UC Berkeley

This dissertation is a study of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia [Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia, or BSE], the primary all-subject encyclopedia of the Soviet Union, which was published in three editions that were released from 1926-1947, 1949-1958, and 1969-1978. The BSE was a revolutionary project: it was intended, at its origin, to effect a transformation in the realm of knowledge, remaking it in accordance with the Bolshevik worldview. Its writing was to bring together the Soviet Union’s leading Marxist and materialist scholars from every field of human knowledge, systematically organizing and structuring their work by providing them with a program of research and writing that would force them to reevaluate and reinterpret all of knowledge (or at least, all of the knowledge thought to be useful for the new, proletarian state). The BSE was to be the country’s universal factual and ideological reference, a collective work that would both create and propagandize the Party line to the masses. Creating such a work proved to be an extremely difficult task, made even more difficult by the numerous ideological shifts that took place over the course of the three editions’ writing. But these goals, along with the claims to totality made by all universal encyclopedias, make the study of Soviet encyclopedias such a unique perspective on Soviet history. It allows one to follow, across the Soviet period, the development of the entire Soviet system of knowledge and the transformations it and its structuring concepts and categories underwent, as one follows the struggles of the editors to produce their work. In practice, there was often no orthodox ideological position on which the editors could draw, requiring them to develop an appropriate interpretation themselves. In many cases, scholars from the BSE became the driving force behind entire intellectual movements.

The dissertation places a special emphasis on the editors of the Encyclopedia and the challenges that they faced in producing the BSE’s three editions, linking the intellectual, institutional, political, and social aspects of this history. It also includes major sections that analyze the history of universal and philosophical encyclopedias in the long nineteenth century and the encyclopedia projects of Aleksandr Bogdanov, considering the influences of both on the BSE. In telling the history of the Soviet Union through the history of its knowledge system, the dissertation offers an account of an ambitious attempt to overturn longue durée structures of knowledge and replace them with new ones that were thought to be more conducive to scientific and social progress. The dissertation is based on extensive archival research into the records of the publisher, the Communist Party apparatus, and many different research institutions, as well as the personal papers of editors and contributors to the project, interviews with current and former encyclopedists, and, of course, the text of the BSE itself.