Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars
Ethan Pollock
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Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
Stalin, Science, and Politics after the Second World War
Joseph Stalin collected many encomiums while ruling the Soviet Union. At
various times the Soviet press called him, among other things: "the
Standard-bearer of Peace," "the Great Helmsman of the Revolution," "the
Leader of the International Proletariat," "Generalissimo," and "the Father
of Nations." In the years following the Second World War he assumed yet
another title: "the coryphaeus of science."1 As the "leader of the
chorus"-or coryphaeus-Stalin stood on the podium while Soviet scientists
sang in rhythm to the commanding movements of his baton.
Stalin tried to live up to the ideal of a man who united political power and
intellectual acumen. Between the end of the Second World War and his death
in 1953 he intervened in scientific debates in fields ranging from
philosophy to physics.2 In late 1946, when Stalin was sixty-seven years old
and exhausted from the war, he schooled the USSR's most prominent
philosopher on Hegel's role in the history of Marxism. In 1948, while the
Berlin crisis threatened an irreparable rift between the United States and
the USSR, Stalin wrote memos, held meetings, and offered editorial comments
in order to support attacks against Mendelian genetics. In 1949, with the
first Soviet atomic bomb test only months away, Stalin called off an effort
to purge Soviet physics of "bourgeois" quantum mechanics and relativity. In
the first half of 1950 he negotiated a pact with the People's Republic of
China and discussed plans with Kim Il Sung about invading South Korea, while
also writing a combative article on linguistics, carefully orchestrating a
coup in Soviet physiology, and meeting with economists three times to
discuss a textbook on political economy. In some cases he denounced whole
fields of scholarship, leading to the firing and occasional arrest of their
proponents. His efforts to unmask errors in science were paralleled by an
equally intense drive to show how each discipline could contribute to
building communism and serve as a symbolic weapon of Soviet superiority in
the battle with the West along an "ideological front."
Why was Stalin so keen to be a scholar? His direct involvement in academic
disputes reveals a side of the aging dictator that supplements what we have
long known about him from the extensive memoir literature. He took ideology
seriously. He was not simply a megalomaniac and reclusive old man who used
scholarly debates only to settle political problems. (After all, he had much
more direct ways of taking care of things he did not like.) The evidence
shows he was far more concerned about ideas than was previously known. We do
not have to accept the intellectual value of Stalin's proclamations about
biology, linguistics, physiology, or political economy to recognize that he
consistently spent time on the details of scholarly disputes.
Applying Marxist-Leninist principles to academic controversies often led to
unpredictable results. Even those members of Stalin's inner circle who were
responsible for ideology had to wait for word from the coryphaeus before
they could be confident that they understood the outcomes he had in mind.
For his part, Stalin's strategies for solving scholarly conflicts evolved in
response to ideas put forth by scientists themselves. When he did reveal his
judgments, others were left with the unenviable task of interpreting his
words and working out their implications for a wide range of fields. In this
sense Marxist-Leninist ideology was often subject to reformulation.
This book analyzes the content of Stalin's scientific forays, places them
within the context of the broader academic disputes, and then traces their
impact on both domestic high politics and the Soviet conceptualizations of
the Cold War. In order to do this, the story moves up and down the Soviet
system, from the institutes and universities where scientific debates often
began and where their effects became apparent, to the presidium of the
colossal Academy of Sciences, to deliberations in the Secretariat of the
Central Committee, and finally to Stalin's office and desk, where the leader
passed final judgments.
Controversies erupted in many academic fields in the 1940s and early 1950s.
