Again, this reminds me of how necessarily it is to ignore good Cold War-era scholarship on the USSR - generational amnesia. Conclusion - I think Sokolov here underestimately how much plagiarism and inattention there is in hard sciences, tbh
not quite what he's on about here, but this reminded me of the new Russian public intellectuals in exile who offer courses for money on extremely basic and old-fashioned topics to russophones.
That your average harried scholar cannot even do a competent google scholar search should underline that most literature reviews are highly instrumentalist and miss obvious works of relevance... And that this does not matter because bubbles are enduring. Goffman - lit reviews as dramaturgy.
Sokolov's quasi-game theory approach predicts that a scholar will strategically limit their literature searches to the point where they will not discover the unoriginality of their research thesis. But this also takes into account the audience's potential range of searches.
Sokolov here is channelling 'nativist' imperatives in Russia: deny a literature exists, but this could equally apply to neocolonial Western scholars who ignore valuable work from 'natives' (perhaps almost as frequent).
Here, in 2023, Sokolov revisits the implicit criticism of the 'provincials' - in that playing the global-conversation game also comes with its own rules of disengagement from dialogue because of the power structures of disciplinarity.
The opposing type - 'provincialized' academics could have been read as those institutionally marginalized in Russia but connected to scholarly conversations with, often, Western colleagues. However Sokolov and coauthor there are careful not to endorse this uncritically.
If you recall, the 'nativist' Russian scholar is socialized to avoid citation, emphasize originality, and make claims 'from the whole of science'. Historically this ideal type aligned with political imperatives of antiwesternism since 2000.
How to socialize your new PhD students who worry about citation and reading practices? Give them Sokolov 2023. This is a great follow-up of his earlier work on 'nativist' versus 'provincial' thinking in Russian scholarship.
