“One of the main paradoxes in the history of Soviet science and an interesting problem is not why this science works badly—it is quite natural—but just the opposite: why despite all the unfavorable conditions it still works and works sometimes better than one would expect.” —Historian of science Aleksei Kozhevnikov, pointing out that five Nobel Prizes had been awarded to Soviet physicists for work done at the height of Stalinist repression. [1]
Joseph Stalin’s and other Soviet leaders’ enthusiastic support for Trofim Lysenko’s wishful approach to plant genetics and agriculture had grave consequences, not only for Soviet genetics but, more vitally, for the careers of eminent scientists.[2] Most notoriously, the leading Mendelian geneticist in the Soviet Union, Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, died in prison, likely, in part, of malnutrition.[3] It might be presumed that the Soviet leadership’s putting such stock in a non-scientific approach damaged Soviet agriculture; however, in their chapter on Lysenkoism in The Dialectical Biologist, Harvard professors Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin state that “Soviet yields followed the same upward trends as yields in other advanced technologies, chiefly as a result of the massive capitalization of agriculture, through the use of pesticides, fertilizers and farm machinery” (191).[4]
Particularly during the Cold War, Western publications about the Soviet Union were awash in dogmatism, political positioning and propaganda, as well as in the ongoing nostalgia and regrets of émigré White Russians (to say nothing of the wishful thinking that, in addition to affecting Russian genetics, has been characteristic of the Russian approach to life). But now both the Cold War and the Soviet Union are simply two more phenomena in our historical archives. We have an opportunity to look back more dispassionately. As regards Soviet science, I believe a more dispassionate backward glance can help us appreciate some of the little-noted ways that governments and societies in general may promote (or discourage) scientific achievement. This paper emerges from a sense that historians of science, by focusing so enthusiastically on Lysenkoism and by treating it not simply as an egregious example of government bungling and cronyism but as typifying the Soviet or dialectical materialist approach to science, diverted attention from a larger and more telling story: the success of Soviet science and the possible sources of this success.[5]
For Americans the lessons of the Soviet experience are particularly interesting to the extent that they are counter-intuitive. In the United States we believe that scientific advance depends on individual genius and on these geniuses being free from interference—from bureaucrats and political passions first and foremost. In this context, the Soviet record is most simply a reminder of the positive role that bureaucrats (government officials) can play. (The flourishing of science in eighteenth-century France is a more commonly cited example of this.) On a less pleasant level, the Soviet experience urges us to recognize that even the most brutal repression can play a positive role in certain contexts.
Of equal interest is what the history of Soviet science has to say about the Russian experience more generally. The Bolshevik revolution has often been treated as an absolutely transforming event, and thus too it has been imagined that Gorbachev’s perestroika and the collapse of the empire could be equally transformative.[6] From a more dispassionate perspective, however, the changes are at best no more striking than the continuities.[7] For example, the collapse of the USSR in many ways paralleled that of tsarist Russia: military failure led to or revealed a breakdown of the social contract, creating an anarchic situation of which foreign countries (Germany in 1914; Germany, the US and others in 1991) took advantage by supporting Russian leaders and coalitions ready to overthrow what remained of the existing government. Perestroika was not a term invented by Mikhail Gorbachev in response, inter alia, to the protracted failure of the Russian military in Afghanistan (and falling oil prices); perestroika is a traditional Russian idea, used notably at the time of Alexander II in response to another crisis—in that case brought on by the Russian military’s failures in the Crimean War. Geoffrey Hosking states that during this earlier period of perestroika, young Russian reformers were convinced “that under their expert guidance Russian society would move towards the rule of law, a more productive economy, and a greater equality of rights and obligations for all subjects” (318–320). This sounds much like the rhetoric of the post-Soviet 1990s (see also Heller, 758–759).
The Success of Soviet Science
To evaluate the success of any undertaking one needs criteria of success, and in the case of twentieth-century science—be it Soviet, American or of other origin—such criteria are particularly hard to establish for two reasons. First, insufficient time has passed. It will be easier for historians, say, two centuries from now to gauge which products of our science are of lasting value.[8] Secondly, what are we to do with such an argument for the success of Soviet science: Soviet physicists and engineers were the first on Earth to produce a deliverable hydrogen bomb?[9] Is this an accomplishment or the apotheosis of the lack of perspective—or lunacy—with which materialist science has been infected for several hundred years, if not since its dawning in ancient Greece?
This said, I believe it is fair to say that the consensus view is the one given in the concluding sentence of Alexander’s Vucinich’s authoritative two-volume study of pre-revolutionary Russian science: “The scientific community in tsarist Russia, though laboring under many handicaps, had laid a solid foundation for the notable achievements of Soviet science” (II, 488). That is, before the revolution Russian, science was already illustrious (thanks to the work of Lobachevsky, Mendeleev and Pavlov, most notably), and during the post-revolutionary period, the range and intensity of scientific activity was expanded and the amount of world-class work increased. More specifically, drawing upon Loren Graham’s exhaustive evaluation in the conclusion and appendix to Science in Russia and the Soviet Union, it seems reasonable to conclude that:
(a) Like their predecessors, Soviet scientists faced many handicaps, if not always the same ones, and they were the victims of unprecedented upheaval and brutality—to include after-effects of revolution and civil war, and state-sanctioned murder.
