Big Science in the Last Years of the Big Soviet Union

Big Science in the Last Years of the Big Soviet UnionAuthor(s): Loren R. GrahamSource: Osiris, 2nd Series, Vol. 7, Science after '40 (1992), pp. 49-71Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/301767 .Accessed: 13/10/2011 09:19

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Big Science in the Last Years of the

Big Soviet Union

By Loren R. Graham*

T O THE EYE OF THE FOREIGN OBSERVER, one of the first characteristics of the science establishment of the former Soviet Union was its bigness

and the high degree of government centralization.' Not only was the Soviet science and technology community the largest in the world, but it was organized in distinctly different ways from those in other countries. The relative roles of the academies of sciences, the universities, and the industrial research organizations were unusual when compared with those in other nations. Furthermore, Soviet science and technology were organized in larger units than commonly found elsewhere, and under the control of fewer influential individuals. To speak of "big science" in the Soviet Union is then, not only a reference to its size, but also to its forms of administration.

When one looks at these unusual characteristics of the organization of Soviet science, the following questions naturally arise: How did the Soviet science establishment come to be so large and monopolistic? How well did this unusual organizational structure work? What effects did this different organization have on Soviet efforts to cooperate with Western nations in science and technology? If the Soviet science system did not work well (as I will maintain), how aware of this fail- ing are the science administrators who have inherited it, and what plans do they have to change their system? Although answering these questions will require us to go back in time as far as the Russian revolutions of 1917, my examination will carry forward to recent times, concentrating on the post-1940 period, as have other authors in this special issue of Osiris. Indeed, the last portions of the article will focus on reforms of the science establishment under Mikhail Gorbachev, viewing those reforms as attempted correctives to the weaknesses inherent in the earlier organization of Soviet research. In the conclusion, an attempt is made to answer the question, What can we learn from the history of Soviet science that is relevant to other nations?2

* Program in Science, Technology, and Society, E51-128, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139.

' This article describes Soviet science up until early 1991. Since then communism has collapsed and the Soviet Union has broken up. The historical background still influences, however, the current debates over the future of science in Russia and the various republics.

2 Portions of this article draw upon my forthcoming book and several previous articles: Loren R. Graham, Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, forthcoming); Graham, "Soviet Union," in Framework for Interaction: Technical Structures in Selected Countries Outside the European Community, ed. Herbert I. Fusfeld (Rensselaer: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 1987), pp. II.D. 1-II.D.44; Graham, "The Development of Science Policy in the Soviet Union," in Science Policies of Industrialized Nations, ed. T. Dixon Long and Christopher

OSIRIS, 2nd series, 1992, 7: 49-71 49

50 LOREN R. GRAHAM

I. JUST HOW BIG WAS SOVIET SCIENCE?

At the beginning of 1991 the total number of people officially classified in the Soviet Union as scientific researchers and faculty was 1,520,000.3 Because of defi- nitional problems, this number cannot be directly compared to similar statistics in other countries, but there is general agreement among Western specialists that by the early 1980s the Soviet Union had 10 to 30 percent more scientists and engineers than the United States, depending on the definition of degrees and fields.4

These Soviet researchers were distributed in three gigantic pyramids, which for sake of convenience can be called the "university system," the "academy of sciences system," and the "industrial and defense ministry system." Table 1 gives a very approximate description of the organization and shares of research personnel and budgetary funds of each of the three pyramids.5

From the standpoint of American experience, the most familiar pyramid of the three is the university system. The Soviet Union, like the United States, had large universities, all supported by the state in the Soviet Union and the majority simi- larly supported in the United States. The superficial similarity of the two systems should not blind one, however, to the enormous differences. In the United States the universities are the home of most of the fundamental research conducted in the country. In the Soviet Union the universities traditionally had a much nar- rower pedagogical role, and the research conducted in them was often of an applied character.6

The system headed by the Academy of Sciences of the USSR was the most unusual in terms of American experience. The Soviet Academy of Sciences was the home of fundamental research. In the United States the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering are primarily honorific organizations; they issue reports periodically, to be sure, but they are not the locus for laboratory research nor the place of employment for active researchers. The So- viet Academy of Sciences, on the other hand, has been the place of employment of the most outstanding fundamental researchers in the country. They have spent their lives in its service, and their places of residence, travel and vacation privi- leges, and health and social services were traditionally controlled by it. No sur- prise that Alexander Vucinich has called it an "empire of knowledge."7

The industrial and defense ministerial system was by far the largest of the pyramids. It was primarily concerned with applied science, although it performed some fundamental work as well (just as the Academy of Sciences system per-

Wright (New York: Praeger, 1975); and Graham, ed., Science and the Soviet Social Order (Cambridge, Mass. Harvard Univ. Press, 1990), introduction.

