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serhy yekelchyk

In contrast, the March 1990 elections to the Supreme Soviet of the Belorus-

sian SSR demonstrated the extent of the authorities’ control, with the Com-

munist Party winning 86 per cent of seats. After years of prodding by the

intelligentsia, party bureaucrats did agree in January 1990 to pass a law mak-

ing Belorussian the ofﬁcial language of the state. (Similar laws were by then

passed in all other republics of the Soviet west.) Yet, in practice the population

of Belorussia remained the most Russiﬁed and the least politically active in the

region.

In Ukraine, support for Rukh was unevenly distributed geographically. In

Western Ukraine, the national movement enjoyed mass support, while in

the east it relied primarily on the humanitarian intelligentsia in the cities.

Correspondingly, during the 1990 elections, Rukh captured most seats from

the western provinces and some in big urban centres, but its total was only

90 out of 450 seats. Hard-line Communists remained policy makers in the

republic, although they now had to face opposition in the parliament. Still,

following the example of other republics, especially Russia, the majority felt it

necessary to pass a declaration of sovereignty (July 1990), which was more an

afﬁrmation of the republic’s rights than a separatist statement.

In Moldavia, however, the Popular Front, together with the reformist Com-

munists, won the majority of seats during the 1990 elections. The majority

pushed through a number of Romanian-oriented cultural reforms, which

alienated the minorities. (It is worth noting, nevertheless, that the idea of

union with Romania had little support even among Moldavians.) In August

1990, the Turkic-speaking Gagauz population in the south declared a sepa-

rate Gagauz Republic with its capital in Comrat, and in September, Russians

and Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Transnistria created the Dniester Repub-

lic with its capital in Tiraspol’. Some 50,000 Moldavian nationalist volunteers

immediately marched on the Dniester Republic, where ﬁghting would go on

intermittently for several years.

When the abortive coup in August 1991 destroyed the centre’s remaining

power structures, the Baltic republics were the ﬁrst to claim their full indepen-

dence. The Estonian parliament passed a motion to this effect on 20 August,

and the ﬁrst international recognition, from Iceland, followed on 22 August.

Yeltsin’s Russia was a close second, on 24 August, while both the USA and

the USSR hesitated until early September. Although the Soviet military went

violent in Riga, Latvia and Lithuania were equally prompt and successful in

asserting their independent statehood. At the end of September, all three states

already had separate seats at the UN General Assembly.

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The western republics: Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova and the Baltics

In Ukraine and Belarus, Communist-dominated parliaments also issued dec-

larations of independence, on 24 and 25 August, respectively. Disoriented by

the collapse of the party’s centralised controls, local bureaucrats let themselves

be persuaded by nationalists and reformers. Moreover, former Communists

envisaged their continuing rule after independence. The Ukrainian referen-

dum on independence on 1 December 1991, with over 90 per cent voting in

favour of separate statehood, delivered the ﬁnal blow to the idea of reviving

the Soviet Union. The general population, including the minority voters, was

swept away by the promises of economic prosperity that state-run media and

nationalist agitators issued so easily. Moldova was the last to declare indepen-

dence, on 27 August 1991, and the question of possible union with Romania

that overnight acquired practical signiﬁcance caused further splits within both

the Popular Front and among the reformist Communists.

In the years after the Soviet Union’s death, the western republics went their

separate roads, albeit the ones determined to a signiﬁcant degree by Russian

politics in the region. But the legacy of twentieth-century nation-building was

more important yet. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania never considered joining

the Commonwealth of Independent States, but the treatment of large Russian

minorities, especially in Estonia and Latvia, became the major issue between

Russia and them. In fact, during the early 1990s, Estonia and Latvia considered

all post-1940 immigrants and their children non-citizens requiring naturali-

sation. The disenfranchisement of minority residents who could not pass a

difﬁcult language exam earned Estonia and Latvia reprimands from the Euro-

pean Union and human rights organisations. Although the three states moved

quickly to reorient their economies towards the West and introduce market

reforms, their continuing connection with Russia was demonstrated as late

as 1998, when their economies suffered downturns as a result of the Russian

ﬁnancial collapse. Still, the three Baltic states were extremely successful in

what they billed as their ‘return to Europe’. In the spring of 2004, all three

joined the European Union and NATO.

