In the Belorussian SSR, a similar policy of Belorussianisation was implemented during the 1920s. Commissar of Education and later president of the Belarusian Academy of Sciences, Usevalad Ihnatouski, initiated the Belorus- sianisation drive, but he was also among the first victims of the eventual hunt for Belorussian nationalists. (Ihnatouski committed suicide in 1930.)[309]Like Ukraine, the Belorussian SSR in the 1930s saw an official effort to bring the national language closer to Russian. The Great Terror of the late 1930s completed the elimination of the generation of radical activists for whom socialism and non-Russian nation-building were two potentially compatible projects.
Unlike Ukraine and Belorussia, Soviet Moldavia was not made a union republic, but only an autonomous republic within the Ukrainian SSR (1924). From the very beginning, a Moldavian autonomy on the eastern bank of the Dniester, in Transnistria, was designed as a political magnet for Moldavians across the river, in Bessarabia. Ethnic Moldovans constituted only 30 per cent of the republic's population (Ukrainians had a plurality, at 48.5 per cent), but their existence was important for supporting the Soviet claim on Bessarabia. Following the high-point of Moldavianisation under Commissar for Education Pavel Chior (1928-30), this policy suffered setbacks. In a puzzling turn of events specific to Moldavia, the authorities first ordered the switch from the traditional Cyrillic script to the Latin (1932) to stress the unity of Moldavian and Romanian languages and then, the return to the Cyrillic alphabet (1938) as closer to Russian.
Before the dust settled after the reversal of nativisation policies, the Soviet nationalities policy changed again with the annexation of new territories in the west. Just as mature Stalinism established the Russians' priority status in the Soviet family ofnations, Stalinist ideologues came to need an ethnic argument again in their defence of the new conquests. The secret protocol attached to the August 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop pact assigned Estonia, Latvia, the eastern part of Poland, and Bessarabia to the Soviet sphere of influence (Lithuania was added in September). The Soviet occupation of Western Ukraine and Belorussia in September 1939 was staged as the historic reunification of the Ukrainian and Belorussian nations, respectively.[310] Stalinist ideologues used the same argument to wrest Bukovina from Romania in June 1940 and Transcarpathia from Czechoslovakia in 1945. Ironically, in view of allprevious and subsequent efforts at establishing a Soviet Moldovan nationality, the annexation of Bessarabia in June 1940 was likewise justified by this land's allegedly Ukrainian character.[311]Still, Bessarabia became part of the Moldavian autonomous republic. Western Ukraine and western Belorussia joined the existing Ukrainian and Belorussian republics, while Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania became new union republics.
During what post-Communist historians in these countries now refer to as the 'first Soviet occupation', Stalinist authorities did not have time to complete either a collectivisation of agriculture or industrialisation. They did, however, nationalise existing industry and large farms. While not infringing the rights of local cultures - and in fact, promoting Ukrainian and Belorussian cultures in the former Polish-controlled territories - the bureaucrats carried out mass deportations to Siberia and Soviet Asia of former government officials, bourgeoisie, intellectuals and other 'unreliable elements'. In tiny Estonia, the number of deportees reached 60,000; in Western Ukraine, estimates are in the hundreds of thousands.[312] The Katyn forest in Belorussia became the symbol of another Stalinist crime, the secret execution of thousands of Polish POWs.
The German attack in June 1941 interrupted the Stalinisation of the western republics, but the Nazis had by then abandoned their earlier plans to create a system of puppet states in the Soviet west. In any case, their racial ideology dictated different treatment of the peoples living in the occupied territories. In Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, local self-government in the form of ministries was set up and universities were allowed to function. In Ukraine and Belorus- sia, the natives could at best serve in municipal administration, and schooling above Grade Four was abolished. However, all these territories were exploited economically and earmarked for future incorporation into the Reich. Looking for immediate economic benefits, the German administration never really kept its promise to dissolve the collective farms in Ukraine and Belorussia or to allow the restitution of nationalised businesses in the Baltics. In all these regions and usually with the help of local collaborators, the Nazis carried out the extermination of the Jews. Late in the war, in a desperate effort to use the non-Russians' manpower, the Nazis established national SS units composed of Estonians, Latvians and Galician Ukrainians. (This effort failed in Lithuania and was not attempted in Belorussia and eastern Ukraine, but throughout the western republics the locals were actively recruited into auxiliary troops and police.) The Germans suppressed or ignored several attempts by the nationalists to proclaim state independence and, until desperate times came in i943, were generally wary of working with them. Especially after 1943, Soviet partisans were active in Ukraine, Belorussia and Lithuania. So were the nationalist guerrilla detachments, which originally attacked the Soviet troops but, in view of Nazi mistreatment, soon turned against the Germans as well.
The Soviet army recovered the western regions one by one between the autumn of i943 (eastern Ukraine) and the spring of i945 (parts of Latvia). Its advance resulted in the mass westward exodus of the population especially from the regions that had been incorporated before the war. Intellectuals and nationalist activists were over-represented among the so-called 'displaced persons', who, during the late 1940s, resettled primarily in North America, Australia and Britain. Particularly in the Baltics and Western Ukraine, the Soviet army encountered fierce resistance from the nationalist guerrillas, who congregated in the region's forests, but, by the end of the decade, the brutal Soviet counter-measures had succeeded in establishing control over the countryside. This achievement was accompanied by a new wave of mass deportations. Still, the armed resistance in the west profoundly traumatised Soviet ideologues, who subsequently always treated the region as nationalism-prone.
Between Eastern Europe and the Russian core
Territorial changes at the end of the Second World War favoured the western republics (see Map 8.1). In addition to the 1939 reunion of eastern and Western Ukraine, the Ukrainian SSR acquired Transcarpathia from Czechoslovakia. Lithuania recovered Vilnius from Poland and Klaipeda from Germany. But the population losses and destruction brought by the war made for a long recovery. While Stalinist authorities in the old Soviet regions busied themselves with reconstruction, in the newly acquired western territories their task was Sovietisation. The collectivisation of agriculture was put on hold until the late 1940s, when the authorities established their control over the countryside, but when it finally came, the collectivisation was as violent and disruptive as its all-Union model had been two decades previously.
The post-war international situation also complicated the authorities' choices. New Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe preserved their independent statehood, and Soviet ideology was at a loss to explain why, for instance, Estonia had to be a part of the USSR, while Poland had not. The very existence of the Soviet republic of Moldavia east of socialist Romania might appear superfluous. As Roman Szporluk has long argued, the emergence of socialist states in Eastern Europe in a fundamental way undermined the legitimacy of Soviet nationality policy.[313] Stalin's new subjects might not feel this theoretical tension. But the Soviet west also became the region most exposed to contacts with East European versions of socialism and served as the USSR's shop window turned to Eastern Europe and Scandinavia.
Either because ofthis window-dressing function or because oftheir general ideological vision of the USSR as a highly developed industrial state, the central authorities in Moscow invested heavily in the industrial development of the western republics. The post-war period saw a quick industrial expansion, particularly in the Baltics and eastern Ukraine. Such previously agricultural areas as Lithuania, Belorussia, Western Ukraine, and Moldavia also, acquired some modern industries. Although not in the short run, industrial growth presented the western nationalities with two problems. First, their specialised production units were included in (and dependent on) the large network of the Soviet command economy. Second, much of the required skilled labour force was - whether intentionally or inevitably - recruited in Russia, thus increasing the share of the Russian population in the western republics. In one extreme case, the Latvian population ofthe Latvian SSR's capital, Riga, decreased from 63.0 per cent in 1939 to 44.6 per cent in 1959 and to 36.5 per cent in 1989.[314] In Moldavia, Bessarabia remained agrarian, while new industrial development (and new Russian migrants) were concentrated in Transnistria, the former Moldavian autonomy within the Ukrainian republic.