(b) The success of Soviet science (as of the science of any given period in any given country’s history) was quite variable, with some fields—such as genetics and public health—losing their way abysmally; with scientists in other fields (chemistry, astronomy, biology in general)—hampered by Stalinist repression and unable to profit from substantial Soviet government investments—accomplishing little of note; and with tremendous achievements being recorded in a third set of fields (mathematics, theoretical physics, astrophysics, geophysics, atmospheric science and geology).[10]
It is important to note that the successes were achieved despite what to Western analysts seems an almost insurmountable obstacle—the Stalinist repression. Graham states that “during just a few weeks during autumn 1929 approximately 650 members of the staff of the Academy of Sciences were purged. . . . Approximately 20 percent of all Soviet astronomers were arrested in 1936 and 1937.” He also details how the outstanding Ukrainian Physico-technical Institute was wiped out by the terror of 1936–37, and how many of the leading Soviet scientists and directors of major research institutes “were either shot or died in labor camps.” As Graham also notes, however, many of these scientists did outstanding work either in the face of such persecution, or indeed after being victims of it. “Even if arrested, they sometimes continued their efforts in prison camps.” The Nobel Prize–winning physicist Peter Kapitsa was kidnapped on Stalin’s orders three years before he did his most important research. “Many physicists and mathematicians of the 1980s and 1990s actually spoke of the 1930s and 1940s as the ‘golden days’ of their fields in the Soviet Union.”[11]
Sources of Success: Seemingly Hostile Practices
The comment from the Soviet historian of science Aleksei Kozhevnikov, used as an epigraph for this paper, mirrors others made regarding the performance of the Russian army, both before and during the Soviet period. For example, a French count who served in the Russian army at the end of the eighteenth century wrote, “Given its composition and the abuses that prevail in it, the Russian army ought to be the worst in Europe, but actually it is one of the best.”[12]
By composition and abuses he was referring to the fact that many of the soldiers were rather more kidnapped than recruited, and were then inadequately armed, weakly led and hardly paid, often surviving and equipping themselves through plunder, by working on the side for civilians, or by selling oil or other state property. Nor has the army lacked for repression and brutality. Military historian Antony Beevor writes that during the battle of Stalingrad, in the Second World War, the Soviet Army executed 13,000 of its own men. Soldiers were shot if they tried to desert and “if they failed to shoot immediately at any comrades seen trying to desert.”[13]
This comparison recalls two of the themes of this paper:
(a) The effectiveness of what appear to be hostile policies and appalling negligence.
(b) The continuity of the Russian experience—in pre-Soviet, Soviet and now post-Soviet times.
As regards the former, in the case of the army one analysis is that the lack of pay, equipment and leadership forced the soldiers to learn how to be resourceful and work together. In the case of Soviet science, Graham writes that Western observers “often spoke of the ‘blackboard rule,’ meaning that their Soviet colleagues could be expected to excel on those topics [e.g., mathematics and theoretical physics] where world-rank work could be done with tools no more complicated than blackboard and chalk.” More specifically, Graham states that Soviet backwardness in computer technology led to Soviet mathematicians and physicists “using applied and analytic mathematics in unusually creative ways.”[14]
There is no direct scientific equivalent to the soldier who fights because otherwise he may be killed by his officers or his comrades, except insofar as one assumes that “survival of the fittest” is the law in the competition for the best jobs, equipment, facilities and recognition. In the Soviet case it seems that scientists were persecuted on account of having achieved status, or for suspected anti-Soviet alliances or contacts, rather than for lack of activity.[15] Graham notes that many of the ideological attacks were in fact the expression of internecine battles for status and rewards. As regards mathematics during the terrorized 1930s, for example, Graham writes that ideological militancy “often provided a pretext for the venting of old personal disputes,” and younger mathematicians attacked older ones—to create vacancies that they would then fill.[16]
This said, however, one of the interpretations most repeated by historians of Soviet and pre-Soviet Russian science is that science, and mathematics in particular, attracted some of the best Russian minds because it offered a way to obtain creature comforts and status without running all the risks and being forced to make all the compromises of those in more ostensibly political occupations.[17] One would think that the history of noxious government interference in Russian science, in particular during Stalin’s reign, would have disabused Russians of this notion, but in fact the interpretation has been repeated to me by Russian colleagues and acquaintances. Presumably it is a matter of degree; Russian scientists were less persecuted under Stalin than political figures were. (An additional question merits consideration: To what extent did scientists intrude on the overall work of the government? Note the role played by Andrei Sakharov in the demise of the Soviet Union. In Soviet Science Zhores Medvedev proposes that the Academy of Sciences in the Soviet Union played a similar role to that played in the United States by the Supreme Court; Russian scientists were integrally involved in the question of the legitimacy and viability of the government.[18]
It is worth noting, too, that Soviet scientists, like the Soviet people in general, provided essential support to the government during both the Second World War and the Cold War, periods that include part of Stalin’s reign. This support stands in sharp contrast to the collapse of support for the tsarist government in the middle of the First World War. Stalin’s popularity must have been a contributing factor, but to what extent should fear—of Stalin, his associates and the treacherous climate they created—also be considered a source of these patriotic efforts? (The same fear that maintained Stalin’s authority was also a source of his popularity: He was and continues to be admired for the “strong hand” with which he ruled.) Such a possibility challenges a Western assumption: that creativity, to include scientific creativity, cannot be coerced.[19]