3 Dmitry I. Piskunov, "Soviet Fundamental Science: State, Problems, and Perspectives of Develop- ment," unpublished manuscript (Moscow: Analytical Center for Problems of Socio-Economy and Science-Technology Development of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1991), p. 2.

4 Louvan Nolting and Murray Feshbach, "R and D Employment in the USSR," Science, 1980, 207:493-503.

5 Drawn in part from Piskunov, "Soviet Fundamental Science" (cit. n. 3), pp. 2-3. 6 See Mark Adams, "Research and the Russian University," in The Academic Research Enterprise

Within the Industrialized Nations: Comparative Perspectives: Report of a Symposium (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1990), pp. 51-65.

7 Alexander Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge: The Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1917-1970) (Berkeley/Los Angeles: Univ. California Press, 1984).

BIG SCIENCE IN THE LAST YEARS OF THE BIG SOVIET UNION 51

Table 1. Organization of Research Personnel in the Soviet Union, ca 1990.

Academy of Sciences Industrial and defense University system system system

State Committee of Higher Academy of Sciences of Industrial ministries; de- and Secondary Educa- USSR fense ministry tion of USSR

Union-republic ministries; Siberian Division of the committees of higher Academy in Novo- and secondary education sibirsk; other branches

and filials Higher educational institu- Academies of sciences of Industrial research insti-

tions (vysshie uchebnye union republics: 14 tutes (otraslevye zavedeniia): universities Academies of Agricultural instituty);t closed mili- and colleges, including Sciences; Medical Sci- tary ("postbox") research leading universities ences; Pedagogical institutes (Moscow, Leningrad): Sciences; Engineering 770 (new)

600,000 researchers* 125,000 800,000 7% of R&D budget 6.5% 87%

*Includes faculty members as well as researchers. tE.g., institutes of steam turbines, coal mining, electronics.

formed some applied work). One should note that most researchers in this system were not located in individual plants or "companies," but instead, like their colleagues in the academies of sciences, usually worked in centralized institutes in large cities. In the period of most intense growth of the Soviet scientific establishment (1 960-1972) the number of these institutes increased from 4,196 to 5,307.8 After 1972 the number of institutes remained approximately stable, but the existing institutes continued to grow in size. The average institute in 1991 had a staff of 270 researchers, but some of the most important had research staffs of several thousands. The directors of these institutes were traditionally very powerful, even autocratic, figures appointed from above, although, as we will see, under Gorbachev an attempt was made to introduce democratic elections of directors.

Soviet science was "big" in several different ways: large in numbers of researchers, highly centralized in organization, and dominated by powerful leaders. The system emphasized quantity over quality, seniority over creativity, military security over domestic welfare, and orthodoxy over freedom.

II. HOW DID SOVIET SCIENCE BECOME SO LARGE AND CENTRALIZED?

The Bolsheviks who took over Russia in 1917 were committed to the creation of a modern industrialized state and were enthusiastic about science and technology. Indeed, no group of governmental leaders in previous history ever placed science and technology in such a prominent place on their agenda. It is true that the more

8 Piskunov, "Soviet Fundamental Science" (cit. n. 3), p. 2.

52 LOREN R. GRAHAM

radical revolutionaries were suspicious of prerevolutionary scientists and engineers, seeing them as members of the despised bourgeoisie (an attitude that found violent expression later, especially when abetted by Stalin), but Lenin in the early years gave strong support to the technical specialists, and the Communist Party promised from the start the patronage of science on an unprecedented scale.

The goal of the new Soviet government was to create a uniquely Soviet system of science and industry, with new "Soviet" scientists and engineers and new forms of research organizations replacing those inherited from the previous regime. Al- though this campaign had many difficulties, on the whole it was successful in the sense that the government created a novel form of science and technology; on the other hand, many of the unique qualities that emerged were, we can now see, not positive. Nonetheless, much progress was made in science. In a period of sixty years the Soviet Union made the transition from being a nation of minor significance in international science to being a great scientific center. By the 1 960s Rus- sian was a more important scientific language in a number of fields than French or German, a dramatic change from a half-century earlier.

The dominant role of the government in science was inherited by Soviet Russia from its tsarist predecessor. When Russia emerged in the early eighteenth century as a state in the European system, it possessed no significant centers of scientific studies; the responsibility for the creation of such institutions, starting with the Academy of Sciences in 1725, fell upon the imperial government. In the next two hundred years, to the time of the Soviet reconstruction of the tsarist heritage, universities and industries grew in Russia, but the role of the central government remained paramount. The important scientists of prerevolutionary Russia received their salaries from the government, and the budgets of their institutions were sim- ilarly derived from the government.