Politically and culturally, life in the western republics stabilised following de-Stalinisation. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Baltic republics demonstrated standards of living higher than elsewhere in the USSR, while the rest of the region (except Moldavia) was on a par with the European part of Russia. Especially in urban areas, consumerism set in with the wider availability of cars, furniture, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners and cassette recorders. Except for a brief period during the late 1950s and early 1960s, the central authorities did not openly encourage assimilation to Russian culture, although they were clearly pleased when social processes pushed in this direction. During the 1970s, especially in Belorussia and eastern Ukraine, local party leaders sometimes assisted the Russification of education, the media and urban environment. Needless to say, the Soviet authorities and the KGB remained ever watchful for manifestations of 'bourgeois nationalism' in the western borderlands, suppressing every potential source of resentment.
But the perpetual threat of 'nationalism' was built into the Soviet system, which had itself institutionalised ethnic difference. There were local administrators who, like the deputy premier Eduards Berklavs in Latvia during the late 1950s or First Secretary Petro Shelest' in Ukraine during the 1960s, developed too strong an identification with their countries and cultures. More important, the functioning of full-fledged national cultures, even Soviet-style, required the existence of national cultural producers, groups of intellectuals who often deviated from the required intricate balance of Sovietness and national pride. There were, too, 'national religions' in some regions of the Soviet west.
Persecutions ofthe Roman Catholic Church in Lithuania, for instance, elicited strong popular protest. Although the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church had been forcibly dissolved in 1946, it retained a considerable following in Western Ukraine as a 'catacomb Church'.
Publicly, only small groups of intellectuals dared to express their discontent with the Soviet nationalities policy. Although much lionised in post-Soviet nationalist historiographies, the dissident movement did not and could not have brought down the Soviet Empire. Until its rebirth under Gorbachev, the dissident movement remained the cause of hundreds, at most a couple ofthou- sand activists. The dissident movement in fact began with attempts to show that Stalin and his successors had forsaken the 'Leninist' notions of national equality. This was the principal message of Internationalism or Russification? by the prominent Ukrainian dissident Ivan Dziuba. Subsequently, the dissenters began openly advocating national rights and self-determination, as well as the advancement of civil rights. In Ukraine, by far the largest western republic, the generation of the 'sixtiers' first explored the limits of artistic expression but soon established an opposition to the regime on the issues of civil rights and cultural freedoms. The underground Ukrainian Herald began appearing in 1970, and a large Ukrainian Helsinki Watch, one of only two such groups in the Soviet west, emerged in Kiev in i976 under the leadership of the former establishment writer Mykola Rudenko.
Interestingly, in view of its weaker industrial development, Lithuania led Estonia and Latvia in the growth of a nationalist dissident movement. There, workers and peasants were far more prominent than in Russian or Ukrainian dissent, which was dominated by intellectuals. Petitions in defence of the Catholic Church collected tens of thousands of signatures, and the underground Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church appeared steadily from 1972. In 1972, following the self-immolation of a nineteen-year-old non-conformist, mass youth protests tookplace in the city of Kaunas.[315] In 1976, the Lithuanian Helsinki Watch group came into existence under the leadership of Victoras Petkus. (It was suppressed in two years.) In Latvia, the 1971 letter by '17 Latvian Communists' (who, as was revealed later, included Berklavs) complained to foreign Communist parties about the advances of assimilation in the republic. In Estonia, the i972 memorandum to the UN that decried Russification and demanded restoration of independent statehood marked thebirth of organised dissent. On the fortieth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact (i979), dissidents of all three Baltic nations issued a declaration demanding its nullification. Among the signatories were thirty-seven Lithuanians, four Estonians, and four Latvians. In contrast to other nations of the region, the dissident movement in Estonia exploded briefly in 1980-1, under the influence of contemporary events in Poland, but was immediately weakened by arrests and imprisonments.
In contrast, dissent in Belorussia was unorganised and limited to statements by intellectuals in defence of the national language. In Moldavia, even such sporadic expressions of discontent were rare.
By the early 1980s, the general population in the Soviet west was reasonably informed about living standards in Eastern Europe and the so-called capitalist countries and in its majority was cynical about Soviet ideology. Multiple indications of malfunctions in the Soviet economy and various social problems - from the lowest birth rate Union-wide in Estonia and Latvia to one of the highest child mortality rates Union-wide in rural Moldova - caused citizens to privately question the efficiency of Soviet socialism. Yet, in those years the authorities almost succeeded in rooting out organised dissent. Mass expression of discontent did not emerge until Gorbachev's glasnost' began creating a genuine public sphere. Only the reforms originating in Moscow allowed the non-Russian national movements to resume their interrupted (or 'frozen') nation-building projects by returning to what Hroch designates as the stage of mass mobilisation. In all western republics, the national cause acquired a truly mass following only after the long-suppressed economic frustrations and social tensions had flowed into the default channel of nationalistic discourse.
In a recent, fundamental study of the Soviet Union's collapse, Mark R. Beissinger argues that nationalist mobilisation proceeded in 'tides' within which the example of one region could influence developments in others. In the rise of secessionist movements within the USSR, the Balts were in the avant-garde. As Beissinger shows repeatedly in his book, other nationalities drew encouragement from their successes and emulated their methods.[316]This, however, applies to the political separatist movement, while the national awakening of the glasnost' period was originally a more complex phenomenon, which began as an ecological and cultural movement. Arguably, the movement started after the Chernobyl' disaster in April i986, which both prompted Gor- bachevto expand the limits ofglasnost' and gave birth to mass environmentalist movements.
Even in the Baltics, the first open protests were against the grand designs of Soviet industry. In Estonia, the first mass meeting opposed Moscow's new phosphorus-mining project, which would damage the country's environment (1987). In 1988, the so-called 'singing revolution' symbolised the breakthrough in cultural revival. The national movement finally reached its organisational stage with the formation of the Estonian Popular Front in April 1988. In Latvia, the first successful effort at open mobilisation of the public was aimed against the construction of a hydroelectric dam on the Daugava River in 1987. Later in the same year, the so-called 'calendar' demonstrations followed, commemorating the 1941 deportations, marking the anniversary of the Molotov- Ribbentrop Pact, and celebrating the proclamation of independence in 1918. In October 1988, a popular front was constituted in the republic. Lithuania, where the Communist Party had been slower in answering the Kremlin's call for reforms, was the last to join the string of demonstrations in the Baltic region, with the first public meeting being organised by a group of Catholic activists on 23 August 1987, to mark the anniversary of the Soviet-German Pact. The popular front known as Sajudis was established in June 1988.
The transition from the stage of cultural and ecological protests to the stage of political mobilisation took longer in Belorussia. There, national awakening began during 1987-8 with cultural figures petitioning the government for the protection of Belorussian culture against assimilation but escalated into open expressions of discontent in June 1988 with the discovery of mass graves of the victims of Stalinist terror in the Kurapaty forest. As the most powerful symbol of Stalinist crimes - and of what was seen as the Soviet regime's general criminal nature - Kurapaty galvanised public opinion. By October, the Belorussian analogue of Moscow's Memorial Society emerged under the name of the Martyrology of Belorussia Association. Led by the archaeologist Zianon Pazniak, this group immediately began organising the Belorussian Popular Front (BPF) but met fierce resistance from the authorities. At this point, Belorussian activists had already established contacts with Sajudis. The BPF's founding congress consequently took place in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius in June 1989.[317] Still, the republic's government effectively prevented the BPF from reaching out to the countryside.