In contrast, Ukraine still struggles to assert its separateness from Rus-

sia, especially in the economic and cultural spheres. Under President Leonid

Kravchuk, the state sponsored the Ukrainisation of public life and education,

normalised relations with Russia and quelled minority unrest. Yet, the lack

of economic reforms caused Kravchuk’s downfall. President Leonid Kuchma

(1994–2004) came to power on the platform of rebuilding economic ties with

Russia and restoring the Russian language to its previously prominent role,

but for most of his rule, he tried to maintain a balance between Russia and

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the West. Still, under Kuchma, Russian ﬁnancial interests came to control

much of Ukraine’s industry and mass culture. Late in 2004 Kuchma’s attempt

to transfer power to a hand-picked successor failed as hundreds of thousands

of orange-clad oppositionists occupied Kiev’s main square, protesting against

the rigged elections. The peaceful ‘Orange Revolution’ brought to power

pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko (2005– ), who promised to ﬁght

corruption and take Ukraine ‘back to Europe’.

Finally, Belarus and Moldova experienced a troubled post-Soviet transi-

tion. In Belarus, continuous economic decline during the early 1990s eroded

already weak support for separate statehood. In 1994, a pro-Russian populist,

Aliaksandr Lukashenka, won the presidential elections, putting the country

on the path of assimilation, preservation of Soviet-style economy and eco-

nomic dependence on Russia. Lukashenka’s rule eventually deteriorated into

an oppressive dictatorship. Formally, Belarus was to enter into union with

Russia (1997), a union that was proclaimed but never consummated because

of the Russian authorities’ reluctance. In Moldova, the early years of indepen-

dence were marred by political fragmentation over the question of national

identity, as well as by ethnic violence, while the second part of the decade

saw the reassertion of Russian political and economic inﬂuence. The conﬂict

in Transnistria escalated in 1992, and, although Yeltsin’s mediation helped to

negotiate a ceaseﬁre, the self-proclaimed Dniester Republic remains de facto

independent. The faltering economy and huge state salary and pension arrears

buoyed the popularity of unreformed Communists, who in 2001 won the par-

liamentary elections with 50.1 per cent of the votes. The parliament elected as

president Vladimir Voronin, who proclaimed a course of closer co-operation

with Russia.

At the beginning of the twenty-ﬁrst century, the former Soviet west no

longer exists as a region distinguished by its one-time connection to non-

Russian European states or by the brief period of pre-Soviet independence.

If the countries of the western belt with their widely disparate economic,

political and cultural proﬁles still have anything in common, it is their Soviet

legacy: a considerable Russian minority, economic ties with Russia and Russia’s

security interest in the area. Only in the cultural sphere, although not without

political implications, do local identities continue to be deﬁned in their relation

to the Soviet project.

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Science, technology and modernity

david holloway

Introduction

Science and technology occupy a central place in the history of all modern

states, but their role is particularly signiﬁcant in twentieth-century Russia. The

Soviet Union had at one time a greater number of scientists and engineers than

any other country in the world. It made a massive effort to overtake the West

in the development of technology. And most important, science and tech-

nology were integral to the Soviet claim to offer a vision of modernity that

was superior to that of Western capitalism. Not only would science and tech-

nology ﬂourish in the Soviet Union, according to this claim; the Soviet system

was itself consciously constructed on the basis of a scientiﬁc theory and would

be guided by that theory in its future development. The Soviet Union pre-

sented itself as the true heir to the Enlightenment project of applying reason

to human affairs.

