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OCR for page 51
THE RUSSIAN RESEARCH SYSTEM
Mark B. Adams
University of Pennsylvania
Today a cold and cleansing wind is blowing in the Soviet Union. Under glasnost' and
perestroika, layers of long-standing ideology and myth are being peeled away, and Soviets are
beginning to take a hard new look at how their system really works. In the process, Soviet
planners are beginning to re-examine their most time-honored assumptions. It is time for us
to re-examine some of our own.
The Soviet research system has played a uniquely important role in Western science and
technology policy. As influential as British, French, and German models of science have been
in the past, in the post-World War Two period, our perceptions of Soviet science have most
often shaped our policies. This may help to explain why it has been so difficult to get an
objective fix on Soviet developments: what we have perceived has depended on wishful
thinking, Western policy agendas, and the politics of the beholder.
Ever since the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, Western policy-makers have found the Soviet
example uniquely instructive. Yet all too often they have drawn the wrong lessons. In the
1930s, influential left-wing British scientists saw Stalinist centralized planning as worthy of
emulation, and Western physicians often took the Soviet health care delivery system as a
model.) With the rise of Lysenkoism after World War Two, the Soviet example became a
cautionary one, stimulating a Western "freedom of science" movement which took it as proof
that science could not prosper in the absence of political democracy and intellectual autonomy.
The wholesale destruction of Soviet genetics in late 1948 reinforced this conviction, leading
many in the West to lament the death of science in Russia and to dismiss that nation as a
scientific power.2 When the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb, this mindset led
many to assume that its "secret" must have been stolen from the West.
It is no wonder that the launching of Sputnik in the fall of 1957 produced a shockwave in
Washington from which that city has not yet fully recovered.3 In the United States, there
followed fears of "the missile gap," the instigation of advanced placement courses in high
schools, new science curricula, the "space race" to the moon, and, of course, the emergence of
the history of science as an academic discipline. In military and space technology, the Soviet
research system once again had to be taken seriously.4 Only in recent months, with the
apparent collapse of traditional Soviet communism as a viable economic and ideological
system, has the USSR yielded pride of place in Western preoccupations to Japan.
For an historian of Soviet science, what is most striking about these various and sometimes
opposite perspectives is the common orientation they have shared. For example, the Bolshevik
Revolution of November 1917 is almost always treated as an historical watershed. The
assumption that the Revolution marked some sort of essential discontinuity has been
institutionalized in Western academe, where the pre-revolutionary and post-revolutionary
periods are commonly taught by different historians, and "Sovietologists" form a separate
interdisciplinary field with their own issues, approaches, and problematics.
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Mark B. Adams
Another common view is that Soviet science is somehow essentially different from our own
because it is socialist, or Marxist, or ideological, or totalitarian-or simply because, as L. C.
Dunn once noted, Russians tend to put a "peculiarly Russian" slant on things.S Even those
historians who have sought to "normalize,' our view of Soviet science have found themselves
preoccupied with its differences, and this has produced peculiar asymmetries in the Western
literature. Nearly all analysts agree that Soviet achievements in mathematics have been most
impressive, yet there has been almost nothing written on its history. Instead, Western literature
on Soviet science has been overwhelmingly preoccupied with two themes that highlight
fundamental differences: Lysenkoism and dialectical materialism. Of course, Lysenkoism
remains a hot topic in the glasnost' literature; the same cannot be said for the discussions of
Marxism and science, however, suggesting that the Western preoccupation with that topic has
more to do with longstanding Western philosophical agendas than current Soviet concerns.6
Finally, Soviet science is often described and interpreted in moral terms. Even the best
studies by emigres and Soviets alike (and even some Western historians) sometimes read like
morality plays in which there are few shades of gray.7 The same historical figures can play
quite different roles in different productions, of course. During the Lysenko period, the
Soviet press described Gregor Mendel as an '`idealist Austrian monk"; following the
repudiation of Lysenkoism, he became a "materialist Czech scientist.', Over the years, Soviet
geneticist Nikolai Vavilov has been variously described by the words "saboteur,', "traitor,"
``sell-out," "hero," "martyr," and "saint." Even today, old interpretive habits die hard:
current Soviet publications remain profoundly polemical and polarized, often contesting, in
abrasively self-righteous tones, over whether N. W. Timofeeff-Ressovsky, N. P. Dubinin, and
other living and dead scientific figures were heroes or villains.8
These orientations have had analytic consequences. From the perspective of many
Westerners who study science or formulate policy, the Soviet example may be variously seen
as inspiring, tragic, or cautionary, but it can only be marginally relevant. We did not, after
all, experience a Bolshevik Revolution; we are not "peculiarly Russian"; and our scientists are
not (as a rule) saints, heroes, villains, or martyrs.
In recent years, however, we have come to understand our own science in a new way. If
an earlier historical tradition focused on great men and great ideas, newer work has come to
understand science in the context of the disciplines, institutions, and networks that have
structured modern science as an international human enterprise. This new perspective makes
possible a somewhat different picture of Russian and Soviet science, one that makes it seem
more familiar and promises to give us a better fix on its future prospects.
ORIGINS OF MODERN RUSSIAN SCIENCE
Before the mid- 1 9th century, Russian science was largely a European import whose
institutions, personnel, and traditions were borrowed from abroad and imposed from above.
Peter the Great created the Academy of Sciences in his new Baltic capital of St. Petersburg in
1725, yet for more than a century thereafter its operating languages were Latin, French, and
German, and its activities were dominated by visiting or resident scholars from the West.