In Ukraine, where the party leadership kept a lid on public opinion until as late as 1989, the development of the national movement combined the traits of the Lithuanian and Belorussian models. In Western Ukraine, a mass movement for the restoration of the Greek Catholic Church emerged in 1987. (The authorities finally gave their permission in late 1989.) In the east, the plight of Chernobyl' was the earliest uniting factor as well as the most obvious symbol ofthe regime's ineffectiveness and criminal secretiveness. The public ecological association, the Green World, was founded in 1987, while the organisation in defence of the national language, the Taras Shevchenko Ukrainian Language Society, was not established until February 1989. But in the same month, a more important political organisation came into existence, namely, the Popular Movement for Restructuring. Better known simply as Rukh (Movement), it was similar in structure and political aims to the Baltic popular fronts at the early stage of their development.
In Moldavia, the party managed to keep the forces of change at bay until mid-1988. But when the breakthrough came in the summer of that year, the republic's intellectuals promptly established both cultural organisations and the more politically oriented Democratic Movement in Support of Restructuring. (These and other pro-reform groups in May 1989 united in the Moldavian Popular Front.) Like the Ukrainian opposition, the Moldavian opposition united around the language issue, which in the Moldavian case entailed not just the status and protection of Moldavian as a state language, but also the recognition of its unity with Romanian and its 'return' to the Latin script. But in all republics of the western belt, the language issue was a political issue.
Although all of them had been created ostensibly to assist Gorbachev in the implementation ofhis perestroika policies, the popular fronts in the Soviet west soon concentrated on the issues specific to their nations. Originally they were limited to language, the environment and Stalinist crimes, but these issues already challenged the Soviet Union's legitimacy. Ultimately, Gorbachev's reforms gave nationalists the opportunity to go public, and the Kremlin proved unable to prevent them from starting mass mobilisations. Initially, popular fronts included reformist Communists and minorities, but the opposition they encountered from the conservative party leadership in most republics, as well as from the emerging minority movements, radicalised their ideology. The seemingly easy collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe was also a contributing factor. By 1990, the popular fronts had evolved from the defence of democratic rights in the republics to the defence of national interests of the titular nations.
During 1989, the national movements went political and succeeded in capturing the protest vote in the Soviet west. Once again, Moscow initiated this turn of events by calling free elections to the All-Union Congress of People's Deputies (March-May 1989). In Lithuania, Sajudis won all the seats except two that went to national Communists whom the nationalists did not oppose. In Estonia and Latvia, nationalists also won, although on a less impressive scale. On the fiftieth anniversary of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, 23 August 1989, the Baltic popular fronts mounted the most imposing protest action yet when they organised a human chain of some 2 million people from Tallinn to Vilnius. The event drew the world's attention to the growing national unrest in the region.
In 1990, elections to republican parliaments (Supreme Soviets) revealed the emerging political realignment. In Lithuania, where the majority of Communist Party members belonged to the titular nationality, the party proclaimed its independence from the All-Union Party (November 1989). In the months leading to the elections, the reformist Communist leader Algirdas Brazauskas co-operated with the Popular Front, but his party won only a minority of seats. In March 1990, the parliament elected as president the nationalist Vytau- tas Landsbergis and voted unanimously for the republic's independence, which the Kremlin did not recognise and which was later revoked after a three-month economic blockade.[318] In Estonia and Latvia, the Communist parties captured the votes of primarily ethnic Russians, yet nationalists had a majority and in March 1990 could proclaim - although not as clearly as the Lithuanians had - their republics' intention to re-establish their independence. Perhaps more important, the Baltic governments began asserting their economic independence by stopping financial contributions to the central budget and initiating independent economic reforms.
While Gorbachev was shocked by the mass support for separatism, he remained reluctant to use force in the republics. Although the local press repeatedly warned about an impending crackdown, it never materialised as a large-scale military operation. Rather, in January 1991, a series of smaller incidents took place in the Baltic states, with the Kremlin either denying its involvement or apologising for the 'unintended violence'. In Lithuania, Soviet troops took control of the radio and TV centre, killing fourteen people and injuring 150. In Latvia, five people died and ten were injured when Soviet police special forces captured the building of the Ministry of the Interior. Because these events received extensive media coverage both within and outside the USSR, instead of harassing nationalists as intended, they actually harmed the cause of those in Moscow who had favoured the use of violence in the borderlands.
In contrast, the March 1990 elections to the Supreme Soviet of the Belorussian SSR demonstrated the extent of the authorities' control, with the Communist Party winning 86 per cent of seats. After years of prodding by the intelligentsia, party bureaucrats did agree in January 1990 to pass a law making Belorussian the official language of the state. (Similar laws were by then passed in all other republics of the Soviet west.) Yet, in practice the population of Belorussia remained the most Russified and the least politically active in the region.
In Ukraine, support for Rukh was unevenly distributed geographically. In Western Ukraine, the national movement enjoyed mass support, while in the east it relied primarily on the humanitarian intelligentsia in the cities. Correspondingly, during the 1990 elections, Rukh captured most seats from the western provinces and some in big urban centres, but its total was only 90 out of 450 seats. Hard-line Communists remained policy makers in the republic, although they now had to face opposition in the parliament. Still, following the example of other republics, especially Russia, the majority felt it necessary to pass a declaration of sovereignty (July 1990), which was more an affirmation of the republic's rights than a separatist statement.
In Moldavia, however, the Popular Front, together with the reformist Communists, won the majority of seats during the 1990 elections. The majority pushed through a number of Romanian-oriented cultural reforms, which alienated the minorities. (It is worth noting, nevertheless, that the idea of union with Romania had little support even among Moldavians.) In August 1990, the Turkic-speaking Gagauz population in the south declared a separate Gagauz Republic with its capital in Comrat, and in September, Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians in Transnistria created the Dniester Republic with its capital in Tiraspol'. Some 50,000 Moldavian nationalist volunteers immediately marched on the Dniester Republic, where fighting would go on intermittently for several years.
When the abortive coup in August 1991 destroyed the centre's remaining power structures, the Baltic republics were the first to claim their full independence. The Estonian parliament passed a motion to this effect on 20 August, and the first international recognition, from Iceland, followed on 22 August. Yeltsin's Russia was a close second, on 24 August, while both the USA and the USSR hesitated until early September. Although the Soviet military went violent in Riga, Latvia and Lithuania were equally prompt and successful in asserting their independent statehood. At the end of September, all three states already had separate seats at the UN General Assembly.
In Ukraine and Belarus, Communist-dominated parliaments also issued declarations of independence, on 24 and 25 August, respectively. Disoriented by the collapse of the party's centralised controls, local bureaucrats let themselves be persuaded by nationalists and reformers. Moreover, former Communists envisaged their continuing rule after independence. The Ukrainian referendum on independence on i December i99i, with over 90 per cent voting in favour of separate statehood, delivered the final blow to the idea of reviving the Soviet Union. The general population, including the minority voters, was swept away by the promises of economic prosperity that state-run media and nationalist agitators issued so easily. Moldova was the last to declare independence, on 27 August 1991, and the question of possible union with Romania that overnight acquired practical significance caused further splits within both the Popular Front and among the reformist Communists.
