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31 3 Tamm’s Protégé at FIAN “Never before or since have I been so close to the highest level of science—its cutting edge.”1 This is how Sakharov described in his memoirs the work he did at FIAN. Reading them one appreciates the enthusiasm Sakharov felt at the time for the academic discipline he had recently chosen as his profession. Sakharov probably had some inkling of what being Igor Tamm’s protégé would be like even before arriving at FIAN in January 1945. One wonders, however, whether he was aware that the Soviet leadership viewed science as critical to the country’s progress from capitalism to socialism and from socialism to communism . By joining the Soviet scientific establishment—which is what Sakharov did by becoming Tamm’s student—he ensured a place for himself, however small it may have seemed at the time, in this enormous endeavor. The original Bolsheviks espoused a Promethean ethos that considered science essential not only in mastering nature but in harnessing it for the larger endeavor of creating communism. Their ultimate objective was to create a New Soviet Man fully cognizant of the degree to which science had made possible the material comforts and prosperity communism provided. For this reason the Bolsheviks, once they took power, needed scientists even more than they needed writers and artists, however useful the latter might be in enforcing political and ideological conformity.2 Stalin’s famous description of Soviet writers as “engineers of the human soul” was mostly a conceit, for in the final analysis he believed it was science, far more than literature, that would remold human consciousness and transform human beings into the malleable automatons he wanted.3 For the Bolsheviks, science was a productive activity, not a creative one, and they viewed scientists essentially as instruments in the achievement of their transformationist objectives. As a result, the political reliability of scientists was as much a criterion for professional advancement as their competence. While scientific discoveries might be valuable for their own sake, for what they revealed about the natural world, the principal task of Soviet scientists was to strengthen the Soviet Union and facilitate the eventual emergence of communism.4 1. Sakharov, Memoirs, 85. 2. Several of the heroes in Soviet novels depicting communism were engineers and scientists. See, for example, Red Star and Engineer Menni, both by Alexander Bogdanov, who died in 1928 from a blood transfusion he performed on himself in an experiment he hoped would lead to the prolongation of human life. Kendall E. Bailes, “The Politics of Technology: Stalin and Technocratic Thinking among Soviet Engineers,” American Historical Review 79, no. 2 (April 1974): 445–69. 3. Jay Bergman, “The Idea of Individual Liberation in Bolshevik Visions of the New Soviet Man,” European History Quarterly 27, no. 1 (January 1997): 57–92, and Jay Bergman, “Valerii Chkalov: Soviet Pilot as New Soviet Man,” Journal of Contemporary History 33, no. 1 (January 1998): 135–52. 4. Katerina Clark, “The Changing Image of Science and Technology in Soviet Literature,” in Science and the Soviet Social Order, ed. Loren R. Graham (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 263. 32 Meeting the Demands of Reason Science was critically important to the Soviet leaders. Without it, they could never achieve their objectives and the Soviet Union would lose its raison d’être. But the importance science held for the Soviets meant that scientists had to be watched extremely carefully so that they would not question the legitimacy of the system that had fostered them. Additionally, scientists were different from the bourgeoisie and all the other classes and social categories that existed under capitalism. Uniquely, they would survive capitalism’s collapse and in fact play a critical role in the transformation of nature and the establishment of communism that would follow. Along with policemen, whose job was to enforce the regime’s monopoly of power, scientists were the Soviet citizens the Soviet leadership needed most. If policemen—those who staffed the security forces that bore such acronyms as Cheka, GPU, NKVD, MVD, and KGB—were the ones ultimately responsible for keeping the Soviet regime in power, scientists were the ones whose accomplishments would give it moral legitimacy. One might think that Soviet ideology—an amalgam of ideas and concepts drawn from Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin that was known as Marxism-Leninism— would facilitate the pursuit of science. Marxism-Leninism, like the Marxism on which it was loosely based, claimed to be scientific, a rigorously...

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