While at Radcliffe, Alexey Golubev is working on a new book project: a history of Soviet efforts to produce mass scientific literacy after World War II, when tens and later hundreds of thousands of members of the Soviet intelligentsia were recruited to communicate scientific knowledge to the public through popular science lectures, publications, public experiments and debates, and television shows. This mass scientific literacy campaign resulted in a diverse and autonomous network of people and ideas in the late Soviet Union that was only superficially controlled by the state, and it eventually undermined the public trust in officially sanctioned knowledge. As a result, this project is also an inquiry into a pressing social question, especially in the age of COVID-19, of why mistrust of science remains a persistent feature in modern societies.

Golubev is the 2020–2021 Joy Foundation Fellow at Harvard Radcliffe Institute and an assistant professor of Russian history and digital humanities at the University of Houston. Find out more at
https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/people/alexey-golubev.

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0:00 Introduction
4:02 Alexey Golubev
37:09 Q&A