A Concise History of Russia (Cambridge Concise Histories)

18 Revolutions in Russian Culture

Unlike Russia’s state and society, its culture did not experience such a sharp break in 1917. The period from about 1890 to the middle of the 1920s was full of artistic revolutions, happening simultaneously and in entirely different directions. These revolutions shared many characteristics with artistic movements in the rest of the world, but paradoxically the Russian culture of the Silver Age, as it is known (by comparison to the Golden Age in the nineteenth century) has never acquired an audience outside of Russia comparable to that which the writers and musicians of the earlier period secured. Perhaps one of the main reasons is that most of the truly talented writers of the Silver Age were poets, masters of that most untranslatable of art forms. The natural scientists, in contrast, began to acquire an international audience, in large part because of the efforts of the Soviet regime to encourage and use the sciences to build a new society.

LITERATURE, MUSIC, AND ART

The writers and artists who came to maturity in the 1890s were a mixed lot: symbolists and realists in literature, the “World of Art” group in the visual arts. In about 1910 new waves, or often wavelets, came on to the scene. A whole series of new movements in poetry, futurism, acmeism, and other groups contended for the attention of readers and critics, while the Ballets Russes introduced both new forms of dance and the radical (it seemed) new music of Igor Stravinskii. The speed of innovation only increased. Working in Germany, Wassily Kandinsky produced entirely abstract work by 1911, and in St. Petersburg Kazimir Malevich painted his “Black Square” in 1915. The revolution and civil war split Russian culture in two, with many of the great names of the time staying abroad or emigrating, and others remaining behind with varying degrees of sympathy for the Bolsheviks. The émigrés largely continued their earlier styles, while in Soviet Russia the situation was more complex. Some saw the new order as of the same essence as their artistic revolution, while others espoused even more radical notions and still others tried to combine modernism with socialist content. By the end of the twenties, with the aging of the émigrés and the new Soviet order in art, a new phase began.

The generation of the 1890s confronted not just new ideas but also new conditions of work. The Russian publishing industry had expanded enormously since the Emancipation, and by 1900, prominent writers could actually live and even prosper on the earnings from their writing alone. Maxim Gorky was the first to be able to do so and in a spectacular fashion. As recounted in his autobiography, he came from a family of minor traders and earned his living by casual labor until he started writing. Virtually a tramp, he followed the course of the Volga working on the boats and taking factory jobs for short periods. By 1905 he was the best-paid author in Russia with a worldwide reputation and he spent his time mostly in Capri or Paris. Gorky was also typical of the artistic currents of the time, a fact muffled by later Soviet attempts to cast him as the father of “socialist realism.” Gorky’s prose was “realist” only by comparison to that of his contemporaries, for it also reflected his worldview, a kind of anarchistic rebelliousness and admiration for strong individuals. European critics immediately branded him a follower of Nietzsche, which was incorrect (Gorky read Nietzsche for the first time long after he formed his ideas and style) but it was an understandable mistake. His other great fascination was with religion, though not with official Orthodoxy but with what he saw as the semi-pagan and mystical religion of the people. It was the latter fascination that drew him to the Bolsheviks, for he saw in Marxism a kind of religion of the future that could lead the people to salvation.

Equally famous in the 1890s were the plays of Anton Chekhov. Chekhov’s great fame was preceded by over a decade of writing short stories for newspapers, and in some ways he was aesthetically closer to the generation of Tolstoy and Turgenev. In his theatrical practice, however, he was in the Russian vanguard, for the most famous stage for his plays was the Moscow Art Theater. The Moscow Art Theater was the first major Russian dramatic theater that was not an Imperial Theater, for the court had abandoned its monopoly in 1882. The Moscow Art Theater was strictly a private enterprise operation with the sponsorship of local businessmen such as Savva Morozov, the heir to the family textile fortune. It was also the first major laboratory for the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky, who reformulated theatrical performance in Russia and much of the world in the first half of the twentieth century. Stanislavsky’s demand that the actor live his role from the inside was a new departure over the (as he saw it) declamatory styles of the nineteenth century.