Six stand out because of their broad implications and because Stalin and his
closest lieutenants in the Soviet government and the Communist Party
directly intervened in them. These six debates-or "discussions," as they
were often called-took place in philosophy, biology, physics, linguistics,
physiology, and political economy.3 Stalin's active participation in these
debates demonstrates that more was at stake than scholarly disagreements:
the science wars of the late Stalin period encompassed themes crucial to the
Party's legitimacy and fundamental to the Soviet worldview in the early Cold
War. Marxist-Leninist "scientific philosophy" provided the foundation for
the ideology that underpinned the state and society. Physiology and biology
had a direct bearing on the new "Soviet man" that the system tried to create
and on nature, which communism promised to transform. Quantum mechanics and
relativity in physics potentially challenged Marxist-Leninist materialist
epistemology even as they seemed crucial for the development of atomic
weapons. Linguistics encompassed issues of consciousness, class, and
nationality. And political economy required a critique of capitalism, a
justification of Soviet socialism, and a road map for achieving communism in
the USSR and throughout the world.4
Stalin did not venture into scientific laboratories, conduct specific
experiments, or solve equations. Yet he insisted that science was
intertwined with the foundations of socialism and with the Party's raison
d'e^tre. Thousands of newly accessible and previously unexplored documents
from Communist Party, Russian State, and Academy of Sciences archives reveal
that he was determined-at times even desperate-to show the scientific basis
of Soviet Marxism. As both an editor and an author, Stalin actively engaged
with the content of scholarly work and contemplated its overall implications
for Marxism-Leninism. His memos and top secret documents are saturated with
the same Marxist-Leninist language, categories, and frames for understanding
the world that appeared in the public discourse. He did not keep two sets of
books, at least on ideological questions.5
Under Stalin's guidance, the USSR went further than any previous state in
placing the support of science at the center of its stated purpose.6 As a
Marxist presiding over an agrarian country, Stalin was eager to modernize as
quickly as possible. He believed that science provided the key to updating
and industrializing the economy. Principles of scientific management would
improve not only industrial production but all other aspects of societal
development. Like Engels and Lenin before him, Stalin understood Marxism as
a science inextricably tied to the methodology and laws of the natural
sciences. Marxism-Leninism claimed to provide a "science of society" that
would help to create a "kingdom of freedom" on earth. The Party's political
authority relied on the perceived rationality and scientific basis of its
actions. If Marxism-Leninism was scientific, and science would flourish if
it was based on Marxist principles, it followed that science and Soviet
Marxism should mutually reinforce each other. They led to the same
discoveries about the nature of things and, together, progressed steadily to
absolute truths.
Science played a unique role in Soviet ideology. When Soviet citizens
publicly spoke or wrote about Soviet ideology, they were referring to a set
of ideas identified and propagated by the regime and used to justify the
superiority of the Soviet state. In principle, these ideas were derived from
interpretations of canonical texts by Marx, Engels, and Lenin and were
supposed to reflect and shape Soviet reality. They were supposed to be
all-encompassing and internally consistent with "Party lines" defining the
parameters of acceptable positions within various fields of thought. Soviet
ideology contrasted with "bourgeois ideology"-a pejorative term depicting
ideas in the Western political "superstructure" that reflected the
capitalist "economic base." By definition, Soviet ideology was an accurate
depiction of the material world, while bourgeois ideology consisted of lies
and illusions that helped the capitalists to maintain power. The regime
strictly upheld its prerogative to judge every activity on ideological
grounds. But what about the cases when science and Soviet ideology seemed to
contradict one another? Unlike the literary or artistic intelligentsia,
whose challenges to the Party's authority were based on subjective notions
of justice and moral truth that the Party could simply reject, scientists
based their autonomy on very limited fields of expertise that provided them
with specific access to objective laws. Scientists claimed that their work
reflected reality, just like Soviet ideology.
