This is a select bibliography of academic level English language books (including translations) and journal articles, published mainly post World War II, about the history of technology in Russia and the Soviet Union.

For other areas of science, please see:

Works listed here are cited in the notes or bibliographies of scholarly sources. Each is published by an academic or major press, written by a recognized expert, or substantially reviewed in scholarly journals; borderline cases are omitted. A selection of primary sources are included. Many of the books below carry their own bibliographies; see the Further reading section for other bibliographies, and the External links section for historical sites, academic sites, and museums.

Citations follow APA style. Book have citations to academic journal or mainstream published reviews when available. For books only partly about the subject, relevant chapter or section titles are provided when useful and available. Translators of the original-language edition are included when possible. In cases where a title or name has appeared with more than one English spelling, the most recent published form is used and a footnote documents any earlier title under which the work appeared.

Engineering Amann, R., Cooper, J., & Davies, R. W. (Eds.). (1977). The Technological Level of Soviet Industry. Yale University Press. Bailes, K. E. (1974). The politics of technology: Stalin and technocratic thinking among Soviet engineers. The American Historical Review, 79(2), 445–469. Bailes, K. E. (1978). Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941. Princeton University Press. Gerovitch, S. (2007). "New Soviet man" inside machine: Human engineering, spacecraft design, and the construction of communism. Osiris, 22(1), 135–157. Graham, L. R. (1993). The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union. Harvard University Press. Graham, L. R. (2013). Lonely Ideas: Can Russia Compete? MIT Press. Hill, M. R. (2020). Politics and technology: The case of Soviet mechanical engineering. Icon, 25(1), 56–77. Josephson, P. R. (2010). Would Trotsky Wear a Bluetooth? Technological Utopianism under Socialism, 1917–1989. Johns Hopkins University Press. Neimark, A. (2012). The infrastructural monument: Stalin's water works under construction and in representation. Future Anterior, 9(2), 1–14. Nikiforova, N. (2015). The concept of technology and the Russian cultural research tradition. Technology and Culture, 56(1), 184–203. Ruder, C. A. (1998). Making History for Stalin: The Story of the Belomor Canal. University Press of Florida. Schattenberg, S. (2002). Stalins Ingenieure: Lebenswelten zwischen Technik und Terror in den 1930er Jahren. Oldenbourg. [In German] Shearer, D. R. (1991). The language and politics of socialist rationalization: Productivity, industrial relations, and the social origins of Stalinism at the end of NEP. Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique, 32(4), 581–608. Siddiqi, A. (2015). Scientists and specialists in the Gulag: Life and death in Stalin's sharashka. Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 16(3), 557–588. Sochor, Z. A. (1981). Soviet Taylorism revisited. Soviet Studies, 33(2), 246–264. Stites, R. (1989). Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution. Oxford University Press. Vaingurt, J. (2008). Poetry of labor and labor of poetry: The universal language of Alexei Gastev's biomechanics. The Russian Review, 67(2), 209–229. Zakharova, L., & MacKinnon, E. (2020). Trust in bureaucracy and technology: The evolution of secrecy policies and practice in the Soviet state apparatus (1917–91). Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, 21(3), 555–590.

Environmental Engineering

Josephson, P. R. (2002). Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World. Island Press. Olšáková, D. (Ed.). (2016). In the Name of the Great Work: Stalin's Plan for the Transformation of Nature and its Impact in Eastern Europe. Berghahn Books. Zeisler-Vralsted, D. (2015). Rivers, Memory, and Nation-Building: A History of the Volga and Mississippi Rivers. Berghahn Books.

Energy

Bösch, F. (2014). Energy diplomacy: West Germany, the Soviet Union and the oil crises of the 1970s. Historical Social Research, 39(4), 165–185. Bruisch, K. (2025). Burning Swamps: Peat and the Forgotten Margins of Russia's Fossil Economy. Cambridge University Press. Coopersmith, J. (1992). The Electrification of Russia, 1880–1926. Cornell University Press. De Groot, M. (2020). The Soviet Union, CMEA, and the energy crisis of the 1970s. Journal of Cold War Studies, 22(4), 4–30. Dienes, L., & Shabad, T. (1979). The Soviet Energy System: Resource Use and Policies. V. H. Winston & Sons. Esno, T. (2018). Reagan's economic war on the Soviet Union. Diplomatic History, 42(2), 281–304. Giebelhaus, A. W. (1996). The emergence of the discipline of petroleum engineering: An international comparison. Icon, 2, 108–122. Gustafson, T. (1989). Crisis amid Plenty: The Politics of Soviet Energy under Brezhnev and Gorbachev. Princeton University Press. Hewett, E. A. (1984). Energy, Economics, and Foreign Policy in the Soviet Union. Brookings Institution. Labbate, S. (2026). Italy and Soviet gas: The history of a dependence (1960–1984). Cold War History. Advance online publication. Martellaro, J. A. (1985). The acquisition and leasing of the Baku oilfields by the Russian Crown. Middle Eastern Studies, 21(1), 80–88. Matala, S. (2023). National security, security of supply: Finlandisation as a diplomatic practice and the Finnish energy dependency on the Soviet Union, 1948–1992. The International History Review, 45(3), 551–571. McKay, J. P. (1984). Baku oil and Transcaucasian pipelines, 1883–1891: A study in Tsarist economic policy. Slavic Review, 43(4), 604–623. Movsumzade, E. M. (2002). The beginning of petroleum transportation in Russia. Icon, 8, 156–167. Perović, J. (Ed.). (2017). Cold War Energy: A Transnational History of Soviet Oil and Gas. Palgrave Macmillan. Perović, J., & Krempin, D. (2014). "The key is in our hands:" Soviet energy strategy during détente and the global oil crises of the 1970s. Historical Social Research, 39(4), 113–144. Schattenberg, S. (2022). Pipeline construction as "soft power" in foreign policy: Why the Soviet Union started to sell gas to West Germany, 1966–1970. Journal of Modern European History, 20(4), 554–573. Tolf, R. W. (1976). The Russian Rockefellers: The Saga of the Nobel Family and the Russian Oil Industry. Hoover Institution Press.

