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capitalist countries’.

Expenditure on science (in constant terms) grew more

than threefold between 1927/8 and 1933. Thereafter the rate of growth slowed

down, but it was still impressive, with spending on science almost doubling

between 1933 and 1940. The Soviet Union probably spent a greater proportion

of its national income than any other country on science in the 1930s.

The

number of research scientists grew rapidly, from about 18,000 in 1929 to 46,000

in 1935.

This expansion took place in the Academy of Sciences, institutions

of higher education and the research institutes under the People’s Commis-

sariats. The Communist Academy and the other Marxist-Leninist institutions

lost much of their inﬂuence in the 1930s through closure or merger.

The Soviet Union imported large quantities of foreign machinery and plant

during the First Five-Year Plan (1928–32).

The Second Five-Year Plan empha-

sised the development of indigenous technology. This put a heavy respon-

sibility on the scientists and engineers who had predicted in the 1920s that

investment in science would produce wonderful results. Such claims had been

easy to advance when economic recovery meant little more than the restora-

tion of an economy destroyed by civil war. They were a more serious matter

once the party began looking to science to help it achieve the enormously

ambitious goals it had set for the economy.

In order to ensure that science did indeed help them to achieve their goals,

the authorities imposed rigorous political and administrative controls on the

scientiﬁc community. In the late 1920s they decided to bring the Academy

of Sciences under tighter political control.

They changed the procedures

for nominating candidates, raised the number of positions in the Academy,

and then pressed for the immediate election of eight Communists including

N. I. Bukharin. The Academy’s leadership acquiesced, but its General Assem-

bly rejected three of the Communist candidates in January 1929. Under gov-

ernment pressure, another ballot was held the following month and the three

Communistswere elected, though with many abstentions.Administrative con-

trol was largely taken over by the newly elected Communist Academicians;

29 I. V. Stalin, ‘Ob industrializatsii strany i o pravom uklone v VKP(b)’, in I. V. Stalin,

Sochineniia (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1950), vol. xi,p.248.

30 Robert Lewis, ‘Some Aspects of the Research and Development Effort of the Soviet

Union, 1924–1935’, Science Studies 2 (1972): 164.

31 Lewis, Science and Industrialisation,pp.10, 13.

32 Antony C. Sutton, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 1930–1945 (Stan-

ford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1971), passim.

33 Loren R. Graham, The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party 1927–1932

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 80–153; Alexander Vucinich, Empire of

Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 123–49; E. I. Kolchinskii,

‘ “Kul’turnaia revoliutsiia” i stanovlenie sovetskoi nauki’, in Kolchinskii, Nauka i krizisy,

pp. 586–601.

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censorship of Academy publications was introduced for the ﬁrst time; and

tight restrictions were imposed on foreign travel. The Academy’s move from

Leningrad to Moscow in 1934 signiﬁed its absorption into the Soviet state

apparatus.

The Academy abandoned the concept of pure science and placed a new

emphasis on engineering and applied research. This policy rested on the belief

that science did not grow by virtue of an internal logic, but in response to the

technological demands that society placed on it.

The government introduced

planning into science, over the objections of many scientists. In a speech to

the ﬁrst all-Union conference on the planning of scientiﬁc research in April

1931, Bukharin stressed that scientists should think beyond their research to

the application of scientiﬁc knowledge in industrial production.

The relationship between science and Marxist philosophy also underwent

a crucial shift. In April 1929, the historian M. N. Pokrovskii, president of the

Communist Academy, called on Marxists to end their ‘peaceful coexistence’

with non-Marxist and anti-Marxist scholars. He urged them ‘to begin the

decisive offensive on all fronts of scientiﬁc work, creating their own Marxist

science’.

Deborin’s claim that dialectical materialism should provide guid-

ance to scientists now appeared too conservative. A group of younger, more

radical philosophers called for the ‘restructuring of the natural and the mathe-

matical sciences on the basis of the materialist dialectic’.

