Formation of the Institution for the History of Technology in the USSR had been long and complicated. For the first time the Institute of the History of Science and Technology was founded in the Soviet Republic in 1932. It worked very actively, particularly in the field of the History of Technology. But the Institute was closed in 1938 after its director Nikolai Bukharin had been arrested and shot.

In September 1953 the Institute of the History of Science and Technology (IHST) was restored. Scholars of the Institute began research in the History of Technology in a wide range of problems with young enthusiasm. The Institute in general and technical departments, in particular, soon became the nucleus of the growing scientific community, which included investigators from many institutes of the Academy of Sciences and other organizations.

In 1962 a group of scientists of the Institute published a book, History of Technology, which has been formed, discussed, and polished up for more than seven years. One of the reasons for long work at that edition was the authors’ desire to eliminate some myths and deformations that had been characteristic of historical works published in the USSR in the 1940s and the early 1950s. Dr. Semyon Shukhardin, the leader of the team of authors, subsequently became as well a recognized leader among Russian historians of technology.

Shukhardin also paid attention to international scientific contacts and already in the 1950s organized regular contacts with historians of technology in the Czech Republic and German Democratic Republic. From the middle of the 1960s Shukhardin together with E. Olszewski, M. Daumas, and M. Kranzberg worked to realize the idea of an international society of the historians of technology that led to the creation of the ICOHTEC in 1968.

That activity had been supported by academician B.M. Kedrov, director of IHST, and by leaders of the Academy of Sciences. The International Congress of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Moscow (1971), and the ICOHTEC Symposia in Kaluga (1976) became a real break-through for Russian historians of science and technology. All this have contributed to a rise of the history of technology in Russia. Marxist-Leninist ‘lining’, what H.-J. Braun paid attention at, was characteristic of a fewer part from vast set of publications on the history of technology.

Ideological ‘clouds’ in due course have disappeared, however problems in contacts with the international community for the Russian scholars have remained. One of them has traditionally been bad knowledge of English language. Besides, the decision of financial questions of trips abroad becomes almost unsolvable problem for the majority of scientists.