Before the revolution (1901–17)

Science (nauka) in Russia was linked with modernisation from the very begin-

ning.

Peter the Great imported natural science from Europe in the early eigh-

teenth century as part of his effort to transform Russia into a Great Power.

He established the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1724, before there

were universities in Russia. For a century and a half, most of the Academy’s

members were from outside Russia, and many Russians regarded science as

alien to Russian culture.

In the second half of the nineteenth century a more

1 ‘Nauka’ covers both natural and social sciences. ‘Nauka’ and ‘nauchnyi’ have a broader

meaning than we currently give to ‘science’ and ‘scientiﬁc’. This chapter looks primarily

at the natural sciences. Where the meaning given to ‘science’ is broader, I hope it will be

clear from the context.

2 Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture: A History to 1860 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford

University Press, 1963).

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or less cohesive scientiﬁc community began to emerge, bound together by

learned societies and scientiﬁc congresses. A number of Russian scientists,

among them N. I. Lobachevskii and D. I. Mendeleev, won international repu-

tations during the nineteenth century, and in the early years of the twentieth

century two Russian scientists – I. P. Pavlov and I. I. Mechnikov – were among

the ﬁrst winners of the Nobel Prize for Physiology. Russia had over 4,000 sci-

entists engaged in research at the beginning of the century, and although it

lagged behind Britain, Germany and France, it did have areas of real strength –

in mathematics and chemistry, for example.

The Academy of Sciences, like academies in other countries, was primarily

an honoriﬁc society at the beginning of the twentieth century. Most scientiﬁc

research was done in universities and specialised institutes of higher educa-

tion. Russia had close scientiﬁc ties with Europe, and Russian scientists felt

themselves to be part of an international community. They were increasingly

conscious of themselves as an important – or at least potentially important –

force in Russian society and, like other members of the intelligentsia, they

wanted to play a useful role in Russia’s development.

In January 1905 a group of 342 St Petersburg university teachers and

researchers signed a document criticising the system of higher education for

treating university teachers as bureaucrats. They argued that science could

ﬂourish only when it was free and protected from external interference. These

sentiments were widely shared in the scientiﬁc community. In the spring of

1905 a group of leading scientists and scholars founded the Academic Union

in order to press for reform of higher education. The Union, which soon

included about 70 per cent of all university teachers as members, called on

the government to carry through democratic reforms in order to prevent

anarchy in the country. Members of the Union helped to found the liberal

Constitutional Democratic Party (the Kadets) later in the year. Although

there was a signiﬁcant group of conservative scientists and scholars in Russia,

and a small number who supported the revolutionary parties, most scientists

were liberal and reformist in their political outlook. With the exception of

3 Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture 1861–1917 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-

versity Press, 1970); Loren R. Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union. A Short

History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 32–75; Robert Lewis, Science

and Industrialisation in the USSR (London: Macmillan, 1979), p. 5.

4 E. I.Kolchinskii and A. V. Kol’tsov, ‘Rossiiskaia nauka irevoliutsionnye krizisy vnachale XX

veka’, inE. I. Kolchinskii (ed.),Naukai krizisy(St Petersburg:Institut istorii estestvoznaniia

i tekhniki, Sankt-Peterburgskii ﬁlial, 2003), pp. 291–4.

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1905–7, however, they did not play an active role in politics as a corporate

group.

Relations with the government remained tense after the Revolution of 1905.

When the government sent the police into Moscow University in 1911 to arrest

students, 130 professors and instructors – almost one-third of the total number

– resigned in protest at the government’s infringement of university autonomy.

This clash reﬂected the strains in the relationship: the government wanted the

beneﬁts of science and education but was unwilling to grant the scientiﬁc

community the autonomy it sought.