There were sporadic

efforts to do just that in the early 1930s, but in the summer of 1932 the Cen-

tral Committee warned against ill-informed attempts to reconstruct scientiﬁc

disciplines.

Philosophers were subordinate to the authority of the party Central Com-

mittee. They did not constitute an ideological supreme court, passing inde-

pendent judgement on the acceptability of scientiﬁc theories. Stalin made it

clear that the primary purpose of theory was to help practice; the correctness

of a theory could be judged by its contribution to practice.

It was the Central

34 Boris Hessen, ‘The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia’, in J. Needham

and P. G. Werksey (eds.), Science at the Cross Roads, 2nd edn (London: Frank Cass, 1971),

pp. 151–212.

35 N. I. Bukharin, ‘Osnovy planirovaniia nauchno-issledovatel’skoi raboty’, in Akademik N.

I. Bukharin, Metodologiia i planirovanie nauki i tekhniki: Izbrannye trudy (Moscow: Nauka,

1989), p. 111.

36 Kolchinskii, ‘ “Kul’turnaia revoliutsiia” ’, p. 610; Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural

Science,pp.215–71.

37 Kolchinskii, ‘ “Kul’turnaia revoliutsiia” ’, p. 618.

38 Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science,p.269.

39 I. V. Stalin, ‘K voprosam agrarnoi politiki vSSSR’, in Stalin, Sochineniia (Moscow: Gospoli-

tizdat, 1953), vol. xii,p.142; Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science,pp.250ff.

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Committee – or, more precisely, its General Secretary – that would decide how

useful a theory was and thus whether or not it was correct. Philosophers had

little independent authority, but they were responsible for propagating dialec-

tical materialism and they served as ideological watchdogs, on the prowl to

see if they could ﬁnd anything untoward or suspicious in the work of scien-

tists.

They were one of the party’s instruments for exercising control over

the scientiﬁc community.

What emerged from the upheavals of 1928–32 was a large, well-funded,

party-controlled R&D effort. ‘In the USSR, as nowhere else in the world, all the

conditions have been created for the ﬂourishing of science,’ Karl Bauman, head

of the Central Committee’s Science Department, claimed in August 1936.

But

the authorities were not satisﬁed. The Academy of Sciences, on instruction

from the government, organised a conference on physics and industry in March

1936.

The main target of criticism was Abram Ioffe, director of the Leningrad

Institute of Physics and Technology, the leading Soviet physics institute at

the time. He and his institute were attacked for not doing enough to help

industry.

In December 1936 the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences

held a conference at which T. D. Lysenko and his followers attacked leading

geneticists.

Practice was crucial here too. Lysenko was a crop specialist who

had won support from those responsible for agricultural policy by propos-

ing various practical measures to improve crop yields. His claims were very

appealing in the terrible years following collectivisation. Lysenko, who had

no training in genetics, accused some of the geneticists of racism and fascism;

he and his followers were in turn charged with being anti-Marx and anti-

Darwin.

The physicists had resisted the introduction of philosophical issues

at their conference. The biology meeting, with its name-calling and political

accusations, showed how far scientiﬁc debate could become politicised. The

Central Committee’s assertion of authority in science had opened the way

to arguments for and against particular lines of research not merely on the

40 Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997),

pp. 71–80.

41 Quoted in ‘Soveshchanie v Narkomtiazhprome o nauchno-issledovatel’skoi rabote’,

Sotsialisticheskaia rekonstruktsiia i nauka, 1936,no.8: 142.

42 On the conference see V. P. Vizgin, ‘Martovskaia (1936 g.) sessiia AN SSSR: Sovetskaia

ﬁzika v fokuse’, Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki, 1990,no.1: 63–84; and his ‘Mar-

tovskaia (1936 g.) sessiia AN SSSR: Sovetskaia ﬁzika v fokuse. II (arkhivnoe priblizhenie)’,

Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki, 1991,no.3: 36–55.

