New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science (review)

Paul Josephson’s study of Akademgorodok is the most thorough treatment we are likely to see of the subject, especially the “heroic” first decade, when everything seemed possible. In many ways Akademgorodok can serve as a trope for the decade after Stalin’s death, when the promise of the Bolshevik revolution seemed to have some chance of being fulfilled. The enthusiasm of the “thaw” generation was short-lived, however, and Brezhnev’s regime permitted the USSR to sink into a miasma of superficial achievements masking massive economic and ecological difficulties.

Josephson combines the social and scientific stories of the would-be Baconian utopia. He describes the founding and construction of Akademgorodok and provides chapters on physics, biology, computer science, and economics and sociology, along with a chapter recounting some of the most egregious Soviet attempts to transform the natural environment. A final chapter deals with political interference and the Communist Party’s assault on freedom of expression. In the chapter on physics, Josephson draws on his earlier monograph on the subject. In discussing biology, he notes the work of scholars such as Mark Adams, David Joravsky, and Loren Graham in a footnote at the beginning of the chapter, but does not integrate their material with his own discussion.

This valuable and detailed account could have been even more significant if the author had been willing to grapple with the serious issues he raises. Josephson cites some of Stalin’s contradictory comments, but he might have benefited from Stalin’s injunction to study the contradictions themselves. He repeatedly backs away from delving into explanations for the extremes of creativity and inhibition that characterized Soviet science. Thus, on page 83 we read that “the geneticists’ return from scientific diaspora was waylaid at every step,” while elsewhere Josephson discusses “Dubinin’s involvement in the resurrection of genetics in Akademgorodok” (pp. 92ff). Contradictions also appear in Josephson’s discussion of what motivated scientists to move to Akademgorodok. At times it is the unique atmosphere and the opportunity for creativity; at other times it is the more mundane opportunity to obtain an apartment. The important section on Soviet river diversion projects is contradictory: on page 187 he tells us “Only a unique combination of Russian writers, Siberian scientists, and local officials managed to waylay the diversion projects”; but on page 185 he states “they were successful, but only because of the great cost involved.” These two statements are not necessarily incompatible, but Josephson never explains how they might fit together.

Many Soviet scientists argued that poor instrumentation forced them to become more creative than their materially better-endowed Western colleagues. I have always found this to be a bit like arguing that a one-armed person who learns to do everything with the one remaining hand is somehow more capable than an individual with two arms. Josephson at times buys the Soviet argument, as in his discussion of Budker’s work on colliders. But one case where it clearly has merit—innovations in parallel processing stemming from limited cpu capacity—is not part of the Akademgorodok story.

Soviet bureaucrats published mounds of dull statistics extolling their quantitative achievements in various realms without ever comprehending that their campaigns to generate more steel, more scientists and engineers, and more inefficient industrial enterprises were not a viable basis for a modern economy. To continue to tell the story of Akademgorodok by listing the number of doctors and candidates of science without putting these data in the context of the needs and capabilities of the economic system perpetuates unrealistic thinking.

An issue that might have received more attention is the unique (for the Soviet system) linkage between higher education and scientific research in Akademgorodok. A growing number of commentators, both Russian and foreign, are coming to see Russia’s parallel systems of education and research institutions as both expensive and pedagogically unsound. Here and elsewhere Josephson misses the chance to suggest...