Science in the service of a dictatorship

In the final chapter of “Stalin and the Scientists,” Simon Ings recalls how by the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union boasted twice as many scientists as the United States and Western Europe combined. Decades after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the ambitious dream of a truly scientific-atheist Soviet superstate had finally been achieved. At least in theory. As Ings shows, a great paradox lay at the heart of the Soviet state: While rapid scientific progress was needed on a mass scale to advance the cause of a utopian socialist nation, the Soviet regime didn’t want to grant the science community within Russia any intellectual freedom or autonomy, fearing that it might end up undermining the socalled science of Marxism.

The Bolsheviks regularly made public pronouncements on the importance of scientific matters for the advancement of world socialism, which Ings reproduces here in some detail. Leon Trotsky, founder of the Red Army and one of the leading intellectual voices of the revolution in its early days, prophesied in 1922, for instance, how “man will put forward a goal (to) raise himself to a new level to create a higher sociobiological type.” Six years later, the paranoid dictator and then-leader of the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin, declared that young people “must seize” the fortress of science “if they want to truly replace the old guard.”

And yet, as Ings explains, just as Stalin was publicly championing science in the name of the coming communist utopia and setting up a number of institutes and prizes, he was also arranging the sacking, imprisonment and murder of individual scientists who dared to question the official party line on Soviet science.

Ings details how top Russian scientists had to deny the works of Newton, Einstein, Mendel and others if they wanted to avoid arrest, the gulag or death.

In 1927, Trotsky, always more internationalist and cosmopolitan in outlook than Stalin, published “Culture and Socialism,” which strongly made the case for understanding the work of Sigmund Freud. But three years later, the Russian Psychoanalytic Society was disbanded, and Freud’s work ceased to be published in Russian. Trotsky eventually was murdered in Mexico on Stalin’s instructions.