The relationship between science and the Party evolved over the course of
Soviet rule. During the 1920s the sciences, particularly the natural
sciences, were relatively free from a radical Bolshevik agenda that sought
to revolutionize thought in the name of building proletarian culture.7 While
theorists debated the meaning of dialectical materialism as a Marxist
philosophy of science, Lenin defended "bourgeois technical experts" and the
contribution they could make to modernizing the state. The regime denounced
bourgeois literature, art, social policies, and the like, but it supported
bourgeois scientists. During the Great Break of the late 1920s and early
1930s, however, zealous Marxist-Leninist philosophers promoted some
scientific theories as "proletarian" and rejected others as "bourgeois." In
an attempt to create "red specialists," activists and young students pushed
to expose, fire, and arrest so-called saboteurs and wreckers among the
"bourgeois experts."8 In 1931 Stalin called for an end to the radical
upheaval of the period, and subsequently the Party supported a calcified
dialectical materialism based more on loyalty to the Party than on specific
philosophical tenets. Scientists and the regime reached a new modus vivendi
in which the Party supported scientific research while retaining control
over scientific planning.9 By the end of the 1930s young scientists who owed
their education to progressive Soviet policies tended to be more sympathetic
to Marxism-Leninism, and young leaders in the Party and state apparatus who
had received training in technical disciplines tended to see themselves as
part of a new Soviet intelligentsia.10
The Second World War altered the relationship between ideology and science
in three crucial ways. First, scientists found themselves relatively free
from Party oversight. Second, the atmosphere of international cooperation
exemplified by the antifascist Grand Alliance created an opportunity for
Soviet scholars to participate in "world science" and weakened the
distinctions between "bourgeois" and "proletarian" science. And third, the
development of atomic weapons, radar, and antibiotics during the war
clarified that science was a crucial component of national security, which
increased Party support and scrutiny. In these fields, science in the West
was in the lead and could not be dismissed. The wartime mood was summed up
at an international celebration of the 220th anniversary of the Academy of
Sciences in the Kremlin in June 1945. With Stalin and foreign scientists in
attendance, the Soviet minister of foreign affairs, Viacheslav Molotov,
proposed a toast for "the development of close collaboration between Soviet
and world science."11
The opportunity for cooperation in science did not last long. In February
1946, Stalin delivered a speech blaming capitalist policies for the outbreak
of the two world wars and outlining a plan to guarantee that the USSR would
be militarily prepared for the next global conflict. From the perspective of
American policy makers, the Cold War was under way.12 The speech also
assured that science would be an important sphere of international
competition. "I have no doubt that if we give our scientists proper
assistance," Stalin said, "they will be able in the very near future not
only to overtake but even outstrip the achievements of science beyond the
borders of our country."13 The Cold War was not just about geopolitics and
military conflicts. It also pitted two ways of organizing science against
one another.
Stalin provided practical support for the effort to surpass foreign science.
In early 1946 Stalin told Igor Kurchatov, the physicist in charge of the
Soviet atomic bomb project, "our state has suffered much, yet it is surely
possible to ensure that several thousand people can live very well, and
several thousand people better than very well, with their own dachas, so
that they can relax, and with their own cars."14 This was true not only of
physicists working to end the American atomic monopoly. The rising tide
raised all ships: funding for the Academy of Sciences expanded rapidly, as
did the number of institutes and the number of scholars working in them. In
turn for their loyalty and hard work, Stalin gave scientists material
comforts that were extremely rare in the USSR at the time.15
Science became a sphere of Cold War competition in ways that went beyond
national security. Stalin assigned Soviet scholars two key roles on the
"ideological front" of the Cold War: they had to criticize Western ideas,
and they had to export Soviet ideas to newly emerging socialist states in
Eastern Europe and Asia. Sustaining the argument that communism was the only
viable way to organize society required a certain ideological coherency,
which scholars could provide. One of the best ways to prove the merits of a
materialist worldview was to show that adhering to it inevitably led to
scientific breakthroughs. Soviet intellectual achievements could serve as
symbolic measures of the superiority of the Soviet system. Scholars from
every discipline joined the battle along the ideological front. Stalin
implored one group of economists, for instance, to recognize the broader
significance of their work, which would be "read by Americans and Chinese .
. . studied in all countries. . . . It will be a model for everyone."16
Soviet scholars had to espouse universal theories in an effort to win the
hearts and minds of people around the globe. Stalin saw the real need for
and value of science, hence his own involvement.
