MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, AND SOCIETY PROGRAM

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STS.095 Russian Science, Society, and Culture

Vladimir Tatlin, Model for the 3rd International Tower, 1919-1920 (never built)

Spring 1999

Course syllabus

Lecturer Vyacheslav Gerovitch

e-mail: slava@mit.edu

This course examines several key episodes in the cultural history of Russian science from the time of Peter the Great to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia has adopted many forms of organization of science -- the Academy, universities, research institutes -- from Western Europe. Did science nevertheless develop differently in a specifically Russian sociopolitical and cultural context? Topics include the early attempts to implant Western science on the Russian soil in the eighteenth century, the radical political interpretation of current neurophysiological theories in the nihilist movement in the 1860s, the cultural adaptation of Darwinism in the late nineteenth century, the attempts to construct a distinct "proletarian science" in the early Soviet period, the Cultural Revolution, the games and rituals of Stalinist science, the controversies over quantum physics, genetics, and cybernetics, the roots of Soviet successes in the atomic project and the space program, informal networks and political dissent in the Soviet academic community. Readings include works by political, intellectual, and cultural historians, as well as primary documents, scientists' memoirs, and scientists' portraits in literature and science fiction. All readings are in English; supplementary readings in Russian, however, can be provided.

Requirements

Every week, each student should submit a one-page informal "reaction paper" on the week's readings; this paper should present the student's reaction to the most interesting points in the readings and suggest questions for discussion. Each student is also required to give one or two oral presentations during the term. At the last session, each student should submit a 10-15-page research paper or a Web publishing project on a topic chosen by the student in consultation with the instructor. There will be no midterm or final exam. Final grades will be calculated as follows: attendance and class participation (20%), reaction papers (30%), oral presentation(s) (20%), and the final paper (30%).

Required books (available at the Coop and on Reserve):

• Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1992).
• Loren Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History (Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Recommended books (available at the Coop and on Reserve):

• David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994).
• Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
• Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

Recommended Books (on Reserve):

• Aleksandr Bogdanov, Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
• Roald Z. Sagdeev, The Making of a Soviet Scientist: My Adventures in Nuclear Fusion and Space from Stalin to Star Wars (New York: Wiley, 1994).
• Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990).
• Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996).
• Alexander Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge: The Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1917-1970) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
• Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, 2 vols. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1963-1970).

Week 1. The Foundation and Russification of the Academy of Sciences

• Loren Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union, chapter 1, "Russian Science Before 1800."
• The Memoirs of Princess Dashkova, trans. and ed. Kyril Fitzlyon (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 1-26, 198-217, 241-47.
• Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, vol. I: History to 1860, chapters 2-4.
• Recommended:
• Marc Raeff, ed., Catherine the Great: A Profile (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972).
• Marc Raeff, ed., Peter the Great Changes Russia, 2nd ed. (Lexington, Mass.: D.C. Heath, 1972).
• Ludmilla Schulze, "The Russification of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Eighteenth Century," British Journal for the History of Science 18 (1985): 305-35.

Week 2. The Rise of Universities: Neurophysiology and Nihilism

• Loren Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union, chapter 2, "Science in Nineteenth-Century Russia."
• David Joravsky, Russian Psychology: A Critical History (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1989), excerpts.
• Ann Hibner Koblitz, "Science, Women and the Russian Intelligentsia: The Generation of 1860s," Isis 79 (1988): 208-26.
• Recommended:
• Ann Hibner Koblitz, A Convergence of Lives: Sofia Kovalevskaia: Scientist, Writer, Revolutionary (Boston: Birkhauser, 1983).
• Ivan Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996).
• Alexander Vucinich, Science in Russian Culture, vol. II: 1861-1917.

Week 3. The Controversy over Darwinism: Darwin without Malthus?

• Loren Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union, chapter 3, "Russian Intellectuals and Darwinism."
• Daniel Todes, "Darwin's Malthusian Metaphor and Russian Evolutionary Thought, 1859-1917," Isis 78 (1987): 537-51.
• Recommended:
• Alexander Vucinich, Darwin in Russian Thought (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1988).
• Daniel Alexandrov, "Nabokov the Naturalist," Configurations 1:3 (1993).

Week 4. The Russian Revolution and "Proletarian Science"

• Loren Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union, pp. 79-93, 173-81.
• Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, chapters 1-4.
• Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), chapters 1-3, 7-8.
• Recommended:
• Aleksandr Bogdanov, Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984).

Week 5. The Cultural Revolution and the "Bolshevization" of Science

• Loren Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union, pp. 93-98.
• Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, chapters 5-7.
• Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), chapters 11-12.
• Recommended:
• Loren Graham, The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party, 1927- 1932 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967).
• Paul Josephson, Physics and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991).

Week 6. Scientific and Cultural Orthodoxies under Stalin

• Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, chapter 8, "The Lady Macbeth Affair: Shostakovich and the Soviet Puritans," and chapter 10, "Cultural Orthodoxies Under Stalin."
• David Joravsky, Russian Psychology: A Critical History (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1989), excerpts.
• Recommended:
• Alexander Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge, chapter III, "The Forging of a Soviet Institution (1929-1940)."
• David Joravsky, "The Stalinist Mentality and the Higher Learning," Slavic Review 42 (1983): 575-600.

