Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry by Schmid Sonja D.;Bijker Wiebe E.;Carlson W. Bernard;Pinch Trevor;

Author:Schmid, Sonja D.;Bijker, Wiebe E.;Carlson, W. Bernard;Pinch, Trevor; [Schmid, Sonja]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Chernobyl; Soviet Union; Nuclear industry; Nuclear power; Reactor design; Organization; Risk; Nuclear safety; Human error; Nuclear profession
ISBN: 9780262028271
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2015-02-06T00:00:00+00:00

Methodological Appendix

To shed light on the social, political, economic, and technical complexities and contingencies that tend to get obliterated in official narratives, I used three major data sources: archival documents, in-depth interviews with nuclear specialists, and published sources (primary and secondary). All three types of sources, to varying degrees, raise the question of whether they can be trusted. Especially in published Soviet sources, the analyst has to decipher a language in which political rhetoric was intricately woven into the texture of even fairly technical narratives. The classic technique of triangulation—that is, checking whether the stories people tell can be backed up with either published or archival sources—often works too well to be reliable in the Soviet context. This remarkable overlap should instead be interpreted as proof of the pervasiveness of Soviet ideology. I used two strategies to get around this problem. The first was to compare Soviet sources with foreign ones, such as CIA reports, publications by the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, non-Soviet reports from international conferences related to nuclear energy, as well as reports from foreign delegations visiting Soviet nuclear facilities. The second strategy was to consult dry, matter-of-fact institutional memory, preserved in administrative document collections. Studying these documents over an extended period, as I was able to, helped me get a “feel” for the style of these documents and understand the unmarked “codes” (for example, what a “satisfactory” evaluation meant became clear only when I found an “unsatisfactory” one). The eerie consistency of discursive choices also made clear how Soviet political ideology could become relatively straightforward to “decode,” at least for those unwilling to buy into the dream of a communist future.

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