Abstract
At the advent of the Bolshevik reign, the atmosphere within the Russian Academy of Sciences was to a large extent that of a club of the like-minded peers with a family kind of relationship, all internal intrigues and animosities notwithstanding. The size of this relatively small institution more than doubled by the end of the 1920s; the Bolshevik takeover not only did not result in the abolition of the academy, but on the contrary, the new government embarked on the policy that brought to the extreme the idea of many academicians that the academy, rather than universities should be the main center of science and scholarship in Russia. The reason behind the Bolsheviks’ support for a special role of the academy was because the concentration of the main scientific research within the framework of one institution offered a better possibility for centralized control over science than the policy of strengthening research in universities would have done, but because as the tsarist government was suspicious of the universities more than of the academy, so were the Bolsheviks. This suspicion was provoked not so much by political positions of professors, who, as has been argued, were no different from those of the members of the academy, but by the activities of students, whose mood was far more radical than that of the professoriate and whose unpredictable actions were difficult to control. Although the Bolshevik policy of further strengthening the academy as the main center of scientific research was supported by academicians, and although the new government started to tackle exactly those problems that even prior to the revolution academicians had discussed as those in need of solution, in the 1920s, especially at the end of this decade, the new government’s policies were strongly resisted by many old academicians. Why was this?
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Notes
On Karpinsky see Loren R. Graham The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party, 1927–1932 (Princeton: Priceton University Press, 1967) p. 25.
V.N. Ipatieff, The Life of a Chemist (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1946) p. 343.
See the chapters on Ol’denburg and Vernadsky. On Ipat’ev’s views, see his memoirs, Ipatieff, The Life of a Chemist, pp. 256–7. On the vandalism and anti-intellectualism of the February and October Revolutions, see Richard Stites, ‘Iconoclastic Currents in the Russian Revolution: Destroying and Preserving the Past,’ in Abbott Gleason et al. (eds), Bolshevik Culture (Bloomingon: Indiana University Press, 1985) pp. 1–24.
Samuel D. Kassow, Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) p. 385.
Terence Emmons (trans., ed. and intro.) Time of Troubles. The Dairy of Iurii Vladimirovich Got’e (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988) pp. 31
K.K. ‘Pyat’ ‘vol’nykh’ pisem akademika V I Vernadskogo synu,’ Minuvshee. Istoricheskii al’manakh, no. 7 (Paris: Atheneum, 1989) p. 433.
The first meeting between Ol’denburg and Lenin to discuss the situation of the academy apparently took place as early as in December 1917 (P.N. Pospelov (ed.) Lenin i Akademiya Nauk (Moscow: Nauka, 1969) p. 25).
B.V. Levshin (ed.), Dokumenty po istorii Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1917–1925 gg. (Leningrad: Nauka, 1986) p. 24
Pospelov (ed.), Lenin i Akademiya nauk, pp. 61–2. On other plans to reorganize the academy see Loren R. Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union. A Short History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993) pp. 84–5.
The SPB branch of the RAN Archives fund 800, op. 3, ed. khr. 807, p. 13. On difficulties faced by Russian professionals in finding adequate employment in foreign countries, see Marc Raeff, Russia Abroad (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990) pp. 106–9.
Kendall E. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin. Origins of the Soviet Technical Intelligentsia, 1917–1941 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) p. 126
Katerina Clark ‘The “Quiet Revolution” in Soviet Intellectual Life,’ in Sheila Fitzpatrick et al. (eds), Russia in the Era of NEP (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991) pp. 210–30.
In 1917, there were more than 300 voluntary scientific societies in Russia. See A.D. Stepansky, Istoriya obshchestvennykh organizatsii dorevolyutsionnoi Rossii (Moscow: Nauka, 1979) p. 67.
Levshin (ed.), Dokumenty po istorii Akademii Nauk SSSR. 1917–1925. On the upgrading of the academy, see pp. 310–17, 323. For the documents concerning the celebrations of the bicentennial, see pp. 326–31, 336–41. For the history of the academy’s relations with the Soviet government and state bodies, see Robert A. Lewis, ‘Government and Technological Sciences in the Soviet Union’, Minerva, vol. XV, no. 2, Summer, 1977, pp. 174–99.
On the preparation of the rules of the academy, see Pamyat’, no. 1, p. 395, which gives details on the beginning of the work on the rules in 1919. The membership of the commission is cited by F.F. Perchenok, ‘Akademiya Nauk na “velikom perelome”’, N.G. Okhotin and A.B. Roginsky (eds) Zven’ya. Istorichesky al’manakh, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress, Feniks, Atheneum, 1991) p. 168.
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On Platonov’s views, see V.P. Leonov et al., (ed.), Akademicheskoe delo, 1929–1931 gg (St Peterburg: Biblioteka Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk, 1993).
Bruce J. Allyn, ‘Fact, Value, and Science,’ in Loren R. Graham (ed.) Science and Soviet Social Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990) pp. 225–6.
David Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, 1917–1932 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961).
V.D. Esakov, Sovetskaya nauka v gody pervoi pyatiletki (Moscow: Nauka, 1971), pp. 178–9.
M. Yur’eva and D. Reizlin, ‘M.N. Pokrovsky. ‘K otchetu o deyatel’nosti Akademii Nauk za 1926 g.’ Zven’ya, vol. 2 (Moscow-St Petersburg: Feniks, Atheneum, 1992) pp. 581–2.
Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 1867–1917 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1970) pp. 96–8.
Leningradskaya pravda, 21 July 1929, p. 5. For details of the purge among technical workers, see Nicholas Lampert, The Technical Intelligentsia and the Soviet State (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1979) pp. 39–45.
See Aleksei Levin, ‘Expedient Catastrophe: A Reconsideration of the 1929 Crisis at the Soviet Academy of Sciences,’ in Slavic Review, vol. 47, no. 2, Summer, 1988, p. 276.
V.E. Grum-Grzhimailo died on 30 October 1928. On Palchinsky, see Loren R. Graham, The Ghost of the Executed Engineer. Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
Mark B. Adams, ‘The Soviet Nature-Nurture Debates,’ in Loren R. Graham (ed.), Science and Soviet Social Order (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 135.
G. Zaidel’, M. Tsvibak, Klassovyi vrag na istoricheskom fronte (Moscow and Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk, 1931).
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© 1997 Vera Tolz
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Tolz, V. (1997). The Academy of Sciences in the 1920s: From Independence to Sovietization. In: Russian Academicians and the Revolution. Studies in Russian and East European History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25840-6_2
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