43 David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1970), pp. 97–104.

44 Krementsov, Stalinist Science,pp.59–60; Zhores A. Medvedev, TheRiseandFallofT.D.

Lysenko (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), pp. 37–44.

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grounds of their scientiﬁc validity or practical utility, but also on the basis

of their political character. Two types of argument now became available in

scientiﬁc debates: ‘quotation-mongering’ (the appeal to the writings of Marx,

Engels, Lenin or Stalin in support of one’s arguments), and ‘label-sticking’

(the attempt to defeat an opponent by associating him with a political or

philosophical deviation).

Lysenko continued to strengthen his position in the late 1930s. He was

made president of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1938 and

a full member of the Academy of Sciences in the following year. The press

portrayed him as a scientist of a new type: a man of the people, patriotic

and oriented towards practice. This background gave him credibility in party

circles. The fact that he understood very little about genetics did not hinder his

ascent. He exploited the political context cleverly and destroyed his opponents

by accusing them of political and ideological sins. The leading geneticist N. I.

Vavilov was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in Saratov in 1943.

Important though the Lysenko affair was, it did not characterise Stalinist

science as a whole. While some ﬁelds suffered, others thrived. It was in these

years, for example, that P. A. Cherenkov, I. M. Frank and I. E. Tamm discovered

and explained the Cherenkov effect, for which they received the 1958 Nobel

Prize for Physics; L. D. Landau did the work on the theory of liquid helium

for which he was awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize; and P. L. Kapitsa did the

research in low-temperature physics that won him the 1978 Nobel Prize.

The important difference between physics and biology was not that one was

compatible with Marxism-Leninism and the other was not. It was the rela-

tionship to practice that determined their fate. Geneticists and plant breeders

had no ready response to the crisis in agriculture caused by collectivisation.

Lysenko, by contrast, found support among agricultural ofﬁcials. He attacked

the geneticists for their failure to provide practical help and explained that fail-

ure in terms of the political and ideological defects of the scientists and their

theories, converting the crisis in the countryside into a crisis in science. There

was no comparable crisis in industry to make physics seriously vulnerable to

attacks of that kind.

The scientiﬁc community in the 1930s was subject to rigorous political and

administrative controls, pressed to contribute to military and economic devel-

opment and under permanent scrutiny for its political loyalty. Communists

were now in key administrative positions; censorship became more stringent;

45 Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair, pp. 105–30; Krementsov, Stalinist Science,pp.54–83.

46 Graham, Science in Russia,pp.207–13.

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and foreign travel came to a virtual stop. Members of the pre-revolutionary

scientiﬁc intelligentsia still occupied some leading positions, often as institute

directors and heads of scientiﬁc ‘schools’, which were networks of patron-

age and support as well as intellectual communities.

Planning, which aimed

to eliminate duplication, reinforced these schools and even encouraged the

formation of monopolies, with particular ﬁelds dominated by individual insti-

tutes and their directors. Expansion of the scientiﬁc community brought large

numbers of young people into science, leading to inter-generational conﬂicts

that sometimes acquired a political character. Careerism and personal rivalries

took on a political edge, and the practice of denunciation affected the scientiﬁc

community as it did society at large.

The growth of science took place against the background of continual

investigations and trials. The Shakhty trial of 1928 and the Industrial Party trial

of 1930 were only the most prominent instances.

Researchers at the Academy

were arrested and imprisoned or exiled in the ‘Historians’ case’, the ‘Slavists’

case’, the ‘Peasant Labour Party case’, the ‘Leningrad SR–Narodnik Counter-

revolutionary Organisation case’, and other cases in the late 1920s and early

1930s. These were widely reported in the press, evidently to frighten scientists

and engineers and ensure their loyalty to the regime.

