Ex Oriente Progressus? The Soviet Union, Between East and West, as the Light of the World

If we reverse the question of what went wrong with ‘the East’ compared to ‘the West’ in terms of ‘progress’ and instead try to determine what went wrong with ‘the West’ in the face of past and impending disasters, we must first discuss relevant meanings of the metaphors ‘East’ and ‘West’ and clarify what kind of progress we refer to. This can serve as a basis for analysing a bygone ‘East’, the Soviet Union, which, despite many terrible and sobering experiences, was for numerous people around the world, including in ‘the West’, for several decades an ‘East’ in which much—or even, in a fundamental sense, everything—went right and truly human progress was made. The Russian Revolution and Soviet Russia were seen by many as a light of the world that shone from the ‘East’—ex oriente lux—, and this also applied to the Soviet Union for much of the twentieth century, including in the ‘Far East’ and the ‘global South’. However, the hopes associated with this new metaphorical ‘East’ changed from almost apocalyptic yearnings for imminent global liberation to expectations of Soviet support of the ‘Third World’, including East Asia, to catch up with ‘the West’ as effectively as the Soviet Union did in many respects. ... mehrCultural representations and practices of engineering and technology both played a key role in the rise of the Soviet new ‘East’ against the backdrop of an earlier history of East-West dichotomies and in the history of interactions between the Soviet Union on the one hand and the Asian East and the Global South on the other. The real history of comprehensive, i.e. technical-scientific and social progress must be reclaimed against Western ideology, and the critique of anti-‘Eastern’ and anti-‘Southern’ Eurocentrism should become a key element of materialist superstructure analysis in science, technology and engineering studies, with aspects of the history of religion and philosophy also being considered central. With regard to the latter in particular, Carl Mitcham’s stimulating discussion of Chinese and Western technological and cultural imaginaries deserves further attention.