ABSTRACT
The chapter looks at the special role of physicians, including many women, in the field of radiation expertise developing since the 1950s in Chelyabinsk/Southern Urals. The individual biographies and memoirs of leading Soviet scientists, hardly known in Western historiography, are used to describe everyday working conditions and power relations within the community of Soviet experts, shaped by political conditions and secrecy in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It addresses the question of gender relations in the scientific community and the special role of female specialists in the newly emerging field of radiation safety. Moreover, important everyday working practices of the physicians are described, such as the treatment of patients, the encryption of diagnoses under the conditions of secrecy, and the search for research literature on secret storage. Last but not the least, the chapter shows how the scientists dealt differently with the problem that, in view of the Soviet secrecy, they could not realize their intellectual capital.