Despite the value of scholars in Cold War competition, Stalin never fully
trusted their loyalty. The lingering appeal of international cooperation and
"world science" challenged the strict dichotomy between East and West that
the Party emphasized. Even the stunning success of the USSR in the Second
World War, an apparent vindication of Stalin's policies, exacerbated
tensions between the regime and the scholarly elite. Soviet citizens hoped
that victory in war would bring improvements in living standards and
increased ideological flexibility. Instead, financial instability,
widespread famine, severe health care problems, and the Party's attempt to
gear the economy for the Cold War led to unexpected sacrifice by ordinary
citizens.17 Stalin believed that this social dissatisfaction could undermine
confidence in the system more generally. So, rather than loosening its grip,
the Party tightened it and looked for scapegoats who could be blamed for the
persistent hardships. Soviet intellectuals, including scientists, who had
actively developed contacts with foreigners during the relative openness of
the wartime alliance were easy targets.
As international tensions rose, Stalin moved systematically to reestablish
control over all sectors of society. Scientific discussions became a means
by which the Party could ensure scientists' loyalty to the state and to
Party principles. Stalin worried that Soviet intellectuals had fallen under
the influence of Western culture. In 1946, at his boss's behest, Party
secretary Andrei Zhdanov led an attack against Soviet writers for their
"formalism" and "subservience to bourgeois culture." Similar denunciations
followed in music and art in a campaign that became known as the
zhdanovshchina. These internal struggles were clearly connected to the
international situation. In 1947 Stalin ordered Zhdanov to deliver a major
policy speech declaring that the world was divided into "two camps" and that
there could be no neutral parties between them.18 Like everyone else,
scientists had to conform to the bipolarity of the Cold War. In 1947 Stalin
told the popular writer Konstantin Simonov, "if you take our intelligentsia,
scientific intelligentsia, professors, physicians-they are not sufficiently
inculcated with the feeling of Soviet patriotism. They have unjustified
admiration for foreign culture."19 Soon afterward the Central Committee
distributed a closed letter to all Party members condemning "servility to
the West" and calling on the intelligentsia to "defend the interest and
honor of the Soviet state."20
Some scholars responded to the Party's call to arms by reviving in their own
disciplines the class categories and divisions from the debates of the late
1920s and early 1930s. They accused some Soviet scientists of "bourgeois"
values and discredited their ideas as manifestations of "bourgeois" science.
With the world divided into "two camps," the Party demanded that Soviet
science contribute to the advancement of socialism and exemplify the
superiority of socialist ideology. The invocation of the vocabulary of class
warfare was at odds, however, with a more recent drive to praise all things
Russian. Beginning in the mid to late 1930s-that is, during the retreat from
the radicalism of the Great Break-the Party began to cite the positive
attributes of Russians and Russian traditions as a means of explaining the
special role of the USSR in the world. The Second World War or "Great
Patriotic War," as it was known in the USSR, only strengthened this shift.21
In this nationalist vein, it was claimed that Russians had laid the
foundation for the natural sciences, had invented the radio and airplane,
and were responsible for many of the greatest ideas the world had ever
known. Postwar ideology required scientists in every field to work out a new
set of tenets that encompassed the seemingly contradictory elements of class
and Russocentrism. The new Soviet patriotism-in its Russocentric
manifestation-became a standard for judging the value of scientists if not
their science.
The opposite of patriotism was subservience to the West. By the late 1940s
the struggle to ensure loyalty among Soviet citizens had evolved into an
effort to purge Soviet society of all "cosmopolitan" influences. Officially,
the "anti-cosmopolitan" campaign targeted anyone with foreign contacts and
those who had ever expressed admiration for foreign culture. In practice,
cosmopolitanism quickly became associated with Jews. Local organizations
responded by firing thousands of Jews because of their alleged disloyalty.
The Party arrested many prominent Jews, sentencing them to death or years in
forced labor camps. Because of their disproportionate representation in the
academy, Jews in scientific fields were particularly vulnerable to the
campaign.22 Secret memos show how troubled Party leaders became when they
realized that Soviet physics, economics, and other fields were dominated by
Jews and other ethnic minorities. The xenophobia of "anticosmopolitanism"
permeated the scientific discussions. Rather than simply determining whether
a scientific theory corresponded to the latest interpretation of Marx and
Lenin's writings, meetings became forums for denouncing individuals-almost
always non-Russians-for maintaining contacts with and citing foreign
scientists.