Sources of Success: Continuities
I have consigned to endnotes evidence of more general continuities of the Russian experience, but here are two examples that relate to the history of science:
(a) In his review of “The strengths and weaknesses of Russian and Soviet science,” Graham notes that Soviet anti-Semitism was one of the factors that limited Soviet science. But—as is well known to those with Jewish ancestors who emigrated from “beyond the pale”—anti-Semitism has a long history in Russia. Vucinich reports on the tsarist government’s quota system, which “placed legal limits on Jewish enrollment in national universities.” It appears that one result of this was that Jews who could went abroad to study. Vucinich reports that “in 1912 there were at least 8,000 Russian students in Western European universities, and Jews made up the bulk—according to some sources 90 percent—of this contingent.” When Graham reports on the advantages for Soviet science of Russians having trained in Western European universities in the early part of the century, he skips over an essential point: It was because they were for the most part Jews, and the tsarist government did not allow them to study at home. This is another example of how a hostile policy may produce a desired result.[20]
(b) Stalin sought expressly to follow in the footsteps of Peter the Great and Ivan Grozny (“the Terrible”). The scale of Stalinist repression was unprecedented, but the means—use of internal security forces and domestic espionage, forced labor, exile to Siberia for dissidents, political assassinations and government interference in scientific activity—were traditional.[21] Vucinich records how in the early twentieth century, before the Revolution, professors and academicians protested government interference in scientific research and in teaching. To summarize the grievances, he quotes the geneticist N. K. Kol’tsov: “In our country, in contrast to Germany, the university staff, from professors to assistants, is not protected from the crudest treatment by all kinds of government officials.”[22]
With this sense of the continuities of the Russian experience in mind, let us speculate on sources of Soviet or Russian scientific achievements:[23]
(a) The high value placed on scientific achievement. The overarching theme of Ethan Pollock’s work on Stalin and Soviet science has been Stalin’s commitment to Soviet science, as exemplified by his personal contributions to scientific debates, his interest in establishing a scientific basis for Soviet Marxism, his providing increased funding for the Academy of Sciences, and his rewarding scientists with “material comforts that were extremely rare in the USSR at the time.” After the economic collapse of the 1990s, “[t]hose who remained in science [in Russia; not emigrating] showed a marked nostalgia for the Soviet system and even aspects of the Party’s ideology, which had emphasized the importance of science for society and in turn funded science aggressively. Despite decades of political and ideological interference by the Party, many ex-Soviet scientists would rather have funding without political freedom than political freedom without funding.”[24] Norman Kaplan, in a 1961 paper comparing the administration of medical research institutes in the Soviet Union and the United States, stated: “There is relatively little disagreement that the scientist is accorded considerably more prestige and is relatively better paid and rewarded in the material sense in the U.S.S.R. than he is in the U.S.”[25] The second “relatively” means as compared with others within the country in question, and thus the word “paid” is a misnomer, as Soviet scientists, military heroes, leading workers, foreign language specialists, Communist party officials and other privileged members of the society often were rewarded particularly with what in the U.S. has been referred to as “non-cash income.” For example, such people had the right to larger apartments, were given rural plots on which to construct dachas (and perhaps assistance with the construction). They had ready access to state-run resorts, were allowed and given the means to travel abroad, had access to difficult-to-obtain goods and so forth.
Here is Pavlovian theory come to life! In the Soviet Union, many more creature comforts and much greater status were accorded scientists and military and space engineers than, say, were accorded merchants and capitalists. And so the country excelled in basic science and lagged in the development of new commercial processes and in the production of consumer goods. During the same period in the United States, basic science took a back seat to consumer goods and services and to the related “applied sciences.”[26]
Of course, the matter is not nearly this simple, for several reasons. For one, ideas of what constitutes “creature comforts” and “greater status” are socially determined. And in order for this particular Pavlovian conditioning to work, Russian society needed to be relatively dynamic, with individuals able to advance in the hierarchy based on their own efforts, loyalty, charm and luck, rather than being relegated to following in their parents’ footsteps irrespective of how they behaved. This may explain why Soviet science was more accomplished than Russian science: Soviet society was more dynamic.[27] (And I must add that one source of the dynamism was all the killing—in the First World War and the Civil War—along with the famines and Stalin’s purges. The high mortality rate created opportunities for bold young men—and, particularly after the Second World War, for bold women as well.)
(b) Indirect results of the privileging of science. Kaplan states that while in the United States it is often laymen who dominate the boards and funding and administrative mechanisms of scientific research institutes, in the Soviet Union science was generally controlled by scientists.[28] He speculated that perhaps the Soviet government was willing to require fewer formal controls on research institute activity because Russians trust their scientists more than Americans do.[29] This is a good example of the problem of evaluating a government or society on the basis of exceptional phenomena, such as Lysenkoism. An egregious example of the negative effects of government interference can divert one from considering, say, if on the whole scientists had more or less intellectual independence under the government in question.