Russian scientists had little contact with Russian industry, which was largely

owned by foreign capital and relied mainly on research done abroad. The

absence of a strong industrial research base became painfully apparent with

the outbreak of the First World War, when Russia was deprived of the prod-

ucts and raw materials it had been importing from Germany. The govern-

ment responded by building up research in the War Department and looking

favourably on proposals from scientists to put research at the service of the

state. In 1915 the Academy of Sciences set up a Commission for the Study of

the Natural Productive Resources of Russia under the chairmanship of the

mineralogist V. I. Vernadskii. This pointed the way to a new and potentially

productive relationship among science, industry and the state.

Science was, for many intellectuals, a force for political change. In the 1860s

the Nihilists had advanced the view that science could be used to change the

existing social and political order. Science as a mode of enquiry represented,

in their view, the highest form of reason; scientiﬁc education would elimi-

nate traditional and patriarchal attitudes, thereby destroying the ideological

foundation of tsarist rule and opening the way to a new, rational social order.

Few intellectuals after the 1860s took quite such an uncompromising view, but

reformers and revolutionaries did look on science as a force for progress. The

government, for its part, regarded scientiﬁc knowledge as indispensable to the

modernisation of Russia, but it distrusted the scientiﬁc spirit, which it saw as

critical of authority.

5 Kolchinskii and Kol’tsov, ‘Rossiiskaia nauka’, pp. 295–300;SamuelD.Kassow,Students,

Professors and the State in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989),

pp. 5–8.

6 Kassow, Students, Professors and the State,pp.348–60.

7 Lewis, Science and Industrialisation,pp.1–5; Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society under

Lenin and Stalin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), pp. 19–43.

8 Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture 1861–1917,pp.14–34, 424–88.

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Science was crucial for those who wanted to make Russia a modern state,

whatever their vision of modernity might be. Vernadskii, to take one promi-

nent example, believed that the twentieth century would be the ‘century of

science and knowledge’.

To survive and win in international politics, a state

had to invest in science and be willing to exploit the knowledge that science

produced. Science was inherently democratic, Vernadskii argued, because it

was the free thought and free will of individuals that determined the direction

of its development. Science needed freedom in order to ﬂourish, and only

states that enjoyed freedom would prosper. Vernadskii was one of the found-

ing members of the Kadet Party, and his advocacy of reform was intimately

linked to his understanding of science and its place in the development of

society.

Marxists claimed that Marxism was both a scientiﬁc theory and a guide to

revolutionary action. It was based, like the natural sciences, on a materialist

conception of reality, and it employed in the analysis of society the same dialec-

tical method that natural scientists used in their study of nature. It enabled

them to make a scientiﬁc analysis of capitalism and of the revolutionary pro-

cess that would lead to its replacement by socialism. Precisely how scientiﬁc

analysis and revolutionary action related to each other was a matter of debate

among Marxists, but the claim to scientiﬁc status was nevertheless an impor-

tant source of Marxism’s appeal. Both Engels and Lenin took an interest in the

philosophy of science and were concerned to show the continuity between

Marxist social science and the natural sciences.

The Bolshevik revolution and its aftermath, 1917–29

Most Russian scientists greeted the February Revolution with enthusiasm

because they hoped that a more liberal regime would allow science to ﬂourish,

but they regarded the October Revolution with deep suspicion.

Like the rest

of the population, scientists suffered from the general economic collapse that

followed the revolution;many succumbed to illness and died. They lost contact

9 V. I. Vernadskii, ‘Razgrom’, in V. I. Vernadskii, O nauke (St Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo

Russkogo khristianskogo gumanitarnogo instituta, 2002), vol. ii,p.177.

10 V. I. Vernadskii, ‘Mezhdunarodnaia assotsiatsiia akademii’, in Vernadskii, O nauke, vol.

ii,p.19; Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture 1861–1917,pp.414–16, 477–82.

11 David Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science 1917–1932 (London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul, 1961), pp. 3–44.

12 Kolchinskii and Kol’tsov, ‘Rossiiskaia nauka’, p. 329; and E. I. Kolchinskii, ‘Nauka i

grazhdanskaia voina v Rossii’, in Kolchinskii, Nauka i krizisy,p.357.