In the years after the Soviet Union's death, the western republics went their separate roads, albeit the ones determined to a significant degree by Russian politics in the region. But the legacy of twentieth-century nation-building was more important yet. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania never considered joining the Commonwealth of Independent States, but the treatment of large Russian minorities, especially in Estonia and Latvia, became the major issue between Russia and them. In fact, during the early i990s, Estonia and Latvia considered all post-i940 immigrants and their children non-citizens requiring naturalisation. The disenfranchisement of minority residents who could not pass a difficult language exam earned Estonia and Latvia reprimands from the European Union and human rights organisations. Although the three states moved quickly to reorient their economies towards the West and introduce market reforms, their continuing connection with Russia was demonstrated as late as i998, when their economies suffered downturns as a result of the Russian financial collapse. Still, the three Baltic states were extremely successful in what they billed as their 'return to Europe'. In the spring of 2004, all three joined the European Union and NATO.
In contrast, Ukraine still struggles to assert its separateness from Russia, especially in the economic and cultural spheres. Under President Leonid Kravchuk, the state sponsored the Ukrainisation of public life and education, normalised relations with Russia and quelled minority unrest. Yet, the lack of economic reforms caused Kravchuk's downfall. President Leonid Kuchma (1994-2004) came to power on the platform of rebuilding economic ties with Russia and restoring the Russian language to its previously prominent role, but for most of his rule, he tried to maintain a balance between Russia and the West. Still, under Kuchma, Russian financial interests came to control much of Ukraine's industry and mass culture. Late in 2004 Kuchma's attempt to transfer power to a hand-picked successor failed as hundreds of thousands of orange-clad oppositionists occupied Kiev's main square, protesting against the rigged elections. The peaceful 'Orange Revolution' brought to power pro-Western President Viktor Yushchenko (2005- ), who promised to fight corruption and take Ukraine 'back to Europe'.
Finally, Belarus and Moldova experienced a troubled post-Soviet transition. In Belarus, continuous economic decline during the early 1990s eroded already weak support for separate statehood. In 1994, a pro-Russian populist, Aliaksandr Lukashenka, won the presidential elections, putting the country on the path of assimilation, preservation of Soviet-style economy and economic dependence on Russia. Lukashenka's rule eventually deteriorated into an oppressive dictatorship. Formally, Belarus was to enter into union with Russia (1997), a union that was proclaimed but never consummated because of the Russian authorities' reluctance. In Moldova, the early years of independence were marred by political fragmentation over the question of national identity, as well as by ethnic violence, while the second part of the decade saw the reassertion of Russian political and economic influence. The conflict in Transnistria escalated in 1992, and, although Yeltsin's mediation helped to negotiate a ceasefire, the self-proclaimed Dniester Republic remains de facto independent. The faltering economy and huge state salary and pension arrears buoyed the popularity of unreformed Communists, who in 2001 won the parliamentary elections with 50.1 per cent of the votes. The parliament elected as president Vladimir Voronin, who proclaimed a course of closer co-operation with Russia.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the former Soviet west no longer exists as a region distinguished by its one-time connection to non- Russian European states or by the brief period of pre-Soviet independence. If the countries of the western belt with their widely disparate economic, political and cultural profiles still have anything in common, it is their Soviet legacy: a considerable Russian minority, economic ties with Russia and Russia's security interest in the area. Only in the cultural sphere, although not without political implications, do local identities continue to be defined in their relation to the Soviet project.
Science, technology and modernity
DAVID HOLLQWAY
Introduction
Science and technology occupy a central place in the history of all modern states, but their role is particularly significant in twentieth-century Russia. The Soviet Union had at one time a greater number of scientists and engineers than any other country in the world. It made a massive effort to overtake the West in the development of technology. And most important, science and technology were integral to the Soviet claim to offer a vision of modernity that was superior to that of Western capitalism. Not only would science and technology flourish in the Soviet Union, according to this claim; the Soviet system was itself consciously constructed on the basis of a scientific theory and would be guided by that theory in its future development. The Soviet Union presented itself as the true heir to the Enlightenment project of applying reason to human affairs.
Before the revolution (1901-17)
Science (nauka) in Russia was linked with modernisation from the very beginning.[319] Peter the Great imported natural science from Europe in the early eighteenth century as part of his effort to transform Russia into a Great Power. He established the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1724, before there were universities in Russia. For a century and a half, most of the Academy's members were from outside Russia, and many Russians regarded science as alien to Russian culture.[320] In the second half of the nineteenth century a more or less cohesive scientific community began to emerge, bound together by learned societies and scientific congresses. A number of Russian scientists, among them N. I. Lobachevskii and D. I. Mendeleev, won international reputations during the nineteenth century, and in the early years of the twentieth century two Russian scientists -1. P. Pavlov and 1.1. Mechnikov - were among the first winners of the Nobel Prize for Physiology. Russia had over 4,000 scientists engaged in research at the beginning of the century, and although it lagged behind Britain, Germany and France, it did have areas of real strength - in mathematics and chemistry, for example.[321]
The Academy of Sciences, like academies in other countries, was primarily an honorific society at the beginning of the twentieth century. Most scientific research was done in universities and specialised institutes of higher education. Russia had close scientific ties with Europe, and Russian scientists felt themselves to be part of an international community. They were increasingly conscious of themselves as an important - or at least potentially important - force in Russian society and, like other members of the intelligentsia, they wanted to play a useful role in Russia's development.[322]
In January 1905 a group of 342 St Petersburg university teachers and researchers signed a document criticising the system of higher education for treating university teachers as bureaucrats. They argued that science could flourish only when it was free and protected from external interference. These sentiments were widely shared in the scientific community. In the spring of 1905 a group of leading scientists and scholars founded the Academic Union in order to press for reform of higher education. The Union, which soon included about 70 per cent of all university teachers as members, called on the government to carry through democratic reforms in order to prevent anarchy in the country. Members of the Union helped to found the liberal Constitutional Democratic Party (the Kadets) later in the year. Although there was a significant group of conservative scientists and scholars in Russia, and a small number who supported the revolutionary parties, most scientists were liberal and reformist in their political outlook. With the exception of 1905-7, however, they did not play an active role in politics as a corporate group.[323]
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]
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.
The Academy abandoned the concept of pure science and placed a new emphasis on engineering and applied research. This policy rested on the belief that science did not grow by virtue of an internal logic, but in response to the technological demands that society placed on it.[347] The government introduced planning into science, over the objections of many scientists. In a speech to the first all-Union conference on the planning of scientific research in April 1931, Bukharin stressed that scientists should think beyond their research to the application of scientific knowledge in industrial production.[348]
The relationship between science and Marxist philosophy also underwent a crucial shift. In April 1929, the historian M. N. Pokrovskii, president of the Communist Academy, called on Marxists to end their 'peaceful coexistence' with non-Marxist and anti-Marxist scholars. He urged them 'to begin the decisive offensive on all fronts of scientific work, creating their own Marxist science'.[349] Deborin's claim that dialectical materialism should provide guidance to scientists now appeared too conservative. A group of younger, more radical philosophers called for the 'restructuring of the natural and the mathematical sciences on the basis of the materialist dialectic'.[350] There were sporadic efforts to do just that in the early 1930s, but in the summer of 1932 the Central Committee warned against ill-informed attempts to reconstruct scientific
disciplines. [351]
Philosophers were subordinate to the authority of the party Central Committee. They did not constitute an ideological supreme court, passing independent judgement on the acceptability of scientific theories. Stalin made it clear that the primary purpose of theory was to help practice; the correctness of a theory could be judged by its contribution to practice.[352] It was the Central
Committee - or, more precisely, its General Secretary - that would decide how useful a theory was and thus whether or not it was correct. Philosophers had little independent authority, but they were responsible for propagating dialectical materialism and they served as ideological watchdogs, on the prowl to see if they could find anything untoward or suspicious in the work of scientists.[353] They were one of the party's instruments for exercising control over the scientific community.
