-
5 Science and Technology
- Penn State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
5 SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY Science and technology have acted powerfully as moderating influences, as forces pulling Russia towards the West, as factors reducing the differences between Russia and the West. — . , What Have We Learned About Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? Science, and scientific exchange, can be a universal solvent in dissolving animosities and securing normal relations. No country can do without science. The scientists of the world are fully prepared to talk to one another even when their statesmen will not. — . , Every Man Should Try “The scientific and academic communities traditionally have been the most proWestern segments of Russian society,”writes Loren Graham, professor emeritus of the history of science from MIT, who studied at Moscow State University in – under the Graduate Student/Young Faculty Exchange program. “Throughout the Soviet period,”continues Graham,“the most prominent calls for democracy and human rights came from their ranks—Andrei Sakharov, the noted physicist and father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, is only the best known of a number of leaders in the human rights movement during the Soviet period.”1 Indeed, many of the leading Soviet dissidents and human rights advocates were scientists. A former U.S. science attaché in Moscow, John M. Joyce, has written that in the basically conservative Soviet society, “the most outward-looking people , the people most susceptible to external influence, are the scientists.” Joyce added that they are also more likely to be advocates of change; and as examples, he noted that many of the most influential Soviet dissidents—Andrei Sakharov, Aleksandr Lerner, and Yuri Orlov—were scientists, as were five of the ten members of the [Moscow] Helsinki Watch Committee, established to monitor the implementation of the Helsinki accords on human rights.2 Science and technology, however, were also the most controversial of U.S.Soviet exchanges. “They are stealing us blind,” cried critics of the exchanges, . Loren Graham and Andrew Kuchins, in Washington Post, November , . . John M. Joyce,“U.S.-Soviet Science Exchanges: A Foot in the Soviet Door,” paper no. in Soviet Science and Technology: Eyewitness Accounts (Cambridge: Russian Research Center, Harvard University , ). “going around the United States like vacuum cleaners sucking up all kinds of scientific information and technical know-how.” True, the Soviet Union did use exchanges to learn from the West, as Russia had often done in the past. Roald Z. Sagdeev, the former Soviet physicist and space scientist now at the University of Maryland, recalls the advice given him in before his departure for Geneva as a member of the Soviet delegation to the first international conference on the peaceful use of nuclear energy.“The main focus of your activity at the conference,” warned a deputy minister in his final briefing to the delegation, “should be to learn a dollar’s worth of science and show a kopeck’s worth in return.”3 The balance in dollars and kopecks of that conference is not known, but we do know that Sagdeev and his fellow Soviet scientists were shocked on their visit to Geneva, their first to the West, by the lack of fear on the faces of people they saw on the streets, and by the prosperity and high standard of living in Switzerland. The Soviet scientists asked each other, “Where is the oppressed working class? Where are the proletarians? . . . When at last would Russia catch up? When would Russia have enough wealth to move people from communal apartments to decent housing?”4 “Trips abroad,” adds Sagdeev, “were windows to the outside world. They provided the reference points we needed to judge our own society.”5 Scientists the world over need to travel and gain reference points by exchanging views with other scientists working in the same or related fields. Like world-class athletes, they need the stimulus of international competition. When the great Soviet physicist Pyotr Kapitsa was told by Soviet authorities in that he would no longer be allowed to work abroad, he wrote to his mentor, the British nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford, “I still feel like a half-prisoner because I have no chance to travel abroad, to see the world, to visit labs. It is a great loss. Undoubtedly , it will lead in the final account to the narrowing of my expertise and ability.”6 And, Kapitsa added, “There are no socialist laws of physics, and no capitalist laws of physics.”7 Kapitsa was not permitted to travel outside the Soviet bloc until when he came to England for four weeks at the invitation...