If Gorky, Chekhov, and Stanislavsky remained influential or at least revered for decades afterward, they were not entirely typical of an era dominated by Symbolism and other new trends. Dmitrii Merezhkovskii was the most prominent of the symbolists, beginning his career with a series of critical articles attacking the utilitarianism of the liberal and radical artistic theories of the previous generation. His call was for a sort of pure art, but in fact his own works were suffused with the philosophical and religious ideas of his generation. His subject matter was far from that of the earlier Russian classics – his first great success being a trilogy of novels set in ancient Rome (Julian the Apostate), the Renaissance, with Leonardo Da Vinci as its hero, and the Russia of Peter the Great. The idea was the eternal struggle of paganism and Christianity, with Peter as a sort of neo-pagan in the tradition of the emperor Julian and Da Vinci. Now largely forgotten, Merezhkovskii was a dominant figure for a generation. A more vital legacy was in the poetry of the younger symbolists, especially Alexander Blok.

Music and art also changed rapidly at the end of the century. For the St. Petersburg musicians the appearance of a patron, the timber merchant Mitrofan Beliaev, opened new possibilities in the 1880s. Beliaev not only sponsored concerts, but he also ran a Friday evening salon that featured regular performances of new music, and even more important, he founded a music publishing firm in Leipzig to publish Russian music and paid generous honoraria. The core of Beliaev’s circle comprised the survivors of the Five, though Balakirev rarely attended the salon. The Beliaev circle was also broader in its tastes than the original Five: to their admiration of Berlioz and Liszt they added Wagner, and grew more friendly to Tchaikovsky. Rimskii-Korsakov was the strongest artistic influence, though Stasov continued to command deep respect. As time passed, a younger generation such as Alexander Skriabin and Sergei Rakhmaninov benefitted from the circle’s attention. The end of the monopoly of the Imperial theaters also allowed the formation of a private opera company in Moscow sponsored by the millionaire businessman Savva Mamontov, whose company attracted Russia’s greatest singer, Fyodor Shaliapin. Mamontov also was the patron for a whole series of innovative painters, especially Valentin Serov. For Serov the light in his paintings was as important as the subject, as in the case of the Impressionists in France. This sort of art was a sharp break with the Itinerants and their fascination with the Russian landscape and the Russian people and its dilemmas.

In St. Petersburg the Russian artistic scene was transformed under the leadership of Sergei Diagilev, the main force behind a new magazine devoted to the visual arts named Mir Iskusstva (World of Art). The journal gave its name to a whole movement, a revolution in subject matter if not in technique. Though World of Art painters had a definite look that differed from the older painters of the Itinerant school, their greatest innovation was the turn from peasant life, landscape, and portraits of the intelligentsia toward more decorative depictions of interiors, retrospective pictures of eighteenth-century France or Russia, and portraits that stressed appearance and style as much or more than the sitter’s inner life. The World of Art was also notable in that its impulses came to a large part from European painting, but there was no direct European prototype. Impressionism, Art Nouveau/Jugendstil, and other European trends played a role. The World of Art group also valued European styles from the past, the Renaissance and the eighteenth century, which the Itinerants despised. The same was the case with Russian art: Diagilev was perhaps the first to discover the value of eighteenth-century Russian portraiture. He organized regular exhibits of contemporary European art, starting with that of Finland and Scandinavia, to educate the Russian public. The goal was to promote painting that was not concerned with social issues and only rarely sought to affirm Russian nationality. Yet the artists like the writers of these years were not yet in pursuit of pure art. Almost all of them were looking for some reality behind the world of appearances, and found it in mysticism, theosophy, encounters with mediums, or occasionally even Orthodox Christianity. They also revealed a great deal of cultural pessimism, and a profound sense of ending. The World of Art painter Alexander Benois published a history of Russian art in 1898 that ended with the statement that art was now coming to an end, and would either cease to exist among humanity or be replaced by an art that served a religious idea.

Into this artistic ferment came the Revolution of 1905. The artistic world reacted variously to the events, but most of the artists were not sympathetic to the tsarist regime. In 1905 the issues were not only the general ones of political representation of the people and the social state of the workers and peasants, because the artists also chafed under the various hindrances and monopolies imposed by the state. Writers were doing well economically, but still had to deal with state censorship. Tolstoy’s last major novel Resurrection could not be published in Russia and was passed around by students in mimeographed copies. The great theaters were under the Ministry of the Court, and their capacities and repertoire were far behind the expectations of the audience in the big cities. In St. Petersburg the only state-financed orchestra, the ancestor of the later Petrograd/Leningrad/St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra was still technically the private orchestra of the tsar, and was founded only in 1882. The imperial patronage of music and the arts that made much of Russian artistic life possible in earlier decades was no longer necessary and felt as a burden.