At the very end of the empire, in the early twentieth century, a few important exceptions to the government's monopoly over the administration and support of research and development began to emerge, supported by industrialists and private philanthropists.9 Even a few private educational organizations appeared, such as the Shaniavskii University and the Moscow Women's University. The Ledentsov Society was a prerevolutionary private philanthropic organization that, allowed to develop freely, might well have become a foundation similar to those emerging in Western Europe and North America in the early twentieth century. The Moscow Scientific Research Institute Society, organized in 1914 by a group of biologists with business support, was devoted to the raising of private funding for research. One of its early ventures was the organization of an Institute of Experimental Biology headed by N. K. Kol'tsov, a very successful institution in the years immediately after the Revolution, albeit under different financial and administrative control than that envisioned by its founders.'0

9 The beginnings of private support of science and technology are discussed in M. S. Bastrakova, "Organizational Tendencies of Russian Science at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century" (in Rus- sian), in Organizatsiia nauchnoi deiatel'nosti (Organization of scientific activity), ed. E. A. Beliaev et al., (Moscow: Nauka, 1968), pp. 150-186.

10 The Institute of Experimental Biology was an important center in the pioneering development of population genetics. See Mark Adams, "Science, Ideology, and Structure: The Kol'tsov Institute, 1900- 1970," in The Social Context of Soviet Science, ed. Linda L. Lubrano and Susan Gross Solomon (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1980), pp. 173-204; and Adams, "The Founding of Population Genetics: Contribu- tions of the Chetverikov School, 1924-1934," Journal of the History of Biology, 1968, 1:23-39.


Private efforts to support research were cut off soon after the Revolution. The tradition of state control, still strong even at the very end of the tsarist period, passed intact to the new Soviet government in 1917 and characterized Soviet science and technology up to the recent breakup. The elimination of the embryonic private initiatives in science that had begun just before the Revolution was a part of the Soviet centralization of the research establishment, a trend then carried to extreme lengths. While the Soviet government in the 1920s and the 1930s supported science and technology on a scale not matched by that of any other government in the world, and thereby gave research a tremendous boost, at the same time it reduced diversity and hindered initiative by creating a system in which all research organizations were parts of huge state bureaucracies.

For a long time the nongovernmental groups in science that emerged just before the Russian Revolution, only to be eliminated after it, were known only to historians-and to few of them. Under Gorbachev, however, reformers in science have displayed new interest in those abortive efforts of long ago and have asked the questions, Were Russian science and technology beginning to move in decentralized and pluralistic directions just before 1917? If these developments had continued, would Russian science and technology today be more similar in their organizational forms and administrative practices to science and technology in Western Europe and North America?" I Since many of the new reformers believe that the Soviet Union made a historic mistake in adopting uniquely Soviet institutions for science, these questions have more than academic interest. But to try to answer them now would sidetrack us from our main story and analysis. First, we must understand how Soviet science administrators of the 1920s were con- vinced that the models for research organization that they adopted would be much more effective than those existing in other countries.

The organizational structure of science and technology created by early Soviet administrators and planners was based both on what they inherited from the tsarist regime and on their vision of a socialist economy different from and, in their opinion, superior to the capitalist economies of the West. The flaws of Western science and technology, they thought, included wasteful duplication of research as a result of competition among secretive capitalist industries, pursuit of profit to the detriment of public benefit, lack of centralized planning, and inadequate financial support from the government.'2

Perhaps the most permanent reform of science which the Soviet government enacted in the 1920s was the creation of a system of research organizationally based on institutes.'3 There are, of course, research institutes in all scientific nations today, and there were quite a few even in the 1 920s; one might doubt, therefore, that the Soviet idea of a research institute is in any way extraordinary. To a Western scientist who has spent considerable time in the Soviet Union, however,

" D. A. Aleksandrov and N. L. Krementsov, "An Experimental Guide to an Unknown Land: A Pre- liminary Outline of a Social History of Soviet Science from 1917 to the 1 950s" (in Russian), Voprosy Istorii Estestvoznaniia i Tekhniki, 1989, No. 4, pp. 667-680.

12 See, e.g., N. Finkel', "Capitalism and Research Work" (in Russian), Molodoi Bol'shevik, 1931, No. 14/15, pp. 22-30.

13 Loren R. Graham, "The Formation of Soviet Research Institutes: A Combination of Revolution- ary Innovation and International Borrowing," in Russian and Slavic History, ed. Don K. Rowney and G. Edward Orchard (Columbus, Ohio: Slavica, 1977), pp. 49-75.

