Expert, Empire, and Socialism: Negotiating Malariology across the Environments of Stalinism, 1926-1937

• In Event: Uneasy Partners: Evaluating the Relationships between Science, Environments, and the State

Abstract

During the “Revolution from Above,” launched by Iosef Stalin at the end of the 1920s, Soviet medical experts were forced to reimagine their place within a political system that collapsed the distinctions between science, state, and society. This presentation examines how malaria specialists balanced their dual roles as scientists and political activists across the Stalinist spatial order. Drawing on sources from central Soviet medical institutions in Moscow as well as local malaria stations in the region of Central Asia, it argues that new models of malariological expertise emerged from the socio-environmental contexts produced by the Stalin Revolution. The chaos, famine, and violence of the early 1930s produced a series of malaria epidemics that centered on characteristic sites of the new socialist order, from massive industrial construction sites to state and collective farms. In such sites, the meanings of science and politics - and of the relationships between them - were fluid and context-dependent, under constant negotiation in relation to social and ecological conditions. By strategically deploying languages of science and politics, the doctors, scientists, and medical workers involved in the “struggle against malaria” maintained a coherent discipline while simultaneously adopting the guises of neutral expert, socialist revolutionary, and colonial agent.

Author

• Marek Eby, New York University