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with colleagues abroad and ceased to receive foreign scientiﬁc journals.

Ye t

scientiﬁc research did not come to an end, nor was the scientiﬁc community

destroyed. Scientists taught and did research in buildings that lacked gas and

electricity. Scientiﬁc publication did not cease entirely. In spite of their mutual

hostility, scientists and the Bolsheviks managed to co-operate. The desire to

save science was a crucial motive for many scientists, who turned to the

Bolsheviks once it became clear that they were consolidating their hold on

power. Some scientists took the view that Bolshevik rule would not last long;

others believed that science itself would have a civilising effect on the new

regime.

Lenin despised the Russian intelligentsia but wanted to harness science to

the purposes of the revolution. He was dismissive of calls to create a ‘proletarian

science’. He wanted to produce a new socialist intelligentsia drawn from

the working class and peasantry, and for this he needed the co-operation of

those who possessed scientiﬁc and technical expertise. He treated scientists

differently from other members of the intelligentsia.

When he expelled about

200 leading intellectuals from the country in 1922 as ideologically alien to the

regime, very few of these were scientists.

In the spring of 1919 the Petrograd

city government decided to provide a hundred scholars with Red Army rations.

By December 1921 the number of scholars receiving ‘academic rations’ was

7,000.

The Bolsheviks were determined to make science serve the revolution.

They quickly rescinded the autonomy for which professors had struggled

before 1917. When the People’s Commissariat of Education failed to win the

co-operation of professors, it proceeded to carry out university reform by

decree.

By the early 1920s almost all the pre-revolutionary professors of

humanities and social sciences had been dismissed, and the last vestiges of

university autonomy eradicated. Universities themselves fell out of favour;

many were closed and replaced by specialised institutes that offered a narrow

13 Kolchinskii, ‘Nauka i grazhdanskaia voina’, pp. 357–439. See also S. E. Frish, Skvoz’ prizmu

vremeni (Moscow: Politizdat, 1992), pp. 62–103.

14 E. I. Kolchinskii, ‘Sovetizatsiia nauki v gody NEPa (1922–1927)’, in Kolchinskii, Nauka i

krizisy,pp.440–51.

15 On Lenin’s attitude, see Bailes, Technology and Society,pp.45–56.

16 Stuart Finkel, ‘Purging the Public Intellectual: The 1922 Expulsions from Soviet Russia’,

Russian Review 62 (2003): 611. See also Kolchinskii, ‘Sovetizatsiia nauki’, pp. 465–73.

17 Kolchinskii, ‘Nauka i grazhdanskaia voina’, pp. 409–28.

18 Sh. Kh. Chanbarisov, Formirovanie sovetskoi universitetskoi sistemy (Moscow: Vysshaia

shkola, 1988), pp. 72–3.

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david holloway

training for the new socialist technical intelligentsia.

The Bolsheviks wanted

to limit the inﬂuence of the old scientiﬁc intelligentsia on students, and that was

one of the reasons why the Academy of Sciences, which had no students and

was besides more pliable than the universities, became the leading scientiﬁc

research centre in the Soviet Union. The government renamed it the USSR

Academy of Sciences in 1925 and acknowledged it formally as the ‘highest

scholarly institution’ in the country.

Scientiﬁc research expanded rapidly in the 1920s. By 1925 there were eighty-

eight research institutes, seventy-three of which had been established since

the revolution. Nineteen of these were devoted to the social sciences, the rest

to the natural sciences and applied research. Some of these institutes were in

the Academy of Sciences, and some in the universities and higher educational

establishments, but most were subordinate to the People’s Commissariats.