54 LOREN R. GRAHAM

it will be obvious that the term "scientific-research institute" (nauchno- issledovatel'skii institut) had a stature and a meaning in the Soviet Union-and still has in Russia-that it does not have in any Western country. Almost all outstanding scientists and engineers in the Soviet Union in 1991 were members of an institute or had connections with one. (The main exception was university scientists, but faculty members without institute connections played a remarkably small role in Soviet research). Of the several thousand research institutes in the Soviet Union the majority fell under the jurisdiction of the industrial ministries. The most prestigious were under the Academy of Sciences, usually in the basic sciences. In the entire academy system (including the republic academies) there were-and still are-about six hundred institutes. Certain streets in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Novosibirsk, and Kiev are lined on both sides with institutes. In Moscow alone, in the area of the city south of October Square and extending to Moscow University and beyond, are dozens of research institutes. This geograph- ical region probably contains more scientific researchers than any other area of comparable size in the world.

The Soviet planners in the 1 920s adopted the institute system as the basic organizational form for research for several reasons. First of all, they believed that they were anticipating Western trends, especially as evidenced in Germany, where the new institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft provided a model. S. F. Ol'denburg, the permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences, maintained in 1926 that "if the eighteenth century was the century of academies, while the nineteenth century was the century of universities, then the twentieth century is becoming the century of research institutes."' 4

Second, by placing the most advanced research in institutes rather than in the universities the early Soviet planners solved a political problem. Almost all of the best scientists in the Soviet Union in the 1 920s had been educated before the Rev- olution and were, at least in the minds of the leaders of the Communist Party, of dubious political loyalty. If these talented but untrustworthy scientists were placed in institutes separate from the universities, they could continue their high- level research without infecting undergraduates with their unorthodox political ideas. The universities, on the other hand, would be converted into mass institutions where the instructors were carefully watched and the spirit of socialism was nurtured. If the quality of science in the universities suffered as a result, the loss would be tolerable. The best science would be done elsewhere, in the institutes.

The fact that the early planners and administrators of Soviet science and technology extended the system of centralized research institutes to industrial technology as well as fundamental science is important for understanding the later strengths and weaknesses of Soviet research.'5 The early industrial managers believed that Western technology was hampered by competition among capitalist companies that concealed their research results from their rivals. In the United

14 S. F O1'denburg, "Impressions of Scientific Life in Germany, France, and England" (in Russian), Nauchnyi Rabotnik, 1927, No. 2, p. 89. See also Paul R. Josephson, "The loffe Physico-Technical Institute and the Birth of Soviet Physics" (Ph.D. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1986).

'5 As Paul Josephson has pointed out, early Soviet science policy was a case of "centralization in as- piration" but "dispersion in fact." See his "Science Policy in the Soviet Union, 1917-1927," Minerva, 1988, 26:342-369.


States, for example, Soviet critics castigated the "wasteful" competition in research on topics like synthetic fibers of the laboratories of Dow, Du Pont, Monsanto, and Union Carbide; these critics cited the "superior" example of the Soviet Union, where one centralized synthetic-fiber research institute in a large city would, they thought, make its results available to the entire Soviet chemical industry. 16

This desire to have large centralized research institutes located in capital cities rather than on plant sites coincided with the general Marxist penchant for centralized planning that was so strong in the early decades of Soviet history. Many years later it would become clear that this prejudice for centralization harmed So- viet industrial research by creating unwieldy bureaucracies and distancing research and industry from each other. Even in the 1920s, when the system was being created, a few Soviet administrators worried about this possibility. Iu. L. Piatakov, for example, proposed in 1925 that research institutes be attached directly to industrial enterprises.'7 This suggestion was sharply opposed by the leading Bolshevik F E. Dzerzhinskii, a police official and also an industrial ad- ministrator. Dzerzhinskii maintained:

In the attaching of institutes to factories or trusts I see a great danger, since this would mean the restricting of the scale of these institutes and their intellectual achievements.... It seems to me that these institutes must be independent .. . because their goals and inter- ests must not be tied to those of trusts and factories (but) ... must be connected to those of the whole country. Perhaps science will show that we need to abolish a whole series of trusts. This requires the independence of institutes from factories.18

In this statement we see both Dzerzhinskii's belief in the superiority of planning from above and also his suspicion that many of the private trusts being permitted to operate in the Soviet Union in the 1 920s as a part of the New Economic Policy (NEP) might soon be dismantled or nationalized (as they, in fact, were). Dzerzhinskii's view prevailed, and on-site industrial research remained weakly developed in the Soviet Union. Compared to other industrial nations, a strikingly small percentage of Soviet research scientists and engineers have been employed directly in industry. Even as late as 1982, only 3 percent of Soviet researchers with the degree of kandidat (roughly equivalent to the American Ph.D.) were employed by industrial plants.19 (In contrast, in 1975 in the United States 23.7 percent of all doctoral scientists and engineers were employed in business or industry.)20

The system of industrial research and development that emerged from these early reforms proved very capable at some tasks, not so capable at others. The centralized control permitted Soviet planners to marshal resources quickly for a

16 Finkel', "Capitalism and Research Work" (cit. n. 12). 17 See G. A. Lakhtin, Organizatsiia sovetskoi nauki: Istoriia i sovremennost'(Organization of Soviet

science: History and today) (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), pp. 62-63. 18 Nauchnye dostizheniia v promyshlennosti i rabota naucho-teknicheskogo otdela VSNKh SSSR

(Scientific achievements in industry and the work of the Scientific-Technical Supreme Economic Council of the USSR) (Moscow: VSNKh, 1925), pp. 41-42.