(c) Commitment to education. In “Soviet Scientists and the Great Break,” David Joravsky writes of “the staggering overall expansion of higher education between 1928 and 1932 (the student body trebled and the teaching staff doubled).”[30] A more basic figure one sees is that, before the Revolution, less than half the population was literate; by the Second World War, most everyone was.[31] In fact, this is another example of the continuity of the Russian experience. History indicates that the Soviet advances were simply the logical next step after the series of perhaps half-baked yet repeated Romanov initiatives to exalt cultural achievement and improve education, including technical and scientific education.[32] Perhaps above all, over the centuries a value was instilled in Russians—a value that many Americans mock, with predictable results. As Marc Raeff put it, Russians have been taught that the only life worth living is “a cultured life based on a sound education.”[33]
(d) Administrative factors. In the style of Montesquieu and Tocqueville, we might develop an analysis of the effects of authoritarian regimes on science. It would seem that under Lenin and Stalin, at least, Soviet life featured much of the same “tumulte universel”—the constant battling for position—that Tocqueville noted in the young United States.[34] But—as many returning to the West from the Soviet Union must have remarked, or as may be remarked if one has seen Moscow in Soviet and post-Soviet times—consumer capitalism with its fashions and its advertising creates a lot of noise and distraction that is absent in other societies and that militates against attempts to concentrate on and devote oneself to in-depth study. Kaplan notes some other advantages for scientific activity of authoritarian systems:
(i) A simple “financial support structure.” Unlike in the U.S. where many research institutes must seek funding from a variety of sources, and thus to some extent serve many masters, in the Soviet Union all funding came from the government.[35] Kaplan’s suggestion here is that it may matter less who one serves than how many.
(ii) A simple and relatively inflexible hierarchy and promotional system. Kaplan notes that in the United States “titles vary from institution to institution, salary scales vary from one institutional sphere to another (industry versus government, etc.), and in general there is diversity with respect to most aspects of employment, supervision and evaluation of the scientist. . . . In the U.S.S.R., on the other hand, there [was] a single system . . . defining salary scales in different types of institutes, employment grades related primarily to educational attainment, and other more or less fixed criteria.”[36]
At the end of a brief review of such a large and contentious subject a writer should be leery of grand pronouncements. Let me simply recall in closing that the Soviet experience points up the power of governments—positive and negative; via leadership, organization, funding and repression—to stimulate and focus scientific activity. And this would seem to be because scientists—like soldiers, scholars and government officials—are rather simpler animals than we Americans, with our hagiographies, like to pretend. As a rule, if not in every case, even the most gifted and creative individuals will adapt their activities to try to maximize their personal security, creature comforts and social status. And this is the case even if the maximal situation attainable by these individuals is not notably secure or comfortable, but simply appears a little more secure and comfortable than the situations of their contemporaries.
Works Cited
Beevor, Anthony. Stalingrad. New York: Viking, 1998.
Dauben, Joseph. “The Practice of Science/Science in Context.” Lecture Nov. 18, 2003. Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Davies, Sarah and James Harris, eds. Stalin: A New History. Cambridge, Eng.: U P, 2005.
Fitzgerald, Sheila. Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Soviet Russia in the 1930s. New York: Oxford U P, 1999.
Garfield, Simon. Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World. London: Faber, 2000; rptd. New York: Norton, 2001.
Gould, Stephen Jay. Hens’ Teeth and Horses’ Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History. New York: Norton, 1994.
Graham, Loren R. “The Strengths and Weaknesses of Russian and Soviet Science.” Science in Russia and the Soviet Union. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge U P, 1993.
Hall, Rupert. “The Scholar and the Craftsman in the Scientific Revolution.” Ed. M. Clagett. Critical Problems in the History of Science. Proceedings of the Institute for the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin, Sep. 1–11, 1957. Madison, Wisc.: U Wisconsin P, 1959; rptd. 1994. Rupert Hall. Science and Society: Historical Essays on the Relations of Science, Technology and Medicine. Ashgate.
Heller, Michel. Histoire de la Russie et de son empire. Paris: Plon, 1997.
Hosking, Geoffrey. Russia: People and Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U P, 1997.
Joravsky, David. “Soviet Scientists and the Great Break.” Barber and Hirsch.
Kaplan, Norman. “Research Administration and the Administrator: U.S.S.R. and U.S.” Administrative Science Quarterly. 6 (1961). Rptd. Barber, Bernard and Walter Hirsch, eds. The Sociology of Science. New York: The Free Press, 1962.
Keep, John. Foreword. Understanding Imperial Russia by Marc Raeff. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia U P, 1984.
Klages, K. H. W. Ecological Crop Geography. New York, 1949.
Lanzheron, Graf. “Russkaia armiia v god smerti Ekateriny II.” Russkaia starina. 26:3 (1895).
Levins, Richard and Richard Lewontin. The Dialectical Biologist. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U P, 1985.
Matlock, Jack F., Jr. “The Poor Neighbor.” New York Times Book Review, Apr. 11, 1999.
Medvedev, Zhores. Soviet Science. New York: Norton, 1978.
Pollock, Ethan. Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars. Princeton, N.J.: U P, 2006.
