Soviet Culture
Soviet science, scholarship, literature, and arts reflected the same traits of the Soviet regime as education, from which, in any case, they cannot be entirely separated. The Soviet performance in all these fields is noteworthy for its vast scope, liberal expenditure of funds, extremely thorough organization, co-ordination, and planning, and ubiquitous party control. All Soviet intellectuals were in effect employed by the state. Even when their income depended primarily on royalties, their books could not be published nor their music played without official authorization. The quality of Soviet creative work ranged from some brilliant develop-
ments in science and excellent compositions in music to the dreary poverty of "socialist realism" in literature and its virtually unrelieved worthlessness in painting and sculpture. But in almost all fields, fruitful as well as barren, the stifling grip of the Party and its ideology left its mark.
Science and Scholarship
For a variety of reasons, science was a privileged area of Soviet culture. It was obviously and immediately useful and, indeed, indispensable if the U.S.S.R. were to become the military, technological, and economic leader of the world. It was fully endorsed by Marxism, which prided itself on its own allegedly scientific character. In fact, some writers have commented on an almost religious admiration of science and technology in the Soviet Union, an expression in part of the old revolutionary titanism and determination to transform the world. Yet science, while subject to the dialectic, lies on the whole outside Marxist doctrines, which concentrate on human society, and thus constituted a "safer" field in the Soviet Union than, for example, sociology or literature. Not that it escaped the Party and the ideology altogether. Communist interference with science included such important instances as Soviet difficulties in accepting Einstein's "petty bourgeois" theories, as well as Trofim Lysenko's virtual destruction of Soviet biology, particularly genetics, together with the elimination of a number of leading Soviet biologists, notably Nicholas Vavilov. Lysenko, an agricultural expert and a dangerous quack and fanatic, claimed to have disproved the basic laws of heredity and obtained Party support for his claims: Lysenko's theories gave Marxist environmentalism a new dimension and made a Communist transformation of the world seem more feasible than ever - the only trouble was that Lysenko's theories were false. But Einstein's views had to be accepted, at least for practical purposes; and even Soviet biology staged a comeback, although it took many years and several turns of fortune finally to dispose of Lysenko's authority. Moreover, thousands of scientists, in contrast, for example, to writers, could continue working in their fields more or less undisturbed. And science especially profited from the large-scale financing and organization of effort provided by the state.
The Sputniks, the shot at the moon, the photographing of the far side of the moon, and Soviet astronauts' orbiting of the earth, together with atomic and hydrogen explosions, have emphasized the achievements of Soviet applied science, and in particular Soviet rockets, missiles, and atomic and space technology* In these fields, as in others, the Soviet Union profited from the prerevolu-
*Soviet "firsts" in space include: first earth satellite, Sputnik I, launched October 4, 1957; first satellite with animal aboard, Sputnik II, November 3, 1957; first moon rocket, Lunik I, January 2, 1959; first photographs of hidden side of moon, October 18, 1959; first retrieval of animal from orbit, August 20, 1960; first launching from orbit, Venus probe, February 12,
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tionary legacy, especially from the continuing work of such scholars as the pioneer in space travel Constantine Tsiolkovsky, 1857-1935. The contributions of espionage and of German scientists brought to the U.S.S.R. after the Second World War are more difficult to assess. The state, of course, financed and promoted to the full all the extremely expensive technological programs referred to above. It also organized, in connection with the five-year plans, a great search for new natural resources, vast geographic expeditions, and other, similar projects. The work of Soviet scientists in the far north acquired special prominence. The Academy of Sciences continued to direct Soviet science as well as other branches of Soviet scholarship.
While Soviet applied science has now received perhaps too much praise in the press of the world, the over-all excellence of Soviet science has on the whole not yet been sufficiently appreciated. With theoretical physicists like Leo Landau, experimental physicists like Abraham Joffe and Peter Kapitza, chemists like Nicholas Semenov, mathematicians like Ivan Vinogradov, astronomers like Victor Ambartsumian, geochemists like Vladimir Vernadsky, and botanists like Vladimir Komarov - to select only a very few out of many names - the Soviet Union had outstanding scientific talent, while the scope of its scientific effort exceeded that of all other countries except the United States.
Soviet social sciences and humanities did not compare with the sciences. The dead hand of Soviet Marxism stifled virtually all growth in such fields as philosophy and sociology. Moreover, the official ideology proved to be remarkably barren, with the result that even Marxist thought in the U.S.S.R. was crude and undeveloped compared to certain Western and satellite varieties. Clearly, and for a number of good reasons, the best talent went into science. To be sure, there were important variations in the Soviet control of scholarship and the results achieved.
Thus, until the early and middle thirties, Mikhail Pokrovsky's negativistic school held sway in history. A convinced Marxist, Pokrovsky took an extremely
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1961; first man in space, Lieut. Col. Iurii A. Gagarin, April 12, 1961; first double launching with humans, Major Andrian Nikolaev, August 11, 1961, Lieut Col. Pavel Popovich, August 12, 1962; first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova, June 16, 1963; first triple-manned launching, Col. Vladimir Komarov, space commander, Konstantin Feoktistov, scientist, Dr. Boris Egorov, physiologist, October 12, 1964; first man to walk in cosmic space, Lieut. Col. Aleksei A. Leonov from Voskhod II (flight commander, Col. Pavel Beliaev) March 19, 1965; first flight around the moon and return of an automatic space craft, Zond 5, September 15-22, 1968; establishment of first orbital experimental station during flight of Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 spaceships, January 1969; first self-propelled automatic laboratory on the surface of the moon, Lunokhod-1, November 17, 1970; first manned research station, Salyut, in circumterrestrial orbit, June 7, 1971; first soft landing on the surface of Mars and transmission of video signal to Earth by Mars-3 probe, December 2, 1971; first soft landing on the sunward surface of Venus by Venera-8 probe and transmission to Earth of atmospheric and surface measurements for 50 minutes, July 22, 1972. The Soviet Union also announced the first loss of a man in actual space flight, Col. Vladimir Komarov, Soyuz 1, April 24, 1967.
critical and bitter view of the Russian past, in effect declaring it of no importance. With the Soviet consolidation and turn to cultural conservatism in the thirties, Pokrovsky and his school were denounced, and the authorities began to promote intense work in the field of history and in such related disciplines as archaeology. In particular, Soviet historians turned to collecting and editing sources. Some valuable work was also done in social and economic history, with at least one Soviet historian, Boris Grekov, originally a prerevolutionary specialist, making contributions of the first rank. Yet in general, in spite of the change in the thirties and a certain further liberalization following Stalin's death, Soviet historiography suffered enormously from the Party strait jacket, most especially in such fields as intellectual history and international relations.