Repression became

more intense in the late 1930s, with the arrest of tens of thousands of scientists

and engineers. Some important institutes were destroyed – the Ukrainian

Institute of Physics and Technology in Khar’kov is a notable example.

The

regime’s faith in science was matched by suspicion of scientists; its support of

science was counterbalanced by repression of the scientiﬁc community. The

epitome of this paradox was the sharashka, the prison laboratory in which

scientists and engineers, who had been arrested for crimes against the state,

developed technologies for defending the state.

Leading scientists welcomed the investment in science and the promi-

nence given to science in ofﬁcial propaganda, but they were unhappy with

47 Gennadii Gorelik, Andrei Sakharov: Nauka i svoboda (Moscow: R&C Dynamics, 2000),

pp. 57–79.

48 Bailes, Technology and Society, pp. 69–121.

49 Kolchinskii, ‘ “Kul’turnaia revoliutsiia” ’, pp. 643–50.

50 Alexander Weissberg, The Accused (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951); Iu. V. Pavlenko

and Iu. N. Raniuk and Iu. A. Khramov, ‘Delo’UFTI 1935–1938(Kiev: Feniks, 1998); Loren R.

Graham, What Have we Learned about Science and Technology from the Russian Experience?

(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 53–5; M. G. Iaroshevskii (ed.),

Repressirovannaia nauka (Leningrad: Nauka, 1991); V. A. Kumanev, Tragicheskie sud’by:

repressirovannye uchenye Akademii nauk SSSR (Moscow: Nauka, 1995).

51 On the sharashka of the aircraft designer A. N. Tupolev, see L. L. Kerber, Tupolev (St

Petersburg: Politekhnika, 1999), pp. 112–86.

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the bureaucratic and political controls on the scientiﬁc community.

Many

were of course horriﬁed by the brutality of the regime, and some wrote letters

to the authorities to seek the release of colleagues who had been arrested.

There were those like Landau who regarded the Stalin regime as no better

than fascism, but others thought that the repressive character of Soviet rule

would be temporary. Vernadskii, for example, saw in the growth of science a

cause for hope in the longer term.

The priority given to science inspired admiration abroad. A Soviet dele-

gation including Bukharin and Ioffe attended a conference on the history of

science in London in 1931. The papers they presented, which analysed the devel-

opment of science in its social context, inspired a group of left-wing British

scientists to develop inﬂuential ideas about science and its social functions.

In the following year, Modest Rubenstein, a member of the delegation to the

London conference, described in a pamphlet for foreign readers how science

and technology would ﬂourish under socialism. The Soviet Union, he wrote,

was the ﬁrst experiment in which ‘a genuinely scientiﬁc theory’ was being

applied to the construction and control of social and economic life, as well as

to the management of science and technology.

The Second World War and the post-war years,

1941–53

Soviet scientists responded to the German invasion by putting themselves and

their knowledge at the service of the state. Many volunteered for service in

the Moscow and Leningrad militias, which suffered terrible losses in the early

months of the war. Research institutes in Moscow and Leningrad were evac-

uated to the east, where scientists contributed to the war effort by working to

52 Vera Tolz, ‘The Formation of the Soviet Academy of Sciences: Bolsheviks and Academi-

cians in the 1920sand1930s’, in Michael David-Fox and Gyorgy Peteri (eds.), Academia

in Upheaval: Origins, Transfers, and Transformations of the Communist Academic Regime in

Russia and East Central Europe (Westport, Com.: Bergin and Garvey, 2000), pp. 39–72.

53 See P. L. Kapitsa’s letter in defence of L. D. Landau, P. L. Kapitsa, Pis’ma o nauke (Moscow:

Moskovskii rabochii, 1989), pp. 174–5.

54 On Landau see Gennady Gorelik, ‘Meine antisowjetische T

atigkeit . . .’: Russische Physiker

unter Stalin (Wiesbaden: Vieweg, 1993), pp. 184–219; V. I. Vernadskii, ‘Nauchnaia mysl’

kak planetnoe iavlenie’, on which he worked in 1937–8, in V. I. Vernadskii, Filosofskie

mysli naturalista (Moscow: Nauka, 1988), p. 95.