Raeff, Marc. Understanding Imperial Russia. Trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Comprendre l’ancien régime russe). New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Rhodes, Richard. The Making of the Atomic Bomb. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986.
Stalin, J. V. “Dizzy with Success: Concerning Questions of the Collective Farm Movement.” Pravda. 60 (Mar. 2, 1930). Rptd. in English trans. J. V. Stalin. Works. Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1976. 483–91.
Taylor, Charles. Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U P, 1995.
Thomas, John R. and Ursula M. Kruse-Vaucienne, eds. Soviet Science and Technology: Domestic and Foreign Perspectives, published for the National Science Foundation by The George Washington University, 1977; based on a workshop at Arlie House, Virginia, Nov. 18–21, 1976.
Tocqueville, Alexis de. De la démocratie en amérique. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1981.
U. S. Bureau of the Census. Historical Statistics. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Services.
Vucinich, Alexander. Science in Russian Culture. Palo Alto: Stanford U P, 1963.
Wikipedia. “Trofim Lysenko.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko.
Williams, L. Pearce. “Science, Education, and Napoleon I.” Isis. 47:4 (Dec. 1956); rptd. Ed. Leonard M. Marsk. The Rise of Science in Relation to Society. New York: Macmillan, 1964.
1. Quoted in Graham, 212. Allow me here to thank the person who introduced me to the study of science and society: Professor Joseph Dauben, executive officer of the Liberal Studies program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
[2] Wikipedia (accessed June 2, 2008) offers a review of the Lysenko story: “Trofim Denisovich Lysenko . . . (September 29, 1898–November 20, 1976) was a biologist and agronomist who was director of Soviet biology under Joseph Stalin. Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics in favor of the hybridization theories of Russian horticulturist Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, and adopted them into a powerful political scientific movement termed Lysenkoism. His unorthodox experimental research in improved crop yields earned the support of Soviet leadership, especially following the famine and loss of productivity resulting from forced collectivization in several regions of the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. In 1940 he became director of the Institute of Genetics within the USSR’s Academy of Sciences, and Lysenko’s anti-Mendelian doctrines were further secured in Soviet science and education by the exercise of political influence and power. Scientific dissent from Lysenko’s theories of environmentally acquired inheritance was formally outlawed in 1948, and for the next several years opponents were purged from the positions they held and many were imprisoned. Lysenko’s work was officially discredited in the Soviet Union in 1964, leading to a renewed emphasis there to re-institute Mendelian genetics and orthodox science.
“Though Lysenko remained at his post in the Institute of Genetics until 1965, his influence on Soviet agricultural practice declined by the 1950s. The Soviet Union quietly abandoned Lysenko’s agricultural practices in favor of modern agricultural practices after the crop yields he promised failed to materialize. Today much of Lysenko’s agricultural experimentation and research is largely viewed as fraudulent.”
In a 1930 Pravda article (whose title is usually translated into English as “Dizzy with Success”), Stalin called attention to “ludicrous attempts to over-leap oneself,” the dangers of post-revolutionary exultation—of the “blockheaded belief of a section of our party: ‘We can achieve anything!’ ‘There’s nothing we can’t do!’” In their chapter on “The Problem of Lysenkoism,” Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin note this critique of Stalin’s, adding that he “was able to perceive, describe and denounce [the mood], though he could not quite resist it.” (Allow me to note here that it was this chapter by Levins and Lewontin that set my mind on the path that led to this paper.)
[3] In July 1941—that is, at the outset of the Second World War—Vavilov “was sentenced to death for agricultural sabotage, spying for England, maintaining links with émigrés and belonging to a rightist organization,” according to Stephen Jay Gould. “The sentence was commuted to ten years imprisonment.” In October Vavilov was “evacuated to the Saratov prison where he spent several months in an underground death cell, suffering from malnutrition.” Gould does not give the sources of his information, and one would not be surprised to learn that there was some debate, at least outside the United States, regarding the details, to include regarding the possibility that Vavilov was guilty of some of the charges. Obviously, however, if Vavilov’s scientific work had been more highly regarded in the Soviet Union at the time, the likelihood of his prosecution would have been less and his ability to defend himself, avoid imprisonment and mistreatment while in prison would have been greater. (These are facts of life not only in Russia but in the U.S. and around the world.)
[4] Table 7.3 on p. 190 shows that the increase in Soviet wheat yields per acre from 1926–28 to 1969–70 slightly outpaced those of the United States. Note, however, that in the initial base years of 1926–28 the U.S. yields were slightly more than twice those of the Soviet Union. Levins and Lewontin would argue that the shorter Russian growing season was a major contributor to this discrepancy—as it was to Lysenkoism. Comparative statistics regarding the Russian and U.S. growing seasons are presented in Table 7.1. Note that such figures need to be taken with a grain of salt. For example, the wheat yields given in Table 7.2 (see Klages) show U.S. farms to be less productive and Russian farms more productive than the yields given in Table 7.3 cited above (see U.S. Bureau of the Census). Note also that from a national standpoint—if one wishes to judge the surplus capital and humanpower available for industrialization, warfare or science—it would also be important to have several other statistics, including acres in cultivation per capita and agricultural labor required, e.g., per bushel of wheat.
