What is it about?
This article tells the surprising story of American popular science and information technology entering the Soviet Union in the early 1980s. IBM sold IT equipment to the USSR, which was then used to develop typesetting and layout for the journal Scientific American to be published in a legal Russian translation.
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Why is it important?
Despite the strict trade embargo that followed the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Soviet State Publishing Committee, Goskomizdat, was able to keep up semi-diplomatic ties with the United States of America. The agency of a few actors played an important role, allowing private stake holders to take on the roles of diplomats, which ultimately opened up for semi-diplomatic political spaces.
Perspectives
On March 31, 2022, in response to Russia’s February invasion of Ukraine, Springer Nature, the current rightsholder and publisher of the translated illustrated science journal Scientific American, joined several other international academic publishers in halting their sales to Russia and Belarus. The last double issue of the Russian language edition V mire nauki—Scientific American came out in June 2022, and the journal has now ceased to exist after almost forty years of popular science communication and academic exchanges across the East-West divide.
Professor Rósa Magnúsdóttir
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This page is a summary of: Scientific American in the USSR, June 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004728196_014.
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