Electrification

Beuerle, B. (2025). A dormant giant: Renewable energy in the Soviet Union and Russia (1970s–present). The Russian Review, 84(2), 267–282. Carlin, W., Schaffer, M., & Seabright, P. (2013). Soviet power plus electrification: What is the long-run legacy of communism? Explorations in Economic History, 50(1), 116–147. Coopersmith, J. (1992). The Electrification of Russia, 1880–1926. Cornell University Press. Coopersmith, J. (1993). Soviet electrification: The roads not taken. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 12(2), 13–20. Josephson, P. R. (1995). "Projects of the century" in Soviet history: Large-scale technologies from Lenin to Gorbachev. Technology and Culture, 36(3), 519–559. Josephson, P. R. (2002). Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World. Island Press. Leversedge, F. M. (1977). Plan GOELRO and Soviet electric power development. The Soviet and Post-Soviet Review, 4(1), 237–255. Makarov, A. A., & Mitrova, T. A. (2020). Centenary of the GOELRO plan: Opportunities and challenges of planned economy. Thermal Engineering, 67(11), 779–789. Michel, A. A., & Klain, S. A. (1964). Current problems of the Soviet electric power industry. Economic Geography, 40(3), 206–220. Pittman, R. (2007). Restructuring the Russian electricity sector: Re-creating California? Energy Policy, 35(3), 1872–1883. Rassweiler, A. D. (1983). Soviet labor policy in the First Five-Year Plan: The Dneprostroi experience. Slavic Review, 42(2), 230–246. Rassweiler, A. D. (1988). The Generation of Power: The History of Dneprostroi. Oxford University Press. Zeisler-Vralsted, D. (2015). Rivers, Memory, and Nation-Building: A History of the Volga and Mississippi Rivers. Berghahn Books. Zheltova, E. L. (1995). The electrification of Soviet Russia: The myth and mystification of the Bolshevik electrification program, 1910–1928. The American Journal of Semiotics, 12(1), 147–184.

Nuclear Power Guth, S. (2019). Breeding Soviet progress: Or "To the pioneers of the distant future fly our 20th-century dreams!". Cahiers du Monde russe, 60(2/3), 281–308. Josephson, P. R. (1996). Atomic-powered communism: Nuclear culture in the postwar USSR. Slavic Review, 55(2), 297–324. Josephson, P. R. (1999). Red Atom: Russia's Nuclear Power Program from Stalin to Today. W. H. Freeman. Potter, W. C. (1991). The impact of Chernobyl on nuclear power safety in the Soviet Union. Studies in Comparative Communism, 24(2), 191–210. Rindzevičiūtė, E. (2021). Nuclear Power as Cultural Heritage in Russia. Slavic Review, 80(4), 839–862. Schmid, S. D. (2015). Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry. MIT Press. Wendland, A. V. (2019). Nuclearizing Ukraine – Ukrainizing the atom: Soviet nuclear technopolitics, crisis, and resilience on the imperial periphery. Cahiers du Monde russe, 60(2/3), 335–368.

Chernobyl

Transportation

Automobiles

Busch, T. N. (2011). Women and children first? Avtodor's campaigns and the limits of Soviet automobility from 1927 to 1935. The Russian Review, 70(3), 397–418. Busch, T. N. (2013). "Comrades, start your engines!": Mobility, legitimacy, and roads to socialism in the Soviet interwar period. Canadian-American Slavic Studies, 47(2), 221–246. Fava, V. (2018). Between business interests and ideological marketing: The USSR and the Cold War in Fiat corporate strategy, 1957–1972. Journal of Cold War Studies, 20(4), 26–64. Gatejel, L. (2016). Appealing for a car: Consumption policies and entitlement in the USSR, the GDR, and Romania, 1950s–1980s. Slavic Review, 75(1), 122–145. Greenstein, D. E. (2014). Assembling Fordizm: The production of automobiles, Americans, and Bolsheviks in Detroit and early Soviet Russia. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 56(2), 259–289. Holliday, G. D. (1979). Technology Transfer to the USSR, 1928–1937 and 1966–1975: The Role of Western Technology in Soviet Economic Development. Westview Press. Lonkila, M. (2011). Driving at democracy in Russia: Protest activities of St Petersburg car drivers' associations. Europe-Asia Studies, 63(2), 291–309. Schultz, K. S. (1990). Building the "Soviet Detroit": The construction of the Nizhnii-Novgorod automobile factory, 1927–1932. Slavic Review, 49(2), 200–212. Siegelbaum, L. H. (2005). Soviet car rallies of the 1920s and 1930s and the road to socialism. Slavic Review, 64(2), 247–273. Siegelbaum, L. H. (2008). Roadlessness and the "path to communism": Building roads and highways in Stalinist Russia. The Journal of Transport History, 29(2), 277–294. Siegelbaum, L. H. (2008). Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile. Cornell University Press. Siegelbaum, L. H. (2009). On the side: Car culture in the USSR, 1960s–1980s. Technology and Culture, 50(1), 1–22. Siegelbaum, L. H. (Ed.). (2011). The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc. Cornell University Press. Usenyuk-Kravchuk, S., Klyusov, N., Hyysalo, S., & Klimenko, V. (2020). Depending on users: The case of over-snow motorized transport in Russia. Icon, 25(2), 76–102.

Railroads

Maritime Technology For military maritime technology, see Bibliography of Russian and Soviet science (Military technology).