Thus the establishment of the state Duma in 1906 and the accompanying relaxation of censorship found great approval among writers and artists, who quickly moved to exploit the opportunities. Whole new subject matter appeared in literature: the first novels to make sexuality an explicit theme and books with all sorts of heterodox religious conceptions that the Orthodox Church could no longer keep out. Alongside the more traditional locations of cultural activity, St. Petersburg and Moscow quickly developed a café and cabaret culture that attracted the leading lights of literature and art alongside the general public. A bohemian style of life was increasingly fashionable, including various experiments in sexuality and dress. Some writers acquired signature appearances, dandified clothing and hairstyles, or a studied artistic look. Sergei Diagilev had pioneered all this with his elegant suits and a lock of hair died silver to make him look more distinguished.

Private patronage became easier and more abundant as Russian businessmen prospered. After 1909 Sergei Kussevitskii was the conductor of a private orchestra in Moscow, the first in Russia to be successful. (After emigration in 1920 he became the long-time conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the founder of the Tanglewood Festival.) The most famous example of a private dance company was Diagilev’s Ballets Russes, which made its debut in Paris in 1909 as well. In the following year the company presented the premiere of Igor Stravinskii’s ballet, the Firebird and in 1913 his even more revolutionary Rite of Spring. The latter caused an uproar with its dissonances and apparent celebration of pagan sexuality and vigor, brilliantly interpreted by the lead dancer Vatslav Nijinskii. Stravinskii was the vanguard of Russian music, but not the whole of it. Of the older generation, Rimskii-Korsakov was active until his death in 1910 and among the younger musicians Sergei Rakhmaninov and Sergei Prokofiev took different paths to fame, Rakhmaninov with his rich neo-romanticism and Prokofiev already heading toward the irony and precision of neo-classicism. Not only Diagilev but also many of the musicians began to gravitate to Paris and Berlin, for the St. Petersburg theaters and orchestras with the necessary resources were usually too conservative for the new music and performance styles.

The painters also moved very rapidly. Kandinsky in Munich had a limited impact on his Russian colleagues, but in Russia painting evolved very quickly. Especially in Moscow a group of young painters in several informal groups (“Jack of Diamonds” and “Donkey’s Tail”) under the influence of Cubism and Russian folk art began to move sharply away from realist technique. One of the most talented among them, Kazimir Malevich began to turn toward full abstractionism, painting his famous “Black Square” and other fully non-representational works. Malevich evolved the notion of Suprematism, in which the artist should work with geometric forms, in their turn the key to hidden reality behind the appearance of the world. Few of his associates followed him all this way, but it was this world that produced such painters as Marc Chagall.

For writers the years after 1905 were equally frenetic with change. The most important of the new prose writers, Andrey Belyi, published his phantasmagoria of St. Petersburg in the revolution, the novel Petersburg, in 1913. Belyi was emblematic of the period in other ways, as he was an adept of the “anthroposophy” of Rudolf Steiner, at whose center in Switzerland he spent much of his time. The poets were even more active and contentious, with new groups, each with a manifesto, forming every year. The Acmeists in St. Petersburg met in the Stray Dog café and proclaimed Apollonian clarity against the “Dionysian” symbolists. Mostly very young, their most striking work came long afterward, as in the case of their greatest writer, the poet Anna Akhmatova. The futurists appeared a bit later with their manifesto, appropriately titled “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste.” The futurists were as apocalyptic as the Symbolist generation in their evaluation of the world, but saw the approaching upheavals in a more positive light. They were fascinated with technology and saw the end of the older forms of art as liberating. The principal writer of the futurists was the poet Vladimir Mayakovskii, who was not only an artistic revolutionary but also a revolutionary in real life. Earlier on he had worked in the Bolshevik party and later he was to become the most famous poetic spokesman for the Reds after 1917.

