Yuri Gagarin, Russian cosmonaut, 1961. PHOTO: HERITAGE IMAGES/GETTY IMAGES
The story of science in the Soviet Union is one filled with contradictions, achievements and tragedies. Here was a country that, at one point, had the world’s largest scientific establishment. It was the first country to launch an artificial satellite and the first to send a human being into space. It was the first to develop diodes and rudimentary transistors. Russians built the first digital computer in continental Europe. Russians received Nobel Prizes for the development of the laser. These technologies—space communications, transistors, lasers and computers—are at the base of much of the world technological boom of the past 50 years. But what role has Russia actually played in that boom?
The Soviet Union may have pioneered in space with Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin,but today Russia has less than 1% of the world commercial market in space telecommunications, the most successful commercial product so far stemming from space exploration. Russians may have won Nobel Prizes for developing the laser, but Russia today is insignificant in the production of lasers for the world market. Russians may have developed the first digital computer in continental Europe, but who today buys a Russian computer? By missing out on the multi-billion-dollar markets for lasers, computers and space-based telecommunications, Russia has suffered a grievous economic loss.
Accompanying this technical and economic failure was a human tragedy. Russian achievements in science and technology occurred in an environment of political terror. The father of the Russian hydrogen bomb, Andrei Sakharov,wrote in his memoirs that the research facility in which he worked was built by political prisoners, and each morning he looked out the window of his office to see them marching under armed guard to their construction sites. The “chief designer” of the Soviet space program, Sergei Korolev, was long a prisoner who worked in a special prison laboratory, or sharashka. The dean of Soviet airplane designers, A.N. Tupolev, also labored for years as a prisoner in a special laboratory. Three of the Soviet Union’s Nobel Prize-winning physicists were arrested for alleged political disloyalty. Probably half of the engineers in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s were eventually arrested. In 1928 alone 648 members of the staff of the Soviet Academy of Sciences were purged.
When one looks at these statistics and at the genuine achievements of Soviet science, one is forced to ask basic questions about the relation of freedom to scientific progress. During the Soviet period, with all the atrocities, 10 Soviet scientists won Nobel Prizes. How could that be?
PHOTO: WSJ
STALIN AND THE SCIENTISTS
By Simon Ings
Atlantic Monthly, 508 pages, $28
Atlantic Monthly, 508 pages, $28
During the past 30 years, and especially since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a group of scholars—20 or so—primarily in the United States, Canada, Britain and Russia, have been trying to tell the story of Soviet science and answer some of these questions. They have worked in newly opened archives and have interviewed hundreds of people. Most of the resulting scholarship has been published in academic presses and journals with small readerships. In “Stalin and the Scientists,” Simon Ings has made an effort to read all of this material and summarize it. A science writer rather than an academic, he has not worked in the archives himself or done primary research on his own, but he has read prodigiously. And he is a gifted writer.
“Stalin and the Scientists” is a good single source for anyone approaching Soviet science for the first time. It suffers from a number of flaws, however. Mr. Ings writes about what interests him most, such as biology, psychology and physiology. He gives no attention to mathematics and very little to theoretical physics, the fields in which the Soviet Union was the strongest. To him, physics means atomic weapons, but the Nobel Prizes that Soviet physicists won were in theoretical areas to which Mr. Ings gives little space.
Mr. Ings admirable effort to reach nonspecialized readers sometimes leads him to make exaggerated statements. He claims that we have “good agricultural and climate data for Russia going back over a thousand years” when in fact the data is incomplete and unreliable. Each of the following statements is incorrect or exaggerated: “Alexei Gastev was a ‘leading architect of the Soviet industrialisation programme’ ”; “The Bolsheviks never meant to nationalise industry on a mass scale”; the chemist V.N. Ipatiev owned the “holiday home in which Nicholas II and his family were murdered”; “most intellectuals had welcomed the revolutions of 1917”; Sergei Vavilov would become the “permanent secretary” of the Academy of Sciences under Stalin; Nikolai Bernstein “invented cybernetics”; collectivization of the Soviet type was an “American” invention; Niels Bohr’s work on physics showed that “nothing useful can be said about the actual state of the universe”; the arrest of the great Soviet biologist Nikolai Vavilov “had nothing to do with Trofim Lysenko,” the powerful and wrong-headed agronomist; Stalin was “the last in a long line of European philosopher kings”; “anti-semitism was not a strong force in Soviet life”; Nikolai Fedorov “rivalled Karl Marx as an intellectual driver of the 1917 revolution”; “Trotsky was a notorious blow-hard”; “By the time of its unexpected collapse, the Soviet Union had become what its founders had always dreamt it might become: a scientific state.”
The claim that the Soviet Union was a scientific state brings Mr. Ings close, in his conclusion, to condemning science itself. He sees science and technology as causing a coming global ecological collapse, and he thinks that in some ways the demise of the Soviet Union was a preview of what we will all soon face. In one of his final sentences he says: “We are all little Stalinists now, convinced of the efficacy of science to bail us out of any and every crisis.” “Stalin and the Scientists” deserves attention, but a very critical form of attention. It is based on an impressive amount of study, and most readers will learn a great deal. It is, however, incomplete and overdrawn.
Mr. Graham is professor of the history of science emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
