Hiroshima_ The World's Bomb - Andrew J. Rotter [16]
In reality, though, scientists at nearly all times and in all places have depended not only on colleagues but on support from the institutions they serve, including governments. The scientific republic is necessarily circumscribed by the requirement that scientists live in one or another country, whatever their feeling about nationalism. One can claim to practice value-free science and to serve no political master. But, whatever the scientist’s indifference to the state, the state is likely to be interested in him, especially if he is a chemist or physicist working on some form of military apparatus. The level of state interest and the degree to which the state might act on it depend on the state’s institutions and relations between political, economic, and scientific elites. Etel Solingen has proposed what she terms ‘a crude fourfold typology’ to describe twentieth-century states and predict how they would treat their scientists. Her political axis includes ‘pluralist’ and ‘noncompetitive’ (that is, ‘autocratic’), her economic axis ‘market-oriented’ and ‘centrally planned.’ Let us choose one pre-Second World War example from the two opposite ends of Solingen’s four categories and in this way examine the influence of state form on scientific communities.27
We can begin with the Soviet Union, a ‘noncompetitive centrally planned’ state. The Russian tsars mistrusted science, discerning in it the impulse toward free enquiry, modernization, and democracy, all of which they regarded with suspicion. The Bolsheviks, who took power in 1917, had a different view. Marxism itself purported to be scientific, and the Bolsheviks’ tenuous hold on authority through the early 1920s made pragmatists of them—after signing the humiliating Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Germans in 1918, Lenin said grimly that ‘it is necessary to master the highest technology or be crushed’. That did not mean that the new government had a policy toward science in mind. And, despite their ideological and practical embrace of science, the Bolsheviks were wary of ‘bourgeois’ scientists themselves, which feeling was mutual. Through the 1920s, with the Communists preoccupied with fending off their enemies and building the economy, scientists enjoyed reasonable autonomy, and their numbers and organizations and status grew.28
This began to change at the end of Bolshevism’s first decade in power, as Josef Stalin solidified his control of the Soviet state. Scientists were told to submit five-year research plans that could grow to hundreds of anxious pages of self-explanation. Scientific professional societies, which had proliferated during the 1920s, were now increasingly absorbed by the scientific apparatus of the state and subsequently eliminated altogether. The Party insisted that scientific research have as its object the improvement of industry. Basic research was starved out, or at least left hungry, leaving only ‘applied science’ as having some obvious benefit to the nation’s political economy. The Party also reined in scientists’ travel to international conferences, prevented to some extent their receipt of scientific journals published abroad, and impeded generally contacts between Soviet scientists and their counterparts elsewhere. Those with foreign training or monied backgrounds were isolated, harried from their posts, or shunted off to Stalin’s Gulag. Certain kinds of science were condemned as anti-proletariat; ‘pure science’ was deemed effete, and thus useless, or worse, to the purposes of the revolution. (This ‘Proletkultist’ movement would win its greatest victory after the Second World War, when the pseudoscientist Trofim Lysenko eliminated the serious study of genetics in the Soviet Union. This ‘rejection of the gene’, as Paul R. Josephson has called it, lasted until 1965.)29
The development of the ‘noncompetitive centrally planned’ state in the Soviet Union had particular