What emerged from the upheavals of 1928-32 was a large, well-funded, party-controlled R&D effort. 'In the USSR, as nowhere else in the world, all the conditions have been created for the flourishing of science,' Karl Bauman, head ofthe Central Committee's Science Department, claimed in August 1936.[354] But the authorities were not satisfied. The Academy of Sciences, on instruction from the government, organised a conference on physics and industry in March 1936.[355] The main target of criticism was Abram Ioffe, director of the Leningrad Institute of Physics and Technology, the leading Soviet physics institute at the time. He and his institute were attacked for not doing enough to help industry.
In December 1936 the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences held a conference at which T. D. Lysenko and his followers attacked leading geneticists.[356] Practice was crucial here too. Lysenko was a crop specialist who had won support from those responsible for agricultural policy by proposing various practical measures to improve crop yields. His claims were very appealing in the terrible years following collectivisation. Lysenko, who had no training in genetics, accused some of the geneticists of racism and fascism; he and his followers were in turn charged with being anti-Marx and anti- Darwin.[357] The physicists had resisted the introduction of philosophical issues at their conference. The biology meeting, with its name-calling and political accusations, showed how far scientific debate could become politicised. The Central Committee's assertion of authority in science had opened the way to arguments for and against particular lines of research not merely on the grounds of their scientific validity or practical utility, but also on the basis of their political character. Two types of argument now became available in scientific debates: 'quotation-mongering' (the appeal to the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin or Stalin in support of one's arguments), and 'label-sticking' (the attempt to defeat an opponent by associating him with a political or philosophical deviation).
Lysenko continued to strengthen his position in the late 1930s. He was made president of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1938 and a full member of the Academy of Sciences in the following year. The press portrayed him as a scientist of a new type: a man of the people, patriotic and oriented towards practice. This background gave him credibility in party circles. The fact that he understood very little about genetics did not hinder his ascent. He exploited the political context cleverly and destroyed his opponents by accusing them of political and ideological sins. The leading geneticist N. I. Vavilov was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in Saratov in 1943.[358]
Important though the Lysenko affair was, it did not characterise Stalinist science as a whole. While some fields suffered, others thrived. It was in these years, for example, that P. A. Cherenkov, I. M. Frank and I. E. Tamm discovered and explained the Cherenkov effect, for which they received the 1958 Nobel Prize for Physics; L. D. Landau did the work on the theory of liquid helium for which he was awarded the 1962 Nobel Prize; and P. L. Kapitsa did the research in low-temperature physics that won him the 1978 Nobel Prize.[359]The important difference between physics and biology was not that one was compatible with Marxism-Leninism and the other was not. It was the relationship to practice that determined their fate. Geneticists and plant breeders had no ready response to the crisis in agriculture caused by collectivisation. Lysenko, by contrast, found support among agricultural officials. He attacked the geneticists for their failure to provide practical help and explained that failure in terms of the political and ideological defects of the scientists and their theories, converting the crisis in the countryside into a crisis in science. There was no comparable crisis in industry to make physics seriously vulnerable to attacks of that kind.
The scientific community in the 1930s was subject to rigorous political and administrative controls, pressed to contribute to military and economic development and under permanent scrutiny for its political loyalty. Communists were now in key administrative positions; censorship became more stringent;
and foreign travel came to a virtual stop. Members of the pre-revolutionary scientific intelligentsia still occupied some leading positions, often as institute directors and heads of scientific 'schools', which were networks of patronage and support as well as intellectual communities.[360] Planning, which aimed to eliminate duplication, reinforced these schools and even encouraged the formation of monopolies, with particular fields dominated by individual institutes and their directors. Expansion ofthe scientific community brought large numbers of young people into science, leading to inter-generational conflicts that sometimes acquired a political character. Careerism and personal rivalries took on a political edge, and the practice of denunciation affected the scientific community as it did society at large.
The growth of science took place against the background of continual investigations and trials. The Shakhty trial of 1928 and the Industrial Party trial of 1930 were only the most prominent instances.[361] Researchers at the Academy were arrested and imprisoned or exiled in the 'Historians' case', the 'Slavists' case', the 'Peasant Labour Party case', the 'Leningrad SR-Narodnik Counterrevolutionary Organisation case', and other cases in the late 1920s and early 1930s. These were widely reported in the press, evidently to frighten scientists and engineers and ensure their loyalty to the regime.[362] Repression became more intense in the late 1930s, with the arrest of tens of thousands of scientists and engineers. Some important institutes were destroyed - the Ukrainian Institute of Physics and Technology in Khar'kov is a notable example.[363] The regime's faith in science was matched by suspicion of scientists; its support of science was counterbalanced by repression of the scientific community. The epitome of this paradox was the sharashka, the prison laboratory in which scientists and engineers, who had been arrested for crimes against the state, developed technologies for defending the state.[364]
Leading scientists welcomed the investment in science and the prominence given to science in official propaganda, but they were unhappy with the bureaucratic and political controls on the scientific community.[365] Many were of course horrified by the brutality of the regime, and some wrote letters to the authorities to seek the release of colleagues who had been arrested.[366]There were those like Landau who regarded the Stalin regime as no better than fascism, but others thought that the repressive character of Soviet rule would be temporary. Vernadskii, for example, saw in the growth of science a cause for hope in the longer term.[367]
The priority given to science inspired admiration abroad. A Soviet delegation including Bukharin and Ioffe attended a conference on the history of science in London in 1931. The papers they presented, which analysed the development of science in its social context, inspired a group of left-wing British scientists to develop influential ideas about science and its social functions.[368]In the following year, Modest Rubenstein, a member of the delegation to the London conference, described in a pamphlet for foreign readers how science and technology would flourish under socialism. The Soviet Union, he wrote, was the first experiment in which 'a genuinely scientific theory' was being applied to the construction and control of social and economic life, as well as to the management of science and technology.[369]
The Second World War and the post-war years, 1941-53
Soviet scientists responded to the German invasion by putting themselves and their knowledge at the service of the state. Many volunteered for service in the Moscow and Leningrad militias, which suffered terrible losses in the early months of the war. Research institutes in Moscow and Leningrad were evacuated to the east, where scientists contributed to the war effort by working to improve arms and equipment as well as production processes.[370] The development of new military technologies did not have high priority until victory was in sight and it was clear just how much progress other countries had made.
