The Role of Science and Technology in Soviet Food Production: The Case of the Confectionery Industry in the 1960-1970s

This thesis examines the role of science and technology in the development of Soviet food industry, in particular, the confectionery industry of the 60-70s. It focuses on how this development was constructed in Soviet state ideological discourse and scince-industrial production. The research shows new strands of the topic and emphasizing the features of main Soviet food industry. It places the topic into the context of Cold War competition in the non-military sphere to examine an important role that so called scientific and technological revolution played in Soviet food making. The paper analyses scientific literature and brochures published by Soviet research institutes, as well as the Soviet journals “Science and Life” and “Chemistry and Life”. There were published researches on the development of the confectionery industryas well as the implementation of the experience of foreign colleagues in Soviet confectionery factories. Another group of sources adressed in this research work is statistical collections, the analysis of which allows us to identify the dynamics of development of all the sectors of Soviet industry, as well as to reveal how the scale of production of confectionery enterprises changed due to innovations in the production process. In addition, in the course of my work, I focus onofficial speeches of the leadership of the USSR, as well as official regulatory acts concerning the confectionery industry. These official documents allow me to reconstruct the official narrative formed during the period I study, as well as how the government planned to develop the confectionery industry, introducing the discoveries of Russian science into it.The relevance of this work is due to the fact that the period studied by me, covering almost the entire period of Brezhnev’s rule, is usually seen as as an era of stagnation, whilst, progress continued in many industries. My worsk concludes that science and technology played no less important role in the Brezhnex period than under Khrushchev, which in turn allowed the Soviet government to continue the competition for the leadership in building a modern society at the international arena.