Following the Napoleonic wars, which brought Tsar Alexander I and his Russian troops int
the heart of Europe, there was renewed interest in European science and technology. But from
52
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the accession of Nikolai I in 1825 until his death in 1855, Russia retreated into cultural
isolation.
In the late lath and the early 19th centuries, Tsarist cultural politics vacillated between
fascination with European ideas (often accompanied by perceptions of Russian
"backwardness") and autocratic nationalistic isolation (accompanied by perceptions of Russia's
unique character and status). Native research agendas focused primarily on the exploration
of the vast Russian frontier. The military conquests that created the Russian Empire were
increasingly accompanied and followed by state-sponsored surveys of the cartography,
geography, geology, natural history, and ethnography of its new territories. Throughout this
time, Russia was ruled by the Tsar, his advisors, and his state bureaucracy; its nobility and
gentry had been originally granted their holdings through state service; and vast numbers of
Russian peasants were tied to the land as serfs.
Then almost exactly 125 years ago, Russia underwent a profound crisis, with remarkable
parallels to recent events. The regime of Nikolai I had been founded on nationalism,
autocracy, religious orthodoxy, and a widespread belief in both the morally corrupt character
of Western economics and the invincibility of the Russian army: that army's defeat in the
Crimean War triggered vast changes and raised fundamental questions about Russia's
competitiveness in a modern world. Following the accession of Alexander II, the early 1860s
saw "Great Reforms" that were sweeping and fundamental in character, encompassing the
abolition of serfdom, the creation of a largely independent judicial system, and a series of
military, rural, and administrative reforms aimed at modernization. Like the governments
of other proud and isolated countries bested by Western military technology (Japan comes to
mind), Tsarist administrators faced a problem: how to bring in Western science and technology
without also bringing in those alien, corruptive, Western values, politics, and ideologies that
threatened Russian tradition and identity.
These events unleashed forces that would dominate Russian life for the remainder of
Tsarist rule, and beyond. Culturally, the period 1865-1910 produced the great literature and
music for which Russia is justly famous Dostoevsky, Tolstoi, Chekhov, Moussorgsky'
Tchaikovsky, and Stravinsky. Economically, Tsarist governments launched a series of attempts
to solve the "rural problem," to industrialize Russia, to develop steel and railroads, and to
encourage foreign investment and native entrepreneurship. With these efforts came a growing
importance of merchants and industrialists in the civic life of Russia. Politically, Tsarist
regimes sought to control the pace of change and to ensure stability; at the same time, there
was increasing political instability, and the period saw a series of radical parties and
revolutionary movements, hundreds of assassinations of Tsarist officials (including the ``Great
Reformer" himself, Alexander II), and a growing disaffection by intelligentsia, many of whom
looked to Western political and parliamentary models.
Modern Russian science thus owes its origin to the decades following the Russian loss of
the Crimean War, a fact long ackr~owledged in both Soviet and Western literature. But
quantitative studies of Russian scientific and technical publications allow us to get a more
precise fix on these developments, and raise interesting problems with traditional
interpretations. Building on work by the prorevolutionary Russian bibliographer N. M.
Lisovskii, my own quantitative studies have indicated that the number of Russian scientific
and technical periodicals began to grow exponentially around 1880; that this growth outpaced
all other forms of publication (theological, literary, artistic); and that this growth rate
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Mark B. Adams
remained remarkably constant over time, doubling the number of periodicals every eleven
years from 1880 through the late 1930s.9
How and why did this "take-off" in Russian science and technology occur? The
phenomenon needs to be studied in more detail, but preliminary work reveals some suggestive
patterns. First, the quantitative output of certain economic indicators manifests an almost
identical plot: as measured by the number of kilometers of railroad lines, steel output in tons,
OF (admittedly rough) estimates of Russian GNP, the Russian economy experienced an
'`exponential take-off" at the same time as Russian scientific and technological publication.
This suggests that the rise of Russian science and technology may be linked to the development
of industrial capitalism in Russia. Second, the most rapid growth in periodical publications
occurs in provincial centers such as Kiev, Kharkov, Odessa, and Kazan. This suggests that the
many historical accounts of Russian science that focus almost exclusively on developments in
St. Petersburg and Moscow may be missing much of the "action."
Finally, the dating is intriguing. It has been commonly assumed that this newly emergent
Russian science was associated with the Russian left, or at least with "progressive" or "liberal"
times. It is true, of course, that in the 1 860s some sciences (Darwinism, physiology, psychology)
were embraced by political radicals; but note that the closest approximation of the initial point
of exponential growth is not the "liberal" 1860s but rather 1880 at the height of political
reaction-and it proceeds at a fairly continuous rate, doubling every eleven years, far
outstripping other kinds of scholarly publication by the turn of the century. It now appears
that, although conservative Tsarist censors were suspicious of the political and ideological
"baggage'' that often seemed to accompany contemporary English, German, and French
science, they were not hostile to science or technology itself; indeed, they understood the
development of Russian science and technology to be vital to their country's economic
development and military strength.~° These "conservative" times also correspond to the wide
popularity in Russia of a kind of positivist philosophy that asserted the essentially objective,
value-neutral, apolitical character of science; and this consensus philosophy became the credo
of a newly self-conscious Russian scientific community, broadly diverse in politics but
uniformly (and even aggressively) scientistic in outlook.
In the late 19th century, then, the dialectics of modernization cast science in a role that
was at once politically innocuous and politically central, wedding "objective" natural
knowledge with nationalism. Just as Russian science was beginning its "take-off," the Russian
Academy became dominated by native Russian scientists for the first time in its history.