Pre-war research on radar and rocketry had been interrupted by the purges. Radar development was resumed during the war, and rocket development at the end of the war.[371] In the spring of 1945 the Soviet Union sent teams of scientists and engineers to Germany to begin the systematic exploitation of German science and technology.[372] Soviet physicists had done pioneering work on nuclear chain reactions, but the German invasion brought that research to an end. Stalin initiated a small nuclear project in September 1942, but it was only on 20 August 1945, two weeks after the bombing of Hiroshima, that he signed a decree converting this project into a crash programme. Special organisations were set up to manage the atomic project, as well as radar and rocket development. New institutions of higher education were established to train the scientists and engineers needed for these programmes.[373]
Stalin more than once expressed the view that another world war was to be expected in fifteen, twenty, or thirty years. The advanced weapons programmes were intended to prepare the country for what he referred to as 'all contingencies'.[374] He promised to give I. V Kurchatov, scientific director of the nuclear project, 'the broadest all-round help'. He told him that he would improve scientists' living conditions and provide prizes for major achieve- ments.[375] 'I do not doubt', he said in February 1946, 'that if we render the proper help to our scientists they will be able not only to catch up, but also to overtake in the near future the achievements of science beyond the borders of our country.'[376]
On 29 August 1949 the Soviet Union tested an atomic bomb, a copy of the first American plutonium design, which Klaus Fuchs had given to Soviet intelligence. In August 1953 it detonated a thermonuclear weapon and two years later, in November 1955, a two-stage thermonuclear design; these were independent Soviet designs.[377] The rocket programme was similarly successful. Building on German technology, Soviet engineers developed generations of rockets with steadily increasing ranges. In August 1957 they carried out the first successful flight test in the world of an intercontinental ballistic missile, and in October they used the same rocket to launch Sputnik.[378] Even with the help of espionage and German technology, these were impressive achievements in science and engineering.
In June 1945 over a hundred foreign scientists tookpart in a special celebration by the Academy of Sciences to mark its 220th anniversary. At a reception in the Kremlin attended by Stalin, Molotov made a short speech promising the 'most favourable conditions' for the development of science and technology and for 'closer ties of Soviet science with world science'.[379] The latter promise was soon broken. In May 1947 Stalin told the writer Konstantin Simonov: 'the scientific intelligentsia, professors, physicians . . . have an unjustified admiration for foreign culture.'[380] He started a campaign against subservience to the West: foreign contacts were curtailed; science journals stopped reporting on research done abroad and were no longer published in foreign languages. In the summer of 1947 two medical researchers were severely criticised for conveying to American scientists the results of their work on the treatment of cancer.[381]
Lysenko's fortunes had declined during the war, and in the early post-war years the Science Department ofthe Central Committee supported the geneticists against him. On 10 April 1948, Iurii Zhdanov, newly appointed head of the Science Department and son of Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov, gave a lecture criticising Lysenko's views on evolutionary biology and genetics. Stalin intervened to support Lysenko, telling Zhdanov that the Central Committee could not agree with his position. When Zhdanov replied that the lecture reflected only his personal point of view, Stalin responded: 'the Central Committee can have its own position on questions of science.' 'We in the Party do not have personal views and personal points of view,' he said.[382] The Politburo instructed the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences to organise a meeting on biology, and this took place from 31 July to 7 August 1948. Lysenko gave the main report. Some of his opponents were allowed to speak, but the meeting was stacked against them. Stalin had edited Lysenko's report and had made substantial changes to it. On the last day of the meeting Lysenko invoked the highest authority in Soviet science when he told his audience, 'the Central Committee of the Party has examined my report and approved it'.[383] The August session marked his complete triumph, with damaging consequences for teaching and research in biology.[384]
Preparations soon began for a conference on physics, a sequel to the 1936 meeting. The organising committee met forty-two times between 30 December 1948 and 16 March 1949. The discussions were sharp and bitter, with divisions not only between physicists and philosophers but also between different groups of physicists at the Academy of Sciences and at Moscow University.[385]The draft resolution called for a 'struggle against kowtowing and grovelling before the West' and criticised individual physicists such as Ioffe, Kapitsa and Landau. What effect such a resolution would have had on physics is not clear, for it did not attack quantum mechanics and relativity theory directly in the way that Lysenko had condemned genetics. In the event, the physicists were reprieved. The meeting was cancelled in the middle of March, some days before it was due to start.[386]
It appears that leading physicists in the atomic project warned Beria and Stalin that a conference would interfere with the development of nuclear weapons.[387] A similar logic was used by a group of nuclear physicists who wrote to Beria in 1952 to complain about philosophers who 'without taking the trouble to study the elementary bases of physics' try to refute 'the most important achievements of modern physics'.[388] They went on to claim that the philosophers' activities might interfere with the nuclear project.[389] In neither case - I949 or I952 - did the party make a definitive ruling in favour of the physicists. The possibility of a conference on physics was held in reserve.
Further discussions took place in the early 1950s, in linguistics, physiology and political economy, and Stalin was deeply involved in each of them.[390] He published his thoughts on linguistics and political economy.[391] He gave Iurii Zhdanov conspiratorial advice on the conference on physiology, telling him to organise the supporters of Pavlov on the quiet, and only then to convene the conference at which 'general battle' could be waged against Pavlov's opponents.[392] But Stalin's interventions raised a fundamental problem: if the Central Committee could have its own position on scientific questions and could adjudicate the truth or falsity of scientific theories, how was it to decide what the correct position was, which theories were true and which false? 'It is generally recognized', Stalin wrote in his commentary on linguistics, 'that no science can develop and flourish without a battle of opinions, without freedom of criticism.'[393] Stalinist discussions, however, were usually initiated in order to destroy, or to reinforce, a particular school or monopoly (Marrist linguistics, Michurinist biology, Pavlovian physiology), and that presupposed that the Central Committee had already decided what it wanted the outcome to be.
In his pamphlet on linguistics, Stalin reasserted Marxism's scientific status. 'Marxism', he wrote, 'is the science ofthe laws governing the development of nature andsociety ... the science ofbuilding communist society' (emphasis added). As a science,' he wrote, 'Marxism cannot stand still; it develops and is perfected.' It did not 'recognize invariable conclusions and formulas, obligatory for all epochs and periods. Marxism is the enemy of all dogmatism.'[394] This suggests that he did not regard Marxism as a fixed point on which the Central Committee could base 'its own position on questions of science'. In his comments on Lysenko's I948 report, he had rejected the idea that socialist natural science was necessarily different from bourgeois natural science.[395] But if Marxism did not provide a key, and scientific monopolies could stifle the truth, how was the Central Committee to make its judgements? It is tempting to see Stalin, in his last writings, struggling with a problem that he himself had created: how could the Central Committee use effectively the authority it claimed on questions of science, without destroying the science on which the power of the state was coming increasingly to depend?
De-Stalinisation and science 1953-68
Encouraged by success in nuclear weapons development and space flight, the post-Stalin leaders placed great hopes in science and technology. Investment in science grew very rapidly in the fifteen years after Stalin's death, and the number of 'scientific workers' rose from 192,000 in 1953 to 822,000 in 1968. New science cities such as Akademgorodoknear Novosibirsk and Zelenograd near Moscow were founded in the expectation that research would flourish there. Boris Slutskii caught the mood of the time in his 1959 poem 'Physicists and Lyric Poets': 'Physicists it seems are honoured, lyric poets are in the shade', the poem begins. There is no point in disputing this, writes Slutskii; greatness is now to be found not in the poet's rhymes, but in logarithms.[396]
The Soviet Union nevertheless lagged behind the West. Kapitsa had written to Stalin in July 1952 to lament the poor condition of Soviet science, and he was not alone in his concern.[397] The tendency towards technological stagnation in the economy was also a source of anxiety.[398] After Stalin's death, the government convened several meetings of engineers, plant directors and scientists to discuss the introduction of new technologies into industrial production. It then established the State Committee for New Technology and created the position of Deputy Minister for New Technology in the industrial ministries.[399]This was the first of a series of administrative reforms designed to stimulate technological progress.
