The scientific community was in a poor state, Kapitsa wrote to Khrushchev in 1955.[405] Scientists had been 'beaten' so often that they were afraid to think for themselves. Excessive secrecy made it impossible for the scientific community at large to form its own judgements about the quality of research. Science was attracting people who were less interested in science than in high salaries and privileges. To remedy this situation, two conditions were needed, in Kapitsa's view. The first was that scientists should not be afraid to express their opinions even if those opinions were going to be rejected. It was particularly harmful to decree scientific truths, as the Science Department ofthe Central Committee had done. The second was that the political leadership should take account of scientific opinion. The situation inbiology was a direct result of the leadership's failure to heed the views of the scientific community.
Important changes took place in the mid-1950s. Scientists had had virtually no contact with foreign colleagues since the mid-i930s, apart from a brief period at the end of the Second World War. Now restrictions on foreign travel were eased, though not completely removed.94 The Soviet Union joined international scientific associations, and some joint research projects were organised with Western countries; information about foreign research became much more accessible. The Soviet Union moved towards closer integration with the international scientific community.95
Scientists became less afraid to demand intellectual freedom. In the autumn of I955 300 biologists signed a letter to the Central Committee calling on it to disavow the August I948 session. Physicists supported them by writing to draw attention to the harm that the situation in biology was doing to Soviet science as a whole. Khrushchev was unmoved and maintained his support of Lysenko, whose advice on agriculture he valued highly.96 Scientists also demanded that philosophers stop policing science and looking for ideological deviations in scientific theories; philosophers, they insisted, should understand science before seeking to interpret it.97 An All-Union Conference on the Philosophical Problems of Contemporary Science in October 1958 enjoined philosophers and scientists to work more closely together, though it also officially, if half-heartedly, endorsed Lysenkoist theories. With the exception of genetics, scientific authority - the right to say what science is - was now clearly vested in the specialist scientific communities, and Lysenko's influence was finally destroyed in October 1964, when Khrushchev fell from power. Philosophers now took their lead from scientists; they no longer claimed, as they had done in the Stalin years, that they should lead the scientists.98
94 Zhores A. Medvedev, The Medvedev Papers: The Plight of Soviet Science Today (London: Macmillan, 1971) explores the restrictions in detail.
95 Ivanov, 'Science after Stalin', pp. 322-5.
96 D. V Lebedev, in 'Kruglyi stol. Stranitsy istorii sovetskoi genetiki v literature poslednikh let', Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki, 1987, no. 4: 113-24; 'Genetika - nasha bol'', Pravda, 13 Jan. 1989, p. 4; Nesmeianov Na kacheliakh XXveka, pp. 169-70.
97 Nesmeianov Na kacheliakh XX veka, pp. 236-9, 240-3.
98 Filosofskie problemy sovremennogo estestvoznaniia (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo AN SSSR, 1959), pp. 602-5.
Lysenkoism was the most striking case of a distinctively 'Soviet' science, and it ended in failure, rejected by Soviet and foreign scientists alike. The rise and fall of Lysenkoism cannot be explained as a clash between genetics and dialectical materialism; it has to be understood in the broader context of the Soviet system and Soviet politics. Soviet leaders supported Lysenko because they believed his ideas were more practical than those of the geneticists and plant breeders. Believing that science would make a huge contribution to socialism, they concluded that there must be something wrong with genetics if it could not offer solutions to the problems they faced in agriculture. The Lysenko affair can provide a misleading picture of Soviet science. It is true that there were efforts to create a distinctively Marxist natural science, but these were largely confined to the early 1930s and were soon reined in by the party. Some scientists found dialectical materialism helpful in thinking about scientific problems. It would be a mistake to believe that the Soviet intellectual climate always hindered science: as Loren Graham has pointed out, there are many cases in which that context helped to shape ideas that proved successful in the sense that the relevant scientific communities, in the Soviet Union and abroad, accepted them.[406]
N. N. Semenov, who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1956, wrote after Khrushchev's fall that Lysenko and his supporters 'had transferred the struggle against those with different ideas from the level of scientific discussion to the level of demagogy and political accusations'.[407] 'Political' and 'philosophical' became pejorative terms in the scientific community in the 1950s and 1960s. Scientists saw themselves as restoring integrity to science by making it illegitimate to invoke the authority of the Central Committee or of Marxism- Leninism in a scientific argument. This prompted the question: now that science had become less political, why not make politics more scientific? The party claimed, after all, to be guided by a scientific theory in its policy-making: why not strengthen the scientific basis of policy? For at least some elements in the scientific community, this became an important mission in the late 1950s and the 1960s. This was a pivotal moment, because now science provided not only a language of legitimation for the regime, but also a language of criticism with the potential to transform political relationships.[408]
There were two broad approaches to making politics more scientific. The first was technocratic and bound up with cybernetics, which had been condemned in the early 1950s as a 'bourgeois pseudo-science' but rehabilitated in the mid-1950s as an overarching framework for understanding control and communication in machine, animal and society.[409] Cybernetics was linked to the new opportunities that computers opened up for data processing and mathematical modelling, and it provided a framework for thinking about planning and management. Mathematicians and computer specialists helped to revive economics as a discipline, in particular the theory of planning. According to a group of cyberneticians in the mid-1960s, 'the view of society as a complex cybernetic system ... is increasingly gaining prestige as the main theoretical idea of the "technology" of managing society'.[410]
The second approach was democratic. This drew not on particular concepts and techniques but on a certain conception of science. It is most clearly expressed in Andrei Sakharov's Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, which began to circulate in samizdat in 1968 and was published abroad that same year. Sakharov had worked since 1950 at the nuclear weapons institute at Arzamas-16. He opened his essay by writing that his views had been 'formed in the milieu of the scientific and scientific-technical intelligentsia', which was very concerned about the future of the human race. 'This concern', he continued, 'feeds upon consciousness ofthe fact that the scientific method ofdirecting politics, economics, art, education, and military affairs, has not yet become a reality. We consider "scientific " that method which is based on a profound study of facts, theories and views, presupposing unprejudiced and open discussion, which is dispassionate in its conclusions.'[411] For Sakharov intellectual freedom was the key to the scientific method. In March 1970 he, V A. Turchin and R. A. Medvedev sent a letter to the Soviet leadership in which they wrote: 'a scientific approach demands full information, impartial thinking, and creative freedom.' Talk about scientific management would be meaningless if those conditions were not met.[412]
408
David Holloway 'Physics, the State, and Civil Society in the Soviet Union',
409
David Holloway 'Innovation in Science - the Case of Cybernetics in the Soviet Union',
410
B. V Biriukov et al., 'Filosofskie problemy kibernetiki', in A. I. Berg (ed.),
411
A. D. Sakharov,
412
A. D. Sakharov, V F. Turchin and R. A. Medvedev, 'A Reformist Program for Democratization', in Stephen F. Cohen (ed.),