Week 7. The Lysenko Affair

• Loren Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union, chapter 6, "Stalinist Ideology and the Lysenko Affair."
• Kojevnikov, Alexei. "Rituals of Stalinist Culture at Work: Science and the Games of Intraparty Democracy circa 1948," The Russian Review 57 (January 1998): 25-52.
• Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), excerpts.
• Trofim Lysenko, The Situation in Biological Science: Address Delivered at the Session of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the U.S.S.R., July 31, 1948.
• Recommended:
• Raisa Berg, Acquired Traits: Memoirs of a Geneticist from the Soviet Union (New York: Viking, 1988).
• Daniil Granin, The Bison: A Novel about the Scientist Who Defied Stalin (New York: Doubleday, 1990).
• David Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970).

Week 8. Knowledge and Power: Negotiating Authority in Soviet Science

• J.W. Boag et al., eds., Kapitza in Cambridge and Moscow: Life and Letters of a Russian Physicist (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1990), excerpts.
• Alexei Kojevnikov, "Piotr Kapitza and Stalin's Government: A Study in Moral Choice," Historical Studies in Physical and Biological Studies 22 (1991): 131-64.
• Alexei Kojevnikov, "President of Stalin's Academy: The Mask and Responsibility of Sergei Vavilov," Isis 87:1 (March 1996): 18-50.
• Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), excerpts.
• Recommended:
• Daniel P. Todes, "Pavlov and the Bolsheviks," History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 17 (1995): 379-418.

Week 9. Science and Cold War: The Atomic Project

• David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), chapter 10, "The Atomic Bomb," and chapter 14, "The Hydrogen Bomb."
• Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness, a Soviet Spymaster (Boston, Mass.: Little and Brown, 1994), excerpts.
• David Holloway, "Charges of Espionage," Science 264 (1994): 1346-47.
• T. Powers, "Were the Atomic Scientists Spies?" New York Review of Books (9 June 1994): 10-17.
• Recommended:
• Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990).

Week 10. Science and Cold War: The Space Race

• Walter A. McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), excerpts.
• Ronald E. Doel, "Evaluating Soviet Lunar Science in Cold War America," Osiris 7 (1992): 238-64.
• James Harford, Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon (New York, John Wiley, 1997), excerpts.
• Recommended:
• Roald Z. Sagdeev, The Making of a Soviet Scientist: My Adventures in Nuclear Fusion and Space from Stalin to Star Wars (New York: Wiley, 1994).
• Ivan Yefremov, Andromeda: A Space-Age Tale, trans. George Hanna (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1980).

Week 11. The Institutional Culture of Soviet Science

• Thane Gustafson, "Why Doesn't Soviet Science Do Better Than It Does?" in Linda Lubrano and Susan Gross Solomon, eds., The Social Context of Soviet Science (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1980), pp. 31-68.
• Linda L. Lubrano, "The Hidden Structure of Soviet Science," Science, Technology, and Human Values 18 (Spring 1993): 147-75.
• Linda L. Lubrano, "Scientific Collectives: Behavior of Soviet Scientists in Basic Research," in Linda Lubrano and Susan Gross Solomon, eds., The Social Context of Soviet Science (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1980), pp. 101-36.
• Boris Strugatskii and Arkadii Strugatskii, Monday Begins on Saturday (New York: Daw Books, 1978).
• Recommended:
• Mark Adams, "Science, Ideology, and Structure: The Kol'tsov Institute, 1900-1970," in Linda Lubrano and Susan Gross Solomon, eds., The Social Context of Soviet Science (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1980), pp. 173-204.

Week 12. Scientists and Political Dissent

• Loren Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union, chapter 8, "Knowledge and Power."
• Andrei Amalrik, Will the Soviet Union Survive until 1984? (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), excerpts.
• Andrei Sakharov, Progress, Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom, trans. Harrison E. Salisbury (New York: Norton, 1968).
• Alexander Solzhenitsyn, ed., From Under the Rubble (Boston: Little and Brown, 1975), excerpts.
• Recommended:
• Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990).
• Vladimir Shlapentokh, Soviet Intellectuals and Political Power: The Post-Stalin Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990).
• Aleksandr Zinoviev, The Yawning Heights, trans. Gordon Clough (New York: Random House, 1979).

Week 13. Communications, Computers, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union

• Loren Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union, pp. 186-203.
• S. Frederick Starr, "New Communications Technologies and Civil Society," in Loren R. Graham, ed., Science and the Soviet Social Order (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 19-50.
• Seymour Goodman, "Information Technologies and the Citizen: Toward a 'Soviet-Style Information Society'?" in Loren R. Graham, ed., Science and the Soviet Social Order (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 51-67.
• Recommended:
• Paul R. Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited : Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1997).