In his letter to Stalin Kapitsa had deplored the way in which science was subordinated to practical needs. It was essential to support fundamental research, he argued, because scientific discoveries could give rise to new technologies; radar, television, jet propulsion and atomic energy were among the examples he mentioned. Kapitsa was challenging the orthodox view that it was the technological needs of society, rather than the internal logic of science, that stimulated scientific progress. Eventually the official position changed, and the 1961 party programme declared that 'science will itself in full measure become a direct productive force'.[400] In the reforms of the Academy of Sciences between 1959 and 1963, a number of technical institutes were moved from the Academy to the appropriate industrial ministries, thus reversing the thrust of the Academy's reform in the late 1920s.[401]
Economic growth was coming to depend more on new technology and higher labour productivity than on the addition of new workers to the labour force. Barriers to technological innovation were, however, deeply embedded in the institutional structure of the economy.[402] First, there was a serious lack of development facilities, because the government had invested heavily in research and production but had neglected engineering development, a crucial phase in the transfer of research into production. Second, factories were reluctant to introduce new products or new processes, because innovation would interfere with their ability to meet plan targets. Third, administrative barriers existed between the R&D system and industrial production, and there were different agencies responsible for R&D, with a resulting lack of policy co-ordination. Khrushchev carried out various administrative reforms, but these did little to improve the situation.[403] Military R&D performed more successfully, not because the defence sector operated according to some ideal of central planning, but because the political leadership devoted considerable resources and effort to overcoming the barriers to innovation that existed elsewhere in the economy.[404]
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]
Technocratic ideas appear to have been more widespread in the scientific community than liberal ideas, but the two approaches rested on a set of shared assumptions. They embodied the belief that politics ought to be, in some sense, scientific, and that the scientific-technical revolution presented new challenges that called for new responses. They reflected the conviction that change was necessary and the hope that it might be possible. There were doubtless many scientists - perhaps the great majority - who did not share these assumptions, either because they were not interested in politics or because they did not want change or were sceptical of its possibility. But some scientists believed that, having regained intellectual freedom in the natural sciences, they could seek change in the wider system. This optimism sprang in part from faith in science and technology, in part from the hope that de-Stalinisation would lead to economic and political reform. When signs appeared that Stalin might be rehabilitated at the Twenty-Third Party Congress in i966, leading scientists wrote to the Central Committee to oppose such a move.[413] Some scientists signed collective letters of protest at the repression of civil rights.[414] Civic engagement of this kind was, for many, a continuation of the struggle for intellectual freedom in the natural sciences.
The post-Stalin years were the period of greatest optimism about science as a force for change, but in 1968 these hopes were dashed.[415] Alarmed by growing political activism among scientists, the party took steps to make it clear that the intellectual freedom that existed in the natural sciences did not extend to politics. M. V Keldysh, president of the Academy of Sciences, warned dissident scientists not to believe that their status as scientists would protect them. 'These individuals ... must remember that it is not they who define our science,' he said. 'The development of science will proceed in any event.'[416] This warning foreshadowed the crushing of the Czechoslovak reform movement in August. That was a huge blow to hopes of reform in the Soviet Union itself because it showed how fearful the regime was of democratic change.[417]
In a speech to the Central Committee in December 1969, Brezhnev made it clear that technocratic proposals for reform should not encroach on the party's prerogatives. In an obvious reference to cybernetics, he said that 'systems of information and control created by specialists' were only auxiliary means for solving administrative tasks. Policy-making was the prerogative of the party and the state. 'Problems of management are in the first instance political, not technical, problems,' he said.[418] The party leadership made clear its opposition to the idea that politics could be made more scientific by either democratic or technocratic reform.
Disenchantment, 1968-91
By the end of the 1960s the Soviet Union had the largest R&D effort in the world, employing about two million people, of whom almost half had higher degrees. The USSR Academy of Sciences had grown into a huge complex, employing 30,000 scientists and researchers. Each union republic, apart from the Russian Federation, had its own Academy of Sciences, most of them estab- lishedinthe 1940s and 1950s, although the Ukrainian and Belorussian academies were older.[419] The universities, which were primarily devoted to teaching, had institutes and laboratories too. The largest element in the R&D effort was the network of institutes and laboratories attached to the industrial ministries and enterprises; most of these worked on military technology. Across the country there were over fifty science cities including ten nuclear cities. Many of these, including all the nuclear cities, were 'closed' and did not appear on Soviet maps.[420]
In some branches of science, most notably in mathematics and physics, Soviet scientists occupied a leading position in the world.[421] But the Soviet Union lagged in technology and, far from closing the technology gap, it was falling further behind in important areas such as computers and electronics.[422]The Brezhnev leadership imported foreign technology and created 'science- production associations' to stimulate technological innovation at home, but these measures did not yield appreciable results.[423] It had been possible in the 1930s to explain Soviet technological backwardness by reference to the backwardness of tsarist Russia; and in the 1950s and 1960s the destruction caused by the Second World War offered an explanation for the continuing lag. These explanations became less plausible with the passage oftime. It was increasingly clear that technological progress required more than the cautious reforms adopted under Brezhnev.
Military power was the one area in which the Soviet Union achieved its goal of catching up with, and perhaps even overtaking, the advanced capitalist countries. It attained strategic parity with the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s and continued to develop and deploy new and more advanced strategic weapons systems.117 The Brezhnev leadership was reluctant to interfere with an economic system that had made it possible to secure what it regarded as an achievement of historic significance. But even in military technology the Soviet Union became concerned about its capacity to compete with the United States. The American strategy of exploiting new electronic technologies for defence worried the General Staff.118 Ronald Reagan's 1983 Strategic Defense Initiative was also a challenge. Most Soviet specialists understood that, even if the United States deployed a ballistic missile defence system, the Soviet Union would be able to retain its deterrent capability by developing counter- measures. Nevertheless, the American initiatives faced the Soviet Union with the prospect of a new round of intense technological competition.119
The party intensified its campaign against dissident scientists after 1968. Regulations were introduced to allow dissertations to be rejected, and higher degrees withdrawn, on grounds of'anti-patriotic and anti-moral behaviour'.120 A fierce campaign was launched against Andrei Sakharov, who was nevertheless allowed to live in Moscow until 1980 when he was exiled to Gor'kii.121 The idea of appealing to science as the inspiration for liberal or technocratic reform now seemed hopeless. Much of the technocratic rhetoric remained, but it was so wrapped up in Marxist-Leninist language that it lost the reformist edge it had had before 1968.122
The idea of science as a progressive force was still to be found in dissident writings of the 1970s, but a less optimistic note could be found there too.
117 David Holloway, The Soviet Union and the Arms Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 43-64.
118 Marshal N. V Ogarkov, Chief of the General Staff,'Zashchita sotsializma: opyt istorii i sovremennost', Krasnaia zvezda, 9 May 1984.
119 Archie Brown, The Gorbachev Factor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 226-32.
120 Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited, pp. 264-304; Zhores A. Medvedev, Soviet Science (New York: W W Norton, 1978), pp. 162-96; the quotation is from p. 173.
121 Sakharov, Vospominaniia, pp. 528-38.
122 Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak, pp. 288-9.