Universities opened new chairs, and science professors who had previously trained only a few
graduate students were now creating whole schools. Moscow University and St. Petersburg
University remained the centers of higher education; but there was a great expansion in
provincial science, and important departments of mathematics, chemistry, and bacteriology
· . . ~ ~ ~ ~ . ~ +~ ~ ~ ~ . ~ . , · . ~ ~ .
arose in such centers as Kazan, Odessa, Kiev, and Kharkov. Postgraduate training abroad In
leading scientific centers became common practice, and Parisian and German universities,
institutes, and medical schools were flooded with Russian students, many of them women.
New technical, engineering, and agricultural schools were opened.
The generation of Russian scientists and scholars who began their careers at the turn of
the century had grown up breathing this new atmosphere and were products of an excellent
Russian university system in which science faculties were playing an increasingly central role.
Most spent several post-graduate years abroad, where they absorbed the new trends in
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European thought generally, including the music of Wagner, the philosophies of Bergson and
Spengler, and the new work on radioactivity, economics, sociology, anthropology, experimental
biology, and hormone research, as well as other enthusiasms of the day.
In Moscow they clustered around Shaniavsky University, the Beztuzhev courses, the
Lebedev Institute, and other privately or municipally funded institutions. To gain support for
their enterprises, they appealed to Russian industrialists and philanthropists, and resurrected
the journal Priroda as a mouthpiece, where they published accounts of the latest Western and
Russian research and reported on scientific societies, institutions, and funding patterns in
Germany, France, Britain, and America. This group also shared the contemporary Western
preoccupation with new hybrid or "borderland" fields, and between 1900 and 1930 there was
a striking profusion of new interdisciplinary theories and fields, including V. I. Vernadsky's
"biogeochemistry," P. P. Lazarev's "biological physics," N. N. Semenov's "chemical physics,"
and V. N. Sukachev's "plant sociology." One also sees in the period 1905 to 1917 a growth in
research in new settings created by entrepreneurial scientists in such fields as experimental
biology, medicine, and bacteriology.
Around the time of World War One, Russian science did not look as different from
American science as one might suppose. And this did not fundamentally change following the
Revolution. Although private philanthropic funding was nationalized in the 1920s, much of
the research that had been supported philanthropically before the Revolution was now
absorbed under the rubric of the appropriate commissariats, several of which were headed
by the personal friends of the people who had developed those institutions. Furthermore,
while there was significant loss of scientific and technical personnel during the wars (through
emigration, injury, execution, famine, and disease), by 1925 many of those who had died or
emigrated had been replaced by bright, younger, entrepreneurial scientists who used the new
opportunities to pursue their pre-revolutionary agendas and to create new fields. Perhaps some
of the growth in the early 1920s was due to the "pruning effects" of the troubled times.
Whatever the reason, the mid-1920s witnessed an extraordinary flowering of Russian science
the creation of population genetics in Moscow, remarkable work done at Ioffe's
Physicotechnical Institute in Leningrad, and a whole variety of other fields where Russian
workers gained world prominence.
I see these developments in the 1920s largely as a natural outgrowth of trends started in
the pre-revolutionary period. As noted earlier, there is a widespread assumption that the
Bolshevik Revolution marked a great divide, with disagreements over whether it was the
worst thing that ever happened to Russian science (a common view in earlier emigre literature)
or the best (the traditional Soviet viewpoint). For a time, it appeared that quantitative studies
supported the Soviet view. For example, in his influential booklet, Little Science, Big Science,
Derek Price tabulated an extraordinarily rapid exponential growth in Russian scientific
publication in the decade after the Revolution, which he saw as confirming its positive
effects.ll However, this finding turned out to be a technical artifact: in counting the
cumulative number of scientific periodicals at a time of rapid expansion, Price saw little to
be gained by subtracting for journal "deaths." I have documented elsewhere that the period
1917-1924 saw a considerable reshuffling of journal names, rubrics, and sponsorship When
journal "deaths" are subtracted, a very different picture of the period emerges. The number
of scientific periodicals grows at a rapid exponential rate from 1880 through 1917, falling off
rapidly during the three civil war years. Under NEP (Novaia Ekonomicheskaia Politika or New
Economic Policy), periodicals start up again (often under somewhat different names and
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Mark B. Adams
auspices), until roughly 1925, when the total has achieved the number that would have been
reached by a constant continuation of the pre-revolutionary growth rate. Thereafter it
resumes that same rate of growth until the late 1930s. The extraordinarily rapid growth in the
number of Russian scientific periodicals 1921-1925 can thus be seen as "making up for lost
time" by compensating for the dramatic fall-off during the civil war.
Despite the Revolution, Russian science in 1925 was not that different from 1915. The
same institutions dominated (often renamed and with new patrons). Russian students could
still do graduate work in Europe with relative freedom, there was a large degree of
international contact, training and research were vigorous, and the relative isolation during
the Civil War may actually have contributed to the flowering of certain especially strong
Russian traditions. In sum, Russian science between 1880 and 1930 was a vigorous and rapidly
growing enterprise centered in universities, scholarly societies, agricultural and engineering
schools, not that different from Western science in its intellectual traditions, institutional
foundations, ideological orientation, and geographical diversity.
BIG SCIENCE SOVIET-STYLE: FROM STALIN TO BREZHNEV
All of this was to end in the period 1929- 1933, which marked the beginning of a
qualitatively different scientific enterprise. The big change started in the year 1929, rightly
remembered by Stalin's term for it, the velikii perelom or "year of the great break." What
happened during the great break was the beginning of purge trials, the move to heavy
industrialization, the collectivization of agriculture and the liquidation of the kulaks it has
been estimated that in these years between ten and twenty million people died in the
countryside. There was also the heavy-handed introduction of the so-called principle of
partiinost': bourgeois experts, so carefully cultivated in the 1920s, were now under attack and
scheduled for replacement by a new group of "Red specialists" who would take their
instructions from the Party. Many of the leading scientific figures who had held forth at
Moscow and Leningrad University were fired from their jobs and replaced by the brightest
of their young Party students. There was enormous disruption during that period.