With so much at stake, it is little wonder that the Soviet Union's most
powerful Party and government leaders-including Zhdanov, Georgii Malenkov,
and Lavrenty Beria-got involved in scientific discussions. Scientific
disputes became particularly heated in part because they fell under the
jurisdiction of both the Party and the state and as such became focal points
for clashes between Stalin's lieutenants. Andrei Zhdanov's power derived
from his position in the Party, where he was in charge of defining and
enforcing unanimity in Soviet ideology and culture. Scientific controversies
left him vulnerable because they revealed potential doctrinal fault lines.
In contrast, his rivals Malenkov and Beria derived their strength from their
dominance of the state apparatus, including ministries that funded and
monitored science and education. They could use scientific discussions to
enhance their own power by highlighting Zhdanov's inability to solve the
persistent problems along the ideological front. Beyond that, doctrinal
issues interested them primarily as a means to gain favor with Stalin.
The six postwar scientific meetings addressed a common theme: in each case
Party leaders and scholars struggled to make space for both Soviet ideology
and Soviet science. Each discussion began with scholarly disagreements in
scientific institutes, in popular and scientific publications, and in the
Central Committee. Scientific administrators such as Sergei Vavilov, the
president of the Academy of Sciences, and Sergei Kaftanov, the minister of
education of the USSR, actively oversaw disputes and forwarded their
opinions to Stalin and other Party secretaries. Individual scientists
presented their arguments to the Party as well, either by publishing
articles or by appealing directly to patrons in the highest echelons of the
Party. In the Central Committee, responsibility for monitoring scholarship
rested with the Agitation and Propaganda Administration (Agitprop) and
within it the Science Section.23 Because Party personnel at this level did
not have the authority to settle major conflicts on their own, particularly
complicated or troublesome disputes made their way up the Party apparatus to
the Party Secretariat.
In the second stage of each discussion, Party leaders and scholars set about
settling the scientific conflicts and defining a unified ideological
position. As controversies became more heated, Party secretaries reviewed
the analyses and plans of their subordinates. Depending on the nature and
seriousness of the matter, decisions would either be made by the Secretariat
or passed along to the apex of Party power, Stalin and the Politburo. At
times Stalin dramatically reversed decisions made at lower levels. The
threat of such actions by Stalin left Party organizers and scholars alike in
a state of constant uncertainty about the validity and proper meaning of
their carefully crafted recommendations.
The decisive meeting in each field was organized to strike the proper
balance between the Party's role in determining the outcomes of debates and
the importance of scholarly participation. In other spheres of Soviet life
the Party did not hesitate to use decrees, speeches, and publications to
articulate and uphold ideological tenets. These techniques would not suffice
when the goal was to reconcile Marxism-Leninism with major scientific
findings. Instead, Stalin and the Central Committee insisted on the
scientific discussions. Scholars, in the course of debates that were closely
observed (but never totally controlled) by the Party, were supposed to forge
an understanding of their disciplines that was in harmony with ideology,
even when the Party's views were not clear to them, or indeed to the Party
supervisors themselves.
In order to help formulate ideologically correct science, the Party often
promoted what can be thought of as "comrade scientists"-that is, heroic
figures combining both ideological vigor and scholarly expertise. The Nobel
laureate physiologist Ivan Pavlov, for instance, was posthumously presented
as a great scientist whose materialist philosophy and outstanding scientific
advancements went hand in hand. The linguist Nikolai Marr was posthumously
knocked off a similar pedestal, but only after scientific and Party
administrators alike had spent years declaring that his theories had done
more to advance Marxist linguistics than anything ever written. Georgii
Aleksandrov in philosophy and Trofim Lysenko in biology also embodied a
blend of scholarship and Party-mindedness, but for differing lengths of time
and with strikingly different outcomes. Of course, Stalin was the ultimate
comrade scientist. In all six scholarly discussions, Stalin either
contributed an essay of his own or intervened indirectly through
instructions to Party leaders or scientists. While he was alive, Stalin was
the only person in the Soviet Union who, by definition, never erred on
either ideological or scholarly issues. Indeed, his role was so important
that major scientific discussions could not be settled until Stalin's views
were known.
