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  • Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars
  • James T. Andrews
Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006. 269 pp. $35.00.

Ethan Pollock has produced a cogent, elegantly written analysis of Soviet knowledge, science, and power in 1945–1953, the era of high Stalinism and the dawn of the Cold War. The book is based on prodigious archival research in Russia, drawing on thousands of documents from the former Central Party Archive (now known as the Russian State Archive for Socio-Political History) in Moscow. Pollock focuses on Iosif Stalin’s [End Page 195] intervention in scholarly debates within six disciplines—philosophy, agricultural science, physics, linguistics, physiology, and economics—and shows that Stalin was far more concerned about scholarly ideas then was previously known. These issues, according to Pollock, were crucial to the Communist Party’s legitimacy, and the debates also reflected a Russocentric patriotism in the post-1945 era, as well as a pervasive xenophobia and “anti-cosmopolitanism.” Pollock explains how the scholarly disputes were administered by the party and how Stalin himself tried to encourage debate while simultaneously contributing essays or settling disputes either overtly or in a subtle manner behind the scenes.

The book begins with an analysis of how the Soviet political and scientific elite maneuvered to attack Georgii Aleksandrov’s History of Western European Philosophy (and the philosophical discipline in general) for purportedly overstating the degree to which European philosophers influenced Marxism. Communist Party officials argued that philosophers such as Aleksandrov needed to emphasize how Russian thought played a central role in the history of philosophy—a Russocentric approach that characterized postwar Stalinism, as Pollock shows in chapter two. He turns in chapter three to the insidious Lysenko affair in biology in 1948 that crushed the field of Soviet agricultural genetics. Pollock to some extent borrows from the work of other scholars such as Kirill Rossianov, who previously analyzed how Stalin edited Trofim Lysenko’s work, and it is not always clear what is specifically new about Pollock’s analysis. Pollock reformulates the notion that Stalin edited Lysenko’s speeches and thus oversaw the nefarious campaign against genetics that deemphasized “class” and replacing it with words such as “reactionary” or “idealistic.” The first part of the book concludes in chapter four with an analysis of the physics debates during this era. Pollock argues that the 1948 Agricultural Academy session dramatically shifted the ideological battleground in physics. Soviet defenders of the new physics of relativity and quantum mechanics could be seen as “unpatriotic” as well as “idealistic.” Pollock believes that anti-Semitism also played a part in the criticisms of physicists in the Academy of Sciences. He contends that there “was a tendency for patriotic, university-based physicists to ally with philosophers critical of modern physical theories” (p. 81). Certain Academy physicists, such as Igor Kurchatov, who headed the scientific portion of the nuclear bomb project, eventually lobbied the regime against a Lysenko-style conference to chastise Academy-based physicists. In the end, according to Pollock, the Academy-based physicists were saved by their usefulness to the regime’s nuclear weapons project—an argument that was exhaustively made by David Holloway in his monumental Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1938–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

The second half of Pollock’s book deals with three disciplinary debates: in physiology, linguistics, and political economy. In chapter six, Pollock analyzes the 1950 Pavlov sessions that were highly coordinated by the Soviet science section under Yuri Zhdanov. The Politburo, in this case, was heavy-handed in defending Pavlov’s theory that conditioned reflexes provided the guide to understanding all complex human and animal behavior. Pollock shows in this chapter how party leaders wanted the Pavlov celebrations to be more divisive than the actual physiologists who preferred (at least [End Page 196] initially) to show some unity in their field. Eventually Stalin gave Zhdanov full endorsement and advice on how, in Stalin’s words, to “attack the detractors with certainty of total success” (p. 146). Probably the most original chapters are five and seven, which delineate the academic debates in linguistics and political economy respectively...

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