It was at this time that the free flow of students and information between Russia and the
West was largely stopped, and Russian science became isolated in a way that it had not been
since the 1 850s. The great American biologist and geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky was one
of those students who was in the United States on a post-doctoral fellowship with T. H. Morgan
when the great break occurred; as a result of the disruptive events, he decided to stay. This
is when the Stalinist system is set into place.
In the 1920s, the Party had largely left the Academy and the universities intact. They had
sought instead to create their own parallel, communist institutions for example, the Sverdlov
Communist University was created, the Institute of Red Professors (to train Party people in
academic and scientific fields). Parallel to the Academy of Sciences was the Communist
Academy. During the great break, this strategy was largely abandoned in favor of `'taking
over" established institutions, creating Party cadres within them that would exert Party
control. For example, the Academy of Sciences was "Bolshevized" during the "great break."
Political control was increased throughout the 1930s, and by mid-decade most of the parallel
"communist" institutions (such as the Communist Academy) had been dissolved. Concurrently
the research system was transformed. Having harnessed the Academy, the government poured
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resources into its rapid expansion, leading to a doubling or tripling in the number of new
institutes, in the number of graduate students, and in the size of research budgets. A series
of reorganizations of the Academy, engineered largely by the new Party people, sought to
. ~
move the Academy toward applied practical work and especially 1ndustrlallzatlon, so a new
technology division was created and new applied institutes created.
This vast expansion of the research system in the 1930s largely left the universities by the
wayside. Not that they were spared; as emigre memoirs make clear, they suffered considerably.
In addition to professors being fired, there were new quotas imposed; it was quite common to
have political meetings in which Party students would denounce professors for their
"bourgeois" sympathies. It also became difficult to Ret into a university if one came from a
. .
professional or merchant family; now those who had been workers, or peasants, or who had
Party connections had a distinct advantage. But in the 1930s, Academy institutes also began
granting academic degrees, so there developed a dual system of scientific training, split
between the universities and state and Academy institutes. The burgeoning of new institutes
and their rapid expansion lay at the core of the new system of Big Science that was brought
Into being, and these institutes could thereby be designed to serve the interests of Big Science.
By contrast, the Russian universities had strong and long-standing identities and traditions of
their own and, to a remarkable degree, these traditions were able to survive: universities
remained centers of excellence, in part because of their marginality in the overall plan.
In the Academy system, by contrast, new norms were in effect, applying the equivalent of
factory standards of production, planning, and quotas to scientific research. The vast
expansion in staff filled technical institutes with many who were promoted beyond their
qualifications because of their politics or class (so-called vy~vizhenie). Some of these so-called
"promoters" (vy~vizhentsy) had received a good education. But, as Joravsky has pointed out,
this hasty, breakneck expansion of personnel resulted in many new research institutions
staffed by uneducated, ill-trained specialists.~3 Perhaps the clearest example of this can be
seen in the rise of Trofim Lysenko and Lysenkoism.
We can get a sense of how this process took place from the archives of Western scientists
who were there. For example, American geneticist H. J. Muller spent the period 1933 to 1937
in the Soviet Union heading a laboratory at the Academy's Institute of Genetics. The
materials he saved from that period are revealing.~4 One set of correspondence includes letters
from Party officials informing Muller that they would like to replace his current staff and
graduate students with PartY people. Muller agreed to take them on in addition to (rather than
· . ^\ , ~ . ~ · . . ~ . . . ~ . . ~ · . · · -
in place of) the geneticists already there. In subsequent years there were understandable
tensions between the two groups. As it happened, in subsequent years these Party people from
Muller's laboratory became, virtually without exception, supporters of Lysenko.
The imposition of bureaucratic research planning is revealed in other correspondence.iS
One especially telling letter from Muller to the head of the institute's Party bureau in the mid-
1930s complains that although he is happy to submit and follow a five-year plan, a one-year
plan, and a quarterly plan (as the Academy required), if he was to submit a monthly and a
weekly plan (as his correspondent wished) the laboratory would never get any work done.
These materials are informative in a number of respects: they illustrate the power of Party
cadres, the ways control was imposed, the growing bureaucratism of the system, and the
counterproductive character of attempts to apply industrial production standards even to pure
scientific research. It is also clear, from Muller's own official "work plans," how he and
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Mark B. Adams
others coped with these pressures: filling the next year's "plan" with the publication of work
that was already largely completed, he could virtually guarantee in advance that his
laboratory's plan would be fulfilled.
In subsequent years, the Terror swept up many millions, among them thousands of
scientists, essentially completing the processes started at the beginning of the decade.
H.J. Muller himself managed to leave before the purges had claimed him; a number of his
closest Soviet colleagues were not so lucky. In 1939, both Lysenko and Stalin were elected to
the Academy of Sciences, and newspapers regularly ran letters from distinguished Party
academicians calling for the arrest of targeted colleagues. Only the outbreak of war with
Germany brought this bloodletting among Soviet scientists to an end.
The Second World War produced an interesting shift. In the surge of patriotism following
the Nazi invasion, large numbers of young apolitical scientists joined the Party; in the 1950s
and 1960s, this group would assume an important role in protecting science from excessive
political intrusion. The last years of the war reopened relations with Britain and America, and
from 1945-1946 Soviet science was briefly resurgent. However, there soon followed
Zhdanovsizchina, a reaction against the '`excesses" in literature, art, music, and culture such
as jazz, detective novels, and abstract art-that had come with such Western contacts.
