Abstract
One Future Only. The Soviet Union in the Age of the Scientific-Technical Revolution
The present article focuses on the «Scientific-Technical Revolution» (STR), tracing the Soviet leadership's bid for the future throughout the post-Stalinist period and examining how it came to be challenged by the scientific-technical and literary intelligentsias of the country. I argue that what was claimed to be the main strength of official Soviet thought on the future – its holistic character – was also its most serious limiting factor. Unlike Western futures studies, which assumed a plurality of possible futures and stressed the need to strategically choose between them on the basis of preferences and values, orthodox Soviet theoreticians framed the prospective development of mankind in terms of a single future that demanded an all-encompassing vision. The resulting Soviet future discourse was unwieldy and restrictive, and left the Soviet Union ill-prepared to deal with the onslaught of «reflexive modernity» that reached the country in the 1970s.
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