Instead of “non-scientific,” Gould refers to Trofim Lysenko’s struggle “to reform Russian agricultural science on discredited Lamarckian principles” (134).
[5] Note as well other instances of this skewed perspective, e.g., (1) the focus on Soviet scientists’ resistance to Einsteinian physics; or (2) recognitions of the technological accomplishments of the Soviet military and space programs that ignore the overall context—the increased literacy and commitment to science and technology in general, the relatively meritocratic job-placement system and the greater patriotism of the Soviet period as compared to its tsarist forerunner.
[6]In a 1999 New York Times review, Jack F. Matlock Jr., who was a national-security adviser in the Reagan administration and ambassador to Russia under President Bush, wrote: “Russia’s belated development of a civil society was interrupted in 1917 by the Bolshevik Revolution and the Communist regime Lenin and his co-conspirators established, a regime that was not specifically Russian but international and ideological” [my italics] (11).
In the foreword to the English translation of Marc Raeff’s classic, Comprendre l’ancien régime russe, John Keep writes: “It has been said, no doubt a little facetiously, that Stalin’s rule combined features characteristic of the reigns of several of the Romanovs, . . . Of course we need not assume that Stalin was conscious of these precedents; still less would any responsible historian waste time trying to demonstrate continuities of such a kind” (ix). It is as if Keep felt compelled to pretend that the Russian Revolution represented such a watershed, or Stalin such a unique monster, that the normal work of a historian—finding continuities—had to be suspended.
[7] Although Geoffrey Hosking does not make this point explicitly in his history of Russia, all the evidence he there gives for it first called my attention to the issue. In addition to the perestroika example, the following continuities are developed from Hosking’s information and the work of Michel Heller:
(a) Soviets were not a Soviet idea; the Bolsheviks reluctantly endorsed the tradition of such peasant assemblies in order to win peasant support.
(b) Cycling from periods of thaw (less authoritarian government) to periods of repression is a central characteristic of Russian history. Typically, the reign of a Tsar, Soviet leader or post-Soviet leader begins with an effort at liberalization, but then the government comes to feel, rightly or wrongly, that its authority or the authority of the state in general is threatened, and there is a crackdown. This insecurity, or paranoia, may be linked to Russia’s geography and the resulting history. That is, it is an immense country with few natural borders, made up of scores of different nationalities, and with a history of being overrun by marauders—Napoleon, Hitler and Western investment bankers being only the most recent.
[8] Easier but not simple. Take, for example, the case of Leucippus and Democritus’ atomic model of matter, which was largely forgotten for two millennia, until the 17th century, since which time it has come to seem one of the most essential concepts of science.
The process works in reverse as well; theories may be jettisoned after having been reverently cherished and refined over centuries. For example, in his essay “Overcoming Epistemology,” Charles Taylor writes, “In some circles [relating to the study of epistemology] it is becoming a new orthodoxy that the whole enterprise from Descartes, through Locke and Kant, and pursued by various nineteenth- and twentieth-century succession movements, was a mistake” (2).
[9] Graham, 212. For more in this vein, see various comments made by Manhattan Project scientists—e.g., that they wished to drop a bomb on a densely built up area of wooden frame buildings [i.e., an area particularly vulnerable to fire], “so that the effect of a single bomb can be ascertained.” Or Hans Bethe’s comments that, prior to the “Trinity” atom-bomb test, he had been curious to see if nature would act “in conformity with our calculations” and “My main worry had been that the part of the bomb which I had specifically designed, at least partly, that that part might not function. But it did, and that was fine.” (See Dauben for first quotation. For the second Bethe quotation, see Rhodes.)
[10]Graham, 197–260. Quotation is from p. 208. See especially “the true blossoming of physics in Russia came after the Revolution” (208) and “leading American specialists [in the 1970s] in the fields of theoretical physics and mathematics wrote in their official reports that Soviet scientists in their fields were as good as any in the world” (198)—this despite the relative lack of contact between Soviet and Western scientists and the lack of Russian scientific papers available in the West.
I am leaving aside here the question of the relative success or failure of the Soviet Union in technological fields. I am not certain that technology is best thought of as a product of science, or of what is not necessarily accurately called “applied science.” Are technological inventions outgrowths of “basic science”? Or do they themselves spur basic scientists to focus on and resolve certain problems? Or do they exist in a largely separate realm—that of inventors, tinkerers and capitalist entrepreneurs? There is ongoing debate about this issue, which dates back at least to Rupert Hall’s discussion of the roles of scholars and craftsmen in the “scientific revolution” (q.v.).
Nonetheless, Americans’ evaluations of Soviet “science,” as of their own, focus heavily on technology (and particularly on technology that has commercial applications). For example, one of the standard American works in the field of Soviet science is a collection of papers presented at a 1976 U.S. National Science Foundation workshop which focused on both Soviet science and technology, and came to the (desired) conclusion that “Soviet science and technology has so far not been particularly distinguished in originality and inventiveness on a world scale.” This conclusion is backed up by a list of “twelve weaknesses affecting Soviet science and technology,” of which half focus on insufficient “incentives for the average Soviet citizen to increase his productivity,” “resistance to innovation in the industrial sector,” restricted “flow of new industrial products and processes,” “a scarcity of advertising literature,” “the inability to successfully integrate science with production and marketing” and “the preemption of resources by the military, who have first call on scientists and equipment, affects negatively the efficiency of the civilian sector.” See Thomas and Kruse-Vaucienne. The quote regarding Soviet science and technology’s lack of originality and inventiveness is from Simon Kassel’s “Summary of Discussion,” p. 13. The list of weaknesses is from Thomas and Kruse-Vaucienne’s introduction to the volume, pp. xxiii-xxvi.
