The Soviet push for tech dominance

It was at once the glory and the laughingstock of the intellectual world, writes Simon Ings

By the time Stalin died on 5 March 1953, the Soviet Union boasted the largest and best-funded scientific establishment in history,” Simon Ings writes in Stalin and the Scientists. “It was at once the glory and the laughingstock of the intellectual world.” 

The Bolsheviks viewed the ideology of Marxism as essentially scientific in its analysis of human progress, and science was always a vital part of their conception of the Soviet Union, which they trumpeted as the first state ever founded on “scientific” principles. Its rulers, particularly Lenin and Stalin, regarded themselves as manifestations of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, which gave them the authority to adjudicate on everything in society, including the arts and sciences. Lenin was an intellectual, at home as much in the London Library as in the Kremlin. Stalin was a published romantic poet and enthusiastic autodidact with a library of thousands of books, not only read but annotated. They had the confidence to interfere in every genre of art and every discipline of science. Stalin would soon be hailed as the all-knowing coryphaeus (leader of the chorus in Greek drama) of science.

 

Their drive to modernise Russia and restore it to great-power status, while struggling to feed millions in a country ruined by World War I and civil conflict, meant science was also a practical necessity. The fact that most scientists (and artists) were middle and upper class added the tension of class struggle. Lenin, as always, put it most succinctly: “Communism cannot be built without a fund of knowledge, technology, culture, but they are in the possession of bourgeois specialists. Among them the majority do not approve of the Soviet regime, but without them we cannot build Communism.”

Ings, the author of A Natural History of Seeing, skillfully relates the life stories of these “bourgeois” scientists. There was Ivan Pavlov, who observed, among many other things, that dogs secreted saliva when they expected food. There were the psychologists Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria, who conducted research on cognitive development. (Luria could be said to be the inventor of the lie detector.) At first, the scientists were surprised to find themselves endowed with new equipment and honour. But the picture darkened once Stalin began demanding astonishing jumps in creativity and production, which in turn made the scientists more important but more dangerous and therefore more policed and persecuted.

Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
Pages: 508
Price: $28

The heart of the book is the story of the Great Terror that struck the scientific establishment in the 1930s. Ings shows that scientists now depended for resources and promotion (but also for physical survival) on the power of patrons such as top leaders like Andrei Zhdanov, or the greatest patron of all, Stalin. He describes the rise of the maliciously cunning but childlike Trofim Lysenko, who notoriously became Stalin’s favourite scientist (though they met only once or twice). 

Ings capably recounts how Soviet science became a laughingstock and often a human tragedy, but he doesn’t explain how Stalinist technology produced colossal successes, too, from the creation of Tupolev and MiG planes to the best designed tank in the world, the T-34. And while Ings’s research is impressive and his exposition of the science is lucid, the key stories of Lysenko and the nuclear project are well known and better covered elsewhere, as in David Holloway’s “Stalin and the Bomb.”

What’s more, Ings’s history contains many mistakes starting with the birthday of Stalin himself: There is a choice of two. Officially it was December 21, 1879 (New Style). In reality, Stalin was born on December 6, 1878 (Old Style), or December 18, 1878 (New Style). This book muddles both and gives the birthday as December 18, 1879. In 1881, Alexander II was assassinated, but it is wrong to say his route “never varied.” He alternated routes, and that was why the terrorists had two plans. The Bolsheviks and Mensheviks didn’t miss the 1905 revolution; they launched an armed uprising that had to be crushed by the army. Dzerzhinsky remained head of the secret police until his death in 1926, not giving it up when he became head of the Supreme Council of the National Economy. In 1940, Finland was not “in Russian hands,” but it did sue for peace. 

Overall, however, Ings is an entertaining storyteller who often captures the essence of things — Stalin was indeed “the last in a long line of European philosopher kings.” Filled with priceless nuggets and a cast of frauds, crackpots and tyrants, this is a lively and interesting book, and utterly relevant today when the Trump administration is challenging the scientific establishment on climate change. We in the West have long laughed at the “Coryphaeus of Science,” but has the United States now elected its own?

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