11 V. Zhamin, "The Intensification of Science" (in Russian), Ekonomicheskie Nauki, 1985, No. 4, p. 34.

20 Characteristics of Doctoral Scientists and Engineers in the United States, 1975 (Washington, D.C.: National Science Foundation Report 77-309, 1977), p. 33.

56 LOREN R. GRAHAM

few high-priority tasks, such as building hydroelectric power plants, creating atomic weapons, or promoting a space program. The system proved much less adept in providing industrial research support across the whole spectrum of high- technology industry, especially for the consumer economy. The centralized approach favored in the formative years of the Soviet Union created a chasm between industrial research and industrial production, with the industrial research institutes and the plants where production was actually taking place sepa- rated geographically, organizationally, and even philosophically. The researchers working in the centralized institutes in the large cities gained a reputation for being little interested in production at local sites. As later Soviet critics would say, they simply "threw their published articles over the transom," assuming that it was the responsibility of the industrial plants to put their ideas into practice. The factory managers, worried about meeting output quotas set by the central planners, were reluctant to interrupt production in order to try out new ideas that ex- isted only on paper. This failure to produce an intimate relationship between research and industrial production was the greatest weakness in Soviet science and technology, and it was a by-product of an intentionally radical and novel organization of R and D.

The Soviet discussions in the 1920s over the proper organization of scientific research and the relevance of foreign models still shape debate in Russia today. It is remarkable how many of the issues about the organization of research that were reopened in the Soviet Union in later years, especially after the advent of Gorbachev to power in 1985, have their roots in the decisions of the late 1920s and early 1930s.21

Another such decision was the one to make the Academy of Sciences the leading center of fundamental research. It was in the Academy that the best of the new institutes in the sciences would be placed. That this venerable institution, closely linked in its origins to monarchical government and long known as the "Imperial Academy," should win the central place in the organization of science in a revolutionary state dedicated to proletarian rule seems to be a paradox. Why was it not abolished by the militant revolutionaries, as was the Academie Royale des Sci- ences in France during that country's great revolution? Radical critics in Russia were aware of the revolutionary precedent in France, and some of them called for the abolition of the Russian Academy.22

The need of governments, including revolutionary ones, for science had increased since the time of the French Revolution, and, consequently, the risks involved in tampering with science were correspondingly greater; Lenin, A. V. Lunacharskii, and other leaders of the Communist Party who were concerned with science and education were aware of these risks, and they frequently ex- pressed their fears. Lenin, in particular, was highly skeptical of the proletarian culture movement's belief that science in the new era would be radically different

21 See, e.g., G. Khanin, "Why is Soviet Science on the Skids?" (in Russian), in Postizhenie: Sotsiologiia, sotsial'naia politika, ekonomicheskaja reforma (Understanding: Sociology, social policy, economic reform), ed. F. M. Borodkin et al. (Moscow: Progress, 1989), pp. 140-168.

22 See the discussion in M. S. Bastrakova, Stanovienie sovetskoi sistemy organizatsii nauki (1917- 1922) (The formation of the Soviet system of the organization of science) (Moscow: Nauka, 1973), pp. 97-99.


from traditional science, and he repeatedly called for the preservation of established centers of scientific and technical expertise.23

There were also ideological differences between the French and Russian revolutions that had implications for the organization of science. In his study of the ill- fated Parisian Academy during the French Revolution Roger Hahn emphasized that one of the major ideological criticisms of the Academy was based on "anti- corporate bias" that issued from two sources: (1) belief in economic free trade and analogous cultural liberalism which rejected self-propagating and guildlike academies; and (2) admiration of the English pattern of an "institutionally open society organized around common-interest groups rather than hierarchic corporate structures." Thus the model for revolutionary French science became the societe libre, not the academy with its centralized structure inherited from the monarchy.24

