SUMMARY:

In her essay, Zinaida Vasilyeva engages in polemics with Mark Lipovetsky. Her major argument consists of three points: first, she disagrees that the abbreviation “ITR” correctly describes the discourse and culture analyzed in Lipovetsky’s article. In the Soviet context, this abbreviation could have signified a highly qualified engineer, as well as a middle-level technician or a qualified and experienced worker. She thinks that the discourse described by Lipovetsky is a general enlightenment (progressors’) discourse of the scholarly and technical intelligentsia (nauchno-tekhnicheskaia intelligentsia). ITRs and NTIs are not synonymous. Moreover, engineers and scientists (representing hard sciences) did not compose a community with a shared culture and discourse. This was true from neither the emic nor the etic point of view. Their worlds were divided by strict administrative and symbolic boundaries. Vasilyeva suggests that the very attempt to contrast the “engineer discourse” with some “humanities” discourse preserves traces of the old competition between Soviet elite groups. In her view, the examples discussed by Lipovetsky do not prove the existence of the ITR discourse. Instead, they document a controversial and problematic discourse about the modernity of the Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet intelligentsia. This discourse focused on issues such as industrialization, the emergence of mass culture, the technocratic elite, and so on.