98

Authentically Socialist Techniques? Telecommunications Transfers and Circulations between the USSR and Europe (1920s-60s) In the interwar years, the “besieged fortress” paradigm did not prevent the Soviets from embarking on “prospecting” trips to the West and various forms of cooperation. By making it possible to directly transfer telecommunications equipment from Germany to the USSR, by contrast, the Second World War represented a break in the to-and-fro flow of techniques between the West and the USSR. This experience became decisive with the Cold War, when circulations were confined to the socialist bloc and Western Europe was no longer perceived as a source of transfers to the USSR. The Cold War and the creation of the two blocs thus changed practices of “prospecting”, models of cooperation in the telecommunications domain and the manner in which socialist techniques were perceived in the global communications network at the time of the Khrushchev Thaw. Indeed, the exploitation of the industrial potential of the people’s democracies was supposed to allow the Soviet Union to overcome its former dependence on Western telecommunications equipment and allow socialist techniques of communication to be distinguished from capitalist productions. ■