The leaders of revolutionary Russia had very different biases and models; to them, the idea of a centralized academy was not ideologically repugnant, only the particular political views held by most of the members of the Russian Acad- emy. The victorious revolutionary leaders believed that Soviet Russia would become a centralized state in which the economy would be directed according to a rational economic plan, not a state with a free market of the sort envisioned by the French revolutionaries. The Soviet leaders valued science for the help that it would give in the process of economic advancement, and they wished to have a centralized scientific organization that could be easily linked to the economic planning organs. To them, a "free association" of scientific institutions, proposed by several critics of the Russian Academy, would have been a reversion to the decentralized model of science appropriate for states with a capitalist economy based on laissez-faire economics, but hardly for the first socialist economy. The question, then, was not whether a central organ should be created for Soviet science, but which of the available candidates should be the central organ.25

In the 1920s several rivals to the old Academy appeared, including a newly created "Communist Academy," but these newcomers could not compete with the old Academy in quality of technical advice to the government.26 The leaders

23 A typical statement by Lenin was: "We must take all of culture which capitalism left us and build socialism out of it. We must take all science, technology, all knowledge, art. Without them we cannot construct the life of a communist society. And science, technology, and art are in the hands and heads of the specialists." Quoted in S. A. Fediukin, Velikii Oktiabr' i intelligentsiia (Great October and the intelligentsia) (Moscow: Nauka, 1972), p. 71. For Lenin's warning about the Academy, see "From the Reminiscences of A. V. Lunacharskii about the Position of V. I. Lenin on Questions of the Reform of the Academy of Sciences in 1919," in Lenin and the Academy of Sciences (in Russian), ed. P. N. Pospelov (Moscow: Nauka, 1969), pp. 62-63. For an interesting early work on Lenin's attitudes toward the bourgeois specialists see S. Girinis, Lenin o spetsakh (Lenin on specialists) (Moscow: MGSPS "Labor and the Book," 1924).

24 Roger Hahn, The Anatomy of a Scientific Institution: The Paris Academy of Sciences, 1666-1803 (Berkeley: Univ. California Press, 1971), pp. 135-136.

25 It is true that in the early years after the Russian Revolution the idea of a free association was pop- ular, but it soon yielded place to more centralized plans. See, e.g., Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Commissar- iat of Enlightenment: Soviet Organization of Education and the Arts under Lunacharsky (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), p. 75. For discussions of the problem of coordinating Soviet science see G. I. Fed'kin, Pravovye voprosy organizatsii nauchnoi raboty v USSR (Legal questions in the organization of scientific work in the USSR) (Moscow: Nauka, 1958); and Lakhtin, Organizatsiia sovetskoi nauki (cit. n. 17).

26 See Joel Shapiro, "A History of the Communist Academy, 1918-1936," (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1976).

58 LOREN R. GRAHAM

of the Academy of Sciences, especially A. P. Karpinskii, S. F Ol'denburg, V. I. Vernadskii, and V. N. Ipat'ev, shrewdly outperformed all the experts and administrators from rival organizations in demonstrating the usefulness of science to the regime. They helped organize the electrification program for the country, sponsored geological surveys of valuable minerals and ores, studied energy sources, and gave technical advice to industry and the military.

A belated assault on the Academy did come in 1929, but the demand voiced by the attackers was not so much for a totally new institution as for access to an old institution by Marxist scholars and an integration of that institution's work with the Soviet political and economic order. The old Academy of Sciences had demonstrated its superiority over the new Communist Academy, which soon expired.27

By the mid 1 930s Soviet science and technology had taken on the basic organizational features that remained constant to the Gorbachev period, despite nu- merous subsequent small reforms. Above all three pyramids (academy, education, industry) was the State Planning Commission (GOSPLAN) of the Council of Ministers, which determined the overall budget of each of the pyramids. And above the Council of Ministers was the Communist Party, acting through the Cen- tral Committee or the Politburo. These highest organs were, in theory, responsi- ble for the actual research work of the pyramids, but on all but high-priority or ideologically troubled topics (such as genetics) these central bodies did not usually interfere with research; the individual pyramid controlled its own work within the budget assigned to it.

In the post-World War II period the Soviet science establishment became even more devoted to "gigantomania" than it had previously. In Novosibirsk, Pushchino, Dubna, Obninsk, and other centers outside Moscow, large "science cities" were established where thousands of researchers worked in close proxim- ity. In the first decade or so after their initiation, these centers performed fairly well, benefiting from their distance from the political influence of Moscow, but soon they too were caught up in the enveloping bureaucracy.

