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Relations with the government remained tense after the Revolution of 1905. When the government sent the police into Moscow University in 1911 to arrest students, 130 professors and instructors - almost one-third of the total number - resigned in protest at the government's infringement of university autonomy. This clash reflected the strains in the relationship: the government wanted the benefits of science and education but was unwilling to grant the scientific community the autonomy it sought.[324]

Russian scientists had little contact with Russian industry, which was largely owned by foreign capital and relied mainly on research done abroad. The absence of a strong industrial research base became painfully apparent with the outbreak of the First World War, when Russia was deprived of the products and raw materials it had been importing from Germany. The government responded by building up research in the War Department and looking favourably on proposals from scientists to put research at the service of the state. In 1915 the Academy of Sciences set up a Commission for the Study of the Natural Productive Resources of Russia under the chairmanship of the mineralogist V I. Vernadskii. This pointed the way to a new and potentially productive relationship among science, industry and the state.[325]

Science was, for many intellectuals, a force for political change. In the 1860s the Nihilists had advanced the view that science could be used to change the existing social and political order. Science as a mode of enquiry represented, in their view, the highest form of reason; scientific education would eliminate traditional and patriarchal attitudes, thereby destroying the ideological foundation of tsarist rule and opening the way to a new, rational social order. Few intellectuals after the 1860s took quite such an uncompromising view, but reformers and revolutionaries did look on science as a force for progress. The government, for its part, regarded scientific knowledge as indispensable to the modernisation of Russia, but it distrusted the scientific spirit, which it saw as critical of authority.[326]

Science was crucial for those who wanted to make Russia a modern state, whatever their vision of modernity might be. Vernadskii, to take one prominent example, believed that the twentieth century would be the 'century of science and knowledge'.[327] To survive and win in international politics, a state had to invest in science and be willing to exploit the knowledge that science produced. Science was inherently democratic, Vernadskii argued, because it was the free thought and free will of individuals that determined the direction of its development. Science needed freedom in order to flourish, and only states that enjoyed freedom would prosper. Vernadskii was one of the founding members of the Kadet Party, and his advocacy of reform was intimately linked to his understanding of science and its place in the development of society.[328]

Marxists claimed that Marxism was both a scientific theory and a guide to revolutionary action. It was based, like the natural sciences, on a materialist conception of reality, and it employed in the analysis of society the same dialectical method that natural scientists used in their study of nature. It enabled them to make a scientific analysis of capitalism and of the revolutionary process that would lead to its replacement by socialism. Precisely how scientific analysis and revolutionary action related to each other was a matter of debate among Marxists, but the claim to scientific status was nevertheless an important source of Marxism's appeal. Both Engels and Lenin took an interest in the philosophy of science and were concerned to show the continuity between Marxist social science and the natural sciences.[329]

The Bolshevik revolution and its aftermath, 1917-29

Most Russian scientists greeted the February Revolution with enthusiasm because they hoped that a more liberal regime would allow science to flourish, but they regarded the October Revolution with deep suspicion.[330] Like the rest of the population, scientists suffered from the general economic collapse that followed the revolution; many succumbed to illness and died. They lost contact with colleagues abroad and ceased to receive foreign scientific journals.[331] Yet scientific research did not come to an end, nor was the scientific community destroyed. Scientists taught and did research in buildings that lacked gas and electricity. Scientific publication did not cease entirely. In spite of their mutual hostility, scientists and the Bolsheviks managed to co-operate. The desire to save science was a crucial motive for many scientists, who turned to the Bolsheviks once it became clear that they were consolidating their hold on power. Some scientists took the view that Bolshevik rule would not last long; others believed that science itself would have a civilising effect on the new regime.[332]

Lenin despised the Russian intelligentsia but wanted to harness science to the purposes ofthe revolution. He was dismissive of calls to create a 'proletarian science'. He wanted to produce a new socialist intelligentsia drawn from the working class and peasantry, and for this he needed the co-operation of those who possessed scientific and technical expertise. He treated scientists differently from other members ofthe intelligentsia.[333] When he expelled about 200 leading intellectuals from the country in 1922 as ideologically alien to the regime, very few of these were scientists.[334] In the spring of 1919 the Petrograd city government decided to provide a hundred scholars with Red Army rations. By December 1921 the number of scholars receiving 'academic rations' was 7,000.[335]

The Bolsheviks were determined to make science serve the revolution. They quickly rescinded the autonomy for which professors had struggled before 1917. When the People's Commissariat of Education failed to win the co-operation of professors, it proceeded to carry out university reform by decree.[336] By the early 1920s almost all the pre-revolutionary professors of humanities and social sciences had been dismissed, and the last vestiges of university autonomy eradicated. Universities themselves fell out of favour; many were closed and replaced by specialised institutes that offered a narrow training for the new socialist technical intelligentsia.[337] The Bolsheviks wanted to limit the influence of the old scientific intelligentsia on students, and that was one of the reasons why the Academy of Sciences, which had no students and was besides more pliable than the universities, became the leading scientific research centre in the Soviet Union. The government renamed it the USSR Academy of Sciences in 1925 and acknowledged it formally as the 'highest scholarly institution' in the country.[338]