Mayakovskii’s attraction to Marxism was as unusual among the writers and artists as it was among the intelligentsia as a whole. The intelligentsia, however, outside the artistic avant-guard in Petersburg and Moscow, remained committed to the older ideals of the nineteenth century, liberalism in politics, occasional populist socialism, and its artistic canons as well. They preferred Turgenev to Merezhkovskii or Belyi, and only some of the poets managed to break out of the rarified atmosphere of the St. Petersburg cafés to reach the provincial reader. When the war came, most of the writers followed the general reaction of the country and the intelligentsia and supported the war effort. The revolution was another matter. By 1917 most realized that the war effort had largely failed, and they were happy with the fall of the tsar but were not heavily engaged in politics or at first even distracted by it. While Mayakovskii enthusiastically worked for the Bolsheviks, the composer Prokofiev was more typical: 1917 was one of his most productive years as he composed major works having nothing to do with the cataclysm around him. Most of the artists and writers, like the rest of the intelligentsia, greeted the Bolshevik revolution with hostility, but it was the outbreak of the Civil War and the economic collapse of Petrograd that forced them to make decisions.

To the writers and artists, whatever their reaction to the Bolsheviks, the Russian Revolution was not so much the seizure of power by Lenin and his comrades as a fundamental and total upheaval, a descent into chaos and anarchy. It seemed to them that Russia had returned to the Time of Troubles, that all the veneer of civilization that the country had acquired since Peter the Great had been blown apart by a massive upsurge of popular anger and violence. For many it was the reign of Antichrist.

A small number of the writers, however, were sympathetic to the revolution, if not to the specific Bolshevik platform. Alexander Blok’s most famous poem, “The Twelve” (1918), depicts the anarchy and violence of Petrograd in the dark of the winter, but the twelve working-class Red Guards marching through the half-deserted streets are following a leader who is Jesus Christ. In contrast Vladimir Mayakovskii was entirely in the Bolshevik camp, and spent the years of the Civil War writing not only poetry but also agitational verse and drawing pictures for political posters. He changed his elegant futurist suits for a proletarian look in dress and a shaved head. In his poetry he tried to make the masses the heroes, most famously in “150,000,000” that began

150,000,000 is the name of the creator of this poem.

Its rhythms – bullets,

Its rhymes – fires from building to building.

150,000,000 speak with my lips…[trans. E. J. Brown]

Some of the painters and artists worked for the Reds as well, making huge modernist decorations for the May Day parades and other Bolshevik rituals. Most writers and artists, however, waited on the sidelines or hoped for White victory. Many moved south to the White-occupied territories. As the Reds drove the White armies out of the country, large parts of the intelligentsia followed them, producing a Russian culture in exile in Berlin and Paris.

For the musicians, dancers, and some of the painters, the move to Western Europe or America was the start of another career. Rakhmaninov made so much money from concerts that he was able to support other Russian émigrés, contributing to Igor Sikorsky’s aircraft company in Connecticut. Prokofiev, the great singer Fyodor Shaliapin, and the dancers of the Ballet Russes worked throughout the world. Though the Ballets Russes fell apart after Diagilev’s death in 1929, it left a legacy to the world of ballet in its many active dancers and in the work of George Balanchine in America. For the writers, however, the emigration was largely a disaster. Dependent on a Russian audience, they were cut off from Russia where their works could not be published and ceased to circulate legally after the early twenties. Russian émigrés did set up publishing companies, journals, and newspapers in Paris and elsewhere, but their readership was necessarily small, limited to the Russian and Russian-speaking exile communities in the West. Nevertheless, some were able to create remarkable works, especially in the early years. The poet Marina Tsetaeva wrote through the revolution, and when she came to Paris in 1921 continued to publish her verse in large quantity until about 1925. Even the older writers were able to produce a great deal at first, but the lack of audience soon began to tell. Western publishers were not interested in translations of any other than a select few, and even Ivan Bunin’s 1933 Nobel Prize could not awaken much interest in the latest émigré literature.

In the emigration new intellectual currents arose, like Eurasianism, the idea that Russia was not really European, but part of a separate “Eurasian” civilization exemplified by the Mongol Empire. Other small groups elaborated new philosophies of religion, or drifted toward fascism. Some made their peace with the Soviets and returned home, such as the writer (Count) Alexei Tolstoy, a distant relative of Lev Tolstoy. Prokofiev returned in 1935. Maxim Gorky, who had maintained his distance from both the Soviets and emigration after 1920, returned in 1932 to become a major figure in the Soviet literary world. Others were not so lucky: Tsvetaeva, after returning, committed suicide in 1941.