III. HOW WELL DID THE SOVIET SCIENCE SYSTEM WORK?

When one considers the enormous effort that the Soviet government made to fos- ter science and technology, one must conclude that the results were disappointing. No matter what criterion of excellence one chooses-number of Nobel Prizes awarded, frequency of citation of Soviet research, number of inventions regis- tered abroad, or honorary membership in foreign scientific societies-the achievements of the world's largest community of scientists was disproportion- ately small.28 In the fields of natural science (physics, chemistry, physiology and medicine) from 1901 through 1990 citizens of the United States received 145 Nobel Prizes and citizens of the USSR received 8. In all fields (including litera- ture, economics, and peace), citizens of the United States have won 217 Nobel awards and citizens of the USSR 23. If one ranks the countries of the world in

27 Ibid. 28 Thane Gustafson, "Why Doesn't Soviet Science Do Better Than It Does?" in Social Context of

Soviet Science, ed. Lubrano and Solomon, pp. 31-68; and Khanin, "Soviet Science on the Skids" (cit. n. 21).


terms of the number of their citizens who have received this award, the Soviet Union ranks sixth, after the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Sweden.

If one looks at the sale of licenses for technology, an even worse picture emerges. The United States, with all of its own troubles in competing with the Japanese, sold annually approximately thirty times more licenses for technology than the Soviet Union in recent years.29 A similar picture emerges from a study of honorary memberships in prestigious scientific societies. In 1986 the Royal Soci- ety of London had 87 foreign members, of whom 6 were citizens of the Soviet Union and 44 citizens of the United States. During the next two years 3 of the So- viet members died, leaving only 3. The situation was slightly better among foreign members of the National Academy of Sciences in the United States, in which 16 members were Soviets in 1986, out of a total of approximately 250 foreign associates.

Each criterion for comparing science in the Soviet Union with that in other countries has, of course, its flaws. The Russian language is still known by few outside researchers, and consequently the achievements of Soviet researchers were more frequently overlooked than those presented in more accessible languages. But the conclusion is still inescapable that Soviet science and technology did not fulfill the grand goals that early Soviet planners established. In recent years this failure was openly recognized in the Soviet Union itself, where under Gorbachev the critics of the science establishment were far more outspoken than Western specialists who write about Soviet science.30

Soviet science and technology have, of course, a string of outstanding successes. The Soviet Union was the first country in the world to build an atomic power plant, the first to launch an artificial satellite, the first to launch a human being into space, and the first to suggest the now widely accepted Tokamak model for nuclear fusion. In some areas of theoretical physics and mathematics the Soviet Union has been a world leader for decades, and it maintained strong traditions in oceanography, seismology, metallurgy, magnetohydrodynamics, chemical catalysis, and a variety of other fields.

Many of the strengths and weaknesses of Soviet science and technology can be explained in social terms. The strength of mathematics and theoretical physics, of "blackboard science," can be described, at least in part, as a natural product of talented researchers in a repressive political atmosphere and a tightly controlled economic one. Gifted young people gravitated to fields where achievement was possible despite the political and economic barriers existing in the Soviet Union. Conversely, the weakness of industrial research and innovation was, again in part, a result of the lack of economic stimulation and competition, and of the separa- tion of industrial research from production. The cyclical pattern of advance and retreat in Russian technology goes far back before the revolutions of 1917 and has been produced by a combination of talented native engineers, periodic foreign stimulus, and an unsupportive domestic environment. Breakthroughs in technol-

29 Khanin, "Soviet Science on the Skids," p. 142. 30 See, e.g., ibid.; and "A Resolution of the Participants of the Seminar-Conference 'Socio-Economic

Problems of the Workers in Scientific Institutions of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR' " (in Rus- sian), Poisk, 1991, 97(1 1): 1.

60 LOREN R. GRAHAM

ogy have not usually been sustained in the domestic and world economies. On the other hand, Soviet strengths in "big technology," in areas such as atomic weapons and space technology, came from centralized governmental control over resources and personnel, a degree of control possessed by few other governments; this ability to focus on a few high-priority projects helped the Soviet government in areas important to its security.

Many Soviet scientists were aware that Soviet science was doing less well in recent years than twenty or thirty years ago. The last Soviet Nobel Prize in science was awarded in 1978, and that was to Peter Kapitsa for work done before World War II. The previous prize was in 1964 to N. G. Basov and A. M. Prokhorov for work on lasers. The Soviet space program, long the glory of Soviet science, came in the end under sharp criticism at home as a wasteful diversion of funds that should have been devoted to improving living standards. The growing gap in quality and speed between Soviet computers and those produced abroad was beginning to affect adversely even those areas of science where Soviet researchers were long on the cutting edge, such as theoretical physics and mathematics. The general crisis in the Soviet economy of the last three years made it extremely diffi- cult to find the funds for expansion of the research budget.

These ominous signs are the reasons that during the last few years Soviet scientists called for radical reforms of the organization and funding of research and development. These reforms will be discussed in Section V of this article.