Stalin ex machina was decisive in principle. But confusion over the proper
interpretation of the new Party line continued even after the discussions'
official conclusions, leading most disciplines into long periods of
stagnation. Efforts in the Academy of Sciences and the Ministry of Education
to define and enforce a unified ideology based on Stalin's dictums proved
futile, and Agitprop and the Science Section continued to lament what they
deemed to be a crisis in Soviet ideology. Widely publicized declarations
notwithstanding, inconsistencies abounded. The aftermaths of the discussions
suggest that scientists, administrators, and Central Committee secretaries
were all caught off guard by the direction of scholarly disputes. Outcomes
from one discussion did not translate into clear lessons for other
disciplines. Far from displaying a carefully formulated and executed
message, each successive discussion revealed apparent contradictions in
Soviet ideology that in turn resulted in further debate and floods of
letters to the Central Committee demanding clarifications.
Although the debates shared certain structural features, the specifics of
what was discussed and the conclusions they reached varied considerably. The
discussion in philosophy, the subject of chapter 2, began in December 1946
in the Kremlin when Stalin informed an elite group of leaders and scholars
that Aleksandrov's prizewinning history of Western European philosophy had
overstated the influence of Hegel and other German philosophers on Marxism.
Despite being head of Agitprop, Aleksandrov had misinterpreted what Stalin
required of scholars working on the ideological front of the Cold War. The
discussion culminated in June 1947 with a meeting at the Central Committee
attended by a wide range of the Soviet political and scientific elite.
Stalin maneuvered behind the scenes and Zhdanov, the Party's second in
command, publicly attacked Aleksandrov and the discipline of philosophy in
general.
A little over a year later, in the summer of 1948, Lysenko took advantage of
his personal favor with Stalin to hold a meeting of the All-Union
Agricultural Academy. As discussed in chapter 3, Lysenko revealed at the
meeting that the Party supported his outright suppression of Western,
Mendelian genetics and favored a homegrown, Soviet theory that emphasized
the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The story of Lysenko's
monopolization of Soviet biology-what Stephen Jay Gould called "the most
chilling passage in all the literature on twentieth-century science"-has
dominated scholarship on Soviet science.24 The context of the other
scientific discussions clarifies that the situation in biology constituted
only one part of a much broader effort to come up with a coherent
understanding of the relationship between Soviet ideology and science.
The next meeting, discussed in chapter 4, had a very different outcome: it
was canceled. The All-Union Physics Conference planned for early 1949, and
modeled on the 1948 biology meeting, never took place, despite months of
careful preparation by physicists and Party philosophers. A select number of
physicists formed a cohesive and savvy group that managed to convince the
conference organizers that the national meeting would never reach a
consensus about what, exactly, ideologically correct physics would look
like. Furthermore, Beria, the brutal police chief whom Stalin had put in
charge of the Soviet atomic weapons project, recognized the expedience of
protecting the scientists under his charge from attacks by ideological
zealots. Physicists adeptly translated the importance of atomic weapons
research into unprecedented control over their own profession. Andrei
Sakharov, a young weapons designer at the time, participated in some of
these political maneuverings and took away from them crucial lessons that he
would later apply as a dissident.
In the spring and early summer of 1950, two more discussions-about
linguistics and about physiology-took place, one right after the other. They
are the subjects of chapters 5 and 6 respectively. In May and June 1950
Pravda printed dozens of conflicting articles on the state of Soviet
linguistics. Then, shockingly, Stalin intervened with an essay overturning
the previously held orthodoxy and suggesting that language was neither part
of the economic base nor part of the political superstructure, two core
categories of Marxist ideology. He also suggested that scientific innovation
required free and open discussions. After the coryphaeus of science had
spoken, scholars in every field, not just linguistics, scrambled to
interpret the implications of the new pronouncements for their own work and
for science more generally.
