remembrance in Poland and in Hungary, and the Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes are exemplary of this trend.

43. Rindzevičiūtė, “Systems Analysis as Infrastructural Knowledge.”