Zhdanovshchina was administered by (and named after) Stalin's "culture tsar," Andrei
Zhdanov, who, interestingly, did not play the same role in science, being a supporter of
genetics and an opponent of Lysenko's biology.
But Stalin supported Lysenko personally, and his triumph at the August 1948 session of the
Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences ushered in the final dark years of Stalinism.
Beginning in the fall of 1948 remarkable things happened. Vials of fruitflies were smashed,
books and journals were removed from the libraries and some were burned, Lysenkoists
assumed complete control of Soviet biology and formed a watchdog committee to oversee the
actions of the Academy presidium as a whole. Soon analogous campaigns sprang up in
cytology, physiology, chemistry, physics, psychology, and medicine. In the months before
Stalin's death in 1953, large numbers of Jewish physicians were arrested for conspiracy in
what came to be known as the "Doctors' Plot." Their lives were spared only by Stalin's timely
demise.
The post-Stalin period introduced major changes and the leadership of the scientific
community tried to cope with the system that Stalin had created. One of the important
effects of the war had been that the physicists in the Academy had gained new independence
and prominence, and their importance continued to grow in the postwar period. After all, they
were responsible for nuclear weapons, rockets, and ultimately Sputnik or at least claimed
responsibility for them so they were left more or less autonomous within the Academy.
Physicists such as Nikolai Semenov (Nobelist in chemistry in 1956), Igor Kurchatov ("father"
of the Soviet atomic bomb), Igor Tamm (a subsequent Nobel prize winner), and Peter Kapitsa
dominated the Academy's governing presidium in the postwar decades. Almost all of these
scientists had learned their science before 1930, and many had studied abroad in Britain or
Germany. With the coming of Khrushchev and the de-Stalinization of 1955 and 1956, when
some ten or fifteen million people were released from the gulag, these physicists went into
action.
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Soviet Union
In the 1 950s, these physicists used their considerable political weight and their
administrative control of the Soviet scientific bureaucracy to try to invigorate the system and
assert a new independence for science. On the philosophical front, they orchestrated in 1957
a revamping of Soviet philosophy that left its sociopolitical dimensions intact but denied it
any role in the innards of science. Kapitsa's clever rhetoric is characteristic of their tactics:
reminding the public in a newspaper article that the Soviet Union would not have had nuclear
weapons, missiles, or computers if Soviet ideologists had had their way, Kapitsa declared
dialectical materialism to be "a Stradivarius violin-the most perfect of violins-but to Flaky
it one must know something about music; otherwise it will sound like any ordinary fiddle." 6
The scientific leadership's most successful strategy involved a series of Academy
reorganizations aimed at isolating science from ideology and bringing it firmly under their
own control. The first reorganization in 1957 involved the creation of the Siberian Division
of the Academy and its Science City (Akademgorodok) at Novosibirsk. Spearheaded by
mathematician M. A. Lavrenttev (a friend of Khrushchev's from his Ukrainian days), and
couched as a response to Khrushchev's call for economic decentralization, the Siberian division
was remarkably different from the standard, Stalinized form of bureaucratic science that
Russia had known since the early 1930s. For one thing, it was an interdisciplinary division,
involving chemistry, physics, biology, and economics institutes independent of their respective
divisions. Second, it was administered by an interdisciplinary presidium of its own that
reported directly to the overall Academy presidium. Third, it ran its own educational system,
including the Siberian Olympiad (a competition aimed at recruiting talented school children
to science) and its own university Novosibirsk State University-whose faculty consisted
entirely of the staff of the Science City. This was the only Soviet university that was not
controlled by a government ministry.
· . · . . . · . · . .
In the Akademgorodok, these leading scientists used their organizational clout in an
attempt to circumvent and overcome some of the unfortunate effects of the Stalinist system:
they cultivated many fields that were still under an ideological cloud elsewhere, including
genetics, molecular biology, cybernetics, econometrics. In 1961, in the second reorganization,
they tossed many technical institutes out of the Academy and returned them to the appropriate
ministries. Finally, in 1963 they completely revamped the divisional structure, isolating
Lysenko and establishing a new molecular biology division under the ultimate control of
Semenov.
The ouster of Nikita Khrushchev in the "little October revolution" of 1964 did not
fundamentally alter the character or structure of the Soviet scientific enterprise. True, with
the fall from power of Lysenko's principle ally, his hegemony in Soviet biology ended,
textbooks were rewritten and genetics was reborn; but Lysenkoists were not ousted from their
posts, and they staged modest periodic comebacks during the Brezhnev decades. The growing
autonomy of the Soviet scientific establishment and their taming of Soviet philosophy
continued. Under Brezhnev, despite ideological zigs and zags, liberalizations and tightenings,
the system continued to grow, the bureaucracy expanded, ideological and Party control
continued. Within the Academy, an uneasy equilibrium continued between political appointees
and good scientists, but both continued to enjoy the special privileges reserved for the stars
of the Soviet Big Science bureaucracy. In short, the Stalinist system of science carried on with
its own momentum. Set in place in the early 1930s with ideological fervor and terror, it
continued on, now run by technocrats of only modest ideological conviction and willing to use
only modest forms of repression.