In late June and early July, within days of the conclusion of the
linguistics discussion, hundreds of physiologists convened in Moscow at a
meeting organized to ensure that Soviet physiology followed a rigid
interpretation of Pavlov's work. With heavy-handed coaxing from Stalin and
the Science Section, a number of prominent physiologists defended Pavlov's
insistence that conditioned reflexes provided the keys to understanding
complex behavior in all animals, including humans. The Politburo set out to
enforce the meeting's conclusion and charged the Science Section with
overseeing a scientific council that continued to repress those who defended
a broader understanding of Pavlov's scientific contribution and legacy.
Finally, chapter 7 addresses a month-long meeting in late 1951 where
hundreds of economists and political leaders gathered at the Central
Committee to discuss a draft of a political-economy textbook. Stalin
intended the book to be used in the Soviet Union and throughout the
expanding socialist camp and therefore fretted over even the smallest
details. Party Secretaries Malenkov and Suslov chaired the daily sessions,
while Stalin took the lead role in organizing the discussion and shaping its
outcome. In response to the meeting, he also published a long essay in which
he declared that "Marxism regards laws of science-whether they are laws of
natural science or laws of political economy-as the reflection of objective
processes which take place independently of the will of man." The laws of
science provided the standard by which to judge the validity of all thought,
including the most fundamental ideas of Marxism-Leninism.
* * * * *
This book is based primarily on newly accessible materials from Russian
archives. It has also benefited from a rich set of books and articles on
Soviet science and a growing body of work on postwar Stalinism.25 Even
before the opening of the archives, historians of Soviet science were in the
vanguard of the study of late Stalinism. This can be explained in part by
the desire to understand both the Soviet Union's tremendous scientific
accomplishments- such as the rapid development of atomic weapons, the
launching of the Sputnik satellites, and the steady stream of Nobel Prizes
in science for work conducted during Stalin's time-as well as its equally
noteworthy disasters, such as the outlawing of the study of genetics.
Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, a number of scholars, including Loren
Graham, David Joravsky, and Alexander Vucinich used published materials and
in some cases interviews and limited archival access to analyze the
relationship between politics and science in the USSR. Their work furthered
our understanding of scientific institutions, philosophical disputes in
science, and the role of the state and Party in both supporting and
suppressing scientific ideas.26 Nonetheless, as David Joravsky noted in 1970
in The Lysenko Affair, a restricted source base forced him and his
colleagues to "postpone the conventional first question of historical
inquiry: Exactly which high-placed men got together with which others to
effect this and that policy? That traditional method of beginning historical
inquiry must await the opening of the archives."27
While the published materials clearly help frame the book, the narrative and
analysis are based on precisely the materials to which Joravsky referred. In
many ways, the subject was well suited for archival research because so many
of the most important decisions were recorded by administrative sections and
individuals whose papers are now declassified. For the postwar period the
archives are well organized, reflecting a stability and efficiency within
the Party and academic institutions that was missing in the 1920s and 1930s.
Information about the discussions flowed up and down the bureaucracy,
leaving a substantial paper trail that allowed me to piece together how
decisions were made and how they were carried out. Papers in the Moscow
Party Archive (TsAODM) and the Archive of the Academy of Sciences (ARAN)
reflect the way disputes germinated and were dealt with among rank-and-file
scholars. Papers in the Russian State Archive (GARF) and the Russian
Economic Archive (RGAE) show how state organs took charge of implementing
Party decisions and at times acted as the principal organizers of
discussions. But the most valuable repository for understanding Stalin and
science is the Central Party Archive (RGASPI), which contains the Central
Committee papers including those of Agitprop, the Science Section, the
Politburo, and the Orgburo and Secretariat. These documents, along with the
personal papers of various Central Committee secretaries, record much of the
organizational mechanisms for each of the discussions. As I was writing this
book, more and more documents from Stalin's archive at RGASPI became
accessible to researchers. These papers revealed in stark detail the extent
to which Stalin became personally engaged with the scientific disputes.