Graham’s review of Soviet technology in the appendix to his Science in Russia and the Soviet Union takes a broader view. He notes the stunning accomplishments of Soviet scientists and engineers in the fields of military and space technology and Russia’s persistent “technological backwardness” in most other areas. He focuses particularly on the “backwardness in computer technology” which hampered Soviet physicists (while stimulating mathematicians—see section 2 of this paper). He also stresses the “fits and starts” that characterize the development of technology in Russia. For example, he writes, “one might notice that in the 1950s the Soviet Union was at world level in the development of computers, only to fall behind in later years.” (Note that both the advance and the decline in the computer field came well after the Stalinist purges.) “Particularly troublesome was the creation of close links between fundamental research and industrial application,” Graham writes. “The Soviet economic and political system did not provide sufficient incentive for the practical exploitation of innovative (and temporarily disruptive) theoretical breakthroughs.” The review of pre-revolutionary and Soviet technology appears on pages 251-60. “Technological backwardness” page 251; “unusually creative”, page 213 (in section on physics); “fits and starts” and computer example, page 256; lack of incentives, p. 209.
[11] Graham, pp. 197-200. Quotations on pages 197 and 200.
[12] Lanzheron, quoted in Hosking, p. 186.
[13] Beevor. Hosking, pp. 188-9, writes of soldiers in the 18th century not being issued boots, guards being left to starve, platoon leaders hiring out their soldiers, new recruits being placed in irons on the way to the induction station. Someone who lived in Hungary before the collapse of the Soviet Union told me that Soviet soldiers used to go door to door selling their supplies of gas and oil.
As per the continuity theme of this paper, the process has continued. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian soldiers in at least one regiment were reported to be eating dog food, for lack of funds. There was a story of soldiers in another regiment being out as factory laborers, their commander pocketing most of their wages. A law forbade drafting boys while they were still in school, so, for example, St. Petersburg high-school students were graduated early so that there would be a space of time when they could not possibly be enrolled in any school.
[14] Graham, pp. 207 and 213.
[15] Thus an additional question: Why, given this dynamic, did the scientists do much work at all? In hischapter on Soviet philosophers, Pollock gives the impression that only the most careerist and politically ambitious produced much at all—and this despite criticism of their lack of productivity from the highest government leaders.
[16] Ibid., p. 216.
Thus experiences and contacts gained during pre-revolutionary or pre-Stalinist times become the grounds for accusations of treason (to include departures from accusers’ self-serving interpretations of dialectical materialism). These accusations were simply attempts to use political means to unseat elders and gain their privileges and status. This is an example of the dizziness Stalin expressed concern about. (See note 2.)
[17] “Practical occupations such as business or law were not often attractive in the Soviet Union, since it was almost impossible to make a great independent career in these areas. The humanities and social sciences beckoned primarily to people with political interests or ambitions. Some of the natural sciences, such as biology and even branches of physics (for example, atomic physics and weapons research), were too close to social and political issues for some fiercely independent intellectuals. For the person who had natural talent in mathematics and who was looking for a career where he or she would encounter the fewest obstacles, either of a material or political sort, mathematics seemed the logical choice.” Graham, p. 218.
This is the inverse of the affect on French mathematics and science of Napoleon’s policy of requisitioning the better students in these fields for service in the army, so that, as Pearce Williams puts it, “the pursuit of a scientific education was . . . tantamount to enlisting”. See Williams, pp. 83-84.
[18] Medvedev, p. 108.
[19] While it was being carried out, few Russians had any idea of the extent of the Stalinist repression. Further, Fitzgerald and others have proposed that most Russians were little aware that anything out of the ordinary—for Russia—was going on.
[20] Graham, vol. 2, pp. 484-85. Vucinich, p. 485, goes on to describe how a wave of anti-Semitism hit German, Austrian and Czech universities in 1913, and many Russian students could not complete their work. “This was an especially severe blow to students in the natural sciences, for whom Western training was almost mandatory.”
[21] If we take, for example, just the reign of the first Romanov, Peter the Great, it seems hard to deny the link between the Stalinst Show Trials and Peter’s trumping up charges of treason against a seeming rival in his inner circle (who happened to be his son), and then having him tortured and killed—or between the Soviet gulag and the northern marsh in which Peter compelled Swedish prisoners of war, other non-Russians and forcibly imported Russian workers to build St. Petersburg, thousands dying of starvation, cold, disease and exhaustion along the way. More generally, Sheila Fitzpatrick notes that long before Stalin began making use of it, “Administrative exile to remote parts of the country was a recognized form of punishment under the Tsarist regime.” Fitzpatrick, p. 122.