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Mark B. Adams
PROSPECTS UNDER PERESTROIKA
An era in Soviet life ended with the death of Leonid Brezhnev in November 1982. The
following interregnum (presided over first by Iurii Andropov, who died in February 1984,
and then Konstantin Chernenko, who died in March 1985) came to a close only when Mikhail
Gorbachev consolidated his leadership in late 1986. During this period, the USSR Academy
of Sciences was headed by physicist A. P. Aleksandrov, who served as president from 1975; he
was replaced by Gurii Marchuk only in 1986. Under Gorbachev, the Soviet Union has
experienced a remarkable rebirth of open expression that the world has come to know as
glasnost'. Such periodicals as Ogonek and Moskovskie novosti have published uncensored articles
on Lysenkoism and the repression of Soviet science that have reopened old wounds. Various
individuals and groups have been freer to express their opinions in print, professional disputes
have become more public, and old controversies have gained new intensity and candor. But
as yet, quantitative change has not become qualitative.
In recent months, as unanticipated events have followed one upon another, Western
commentators have been afflicted with a wishful euphoria. Most Soviets I have talked to are
more sober. They point out that liberalizations have occurred before: during NEP in the 1920s,
and just after Lenin's death; just after Stalin's death in the mid-19SOs; just after Khrushchev's
ouster in the mid-1960s; and now after Brezhnev's death and the prolonged interregnum. While
Western commentators fantasize about capitalism, democracy, and the end of the Soviet Union,
Soviets see a socioeconomic political system falling apart with nothing to replace it. Soviet
policy-makers indeed face a daunting reality. The current system is stratified and
bureaucratic, filled by political connection and maintained by privileged access to increasingly
scarce resources.
Given the past, the effects of the new democratizing trends can be unpredictable and
unsettling. An example is provided by recent events at an institute whose history I have
studied- the Institute of General Genetics in Moscow, a lineal descendant of a collective that
saw some of the most brilliant and most troubled events in Soviet science. Built around the
group created by Filipchenko in Petrograd in the years immediately after the Revolution (a
group that included Dobzhansky), the institute became the scientific base of Nikolai Vavilov
and was where H. J. Muller worked in the 1930s. Following Vavilov's arrest it was taken over
by Lysenko, and it became his base in the Academy of Sciences until it was reorganized in
1965. In its new form as the Institute of General Genetics in Moscow, directed by Nikolai
Dubinin, the institute was an amalgam of Lysenkoists and their geneticist victims. After
Dubinin forbade the study of human genetics and attacked colleagues who studied it elsewhere
as representing "an alien ideology aimed at crushing the human personality," he was
eventually removed from his directorship by the presidium in 1981, but nonetheless retained
his laboratory at the institute. With the coming of glasnost', he denounced the new institute
director as the head of a ``Zionist clique." As an accommodation, the new Academy president
allowed Dubinin's laboratory to `'secede" from the institute administratively, while retaining
one of its four floors; meanwhile, laboratory technicians quarrel in the building's single
stockroom over whose equipment belongs to whom.
With the coming of new laws concerning democratization some two years ago, new
complexities emerged for the scientific institutes. On the basis of an official ruling, directors
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of scientific institutes were now to be elected by the staff-with the Party committee running
the proceedings in most places. The first balloting at the Institute for General Genetics, for
example, saw the nomination of several dozen candidates; many votes and committee meetings
later, the selection was reduced to two. The election led to a 49 percent to 51 percent split;
when the losing side protested that this was not democratic, a new ballot was held, and this
time the results were reversed: 51 percent to 49 percent. As a way out, the Academy proposed
that the loser could be given one of the remaining three floors as an administratively
independent laboratory (thankfully he demurred). This is a rough account told to me by
people who were there; if even part of it is true, the Academy has some interesting times
ahead. As recent elections and reelections to the Soviet parliament have made clear, the
Academy remains a deeply divided, sprawling, bureaucratic "empire of knowledge" (in the apt
phrasing of historian Alexander Vucinich). In Leningrad, there have even been moves afoot
to form a new, "real" Academy to replace the old.
Given the pace of recent events, it is difficult to discern any trends that would allow us
to forecast even the shape of Soviet science and technology in a few years time with any
certainty. In such a setting, it might seem that history is a useless guide; however, I think it
may well prove to be by far the most useful one. Historians know of the extraordinary
breadth and interconnectedness of the Russian intelligentsia; current events suggest that it is
alive and well. The career patterns of individuals involved in current scientific debates
suggest that intellectual and scientific networks dating from the 1920s and earlier have
endured, tested and tempered by war and repression. Such personal human networks formed
by "old school ties," extended families, work settings, and common interests span diverse
institutions and disciplines, connecting them in ways that cannot be seen in organizational
charts or the published "paper trail."
We have tended to associate the Soviet scientific community with the move for human
rights, democracy, and social reform.
, . . · . · ~· . . ~· . ~
Certainly some scientists have played a leading role
- notably Andrea Sakharov. And it is certainly true that the Soviet scientific leadership was
able to make important contributions to the autonomy of their enterprise in the 1950s. But this
picture, if not totally inaccurate, can be profoundly misleading. Scientists enjoyed
disproportionate success precisely because they were specially privileged in status, income,
and autonomy and they enjoyed their privileged position because of their contributions to
the vital interests of the state: nuclear fission and fusion, bombs and rockets. Their greatest
successes on behalf of their own values came as a result of their privileged access to political
leaders, their unique contributions to Soviet-style Big Science, and their ability to manipulate
its centralized, bureaucratic structures from the top.
Modern science is Big Science; but Big Science Soviet-style was created under Stalin in
the 1930s, and it retains the characteristics he gave it. Soviet scientists have never experienced
a kind of Big Science that was not politically controlled, statist, centralized, bureaucratic,
and relatively isolated from international science. They and their successes are, to a large
extent, creatures of the Stalin-Brezhnev system, a system whose future is now uncertain.