55 Needham and Werksey, Science at the Cross Roads, 2nd edn; for the impact in Britain see

P. G . W e r s k e y, The Visible College (London: Allen Lane, 1978), pp. 138–49.

56 M. Rubenstein, Science, Technology and Economics under Capitalism and in the Soviet Union

(Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR, 1932), p. 35.

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improve arms and equipment as well as production processes.

The develop-

ment of new military technologies did not have high priority until victory was

in sight and it was clear just how much progress other countries had made.

Pre-war research on radar and rocketry had been interrupted by the purges.

Radar development was resumed during the war, and rocket development at

the end of the war.

In the spring of 1945 the Soviet Union sent teams of

scientists and engineers to Germany to begin the systematic exploitation of

German science and technology.

Soviet physicists had done pioneering work

on nuclear chain reactions, but the German invasion brought that research

to an end. Stalin initiated a small nuclear project in September 1942, but it

was only on 20 August 1945, two weeks after the bombing of Hiroshima, that

he signed a decree converting this project into a crash programme. Special

organisations were set up to manage the atomic project, as well as radar and

rocket development. New institutions of higher education were established to

train the scientists and engineers needed for these programmes.

Stalin more than once expressed the view that another world war was to

be expected in ﬁfteen, twenty, or thirty years. The advanced weapons pro-

grammes were intended to prepare the country for what he referred to as

‘all contingencies’.

He promised to give I. V. Kurchatov, scientiﬁc director of

the nuclear project, ‘the broadest all-round help’. He told him that he would

improve scientists’ living conditions and provide prizes for major achieve-

ments.

‘I do not doubt’, he said in February 1946, ‘that if we render the

proper help to our scientists they will be able not only to catch up, but also to

overtake in the near future the achievements of science beyond the borders of

our country.’

On 29 August 1949 the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb, a copy of

the ﬁrst American plutonium design, which Klaus Fuchs had given to Soviet

57 B. V. Levshin, Sovetskaia nauka v gody velikoi otechestvennoi voiny (Moscow: Nauka, 1983);

E. I. Grakina, Uchenye – frontu 1941–1945 (Moscow: Nauka, 1989); E. I. Grakina, Uchenye

Rossii v gody velikoi otechestvennoi voiny 1941–1945 (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii

Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk, 2000).

58 On radar see M. M. Lobanov, Razvitie sovetskoi radiolokatsionnoi tekhniki (Moscow:

Voenizdat, 1982); on rocketry see B. E. Chertok, Rakety i liudi (Moscow: Mashino-

stroenie, 1994).

59 N. M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,

1995), pp. 205–50.

60 David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956 (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 49–133.

61 Ibid., pp. 150–1. 62 Ibid., pp. 147–8.

63 I. V. Stalin, ‘Rech’ na predvybornom sobranii izbiratelei Stalinskogo izbiratel’nogo

okruga goroda Moskvy, 9 fevralia 1946g’, in I. V. Stalin, Works, ed. Robert H. McNeil,

vol. iii: 1946–1953 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1953), p. 19.

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intelligence. In August 1953 it detonated a thermonuclear weapon and two

years later, in November 1955, a two-stage thermonuclear design; these were

independent Soviet designs.

The rocket programme was similarly successful.

Building on German technology, Soviet engineers developed generations of

rockets with steadily increasing ranges. In August 1957 they carried out the ﬁrst

successful ﬂight test in the world of an intercontinental ballistic missile, and

in October they used the same rocket to launch Sputnik.

Even with the help

of espionage and German technology, these were impressive achievements in

science and engineering.