CULTURE AND NEP

In the years of NEP the fate of the émigré writers and artists abroad seemed to be increasingly irrelevant, as the cultural world of the new USSR burgeoned with new artistic trends and new names. In the early years the Bolsheviks had no definite position on the arts. During the Civil War some of the radicals in the party formed the Proletarian Cultural-Educational Organizations, known as Proletkult, which combined schools to teach workers to write poetry and paint with radical esthetic notions. Lenin and Trotsky were skeptical of Proletkult, believing its claims to represent the correct proletarian line in art to be spurious. The Bolshevik leadership was also generally skeptical of much modernist art: Lenin reproached the Commissar of Education Anatolii Lunacharskii for printing so many copies of the works of Mayakovskii. Whatever their content, the verses failed to impress Lenin with their quality and he thought the money better spent elsewhere.

The Civil War had a catastrophic effect on music and the theater, for the simple reason that there was no money to keep the theaters going at any but the most minimal level. The Imperial Ballet School closed, and the ballet and opera theaters closed for various periods until the early 1920s. Orchestras suffered similar fates. With NEP and the revival of the Soviet economy, the Soviet government gradually reestablished the old theaters and orchestras under different names, and at the same time the NEP economy and the absence of a defined party line on the arts meant that many smaller ballet companies and theaters of various types came into existence. Instrumental music did better, for the conservatories continued to function with many of the old staff, and produced a whole generation of new composers. By the end of the 1920s Dmitrii Shostakovich already had a name, both for his “serious” compositions and for film music. Perhaps the most innovative theater was established under the leadership of Vsevolod Meyerhold in Moscow in 1922. Meyerhold had begun under Stanislavskii in the Moscow Art Theater, but by 1917 had rejected the master’s ideas to develop his own theory and style of acting which he called “biomechanical.” The idea was that the actor should not strive for naturalism but use his body and his voice for the most expressive possible performance, making his point by an “unnatural” style that would strike the audience more powerfully. Meyerhold in turn had a powerful effect on another art form that was just coming into its own at the time, the cinema. Sergei Eisenstein was just starting on his career as a director in the 1920s with his historical masterpieces such as Battleship Potemkin. The actors in the film reflected Meyerhold’s theories, while the overall structure was the product of Eisenstein’s technique of montage, using a series of discontinuous images to hammer home his esthetic and political points. This was a radical break with the normal technique of Hollywood and other films of the time, which stuck to visual continuity to tell the story. Eisenstein’s innovations seem to have bothered no one among the Soviet authorities, for whom film was in some ways the perfect art form: it spoke to the masses, was based on the latest technology, was easy to reproduce, and was cheaper and more portable than the stage. It was also much more adaptable for political messages, as Eisenstein and other directors proved. As Lenin had said, in a comment endlessly repeated, “of all the arts, cinema is the most important to us.” The Soviet authorities funded movies through their cultural offices, but resources were inadequate to produce films in large numbers. The great majority of the movies shown in the NEP era were actually imported Hollywood films.

With the end of the Civil War, publishing also revived, and in the NEP years a number of private publishers supplemented the products of the state publishers. The rich artistic world of the past could not be recreated. The NEP cafés lacked the elegance and panache of their pre-revolutionary prototypes, and the state publishers did not pay very well. The young Shostakovich survived by playing the piano in movie theaters to accompany silent films. The economy of artistic life was only one issue, as artists had to deal with the ambiguities of Soviet policy toward the intelligentsia, a policy based on an attitude of suspicion combined with an awareness of its value. The party also had very little to say about art. Certainly openly anti-Soviet works could not be published and the émigré writers gradually disappeared from the bookstores. Yet the party did not even publish a statement on literature until 1925, and that one contained little in the way of positive recommendations. The gist was that the party should help and promote “proletarian” writers as well as writers from the peasantry, but should also show tolerance of the “fellow travelers” (originally Trotsky’s phrase), writers from the intelligentsia to a greater or lesser degree sympathetic or at least neutral toward the new order. Party critics should not expect the “fellow travelers” to have and express a complete Bolshevik world-view. In a sense, the party’s position on the writers was similar to its position on engineers or government officials from the old intelligentsia. Until the end of the decade, the party relied on their skills and seemed to be willing to let them gradually move toward a friendlier attitude to the party and its aims.