Recent studies suggest that the reactor at Chernobyl, the disaster there, and the cover-up that
followed were also largely a product of Soviet-style "big physics." And despite national
economic hardship and Soviet military cutbacks, there have been no cutbacks in science-
related military research activity, including the space program and the development and
modernization of missile and warhead technology.
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Mark B. Adams
It is hard to escape the inevitable conclusion that things cannot go on as they are. Vast
quantitative growth in the Soviet scientific enterprise has yielded no corresponding qualitative
change not a positive one, at any rate. If anything, the vast quantitative increases in the
number of scientists, engineers, research institutes, and funding appears to have resulted in
lower quality, encumbering the current system with a massive scientific and technical
bureaucracy. And despite a half century of dedicated efforts to link science and production,
following the Marxist dictum of "the unity of theory and practice," today theory and practice
are more distant than ever. In the application of science and technology to production, the
Soviet Union trails not only North America, Western Europe, and Japan, but also much of
Eastern Europe and the Pacific rim.
What options are open for Soviet science? Until the Soviet economic system is
fundamentally reformed, it seems likely that the continued successes of Soviet science will
continue to depend on its privileged access to the "high-tech" machines, devices, chemicals,
and computers on which modern science depends. But special access to such technology by
Soviet scientists may deny these resources to other sectors of Soviet society sorely in need of
them and lacking the hard currency required to buy them. Nor should we expect too much
from democratization, because Soviet-style Big Science encompasses vast numbers of institutes
staffed by many people who won their posts through political, Party, or personal connections.
Administering these institutes by internal elections of all staff members promises to produce
the kind of politicization and disorderly confusion that may make good science hard to do.
Given the history of the Soviet research system, it may be that universities will hold the
greatest promise. Although beset by Party and politics after 1930, the universities were largely
left out of the vast bureaucratization that accompanied Stalinist construction, and they were
able to remain centers of tradition and quality. And here we may be able to help. Under
Gorbachev more Soviets are traveling to the West. As in earlier times, however, they continue
to be well along in their careers; to some extent, short-term foreign travel is still being used
as a form of reward for years of cooperative service. The most useful form of exchange, it
seems to me, would be for the younger generation: graduate students who could spend enough
time in Western Ph.D. programs to absorb the culture of Western science, to breathe its
atmosphere and learn its conventions and values, to form the professional international
networks at a young age that wil1 be so important as their careers in Soviet science mature.
Can the Soviet scientific community draw on its pre-1930 traditions and historical
experience to effect its own perestroika and fashion a new kind of Big Science Soviet-style?
I do not know, but, like my Soviet colleagues, I am more hopeful than optimistic.
NOTES
1. The group included J. D. Bernal, J. G. Crowther, J. B. S. Haldane, and others. See Gary Werskey, The Visible
College: The Collective Biography of Bnash Scientific Socialists of the 1930s, New York: Holt, 1979.
2. Associated with Michael Polanyi and Karl Popper, the "freedom of science" movement exercised an important
influence not only on science policy in the United States, but also on the then-emerging fields of the history of science,
the philosophy of science, and the sociology of science.
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3. The sense of panic is v~dl~r described in James R. Killian, Jr., Spumik; Scieniists, and Eisenhower: A Memoir of the
First Special Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977.
See Walter ~ McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, New York: Basic, 1985.
5. As American biologist L. C. Dunn noted after a trip to Russia: "The problems frequently and the mode of attack
nearly always are quite different from those in other countries and where they have followed an influence from
abroad (as in the Drosophila work) they have given it a direction and a method that is peculiarly local or Russian."
"Aside from this peculiarity," he added, "they are nearest in spirit and sympathy to the American type" (L. C. Dunn
to Hutchison, Berlin, 2 November 1927, pp. 2-3~.
6. See, for example, Loren R. Graham, Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union, New York
Columbia University Press, 1987; and the review Or Valentin F. Turchin, "The Exclusion Principle," Nature, No. 331
(7 January 1988~: pp. 23-24.
7. For a sample, see Zhores A Medvedev, The Rise and FaR of T. D. Lysenko, New York: Columbia University Press,
1969; Mark Popovsky, Manipulated Science: The Crisis of Science and Scientists in the Soviet Union Today, Garden
City, NY: Doubleday, 1979; Mark Popovsly, The Vavilov Affair, Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1984; Rais~sa Berg,Acquired
Traits: Memoirs of a Geneticist from the Soviet Union, New York: Viking, 1988; and Daniil Granin, Zubr, New York:
Doubleday, 1990.
8. This moralistic polarity has affected the treatment of even obviously "gray" careers. For example, ~ I. Oparin
pioneered studies of the chemical origin of life, but he also helped Lysenko destroy Soviet genetics (see Mark B.
Adams, "Alexander I. Oparin," in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, Supp. 2, New York: Charles Scribners' Sons,
1990. According to one school of thought, Oparin's contribution to the origin of life will be everlasting, whereas his
support of Lysenko is ambivalent and not worth dwelling on; according to another, Oparin was an opportunist hack
whose contributions to the biochemical origin of life were either faked or insignificant.
9. Nikolai Mikhailovich Lisovskii (1854-1920) was a distinguished and innovative Russian bibliographer. His classic work
Russka~a periodicheskaia pechat 1703-1900 (Russian periodical publication 1703-1900; St. Petersburg, 1895-1915), was
a massive and informative index of all Russian periodical literature. He also graphed the totals, pointing out that
"scientific and technical" forms of publishing began a rapid expansion in the period 1865-1885, far outpacing literary,
philosophical, social, and others forms of publication. Although rarely if ever credited in Soviet literature as a founder
of naukovedenie (science studies), Lisovskii anticipated by a half century some of the approaches pioneered in the
1960s in America by Derek Price.