In June 1945 over a hundred foreign scientists took part in a special celebra-

tion by the Academy of Sciences to mark its 220th anniversary. At a reception

in the Kremlin attended by Stalin, Molotov made a short speech promising the

‘most favourable conditions’ for the development of science and technology

and for ‘closer ties of Soviet science with world science’.

The latter promise

was soon broken. In May 1947 Stalin told the writer Konstantin Simonov: ‘the

scientiﬁc intelligentsia, professors, physicians...haveanunjustiﬁed admi-

ration for foreign culture.’

He started a campaign against subservience to

the West: foreign contacts were curtailed; science journals stopped reporting

on research done abroad and were no longer published in foreign languages.

In the summer of 1947 two medical researchers were severely criticised for

conveying to American scientists the results of their work on the treatment of

cancer.

Lysenko’s fortunes had declined during the war, and in the early post-war

years the Science Department of the Central Committee supported the geneti-

cists against him. On 10 April 1948, Iurii Zhdanov, newly appointed head of the

Science Department and son of Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov, gave a

lecture criticising Lysenko’s views on evolutionary biology and genetics. Stalin

intervened to support Lysenko, telling Zhdanov that the Central Committee

could not agree with his position. When Zhdanov replied that the lecture

reﬂected only his personal point of view, Stalin responded: ‘the Central Com-

mittee can have its own position on questions of science.’ ‘We in the Party do

64 Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb,pp.138, 213–19.

65 Asif A. Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974

(Washingon: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2000), pp. 160–1, 167.

66 Quoted in Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge,p.206.

67 Konstantin Simonov, Glazami cheloveka moego pokoleniia (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Pravda,

1990), p. 126.

68 V. D. Esakov and E. S. Levina, Delo KR. Sudy chesti v ideologii i praktike poslevoennogo

stalinizma (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii i institut istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki

Rossiiskoi Akademii nauk, 2001), pp. 219–44.

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david holloway

not have personal views and personal points of view,’ he said.

The Politburo

instructed the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences to organise a meeting

on biology, and this took place from 31 July to 7 August 1948. Lysenko gave the

main report. Some of his opponents were allowed to speak, but the meeting

was stacked against them. Stalin had edited Lysenko’s report and had made

substantial changes to it. On the last day of the meeting Lysenko invoked

the highest authority in Soviet science when he told his audience, ‘the Cen-

tral Committee of the Party has examined my report and approved it’.

The

August session marked his complete triumph, with damaging consequences

for teaching and research in biology.

Preparations soon began for a conference on physics, a sequel to the 1936

meeting. The organising committee met forty-two times between 30 Decem-

ber 1948 and 16 March 1949. The discussions were sharp and bitter, with divi-

sions not only between physicists and philosophers but also between different

groups of physicists at the Academy of Sciences and at Moscow University.

The draft resolution called for a ‘struggle against kowtowing and grovelling

before the West’ and criticised individual physicists such as Ioffe, Kapitsa and

Landau. What effect such a resolution would have had on physics is not clear,

for it did not attack quantum mechanics and relativity theory directly in the

way that Lysenko had condemned genetics. In the event, the physicists were

reprieved. The meeting was cancelled in the middle of March, some days

before it was due to start.

It appears that leading physicists in the atomic project warned Beria and

Stalin that a conference would interfere with the development of nuclear

weapons.

A similar logic was used by a group of nuclear physicists who

wrote to Beria in 1952 to complain about philosophers who ‘without taking

the trouble to study the elementary bases of physics’ try to refute ‘the most

important achievements of modern physics’.

They went on to claim that the

69 Krementsov, Stalinist Science,pp.105–57, 161–7; the ﬁrst remark by Stalin is on p. 166.The

second remark by Stalin comes from V. A. Malyshev, ‘Dnevnik narkoma’, Istochnik, 1997,

no. 5: 135.