The result of all these different elements was a great deal of varied writing, much of it innovative in language, style, and narrative technique. Even the “proletarian” writers wrote in a language that was full of slang, local dialects, and obscenities, a language that was later edited out of reprints of their work after the 1930s. While some of the proletarians wrote stories of Civil War sacrifice and heroism, pulling few punches to describe the horrors of the war, others tried to write about the working class in their factories, accounts of the rebuilding of Soviet industry and the new forms of life emerging around them. There were not very many of the actual proletarian writers, however, and most literature of the time presented a wide variety of daily life – often the semi-criminal margins of Soviet urban life, the complexities of the personal and private life of the intelligentsia and party officials. While many of the writers also spent much time in acrimonious debate among the various groupings, others managed to produce work of more enduring significance. In 1921 Boris Pasternak published a collection of poetry, “My Sister Life,” which instantly established him as a leading poet. In 1926 Isaak Babel’s Red Cavalry with its brutal honesty placed it at the head of all descriptions of the Civil War. The stories of NEP-era marginal characters culminated in 1928 with Ilf and Petrov’s Twelve Chairs, whose con man hero Ostap Bender passed into Soviet and Russian folklore. Other writers found it impossible to publish: Anna Akhmatova was not published from 1925 to 1940, and Mikhail Bulgakov began to have difficulties from the mid-twenties. Though his Civil War–era play “Day of the Turbins” was scarcely a flattering portrait of the White cause, it was also not crudely hostile, and the play was repeatedly banned and then allowed again until it finally disappeared from the repertory to return only in the 1960s. His other works were simply forbidden entirely. Some writers were allowed to emigrate, such as Yuri Zamiatin whose novel of an anti-utopian society We would come to influence Aldous Huxley and George Orwell.

In literature and art, the 1920s were in many ways a continuation of the Silver Age under new conditions. Many of the most important voices of the twenties, Mayakovskii or Pasternak, Meyerhold or Prokofiev, were already accomplished artists by 1917, and the younger generation that came to maturity after 1920 was profoundly influenced by the culture of the pre-revolutionary decades. Even some of the young “proletarian” writers with their new themes wrote with Belyi or Blok in the back of their heads. The numerous literary or artistic platforms and groups maintained some of the organizational forms of artistic life of the Silver Age until the end of the NEP era.

THE NATURAL SCIENCES

For the natural sciences, in contrast, the revolution marked a more fundamental break, not so much intellectually but institutionally. The years before the revolution had been a period of change for Russian science. Perhaps the most important innovation had been the foundation of the new engineering schools under the Ministry of Finance. These technical schools not only produced sorely needed engineers but also were less conservative in their curricula than the universities under the Ministry of Education. Thus they were open to rapidly changing and growing disciplines like physics, while the universities tended to keep chemistry at the center of scientific education. The technical institutes were more open to society. They maintained ties with business, and were less restrictive about their admissions. Thus Jewish students like Abram Ioffe finished the St. Petersburg Technological Institute, studied in Germany, and received his first position in physics at the new St. Petersburg Polytechnic Institute, which was Witte’s creation. His years there from 1906 to the Revolution were to be the incubation period of the later Soviet physics, for Ioffe quickly revealed his talent for organization and intellectual leadership. Yet the conditions of science as a whole left much to be desired. Physics had suffered a major blow in 1911 when much of the science faculty of Moscow University and the Kiev Polytechnic Institute resigned over Minister of Education Kasso’s illegal repression of student meetings (a meeting in honor of Tolstoy’s death was at issue). There were few other institutions where the scientists could move, though some managed to find a home in the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. Among the successful few among the protestors was the geochemist Vladimir Vernadskii, one of the founders of the science of ecology, who managed to find a place in the Academy.

For the scientists, laboratory equipment and space was a crucial issue, and unfortunately most government offices did not see it as a priority. Pre-revolutionary Russian scientific laboratories and research stations were mostly small divisions within ministries or government offices like the Division of Agriculture within the Ministry of Finance or the small research laboratories of the Ministry of War, devoted to such problems as the production of optical sights for artillery. Most science took place in university departments, and there were scarcely any privately financed laboratories. Science was already dependent on government support throughout the world, but Russia was still too poor and backward to provide facilities similar to those of Germany or France. There were exceptions, like the physiologist Ivan Pavlov’s laboratory at the Imperial Institute of Experimental Physiology in St. Petersburg which had state funding and aristocratic donors and patrons, primarily Prince A. P. Oldenburgskii, a relative of the tsar and a general. It produced medicines while Pavlov conducted experiments on conditioned reflexes. Most scientists lacked such facilities, and all these problems came to a head during the First World War, in which Russia’s technological backwardness played a crucial role in its defeats. The scientific community was patriotic if not monarchist and in 1915 the Academy of Sciences founded a Commission for the Study of Natural Productive Forces, that was designed to survey the Russian Empire for natural resources that would be useful in war and industry. The result was a massive accumulation of data that came to be used by an entirely new regime after 1917.

