Science for the Masses: The Bolshevik State, Public Science, and the Popular Imagination in Soviet Russia, 1917-1934 (review)

That the Bolsheviks sought to enroll science in the Soviet experiment is hardly news. Whole forests have been felled both to demonstrate and to refute the Bolsheviks' claims to "scienticity" in interpreting philosophy and the historical process. Historians of science have investigated the complex interactions of natural scientists with their would-be Soviet patrons, often finding affinities in political and philosophical outlook but just as often pointing to Soviet scientists who viewed science as the one sure alternative claim to authoritative knowledge in the face of the Bolsheviks' world-historical pretensions. Scholars like Michael David-Fox have also offered crucial insights into the institution building that the Bolsheviks hoped would transform the "sciences" (in the sense of Wissenschaft because by far the greatest attention has been devoted to the social sciences and humanities). With James Andrews's Science for the Masses, we finally have the first thorough study in English focusing on the broader audience for all these aspirations to scienticity. Andrews covers the natural sciences and technology, showing that "scientization" of public discourse was more than simply the result of a category mistake by usurpers of the authority of science. Rather, it was the product of an ongoing transformation of the cultural role of expert knowledge among the lay populace. In developing this theme, Andrews makes an important contribution to the history of Soviet science broadly construed, as well as to the history of Soviet popular culture.

Andrews is careful to highlight the historical continuities in science popularization across the revolutionary divide. He opens with a description of eighteenth-century attempts to present natural philosophy to a larger Russian audience and devotes an all-too-brief second chapter to the scientific societies and museums of the late Tsarist era that were crucial venues for the propagation of science as a virtuous civic activity. In the Soviet period, Glavnauka (the Science Department of the Ministry of Education) became the principal overseer of these activities, and Andrews nicely illustrates how the local societies both benefited from and were caught up in the ongoing centralization of bureaucratic control over the provinces. From voluntary educational technical groups like Technology for the Masses (TekhMass) to journals like Nauka i tekhnika (Science and Technology), a remarkable number of new institutions were set up to compete for the attentions of the populace. Science for the Masses is at its best in capturing this welter of competing agendas during the 1920s.

Andrews devotes a chapter to scientific print culture in the 1920s, including descriptions of the private and cooperative publishing houses that managed to survive and even thrive for a time. Not only the variety of the offerings, but the diversity of the constituencies for popular science, come across clearly in his account. To his credit, Andrews also marshals the spotty evidence available that might give us some sense of reader responses to this barrage of scientific literature. Not surprisingly, the effects in rural areas seem to have been tenuous, except when science could be linked with agriculture. Here and elsewhere in the book, by far the most important print media for Andrews's discussion are journals, pamphlets, and newspapers, from which he has sampled widely and to good effect. I would like to have seen a more systematic treatment of the mechanics of publishing, however. The editorial processes that governed science popularization are largely absent, along with any clear sense of how resources were allocated at higher levels. Moreover, the most prominent Bolshevik scientist to play a role in Soviet publishing, the mathematician and explorer Otto Schmidt, makes no appearance. Schmidt not only ran the State Publishing House for a time but also served as chief editor of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, itself a fascinating venue for science popularization that could well have justified some discussion of it in the book.

Andrews ranges widely in discussing themes...