Slanderer (Klevetnik), a character in Aleksandr Zinoviev's satirical novel The Yawning Heights (Ziiaiushchie vysoty), expresses the view that when 'one places one's hopes on the civilising role of science, one commits the gravest error'.[424]That is because science as an activity devoted to the pursuit of truth is subordinate to science as a social system. Slanderer declares that careerism has created a 'moral and psychological atmosphere in science which has nothing in common with those idyllic pictures one can find in the most critical and damning novels and memoirs devoted to the science of the past'.[425] The emigre science journalist Mark Popovsky painted a similar picture.[426] Far from exercising a civilising influence on Soviet society, science had come to embody the worst features of Soviet life: it was dominated by an overpowering bureaucratic apparatus; careerism, patronage and corruption were rife; there was a cynical disregard of ethics and morality; military and security considerations had first priority; the scientific community was riven by national antagonisms, and enmeshed in secrecy. In this disillusioned and perhaps jaundiced view, science could not serve as the model for a free or a moral society.
Early in the 1980s the party leadership decided, after years of putting off the idea, to devote a Central Committee plenary session to the scientific- technical revolution. Preparations began in earnest in the summer of 1984, but the plenum was cancelled.[427] Gorbachev, who had been deeply involved in these preparations, was persuaded of the urgency of the problem. Three months after becoming General Secretary, he told a conference on science and technology: 'an acceleration of scientific-technical progress insistently demands a profound perestroika of the system of planning and management, of the entire economic mechanism.'[428] He made it clear that he thought the transition to technology-intensive economic growth should have taken place fifteen years earlier.[429] Subsequent history showed, however, that he himself did not have an effective strategy for making that transition.
The nuclear accident at Chernobyl' on 26 April 1986, dramatised the Soviet Union's technological failings. In the worst nuclear accident ever, explosions at the nuclear power plant released millions of curies of radioactive particles into the atmosphere.[430] Secrecy and cover-up were the instinctive reaction of the Soviet authorities. It was only after sixty-eight hours - and prodding by the Swedish government - that they issued their first official statement. Once satellite pictures of the burning reactor appeared on television screens around the world, they could not deny that the accident had taken place. Glasnost' extended not only to the accident and its consequences, but to its causes as well. It was clear that poor reactor design and human error on the part of the plant operators were part of the picture. But the accident also resulted from the modus operandi of the Soviet bureaucracy, with its insistence on targets, pressure to meet those targets, neglect of safety considerations, secrecy and immunity from public opinion.
Only glasnost' would help to remedy the situation.[431] The Soviet press began to publish stories about past accidents. Environmental movements, often linked to nationalist sentiment in the republics, sprang up to oppose the building of new nuclear power plants and to draw attention to environmental damage caused by Soviet policies.[432] It became clear that, in its drive for modernity, the Soviet Union, which ruled one-sixth of the earth's surface, had imposed enormous costs not only on its people, but on its land, air and water too.[433] Chernobyl' - and the glasnost' it stimulated - delivered the coup degrace to the regime's claim that, guided by a scientific theory, it was creating a society in which science and technology would flourish for the benefit of the people.
Science in post-Soviet Russia, 1991-2000
Science in Russia entered what some scientists regard as its most serious crisis in the twentieth century when the Soviet Union collapsed.[434] The depth of the crisis is testimony both to the support that the Soviet Union had given to science and, notwithstanding the failings that critics pointed to in the 1970s and 1980s, to the quality of Soviet science. There was a threefold drop in total expenditure on civilian science in the 1990s, and this was compounded by the removal of price controls, which resulted in sharp increases in the cost of equipment, electricity and other services. The post-Soviet government made a sharp and sudden reduction in defence expenditure in 1992, with a corresponding cut in military R&D.[435]
One indicator of the depth of the crisis was the number of scientists who emigrated or quit science in order to pursue other careers in Russia. According to the Russian Ministry of Science, about 2,000 researchers a year left Russia between 1991 and 1996; after that, the outflow fell to under 1,500 a year. These are conservative figures, however; other estimates suggest that more than 30,000 scientists emigrated in this period. The internal brain drain is even more difficult to estimate, because many researchers remained formally on the staff of research institutes even while devoting themselves to non-scientific activities such as business. It appears that the internal brain drain was far greater than the number of scientists who emigrated.[436]
The international community did not want to see the Russian scientific community destroyed; it especially feared that knowledge of advanced weapons technologies would find its way to states hostile to the West. International organisations and foreign governments took steps to provide assistance to Russian scientists. The financier George Soros set up the International Science Foundation, which over the years 1993-6 granted about $130 million to support basic research in the natural sciences. Learned societies and philanthropic foundations gave significant help. The United States, Japan and the European Union established the International Science and Technology Centre in order to fund civilian projects by scientists who had been engaged in weapons research. By one Russian estimate, about half of Russian basic science was being funded from foreign sources in 1995.136
During the twentieth century the scientific community had shown remarkable resilience, and it was called upon to do so again at the century's end. The Academy of Sciences once again displayed considerable powers of survival. No radical reform of scientific institutions took place. Change was evolutionary: co-operation between the Academy of Sciences and the universities began to grow; the government set up a fund to support basic research; collaboration with foreign scientists increased. By the very end of the century there were signs that the situation had stabilised. It was still unclear, however, what shape Russian science would take. Would the universities and the Academy work more closely together? Would the universities become more important centres of research? Was a thoroughgoing reform of science and education needed? Would a capitalist Russia be more successful at commercialising science than the Soviet Union was? Would Russian industry develop advanced civilian technologies? Would the scientific community, which found itself on the sidelines in the 1990s, find a secure position in Russian society?
Conclusion
Less than six months after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Vaclav Havel claimed that the end of Communism signified the end not only of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but also of 'the modern world as a whole'. The modern era, he wrote, had been dominated by the belief that 'the world ... is a wholly knowable system governed by a finite number of universal laws that man can grasp and rationally direct for his own benefit'.[437] Havel presented the Soviet experience as the perverse extreme of scientific rationalism.
The Soviet Union did indeed appear to many people to offer a vision of modernity that was more attractive than Western capitalism, especially in the 1920s and 1930s when capitalism was in deep crisis, and the commitment to science and the claim to be guided by a scientific theory were important elements in that vision. Optimism about science was high again in the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when successes in space dramatised the possibilities of scientific-technical progress and de-Stalinisation offered the prospect of political change. These hopes were not realised, however. From the late 1960s on, it became increasingly clear that central planningwas not effective at generating technological progress, that the party leadership feared reform and that the state had pursued industrial development with little regard to the consequences for public health or for the environment. The Soviet system began to lose legitimacy at home and abroad. This shook the self-confidence of the political leadership and prompted the attempts at radical reform in the late 1980s.
Andrei Sakharov proposed an alternative approach to politics, derived from his conception of science. The state, in this model, would be guided in its policies by a public opinion formed in the process of reasoned debate and discussion. 'Progress is possible and innocuous only when it is subject to the control of reason,' he wrote in his 1975 Nobel Peace Prize lecture.138 A reasoned approach to the great challenges of the scientific-technical revolution, such as nuclear weapons and environmental change, would be possible only if human rights were guaranteed. Only then would society be able to engage in the process of debate and discussion that would ensure that decisions were grounded in reason. Sakharov's views can be read as a commentary on the Soviet experience of harnessing science to politics: debate and discussion were extremely restricted in the Soviet Union, with harmful consequences for science and for society. Sakharov's views can be taken also as a rejoinder to Havel's equation of modernity with the Soviet experience, by suggesting an alternative vision of the application of reason to human affairs.
138 Andrei Sakharov, 'Peace, Progress, and Human Rights', in Andrei D. Sakharov, Alarm and Hope (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), p. 9.
83 Nauchnye kadry SSSR: dinamika i struktura (Moscow: Mysl', 1991), p. 40.
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