10. For an excellent discussion of the difficulties facing tsarist censors, see Daniel P. Todes, "Biological Psychology and
the Tsarist Censor: Me Dilemma of Scientific Development," Bulletin of the History of Medicine, Vol. 58 (1984),
pp. 529-544.
11. See Derek Price, Big Science, Little Science, New York: Columbia University Press, 1963.
12. See Mark B. Adams, "Measurements of the Growth of Russian Science," manuscript, 1965.
13. See David Joravsly, The Lysenko Affair, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970.
14. H. J. Muller papers, Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana.
15. Ibid.
On developments during this period, see Mark B. Adams, "Biology After Stalin: A Case Study," Survey, Vol. 23,
No. 1 (1977/78).
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
In addition to sources cited, the following list contains selected works on Soviet science policy, as well as a sampling of the
most important standard, recent, and forthcoming monographs on Russian and Soviet science.
Adams, Mark B. "Measurements of the Growth of Russian Science." MS, 1965.
Adams, Mark B. "Biology After Stalin: A Case Study." Survey, Vol. 23, No. 1 (1977n8~.
Adams, Mark B. "Science, Ideology, and Structure: Lee Kol'tsov Institute 1900-1970." lithe Social Content of Soviet
Science. Edited by Linda S. Lubrano and Susan Gross Solomon. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1980.
Adams, Mark B. "Alexander I. Oparin." In Dictionary of Scientif c Biography. Supp. 2. New York: Charles Scribners' Sons,
1990.
Adams, Mark B. "The Siberian Strategy: A New Look at the Founding of Akademgorodok." Slavic Review. (In press.)
Bailes, Kendall E. Science and Technology Under Lenin and Stalin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
Bailes, Kendall E. Science and Russian Culture in an Age of Revolutions: lo. I. Vemadsky and His School, 1863-1945.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.
Berg, Raissa. Acquired Traits: Memoirs of a Geneticist from the Soviet Union. New York: Viking, 1988.
Cocks, Paul M. Science Policy: USA/USSR. Vol. 2. Science Policy in the Soviet Union. Washington DC: National
Science Foundation, 1980.
Graham, Loren R. The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party 1927-1932. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1967.
Graham, Loren R. Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union. New York: Columbia University Press,
1987.
Graham, Loren R., editor. Science and the Soviet Social Order. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,1990 (In press.)
Granin, Daniil. Zubr. New York: Doubleday, 1990.
Joravsly, David. Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, 1917-1932. New York: Columbia University Press, 1961.
Joravsky, David. The Lysenko Affair. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970.
Joravsky, David. Russian Psychology: A Cntzcal History. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
Killian, James R., Jr. Sputnik Scientists, and Eisenhower: A Memoir of the First Special Assistant to the President for
Science and Technology. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1977.
Lisovskii, N. M. Russkaia penodicheskaia pechat' 1703-1900 [Russian periodical publication 1703-1900~. St. Petersburg,
1895-1915.
Lubrano, Linda S. and Susan Gross Solomon, editors. Ike Social Content of Soviet Science. Boulder, Colo.: Westview,
1980.
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Soviet Union
McDougall, Walter ~ Me Heavens awl the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age. New York: Basic, 1985.
Medvedev, Zhores ~ lhe Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko. New York Columbia University Press, 1969.
Medvedev, Zbores ~ Soviet Science. New York: Norton, 1978.
Parry, Albert. The New Class Divided: Science and Technology Versus Communism. New York: Macmillan, 1966.
Popovsky, Mark Manipulated Science: The Crisis of Science and Scientists lit the Soviet Union Today. Garden City, NY:
Doubleday, 1979.
Popovsly, Mark. Me Vavilov Affair. Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1984.
Price, Derek Little Science, Big Science. New York: Columbia University Press, 1963.
Solomon, Susan Gross and John Hutchinson, editors. Public Health in Revolutionary Russia. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990 (In press).
Soyfer, Valery N. Tchernobyl: fatality ou accident programmi? Paris: Continent, 1987, pp. 9-20.
Spyfer, Valery N. "A Collision Course with Catastrophe." Chicago Tribune, 1 April 1988, p. 9N
Soyfer, Valery N. naSt, i no Istonia r~groma genetiki v SSSR [Science and power: history of the rout of genetics
in the USSR]. Ann Arbor: Hermitage, 1989.
Spyfer, Valery N. "New light on the Lysenko era." Nature, vol. 339 (8 June 1989), pp. 415420.
Systems for Stimulating the Development of Fundamental Research Washington DC: National Science Foundation, 1980.
Thomas, John R. and Ursula M. Kruse-Vaucienne, editors. Soviet Science and Technology: Domestic arid Foreign
Perspectives. Washington DC: National Science Foundation, 1977.
Todes, Daniel P. Darwin Without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989.
Todes, Daniel P. "Biological Psychology and the Tsarist Censor: The Dilemma of Scientific Development." Bulletin of
the History of Medicine, Vol. 58 (1984), pp. 529-544.
Turchin, Valentin F. "Lee Exclusion Principle." Nature, No. 331 (7 January 1988), pp. 23-24.
Vucinich, Alexander. Science in Russian Culture, 1861-1917. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970.
Vucinich, Alexander. Empire of Knowledge: The Academy of Sciences of the USSR 1917-1970. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1984.
Weiner, Douglas R. Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1988.
Werskey, Gary. The Visible College: The Collective Biography of British Scientif c Socialists of the 1930s. New York: Holt,
1979.
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GREAT BRITAIN
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Representative terms from entire chapter:
russian science