70 Krementsov, Stalinist Science, p. 172.

71 T. A. Ginetsinskaia, ‘Biofak Leningradskogo universiteta posle sessii VASKhNIL’, in

Iaroshevskii, Repressirovannaia nauka, pp. 114–25; and A. N. Nesmeianov, Na kacheliakh

XX veka (Moscow: Nauka, 1999), pp. 135–7.

72 G. E. Gorelik, ‘Fizika universitetskaia i akademicheskaia’, Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i

tekhniki, 1991,no.2: 31–46.

73 A. S. Sonin, Fizicheskii idealism: istoriia odnoi ideologicheskoi kampanii (Moscow: Fizmatlit,

1994); and V. P. Vizgin, ‘The Nuclear Shield in the “Thirty-Year War” of Physicists against

Ignorant Criticism of Modern Physical Theories’, Physics-Uspekhi 42, 12 (1999): 1268–70.

74 Vizgin, ‘The Nuclear Shield’, pp. 1270–4.

75 ‘Beria i teoriia otnositel’nosti’, Istoricheskii arkhiv, 1994,no.3: 217.

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Science, technology and modernity

philosophers’ activities might interfere with the nuclear project.

In neither

case – 1949 or 1952 – did the party make a deﬁnitive ruling in favour of the

physicists. The possibility of a conference on physics was held in reserve.

Further discussions took place in the early 1950s, in linguistics, physiology

and political economy, and Stalin was deeply involved in each of them.

published his thoughts on linguistics and political economy.

He gave Iurii

Zhdanov conspiratorial advice on the conference on physiology, telling him

to organise the supporters of Pavlov on the quiet, and only then to convene

the conference at which ‘general battle’ could be waged against Pavlov’s oppo-

nents.

But Stalin’s interventions raised a fundamental problem: if the Central

Committee could have its own position on scientiﬁc questions and could adju-

dicate the truth or falsity of scientiﬁc theories, how was it to decide what the

correct position was, which theories were true and which false? ‘It is generally

recognized’, Stalin wrote in his commentary on linguistics, ‘that no science

can develop and ﬂourish without a battle of opinions, without freedom of

criticism.’

Stalinist discussions, however, were usually initiated in order to

destroy, or to reinforce, a particular school or monopoly (Marrist linguistics,

Michurinist biology, Pavlovian physiology), and that presupposed that the

Central Committee had already decided what it wanted the outcome to be.

In his pamphlet on linguistics, Stalin reasserted Marxism’s scientiﬁc status.

‘Marxism’, he wrote, ‘is the science of the laws governing the developmentofnature

and society . . . the science of building communist society’ (emphasis added). ‘As

a science,’ he wrote, ‘Marxism cannot stand still; it develops and is perfected.’

It did not ‘recognize invariable conclusions and formulas, obligatory for all

epochs and periods. Marxism is the enemy of all dogmatism.’

This suggests

thathe did not regardMarxismasaﬁxedpoint on whichtheCentral Committee

could base ‘its own position on questions of science’. In his comments on

Lysenko’s 1948 report, he had rejected the idea that socialist natural science

was necessarily different from bourgeois natural science.

But if Marxism did

not provide a key, and scientiﬁc monopolies could stiﬂe the truth, how was

the Central Committee to make its judgements? It is tempting to see Stalin,

76 Ibid., p. 218.

77 On the post-war sessions see Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2006).

78 I. V. Stalin, Marxism and the Problems of Linguistics (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing

House, 1955); I. V. Stalin, Ekonomicheskie problemy sotsializma v SSSR (Moscow: Gosizdat,

1952).

79 I. Stalin to Iu. A. Zhdanov, 6 Oct. 1949, RGASPI f. 558,op.11,d.762,pp.24–5.

80 Stalin, Marxism and Problems of Linguistics, p. 41. 81 Ibid., p. 71.

82 Kirill O. Rossianov, ‘Editing Nature: Joseph Stalin and the “New” Soviet Biology’, Isis 84

(1993): 728–45.

565