Stalin's Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists (review)

During the cold war, pioneering scholars of Soviet science such as David Joravsky and Loren Graham underscored the important relationship between ideology and science. Yet most laypersons typically understood this connection within the Soviet context as discrete and unidirectional. For example, the "failures" of Soviet science, including the disastrous case of Trofim Lysenko and the ban on genetics research from 1948 to 1964, represented stark examples of the negative influence of ideology on science. Meanwhile, the successes of Soviet science were seen as exceptional: scientists succeeded despite the draconian and limiting structures imposed on them.

In the past fifteen years, scholars have completely overturned such views. In this collection of eleven essays, most of them originally published during the 1990s, Russian historian Alexei Kojevnikov attempts to dispel received wisdom about Soviet science. His stated goal is to answer "how and why a truly great science developed in Russia and the Soviet Union between the mid-1910s and the mid-1950s" (p. xiii). Though written over a period of a decade, Kojevnikov's essays prove remarkably cohesive as an overarching narrative on the history of physics (with a couple of diversions into biology and linguistics) in the Soviet Union. In the early essays, he investigates the origin of the Soviet system of scientific research and development—features such as the separation of research from teaching and the centrality of the research institute—which he argues had roots prior to 1917, in institutional responses to the Great War. Moving to the postrevolutionary era, he treats the birth and development of theoretical physics in the Soviet Union as being spurred by entirely different sources: philanthropy from the Rockefeller Foundation that allowed Soviet physicists to travel abroad, and the chaotic displacement of the Cultural Revolution which scientists used to their advantage.

Returning agency to the scientific community—i.e., countering notions of an all-powerful Stalinist state with total control of scientists—has been a major theme of post–cold war historiography. Like many of his contemporaries, Kojevnikov advances a more nuanced view of the intricate dynamics or "games" that were part of the negotiations between scientist and state. In two excellent chapters, one on Nobel Prize–winning physicist Piotr Kapitza and the other on a post–World War II president of the Academy of Sciences, Sergei Vavilov, Kojevnikov illustrates how scientists of such stature could live in worlds fraught with contradiction. Countering a popular perception of Kapitza as a dissident, Kojevnikov shows that his relationship with Stalin was much more complex, representing a successful synthesis of a patron-client relationship with points of dissent. Vavilov, on the other hand, "learned how to become a perfect Stalinist politician by mastering the language and games" (p. 185) of late Stalinist society and culture to represent (in many cases very effectively) the cause of the broader scientific community.

The issue of language, behavior, and discourse is a central interpretive thread in Kojevnikov's essay relocating the Lysenko episode in the broader context of ideological controversies in the late 1940s involving philosophy, biology, linguistics, physiology, and political economy. He finds that the outcome of these controversies was never predetermined by top leaders but rather by unpredictable contingencies often related to the scientists' abilities to translate their own agendas in language and behavior that would resonate with the broader social and political concerns of the government and the Communist Party.

Historians such as Loren Graham and David Holloway have mined many of the topics and arguments that Kojevnikov presents here, particularly the relationship between science and ideology and the spaces for local initiative among scientific communities at the height of Stalinism. Yet Kojevnikov's strength, especially in comparison to works such as Nikolai Krementsov's Stalinist Science (1997), lies both in his deep familiarity with the subject matter (his piece on the history of the Soviet atomic bomb is one of the best succinct accounts in print) and in his awareness that...