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in his last writings, struggling with a problem that he himself had created:
how could the Central Committee use effectively the authority it claimed on
questions of science, without destroying the science on which the power of
the state was coming increasingly to depend?
De-Stalinisation and science 1953–68
Encouraged by success in nuclear weapons development and space flight, the
post-Stalin leaders placed great hopes in science and technology. Investment
in science grew very rapidly in the fifteen years after Stalin’s death, and the
number of ‘scientific workers’ rose from 192,000 in 1953 to 822,000 in 1968.
83
New science cities such as Akademgorodok near Novosibirsk and Zelenograd
near Moscow were founded in the expectation that research would flourish
there. Boris Slutskii caught the mood of the time in his 1959 poem ‘Physicists
and Lyric Poets’: ‘Physicists it seems are honoured, lyric poets are in the shade’,
the poem begins. There is no point in disputing this, writes Slutskii; greatness
is now to be found not in the poet’s rhymes, but in logarithms.
84
The Soviet Union nevertheless lagged behind the West. Kapitsa had written
to Stalin in July 1952 to lament the poor condition of Soviet science, and he was
not alone in his concern.
85
The tendency towards technological stagnation in
the economy was also a source of anxiety.
86
After Stalin’s death, the govern-
ment convened several meetings of engineers, plant directors and scientists
to discuss the introduction of new technologies into industrial production. It
then established the State Committee for New Technology and created the
position of Deputy Minister for New Technology in the industrial ministries.
87
This was the first of a series of administrative reforms designed to stimulate
technological progress.
In his letter to Stalin Kapitsa had deplored the way in which science was sub-
ordinated to practical needs. It was essential to support fundamental research,
he argued, because scientific discoveries could give rise to new technologies;
radar, television, jet propulsion and atomic energy were among the examples
he mentioned. Kapitsa was challenging the orthodox view that it was the
83 Nauchnye kadry SSSR: dinamika i struktura (Moscow: Mysl’, 1991), p. 40.
84 Boris Slutskii, ‘Fiziki i liriki’, in Boris Slutskii, Sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Khudozh-
estvennaia literatura, 1991), vol. i Stikhotvoreniia 1939–1961 ,p.351.
85 ‘Nel’zia peredelyvat’ zakony prirody (P. L. Kapitsa I. V. Stalinu)’, Izvestiia TsK KPSS, 1991,
no. 2: 105–9.
86 F. Burlatskii, ‘Posle Stalina’, Novyi mir, 1988,no.10: 157.
87 Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb,pp.356–7; A. B. Bezborodov, Vlast’ i nauchno-tekhnicheskaia
politika v SSSR serediny 50-kh–serediny 70-kh godov (Moscow: Mosgorarkhiv, 1997), pp. 37–8.
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technological needs of society, rather than the internal logic of science, that
stimulated scientific progress. Eventually the official position changed, and
the 1961 party programme declared that ‘science will itself in full measure
become a direct productive force’.
88
In the reforms of the Academy of Sci-
ences between 1959 and 1963, a number of technical institutes were moved
from the Academy to the appropriate industrial ministries, thus reversing the
thrust of the Academy’s reform in the late 1920s.
89
Economic growth was coming to depend more on new technology and
higher labour productivity than on the addition of new workers to the labour
force. Barriers to technological innovation were, however, deeply embedded
in the institutional structure of the economy.
90
First, there was a serious lack
of development facilities, because the government had invested heavily in
research and production but had neglected engineering development, a cru-
cial phase in the transfer of research into production. Second, factories were
reluctant to introduce new products or new processes, because innovation
would interfere with their ability to meet plan targets. Third, administrative
barriers existed between the R&D system and industrial production, and there
were different agencies responsible for R&D, with a resulting lack of policy
co-ordination. Khrushchev carried out various administrative reforms, but
these did little to improve the situation.
91
Military R&D performed more suc-
cessfully, not because the defence sector operated according to some ideal
of central planning, but because the political leadership devoted considerable
resources and effort to overcoming the barriers to innovation that existed
elsewhere in the economy.
92
The scientific community was in a poor state, Kapitsa wrote to Khrushchev
in 1955.
93
Scientists had been ‘beaten’ so often that they were afraid to think for
themselves. Excessive secrecy made it impossible for the scientific community
at large to form its own judgements about the quality of research. Science was
attracting people who were less interested in science than in high salaries and
privileges. To remedy this situation, two conditions were needed, in Kapitsa’s
88 Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge,pp.298–304; Konstantin Ivanov, ‘Science after Stalin: Forg-
ing a New Image of Soviet Science’, Science in Context 15, 2 (2002): 317–38.
89 Graham, Science in Russia,pp.183–5.
90 E. Zaleski etal., SciencePolicyin theUSSR (Paris:Organization forEconomic Co-operation
and Development, 1969), pp. 425–35.
91 Bruce Parrott, Politics and Technology in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1983), pp. 177–9.
92 David Holloway, ‘Innovation in the Defence Sector’, in R. Amann and J. Cooper (eds.),
Industrial Innovation in the Soviet Union (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
1982), pp. 276–367.
93 P. L. Kapitsa to N. S. Khrushchev, 15 Dec. 1955, Kapitsa, Pis’ma o nauke,pp.314–19.
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view. The first was that scientists should not be afraid to express their opinions
even if those opinions were going to be rejected. It was particularly harmful to
decree scientific truths, as the Science Department of the Central Committee
had done. The second was that the political leadership should take account of
scientific opinion. The situation in biology was a direct result of the leadership’s
failure to heed the views of the scientific community.
Important changes took place in the mid-1950s. Scientists had had virtually
no contact with foreign colleagues since the mid-1930s, apart from a brief
period at the end of the Second World War. Now restrictions on foreign
travel were eased, though not completely removed.
94
The Soviet Union joined
international scientific associations, and some joint research projects were
organised with Western countries; information about foreign research became
much more accessible. The Soviet Union moved towards closer integration
with the international scientific community.
95
Scientists became less afraid to demand intellectual freedom. In the autumn
of 1955 300 biologists signed a letter to the Central Committee calling on it
to disavow the August 1948 session. Physicists supported them by writing to
draw attention to the harm that the situation in biology was doing to Soviet
science as a whole. Khrushchev was unmoved and maintained his support
of Lysenko, whose advice on agriculture he valued highly.
96
Scientists also
demanded that philosophers stop policing science and looking for ideological
deviations in scientific theories; philosophers, they insisted, should under-
stand science before seeking to interpret it.
97
An All-Union Conference on the
Philosophical Problems of Contemporary Science in October 1958 enjoined
philosophers and scientists to work more closely together, though it also offi-
cially, if half-heartedly, endorsed Lysenkoist theories. With the exception of
genetics, scientific authority – the right to say what science is – was now clearly
vested in the specialist scientific communities, and Lysenko’s influence was
finally destroyed in October 1964, when Khrushchev fell from power. Philoso-
phers now took their lead from scientists; they no longer claimed, as they had
done in the Stalin years, that they should lead the scientists.
98
94 Zhores A. Medvedev, The Medvedev Papers: The Plight of Soviet Science Today (London:
Macmillan, 1971) explores the restrictions in detail.
95 Ivanov, ‘Science after Stalin’, pp. 322–5.
96 D. V. Lebedev, in ‘Kruglyi stol. Stranitsy istorii sovetskoi genetiki v literature poslednikh
let’, Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki, 1987,no.4: 113–24; ‘Genetika – nasha bol’’,
Pravda, 13 Jan. 1989,p.4; Nesmeianov, Na kacheliakh XX veka,pp.169–70.
97 Nesmeianov, Na kacheliakh XX veka,pp.236–9, 240–3.
98 Filosofskie problemy sovremennogo estestvoznaniia (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo AN SSSR, 1959),
pp. 602–5.
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Lysenkoism was the most striking case of a distinctively ‘Soviet’ science,
and it ended in failure, rejected by Soviet and foreign scientists alike. The rise
and fall of Lysenkoism cannot be explained as a clash between genetics and
dialectical materialism; it has to be understood in the broader context of the
Soviet system and Soviet politics. Soviet leaders supported Lysenko because
they believed his ideas were more practical than those of the geneticists and
plant breeders. Believing that science would make a huge contribution to
socialism, they concluded that there must be something wrong with genetics
if it could not offer solutions to the problems they faced in agriculture. The
Lysenko affair can provide a misleading picture of Soviet science. It is true
that there were efforts to create a distinctively Marxist natural science, but
these were largely confined to the early 1930s and were soon reined in by the
party. Some scientists found dialectical materialism helpful in thinking about
scientific problems. It would be a mistake to believe that the Soviet intellectual
climate always hindered science: as Loren Graham has pointed out, there are
many cases in which that context helped to shape ideas that proved successful
in the sense that the relevant scientific communities, in the Soviet Union and
abroad, accepted them.
99
N. N. Semenov, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1956, wrote after
Khrushchev’s fall that Lysenko and his supporters ‘had transferred the strug-
gle against those with different ideas from the level of scientific discussion to
the level of demagogy and political accusations’.
100
‘Political’ and ‘philosoph-
ical’ became pejorative terms in the scientific community in the 1950s and
1960s. Scientists saw themselves as restoring integrity to science by making it
illegitimate to invoke the authority of the Central Committee or of Marxism-
Leninism in a scientific argument. This prompted the question: now that
science had become less political, why not make politics more scientific? The
party claimed, after all, to be guided by a scientific theory in its policy-making:
why not strengthen the scientific basis of policy? For at least some elements in
the scientific community, this became an important mission in the late 1950s
and the 1960s. This was a pivotal moment, because now science provided not
only a language of legitimation for the regime, but also a language of criticism
with the potential to transform political relationships.
101
99 Graham, Science in Russia,pp.99–134; Graham, What Have we Learned, ch. 1.
100 N. N. Semenov, ‘Nauka ne terpit sub”ektivizma’, Nauka i Zhizn’, 1965,no.4: 43.
101 David Holloway, ‘Physics, the State, and Civil Society in the Soviet Union’, Historical
Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 31 (1999), pt. 1: 173–93.
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There were two broad approaches to making politics more scientific. The
first was technocratic and bound up with cybernetics, which had been con-
demned in the early 1950s as a ‘bourgeois pseudo-science’ but rehabilitated
in the mid-1950s as an overarching framework for understanding control and
communication in machine, animal and society.
102
Cybernetics was linked to
the new opportunities that computers opened up for data processing and math-
ematical modelling, and it provided a framework for thinking about planning
and management. Mathematicians and computer specialists helped to revive
economics as a discipline, in particular the theory of planning. According to
a group of cyberneticians in the mid-1960s, ‘the view of society as a complex
cybernetic system ...isincreasingly gaining prestige as the main theoretical
idea of the “technology” of managing society’.
103
The second approach was democratic. This drew not on particular con-
cepts and techniques but on a certain conception of science. It is most clearly
expressed in Andrei Sakharov’s Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and
Intellectual Freedom, which began to circulate in samizdat in 1968 and was pub-
lished abroad that same year. Sakharov had worked since 1950 at the nuclear
weapons institute at Arzamas-16. He opened his essay by writing that his views
had been ‘formed in the milieu of the scientific and scientific-technical intelli-
gentsia’, which was very concerned about the future of the human race. ‘This
concern’, he continued, ‘feeds upon consciousness of the fact that the scientific
method of directing politics, economics, art, education, and military affairs, has not
yet become a reality. We consider “scientific” that method which is based on a profound
study of facts, theories and views, presupposing unprejudiced and open discussion,
which is dispassionate in its conclusions.’
104
For Sakharov intellectual freedom
was the key to the scientific method. In March 1970 he, V. A. Turchin and
R. A. Medvedev sent a letter to the Soviet leadership in which they wrote: ‘a
scientific approach demands full information, impartial thinking, and creative
freedom.’ Talk about scientific management would be meaningless if those
conditions were not met.
105
102 David Holloway, ‘Innovation in Science – the Case of Cybernetics in the Soviet Union’,
Science Studies, 1974,no.4: 299–337. Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A
History of Soviet Cybernetics (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002) provides an excellent
full account.
103 B. V. Biriukov et al., ‘Filosofskie problemy kibernetiki’, in A. I. Berg (ed.), Kibernetiku –
na sluzhbu kommunizmu, vol. vi (Moscow: Energiia, 1967), p. 303.
104 A. D. Sakharov, Razmyshleniia o progresse, mirnom sosushchestvovanii i intellektual’noi svo-
bode (Frankfurt-am-Main: Possev Verlag, 1968), p. 3 (emphasis added).
105 A. D. Sakharov, V. F. Turchin and R. A. Medvedev, ‘A Reformist Program for Democ-
ratization’, in Stephen F. Cohen (ed.), An End to Silence: Uncensored Opinion in the Soviet
Union (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), pp. 321–2.
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Technocratic ideas appear to have been more widespread in the scientific
community than liberal ideas, but the two approaches rested on a set of shared
assumptions. Theyembodied the belief that politics ought to be, in some sense,
scientific, and that the scientific-technical revolution presented new challenges
that called for new responses. They reflected the conviction that change was
necessary and the hope that it might be possible. There were doubtless many
scientists – perhaps the great majority – who did not share these assumptions,
either because they were not interested in politics or because they did not
want change or were sceptical of its possibility. But some scientists believed
that, having regained intellectual freedom in the natural sciences, they could
seek change in the wider system. This optimism sprang in part from faith in
science and technology, in part from the hope that de-Stalinisation would lead
to economic and political reform. When signs appeared that Stalin might be
rehabilitated at the Twenty-Third Party Congress in 1966, leading scientists
wrote to the Central Committee to oppose such a move.
106
Some scientists
signed collective letters of protest at the repression of civil rights.
107
Civic
engagement of this kind was, for many, a continuation of the struggle for
intellectual freedom in the natural sciences.
The post-Stalin years were the period of greatest optimism about science
as a force for change, but in 1968 these hopes were dashed.
108
Alarmed by
growing political activism among scientists, the party took steps to make it
clear that the intellectual freedom that existed in the natural sciences did not
extend to politics. M. V. Keldysh, president of the Academy of Sciences, warned
dissident scientists not to believe that their status as scientists would protect
them. ‘These individuals...mustremember that it is not they who define our
science,’ he said. ‘Thedevelopment of science will proceed in anyevent.’
109
This
warning foreshadowed the crushing of the Czechoslovak reform movement
in August. That was a huge blow to hopes of reform in the Soviet Union itself
because it showed how fearful the regime was of democratic change.
110
In a speech to the Central Committee in December 1969, Brezhnev made it
clear that technocratic proposals for reform should not encroach on the party’s
prerogatives. In an obvious reference to cybernetics, he said that ‘systems of
106 Andrei Sakharov, Vospominaniia (New York: Izdatel’stvo imeni Chekhova, 1990), pp. 353–
4; A. Iu. Semenov, ‘Zvezdnoe nebo i nravstvennyi zakon’, in Iulii Borisovich Khariton:
put’ dlinoiu v vek (Moscow: Editorial URSS, 1999), pp. 468–9.
107 Raisa Berg, Sukhovei (New York: Chalidze Publications, 1983), pp. 262–80, 309–23.
108 Paul R. Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), pp. 1–32.
109 M. V. Keldysh, ‘Nauka sluzhit kommunizmu’, Pravda, 1 Apr. 1968,p.2.
110 Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited,pp.263–304.
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information and control created by specialists’ were only auxiliary means for
solving administrative tasks. Policy-making was the prerogative of the party
and the state. ‘Problems of management are in the first instance political, not
technical, problems,’ he said.
111
The party leadership made clear its opposition
to the idea that politics could be made more scientific by either democratic or
technocratic reform.
Disenchantment, 1968–91
By the end of the 1960s the Soviet Union had the largest R&D effort in the
world, employing about two million people, of whom almost half had higher
degrees. The USSR Academy of Sciences had grown into a huge complex,
employing 30,000 scientists and researchers. Each union republic, apart from
the Russian Federation, had its own Academy of Sciences, most of them estab-
lished in the 1940s and 1950s, although the Ukrainian and Belorussian academies
were older.
112
The universities, which were primarily devoted to teaching, had
institutes and laboratories too. The largest element in the R&D effort was the
network of institutes and laboratories attached to the industrial ministries and
enterprises; most of these worked on military technology. Across the country
there were over fifty science cities including ten nuclear cities. Many of these,
including all the nuclear cities, were ‘closed’ and did not appear on Soviet
maps.
113
In some branches of science, most notably in mathematics and physics,
Soviet scientists occupied a leading position in the world.
114
But the Soviet
Union lagged in technology and, far from closing the technology gap, it was
falling further behind in important areas such as computers and electronics.
115
The Brezhnev leadership imported foreign technology and created ‘science-
production associations’ to stimulate technological innovation at home, but
these measures did not yield appreciable results.
116
It had been possible in
111 ‘Vystuplenie General’nogo Sekretaria TsK KPSS tov. Brezhneva L. I. na Plenume TsK
KPSS, 15 Dec. 1969,RGANIf.2,op.3,d.168,p.45.
112 E. Zaleski et al., Science Policy in the USSR, pp. 207, 216–17, 501–5.
113 Glenn E. Schweitzer, Swords into Market Shares: Technology, Economics, and Security in the
New Russia (Washington: Joseph Henry Press, 2000), pp. 283–5.
114 Graham, What have we Learned, pp. 56–8.
115 This was the general conclusion of the most detailed Western study of Soviet tech-
nology. See R. Amann, J. Cooper and R. Davies (eds.), The Technological Level of Soviet
Industry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), and Amann and Cooper, Industrial
Innovation.
116 Philip Hanson, ‘The Soviet System as a Recipient of Foreign Technology’, and Julian
Cooper, ‘Innovation for Innovation in Soviet Industry’, in Amann and Cooper, Industrial
Innovation,pp.415–52, 453–512.
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the 1930s to explain Soviet technological backwardness by reference to the
backwardness of tsarist Russia; and in the 1950s and 1960s the destruction
caused by the Second World War offered an explanation for the continuing
lag. These explanations became less plausible with the passage of time. It was
increasingly clear that technological progress required more than the cautious
reforms adopted under Brezhnev.
Military power was the one area in which the Soviet Union achieved its goal
of catching up with, and perhaps even overtaking, the advanced capitalist coun-
tries. It attained strategic parity with the United States in the late 1960s and early
1970s and continued to develop and deploy new and more advanced strategic
weapons systems.
117
The Brezhnev leadership was reluctant to interfere with
an economic system that had made it possible to secure what it regarded as
an achievement of historic significance. But even in military technology the
Soviet Union became concerned about its capacity to compete with the United
States. The American strategy of exploiting new electronic technologies for
defence worried the General Staff.
118
Ronald Reagan’s 1983 Strategic Defense
Initiative was also a challenge. Most Soviet specialists understood that, even
if the United States deployed a ballistic missile defence system, the Soviet
Union would be able to retain its deterrent capability by developing counter-
measures. Nevertheless, the American initiatives faced the Soviet Union with
the prospect of a new round of intense technological competition.
119
The party intensified its campaign against dissident scientists after 1968.
Regulations were introduced to allow dissertations to be rejected, and higher
degrees withdrawn, on grounds of ‘anti-patriotic and anti-moral behaviour’.
120
Afiercecampaignwaslaunchedagainst Andrei Sakharov,whowasnevertheless
allowed to live in Moscow until 1980 when he was exiled to Gor’kii.
121
The
idea of appealing to science as the inspiration for liberal or technocratic reform
now seemed hopeless. Much of the technocratic rhetoric remained, but it was
so wrapped up in Marxist-Leninist language that it lost the reformist edge it
had had before 1968.
122
The idea of science as a progressive force was still to be found in dissident
writings of the 1970s, but a less optimistic note could be found there too.
117 David Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1983), pp. 43–64.
118 Marshal N. V. Ogarkov, Chief of the General Staff, ‘Zashchita sotsializma: opyt istorii i
sovremennost’, Krasnaia zvezda, 9 May 1984.
119 Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 226–32.
120 Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited, pp. 264–304; Zhores A. Medvedev, Soviet Science (New
York: W. W. Norton, 1978), pp. 162–96; the quotation is from p. 173.
121 Sakharov, Vospominaniia, pp. 528–38.
122 Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak,pp.288–9.
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Slanderer (Klevetnik), a character in Aleksandr Zinoviev’s satirical novel The
Yawning Heights (Ziiaiushchie vysoty), expresses the view that when ‘one places
one’s hopes on the civilising role of science, one commits the gravest error’.
123
That is because science as an activity devoted to the pursuit of truth is sub-
ordinate to science as a social system. Slanderer declares that careerism has
created a ‘moral and psychological atmosphere in science which has noth-
ing in common with those idyllic pictures one can find in the most critical
and damning novels and memoirs devoted to the science of the past’.
124
The
´
emigr
´
e science journalist Mark Popovsky painted a similar picture.
125
Far from
exercising a civilising influence on Soviet society, science had come to embody
the worst features of Soviet life: it was dominated by an overpowering bureau-
cratic apparatus; careerism, patronage and corruption were rife; there was a
cynical disregard of ethics and morality; military and security considerations
had first priority; the scientific community was riven by national antagonisms,
and enmeshed in secrecy. In this disillusioned and perhaps jaundiced view,
science could not serve as the model for a free or a moral society.
Early in the 1980s the party leadership decided, after years of putting off
the idea, to devote a Central Committee plenary session to the scientific-
technical revolution. Preparations began in earnest in the summer of 1984,
but the plenum was cancelled.
126
Gorbachev, who had been deeply involved
in these preparations, was persuaded of the urgency of the problem. Three
months after becoming General Secretary, he told a conference on science
and technology: ‘an acceleration of scientific-technical progress insistently
demands a profound perestroika of the system of planning and management,
of the entire economic mechanism.’
127
He made it clear that he thought the
transition to technology-intensive economic growth should have taken place
fifteen years earlier.
128
Subsequent history showed, however, that he himself
did not have an effective strategy for making that transition.
The nuclear accident at Chernobyl’ on 26 April 1986, dramatised the Soviet
Union’s technological failings. In the worst nuclear accident ever, explosions
123 Aleksandr Zinov’ev, Ziiaiushchie vysoty (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1976), p. 143.
124 Ibid., p. 143.
125 Mark Popovsky, Science in Chains: The Crisis of Science and Scientists in the Soviet Union
Today (London: Collins and Harvill Press, 1980). See also Josephson, New Atlantis Revis-
ited, p. xix.
126 M. S. Gorbachev, Zhizn’ i reformy, 2 vols. (Moscow: Novosti, 1995), vol. i,pp.220, 261;
Yegor Ligachev, Inside Gorbachev’s Kremlin (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), pp. 45–49;
Brown, The Gorbachev Factor,pp.72, 123, 146–7.
127 M. S. Gorbachev, ‘Korennoi vopros ekonomicheskoi politiki partii’, 11 June 1985,in
M. S. Gorbachev, Izbrannye rechi i stat’i, vol. ii (Moscow: Politizdat, 1987)p.269.
128 Gorbachev, ‘Korennoi vopros’, p. 253.
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at the nuclear power plant released millions of curies of radioactive particles
into the atmosphere.
129
Secrecy and cover-up were the instinctive reaction of
the Soviet authorities. It was only after sixty-eight hours – and prodding by
the Swedish government – that they issued their first official statement. Once
satellite pictures of the burning reactor appeared on television screens around
the world, they could not deny that the accident had taken place. Glasnost’
extended not only to the accident and its consequences, but to its causes as
well. It was clear that poor reactor design and human error on the part of the
plant operators were part of the picture. But the accident also resulted from
the modus operandi of the Soviet bureaucracy, with its insistence on targets,
pressure to meet those targets, neglect of safety considerations, secrecy and
immunity from public opinion.
Only glasnost’ would help to remedy the situation.
130
The Soviet press
began to publish stories about past accidents. Environmental movements,
often linked to nationalist sentiment in the republics, sprang up to oppose the
building of new nuclear power plants and to draw attention to environmen-
tal damage caused by Soviet policies.
131
It became clear that, in its drive for
modernity, the Soviet Union, which ruled one-sixth of the earth’s surface, had
imposed enormous costs not only on its people, but on its land, air and water
too.
132
Chernobyl’ – and the glasnost’ it stimulated – delivered the coup de gr
ˆ
ace
to the regime’s claim that, guided by a scientific theory, it was creating a society
in which science and technology would flourish for the benefit of the people.
Science in post-Soviet Russia, 1991–2000
Science in Russia entered what some scientists regard as its most serious crisis
in the twentieth century when the Soviet Union collapsed.
133
The depth of
the crisis is testimony both to the support that the Soviet Union had given to
science and, notwithstanding the failings that critics pointed to in the 1970s
and 1980s, to the quality of Soviet science. There was a threefold drop in
total expenditure on civilian science in the 1990s, and this was compounded
129 V. G. Bar’iakhtar (ed.), Chernobyl’skaia katastrofa (Kiev: Naukova dumka, 1995).
130 Grigorii Medvedev, Chernobyl’skaia khronika (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1989); Loren R.
Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).
131 Jane I. Dawson, Eco-nationalism: Anti-nuclear Activism and National Identity in Russia,
Lithuania, and Ukraine (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996).
132 Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Jr., Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature under
Siege (New York: Basic Books, 1992).
133 V. E. Zakharov, ‘Predislovie’, in B. M. Bongard-Levin and V. E. Zakharov (eds.),
Rossiiskaia nauchnaia emigratsiia (Moscow: URSS, 2001), p. 10.
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