Scientific research expanded rapidly in the 1920s. By 1925 there were eighty- eight research institutes, seventy-three of which had been established since the revolution. Nineteen of these were devoted to the social sciences, the rest to the natural sciences and applied research. Some of these institutes were in the Academy of Sciences, and some in the universities and higher educational establishments, but most were subordinate to the People's Commissariats.[339]The new institutes were a sign ofthe emerging collaborationbetween scientists and the new regime. Both sides believed that science was important for the future of Russia, and although they might have different visions of the future, belief in progress provided a basis for co-operation. This was, moreover, a real, if unequal, partnership. The Bolsheviks did not have plans for the organisation of science in 1917 and they responded favourably to scientists' proposals, many of them formulated in the years before the revolution. Leading scientists quickly adopted the language of the Bolsheviks in arguing that their research would provide the basis for new technology and contribute to the transformation of Russia. It was all the easier for them to do this because, although very few scientists were Communists, many of them shared the belief that science and technology were crucial to Russia's development.[340]
In 1918 the Bolsheviks established the Socialist Academy (renamed the Communist Academy in 1924) to encourage the development of Marxist social science. Independent of the Academy of Sciences, it was one of several Communist institutions designed to revolutionise intellectual life and educate a new intelligentsia. Initially focused on the social sciences, these institutions began to pay attention to the natural sciences in the mid-1920s. The Communist Academy created a Section of the Natural and Exact Sciences, with the task of 'rebuffing attacks on materialism and contributing to the development of materialist science'. The section was to organise a survey of scientific theories in order to bring to light the elements of idealism and materialism, and to synthesise the latter into 'purely materialistic general theories'.[341]
There was, however, no agreement among scientists or philosophers about the proper relationship between science and Marxist philosophy. The dominant view in the early 1920s was that ofthe 'mechanists', who argued that philosophy should confine itself to representing the most general conclusions of science, especially of the natural sciences.[342] There were, on the other hand, those who believed that philosophy could - and should - guide the scientists in their work. That was the position taken by a group of philosophers known as the 'dialecticians' (or the Deborinites, after their leader A. M. Deborin), who saw in the Hegelian dialectic - as reinterpreted by Marx and Engels - the methodological basis of science. 'We are striving for this', Deborin said in 1927, 'that dialectics should lead the natural scientist, that it should indicate the correct path to him.'[343] These philosophical debates did not, however, impinge very much on the conduct of research in the 1920s.[344]
The 1920s were a period of optimism for science in the Soviet Union. A bargain was struck between the Bolsheviks and the scientific community: if the latter would contribute its knowledge to the building of a socialist society, the Bolsheviks would help it to realise its projects for investigating and transforming nature. Scientists were relatively well paid, and they were allowed to maintain their foreign contacts.[345] The party's commitment to science was never in question. It was not a divisive issue in the party debates and leadership struggles of the 1920s. Vernadskii, who had gone to Paris in 1921 and thought about staying abroad, was impressed by what was happening in the Soviet Union, to which he returned in 1926.[346]
The great break and the emergence of Stalinist science, 1929-41
Soviet leaders believed that science had a crucial role to play in helping the Soviet Union to 'catch up and overtake the technology of the advanced
capitalist countries'.29 Expenditure on science (in constant terms) grew more than threefold between 1927/ 8 and 1933. Thereafter the rate of growth slowed down, but it was still impressive, with spending on science almost doubling between 1933 and 1940. The Soviet Union probably spent a greater proportion of its national income than any other country on science in the 1930s.30 The number of research scientists grew rapidly, from about 18,000 in 1929 to 46,000 in 1935.31 This expansion took place in the Academy of Sciences, institutions of higher education and the research institutes under the People's Commissariats. The Communist Academy and the other Marxist-Leninist institutions lost much of their influence in the 1930s through closure or merger.
The Soviet Union imported large quantities of foreign machinery and plant during the First Five-Year Plan (1928-32).32 The Second Five-Year Plan emphasised the development of indigenous technology. This put a heavy responsibility on the scientists and engineers who had predicted in the 1920s that investment in science would produce wonderful results. Such claims had been easy to advance when economic recovery meant little more than the restoration of an economy destroyed by civil war. They were a more serious matter once the party began looking to science to help it achieve the enormously ambitious goals it had set for the economy.
In order to ensure that science did indeed help them to achieve their goals, the authorities imposed rigorous political and administrative controls on the scientific community. In the late 1920s they decided to bring the Academy of Sciences under tighter political control.33 They changed the procedures for nominating candidates, raised the number of positions in the Academy, and then pressed for the immediate election of eight Communists including N. I. Bukharin. The Academy's leadership acquiesced, but its General Assembly rejected three of the Communist candidates in January 1929. Under government pressure, another ballot was held the following month and the three Communists were elected, though withmany abstentions. Administrative control was largely taken over by the newly elected Communist Academicians;
29 I. V Stalin, 'Ob industrializatsii strany i o pravom uklone v VKP(b)', in I. V Stalin, Sochineniia (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1950), vol. xi, p. 248.
30 Robert Lewis, 'Some Aspects of the Research and Development Effort of the Soviet Union, 1924-1935', Science Studies 2 (1972): 164.
31 Lewis, Science and Industrialisation, pp. 10, 13.
32 Antony C. Sutton, Western Technology and Soviet Economic Development, 1930-1945 (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution Press, 1971), passim.
33 Loren R. Graham, The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party 1927-1932 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 80-153; Alexander Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 123-49; E. I. Kolchinskii,
' "Kul'turnaia revoliutsiia" i stanovlenie sovetskoi nauki', in Kolchinskii, Nauka i krizisy, pp. 586-601.
censorship of Academy publications was introduced for the first time; and tight restrictions were imposed on foreign travel. The Academy's move from Leningrad to Moscow in 1934 signified its absorption into the Soviet state apparatus.
339
22 M. S. Bastrakova,
341
Kolchinskii, 'Sovetizatsiia nauki', p. 513; Michael David-Fox,
342
Joravsky
344
On these debates see esp. Joravsky,