Now that many of those archives are open to research, this book uses
thousands of primary documents to show how the politics of science was
practiced in the Kremlin by Stalin and his closest subordinates. It is not a
traditional history of science in that the processes of scientific
investigation, institutional development, and discipline formation are set
aside so that politics and ideology can come to the fore. When background on
the history of specific scientific fields is necessary, the book relies on
existing disciplinary histories.28
This book branches out from previous approaches in three ways. First, it
uses archival material to analyze six different discussions in detail, and
thus avoids the temptation to extrapolate from one discipline to reach
general conclusions about Stalinist science. This complicates our
understanding of Stalin's motives for organizing debates and allows us to
see how the approaches of scientists and the Party changed from one debate
to another. No single discussion emerges as typical or paradigmatic. Second,
the chapters pay careful attention to the ways in which shifting domestic
political concerns affected decision making, arguments, and the grounds on
which people defended their ideas. Scientific debates are understood as both
a forum for political battles as well as a means of reaching ideological
settlements that had effects far beyond the walls of academia. Finally, the
book takes advantage of the recent declassification of Stalin's papers to
place the "coryphaeus of science" at the center of the story. This
material-which includes drafts of his essays, his extensive editorial
comments on other people's written work, minutes from Kremlin meetings with
scholars, and much more-reveals how these six discussions became focal
points for Party politics and the effort to formulate Soviet ideology.
In many respects, Stalin's stint as the coryphaeus of science can be
understood as part of the longer history of political leaders' desires to be
taken seriously as thinkers. From Alexander the Great to the "enlightened
despots" of the eighteenth century, heads of state have sought to justify
their place atop the political landscape by placing their rule within a
broader intellectual context. Confidence in the ability of human reason to
control the natural and social environment blossomed throughout Europe in
the century following the Enlightenment. Political leaders and political
theorists alike held that the rational ordering of society based on the
application of scientific knowledge would naturally lead to greater economic
progress and social justice. By the twentieth century, governments in Europe
and North America relied on rationality as a form of political
legitimization.
Both superpowers in the Cold War claimed to have science on their side. In
the United States, scientific administrators, such as Vannevar Bush and
James Conant, and the sociologist of science Robert K. Merton argued that
Western democracy and science mutually reinforced one another.29 In 1950,
Conant presented the mirror image of the Soviet argument: "Scholarly inquiry
and the American tradition go hand in hand. Specifically, science and the
assumptions behind our politics are compatible; in the Soviet Union by
contrast, the tradition of science is diametrically opposed to the official
philosophy of the realm."30 Stalin also insisted on the unity of his
political system and the scientific discoveries of his age. The effort to
show how Marxism-Leninism constituted the best environment for science
represents an extreme and at times brutal variation-but a variation
nonetheless-on the broader story of the way in which science has been used
to justify a full range of political systems in the modern world. In this
sense, the story of the Soviet science wars offers lessons beyond the
peculiarities of postwar Stalinism. Today's battles over stem cell research,
global warming, and the teaching of evolution in schools are faint echoes of
the controversies described in this book. To some extent, all modern
societies must forge a working relationship between knowledge and power.
The physicist Peter Kapitsa wrote of the debate in his own field that "more
than anything [it] reveals the mechanism of the Stalinist process. The
battle of idealism and materialism in physics-this was only a philosophical
mask which disguised political goals."31 Like many of his fellow scientists,
Kapitsa assumed that philosophy and politics were clearly distinct. But as
the campaign for a coherent Marxist-Leninist ideology of science spread from
one discipline to another, distinguishing the masks from the goals became
difficult even for the participants, including Stalin. Philosophical content
merged with political power; scientific argument melted into polemical
leverage. The progress of science, which was so tightly intertwined with the
self-image and foundational ideology of the Party, required procedures
developed from within scientific and Party traditions. All the participants
in the discussions appreciated the wider significance of their
contributions. Their job entailed nothing less than the clear and forceful
articulation of a worldview that placed the Soviet system at the pinnacle of
historical development. Failure to accomplish this goal would undermine the
Soviet Union's legitimacy for those living within its borders and for those
observing the socialist experiment from around the world.
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