INCLUSION CRITERIA
An entry belongs in this tradition if and only if the method as catalogued here was developed within the institutional sphere of the Soviet Union.
Geography: The USSR and its research institutions — the Academy of Sciences and its institutes, the design bureaus, the military-scientific establishment, the planning apparatus, and the universities under them.
Time: 1917–1991. The bound is the state's, because the tradition's distinguishing constraint is institutional: centralized planning, isolation from Western publication, and problems set by a command economy and its military. A method developed under those constraints is Soviet whatever its author's later nationality.
Required: All of the following:
- The collection's root criteria: a procedure, a mechanism, and stated limitations
- Development within the geographic and temporal bounds above, or one of the two boundary cases below
- An attributable lineage: who, which institute, and what problem it was set against
Not sufficient: Being Russian, which is a nationality and not a tradition. Pre-revolutionary Imperial work whose procedure was fixed before 1917 (Russian Imperial). Being written in Russian. Post-1991 work by the same authors or their students, which belongs to whatever tradition now funds it. A Western method merely translated or taught in the USSR.
Boundary: Two classes straddle the temporal bound and are admitted with the straddle stated in the entry. Pre-revolutionary Imperial work absorbed into Soviet practice belongs here when the Soviet development is what the entry catalogues, and belongs under Russian Imperial when the pre-1917 procedure is — Lyapunov's stability theory is an 1892 doctoral thesis and is here because the absolute stability school of Lur'e and Yakubovich is what made it a method. Work begun before 1917 and completed within the sphere belongs here — Bogdanov's Tektology (1913–1922) straddles the founding and its completion is Soviet. Émigré continuation does not extend the bound: Lefebvre's reflexive control is here for the Soviet military-strategic work of the 1960s and 1970s, not for what he wrote in California afterwards. Pre-modern and folk Slavic practice is not Soviet and belongs under Slavic; the tradition boundary here is institutional, not ethnic.