[22] Vucinich, vol. 2, p. 483. Kol’tsov was apparently writing in 1915.
[23] For lack of solid information in this regard, and with apologies to Fernand Braudel and others who have so revealingly focused on such factors, I am leaving out climate—the long, cold, dark Russian winters—which has played one of the largest roles in the successful development of the sciences in Russia. I happen to have had the good fortune to be able to study in Berkeley, New York, Paris and St. Petersburg, and while Paris, with its statues of great writers, was perhaps the most inspiring, nowhere was I so productive as during a “winter” (February-May; the temperature never above freezing until the last two weeks) in St. Petersburg.
[24] Pollock, pp. 1-5 and 221. See also, “Stalin as the Coryphaeus of Science: ideology and knowledge in the postwar years,” in Davies and Harris, pp. 271-88.
[25] Kaplan, p. 383. In this paper Kaplan sets forth several reasons—“speculative factors,” he calls them—why the Soviet system might have been so successful (here by comparison with the United States). As I will be making liberal use of these reasons, I note here that the Kaplan’s article is based on a mix of secondary material and a rather limited study (“impressionistic,” is a word Kaplan uses) of administrative practices in one field of applied science. “Obviously, neither the short period of time spent in the U.S.S.R., nor the preliminary nature of my inquiries permit anything other than a very tentative analysis,” he writes (p. 384). Furthermore, he refrains (pp. 386-67) from discussing the quality of the output of the institutes he studied. Thus it would be fair to claim that I am here speculating on the basis of Kaplan’s own speculations. Part of the strong Russian government support for mathematics, Graham writes, “derived, no doubt, from the fact that mathematics was far from politics and presented no threat to the regime. Such conservative ministers of education as Count Uvarov in the nineteenth century favored fields such as classical studies and mathematics because they brought international laurels, were politically acceptable, and were not very expensive to support.” Graham, p. 218.
[26] Again, Graham, p. 201: “Gifted young people gravitated to fields where achievement was possible despite the political and economic barriers of tsarist Russia and the Soviet Union. Conversely, the weakness of industrial research and innovation was, again in part, a result of the absence of a free economy.” (It would be a worthy project to unpack the normative baggage stuffed into that phrase “free economy.” Perhaps phrases like “liberal capitalist economy” or “consumer-oriented economy” would be more descriptive.)
As regards the development of science in “free economies,” according to Simon Garfield, chemistry was a moribond profession in England until William Perkin synthesized an aniline dye and was able to make a small fortune thereby. After this event, organic chemistry took off, and two-thirds of the former pupils of the Royal College of Chemists ended up working for dye firms. Garfield, p. 82. See as well quote from Perkin, page 48: “It was said that by my example I had done harm to science and diverted the minds of young men from pure to applied science, and it is possible that for a short time some were attracted to the study of chemistry from other than truly scientific motives.”
This fits well with Tocqueville’s analysis of the fate of basic science in democratic societies, in “Pourquoi les américains s’attachent plutôt à la practique de sciences qu’à la théorie”, vol. 2. For example, from page 57: “La plupart des hommes qui composent ces nations sont fort avides de jouissances matérielles et présentes, comme ils sont toujours mécontent de la position qu’ils occupent, et toujours libres de la quitter, ils ne songent qu’aux moyens de changer leur fortune ou de l’accroître. Pour des esprits ainsi disposés, toute méthode nouvelle qui mène par un chemin plus court à la richesse, toute machine qui abrège le travail, tout instrument qui diminue les frais de la production, toute découverte qui facilite les plaisirs et les augmente, semble le plus magnifique effort de l’intelligence humaine. C’est principalement par ce côté que les peuples démocratiques s’attachent aux sciences, les comprennent et les honorent. Dans les siècles aristocratiques, on demande particulièrement aux science les jouissances de l’esprit; dans les démocraties celles du corps.”
[27] There has been similar conjecture about the blossoming of modern science in 17th-century England and France, societies that were opening up (or in turmoil).
[28] “It is a single body of scientists to whom the director [of a research institute] must go for his financial support for the following year.” [Kaplan’s emphasis.] Kaplan, p. 382.
Russians have counseled me to take with a grains of salt observations like these of Kaplan’s. There have been and are plenty of administrators and government officials in Russia who hold scientific degrees but are, in fact, apparatchiki. And the higher one rises in the government, the easier it becomes to obtain degrees for which one has done little or no studying. That is, the administrators and officials may have been scientists in name only.
[29] Kaplan, p. 381. According to Kaplan, among the advantages for scientists of this trust, or alternative organizational arrangement, is that Soviet scientists by and large needed only to impress their peers and were not diverted by the need to produce reports and data which lay people could understand. Obviously, in a broader sense, it may often be preferable for the society as a whole to receive more such reports and data and to have more direct control over the activities of its scientists. But the focus of this paper is on scientific accomplishments as defined by scientists themselves.
[30] Joravsky, p. 117.
[31] Fitzpatrick, p. 70, cites Russian statistics indicating that by 1926, 57 percent of the population was literate, by 1939, 81 percent; in the late 1920s, 11 million Russian children were in school, 3 million of them in secondary school; in the late 1930s, 30 million children were in school, 18 million in secondary school.
[36] Kaplan.