Thenew institutes wereasign of the emergingcollaboration between scientists

and the new regime. Both sides believed that science was important for the

future of Russia, and although they might have different visions of the future,

belief in progressprovided a basis forco-operation. Thiswas,moreover, a real, if

unequal, partnership. The Bolsheviks did not have plans for the organisation of

science in 1917 and they responded favourably to scientists’ proposals, many of

them formulated in the years before the revolution. Leading scientists quickly

adopted the language of the Bolsheviks in arguing that their research would

provide the basis for new technology and contribute to the transformation of

Russia. It was all the easier for them to do this because, although very few

scientists were Communists, many of them shared the belief that science and

technology were crucial to Russia’s development.

In 1918 the Bolsheviks established the Socialist Academy (renamed the Com-

munist Academy in 1924) to encourage the development of Marxist social

science. Independent of the Academy of Sciences, it was one of several Com-

munist institutions designed to revolutionise intellectual life and educate a new

intelligentsia. Initially focused on the social sciences, these institutions began

to pay attention to the natural sciences in the mid-1920s. The Communist

Academy created a Section of the Natural and Exact Sciences, with the task

of ‘rebufﬁng attacks on materialism and contributing to the development of

materialist science’. The section was to organise a survey of scientiﬁc theories

19 Ibid., pp. 189–99; Kolchinskii, ‘Sovetizatsiia nauki’, pp. 458–65.

20 Ibid., p. 502. 21 For the ﬁgures see ibid., pp. 473–80.

22 M. S. Bastrakova, Stanovlenie sovetskoi sistemy organizatsii nauki (1917–1922) (Moscow:

Nauka, 1973), pp. 34–61.

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Science, technology and modernity

in order to bring to light the elements of idealism and materialism, and to

synthesise the latter into ‘purely materialistic general theories’.

There was, however, no agreement among scientists or philosophers about

the proper relationship betweenscienceandMarxist philosophy. The dominant

viewin the early 1920s was that of the ‘mechanists’, who argued that philosophy

should conﬁne itself to representing the most general conclusions of science,

especially of the natural sciences.

There were, on the other hand, those

who believed that philosophy could – and should – guide the scientists in

their work. That was the position taken by a group of philosophers known

as the ‘dialecticians’ (or the Deborinites, after their leader A. M. Deborin),

who saw in the Hegelian dialectic – as reinterpreted by Marx and Engels –

the methodological basis of science. ‘We are striving for this’, Deborin said in

1927, ‘that dialectics should lead the natural scientist, that it should indicate the

correct path to him.’

These philosophical debates did not, however, impinge

very much on the conduct of research in the 1920s.

The 1920s were a period of optimism for science in the Soviet Union. A

bargain was struck between the Bolsheviks and the scientiﬁc community: if

the latter would contribute its knowledge to the building of a socialist society,

the Bolsheviks would help it to realise its projects for investigating and trans-

forming nature. Scientists were relatively well paid, and they were allowed

to maintain their foreign contacts.

The party’s commitment to science was

never in question. It was not a divisive issue in the party debates and leadership

struggles of the 1920s. Vernadskii, who had gone to Paris in 1921 and thought

about staying abroad, was impressed by what was happening in the Soviet

Union, to which he returned in 1926.

The great break and the emergence of Stalinist

science, 1929–41

Soviet leaders believed that science had a crucial role to play in helping

the Soviet Union to ‘catch up and overtake the technology of the advanced

23 Kolchinskii, ‘Sovetizatsiia nauki’, p. 513; Michael David-Fox, Revolution of the Mind: Higher

Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997),

pp. 201–29.

24 Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, pp. 82–3, 93–107; Kolchinskii, ‘Sovetizatsiia

nauki’, pp. 520–1.

25 Quoted by Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, p. 176.

26 On these debates see esp. Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science,pp.150–214;and

Kolchinskii, ‘Sovetizatsiia nauki’, pp. 508–33.

27 Kolchinskii, ‘Sovetizatsiia nauki’, pp. 507, 548.

28 I. I. Mochalov, Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadskii (Moscow: Nauka, 1982), pp. 246–9.

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