The new Bolshevik government inaugurated a revolution in Russian science. For the Bolsheviks, the natural sciences were central to their utopian project. Their own ideology, Marxism, was in their minds a science, not just a political viewpoint. To them it was an objectively true account of the character and laws of development of human society. They believed that knowledge of the natural sciences would help convince people of the truth of Marxism, as it would impart knowledge of scientific methodology. There were other more practical benefits. The spread of scientific knowledge would combat religion, a high Bolshevik priority in the early years. Most important, however, they believed that science held the key to technology, and that the new Soviet Union needed technology to become a modern state and society.

Right from the beginning, the Bolshevik regime treated science and scientists very differently from other sectors of the old intelligentsia. The Soviets preferred large-scale, state-financed institutions mostly detached from university teaching, and the scientists were mostly in favor of the same structure, frustrated by the conservatism and limited resources of the pre-1917 Ministry of Education. Thus as early as 1918, as the Civil War was beginning, the Soviet government set up what became the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute under Abram Ioffe. As the Civil War ended, Ioffe’s institute was given a series of buildings and money to build new laboratories at a time when the state had almost no resources and famine swept the interior of Russia. Similarly, the Section of Applied Botany and Selection, a small laboratory of the old Agriculture Department, became the All-Union Institute of Plant-Breeding under the botanist and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov.

These were highly sophisticated institutions, and the Soviet government did not spare expense. Vavilov’s institute moved into the former mansion of the tsarist Minister of State Properties off St. Isaak’s Square in the center of Leningrad, with greenhouses and research facilities in Tsarskoe Selo (renamed Detskoe Selo in the 1920s and later Pushkin) in confiscated properties from the old regime. Even more important, Vavilov was sent abroad to Europe and to the United States to acquire scientific literature, equipment, and seeds for research. In the United States he traveled widely, met Luther Burbank, and spoke at American universities – all of this at Soviet government expense. Ioffe and the physicists fared as well or better. Ioffe made a similar journey to Europe in 1920–21, and the students at the physics institute were not only allowed but even officially encouraged to spend years abroad working at Cambridge, England, with Ernest Rutherford or in Germany with the leading physicists of the time. In the rapidly changing world of physics in the early twentieth century, these contacts were crucial and established international reputations for many Soviet physicists. They published their works in the German Annalen der Physik, until 1933 the leading outlet for physics research in the world. Vladimir Vernadskii, in spite of his participation in the Kadet party before the Revolution, spent several years working in Paris in the 1920s with the full approval of the Soviet authorities. The Soviet government created a system that supplied scientists with better housing and favored access to consumer goods even in the 1920s, when the NEP market could have supplied many of their needs and wants. Pavlov, who was openly anti-Soviet, was appointed the head of the new Institute of Physiology of the Academy of Sciences in 1925.

Standing over and financing the scientific institutes in the 1920s were a variety of government offices. Some institutes were supported by the Russian republic Commissariat of Education, but the physical sciences increasingly came under the industrial commissariats or the Supreme Economic Council. Biology was mainly the purview of the Commissariats of Health or the Russian Commissariat of Agriculture. The idea was to unite theory and practice, an idea central to Marxism but also popular with many scientists on the eve of the Revolution who thought that Russia needed their expertise to overcome its backwardness. Thus the Leningrad Physical-Technical Institute had contracts with many industrial agencies, including a long-lasting and ultimately unsuccessful study of insulation for long-distance power cables. Successful or not, these contracts provided supplementary financing and demonstrated to the party leadership the usefulness of scientific research. The party authorities were perfectly aware that the scientists were not Bolsheviks. Many of them did believe that they should help the new state to modernize the country, whatever its leadership, but they were not Marxists. For the time being, this divergence of aims was not a problem.

The end of NEP meant, however, a radical upheaval in society launched by Stalin and the party leadership and a radical upheaval in art, literature, the humanistic disciplines, and the natural sciences. No area was spared this “cultural revolution,” as it was called at the time, an upheaval in culture that matched that in the villages and the factories of the Soviet Union. This cultural revolution itself was short-lived but it was the beginning of a fundamental transformation of Soviet culture.