ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Smelting Solutions: Georgian Engineers Against Industrial Decline

• In Event: Hazards, Accidents, and Knowledge Production in Modern Industry

English Abstract

The idea that Soviet technological innovations were either derivative of Western analogies or produced under centralized party control has long dominated Soviet Science and Technology Studies. Although scholars have probed the inner dynamics of Soviet science - from party politics to institutional structures and knowledge-production practices - the histories of bottom-up innovation emerging from the peripheries remain largely unwritten. This paper addresses this lacuna by examining the development of the Closed-Top Electric Furnace, an innovative smelting technology devised at the Institute of Metallurgy of the Academy of Sciences of the Georgian SSR. Confronting the interconnected challenges of energy instability, deteriorating infrastructure, and declining productivity in the post-Stalinist period, Georgian scientists sought to create a self-sustaining technological system capable of operating independently of unreliable centralized supply networks while addressing locally acute problems of pollution, energy consumption, and worker safety. By tracing this innovation, the paper offers a bottom-up perspective on how peripheral scientific actors responded to the shifting material realities of the late Soviet period, thereby complicating narratives of Soviet technological development as solely derivative or top-down.

Author

• Tamar Qeburia, Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies