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Soviet Union
Pages 51-68

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From page 51... ... 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. Read the entire page →
From page 52... ... 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. Read the entire page →
From page 53... ... , 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. Read the entire page →
From page 54... ... 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. Read the entire page →
From page 55... ... 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. Read the entire page →
From page 56... ... 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. Read the entire page →
From page 57... ... 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. Read the entire page →
From page 58... ... 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. Read the entire page →
From page 59... ... 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) Read the entire page →
From page 60... ... 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. Read the entire page →
From page 61... ... 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. Read the entire page →
From page 62... ... 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. Read the entire page →
From page 63... ... 11. See Derek Price, Big Science, Little Science, New York: Columbia University Press, 1963. Read the entire page →
From page 64... ... Adams, Mark B "Measurements of the Growth of Russian Science." MS, 1965. Read the entire page →
From page 65... ... Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1984. Price, Derek Little Science, Big Science. Read the entire page →

From page 51...

... 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.

Soviet Union Pages 51-68

Soviet Union
Pages 51-68