IV. EFFORTS OF WESTERN AND SOVIET SCIENTISTS TO COOPERATE

The history of scientific contacts between Western nations and the Soviet Union was a checkered one. From the early 1930s until Stalin's death in 1953 the contacts were almost nil, since Stalin feared that travel by Soviet scientists would lead to political unorthodoxy and even defection.31 Furthermore, during the Cold War many Western governments (and particularly that of the United States) restricted contacts in an effort to prevent transfer of valuable technology to their Commu- nist rival. And just as Stalin feared the influence of Western politics on the Soviet Union, so also many politicians in the Western countries were wary of Marxism.

The first real breakthroughs came in the thaw of the late 1 950s, during the rule of Nikita Khrushchev. The "Lacy-Zarubin Agreement" between the Soviet Union and the United States, signed in 1957, marked the beginning of scientific exchanges between the two countries.32 From that time to the present these exchanges never entirely ceased, although the level of interaction has varied wildly. Exploring the factors that inhibited and promoted these exchanges reveals a great deal about the politics of science in the late twentieth century.

A constant factor encumbering scientific contacts between the Soviet Union and Western nations was the asymmetry in the organization of research in the different countries and the assumptions, on both sides, about how scientific ex-

II Before Stalin's crackdown, however, relations in some fields were developing nicely. See Paul R. Josephson, "Physics and Soviet-Western Relations in the 1920s and 1930s," Physics Today, 1988, 41:54-61.

32 See, e.g., David D. Finley, "Soviet-U.S. Cooperation in Space and Medicine," in Sectors of Mu- tual Benefit in U.S.-Soviet Relations, ed. Nish Jamgotch, Jr. (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1985), p. 140.


changes should be conducted. Most scientists and administrators in Western nations believed that visits by scientists from one country to those in another should be locally, not centrally, arranged. No one keeps track, for example, nor could keep track, of the number of scientific visitors between the United States and Great Britain or France. Different individuals, institutions, and foundations ar- range such visits without coordination at the governmental level. Governments do, of course, often provide money to support various exchange programs, such as National Science Foundation and Fulbright grants, but once the money is awarded, the arrangements are usually made locally.

The Soviet government insisted that all exchanges be centrally controlled on the basis of a governmentally stipulated quota.33 The Academy of Sciences of the USSR actually administered the exchange visits of most Soviet scientists to the West on the basis of intergovernmental agreements. In order to mesh with this system, the United States and other Western governments set up similar centrally controlled exchange administrations. In the United States the leading organization administering exchanges in science and technology, working within the framework of governmental agreements, was the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. This ill-matched system continues today, even though the two academies are about as different as can be imagined. Out of this asymmetry a host of problems arose concerning access to institutions. Furthermore, until quite recently the Soviet Union wanted its scientists to be nominated by Soviet administrators instead of individually invited by American scientists. Most Soviet scientists were hosted by the National Academy in the United States even though their logical hosts were American universities. Most American scientists came from universities but were sent to the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Expecting the two different bureaucracies to interact smoothly was like asking an eagle and a bear to dance a minuet.

In addition to the problem of asymmetry of organization, three other factors affected the degree of contact between Soviet scientists and their American colleagues. While asymmetry of organization was nearly constant after the 1 940s, these three other factors varied greatly over time. I categorize them as diplomatic cordiality, political compatibility, and commensurability in science and technology.

Diplomatic cordiality refers to the state of international relations between the Soviet Union and the United States. During much of the past forty-five years these relations have been cool or even frigid, but significant variations have oc- curred. For example, diplomatic relations improved greatly after the summit meeting between Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev in 1972, and a whole series of scientific exchange agreements followed, leading to a marked expansion of

33 For evaluations of U.S.-Soviet scientific exchanges see Catherine P. Ailes and Arthur E. Pardee, Jr., Cooperation in Science and Technology: An Evaluation of the US-Soviet Agreement (Boulder, Colo./London: Westview Press, 1986); Jamgotch, ed., Sectors of Mutual Benefit (cit. n. 32); Carl Kaysen, ed., Review of U.S.-U.S.S.R. Interacademy Exchanges and Relations (Washington, D.C.: Na- tional Academy of Sciences, 1977); Richard L. Garwin, ed., Review of the US-USSR Agreement on Cooperation in Science and Technology (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1977); Robert E Byrnes, Soviet-American Academic Exchanges, 1958- 75 (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1976); Yakov M. Rabkin, Science Between the Superpowers (New York: Priority Press, 1988); and Loren R. Graham, "How Valuable are Scientific Exchanges with the Soviet Union?" Science, 1978, 201:383-390.

62 LOREN R. GRAHAM

scientific contacts between the two countries. But with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and the subsequent suppression of Andrei Sakharov, relations abruptly cooled. After new summit meetings in the late 1980s, Ronald Reagan announced that "Mikhail Gorbachev is my friend," and contacts grew again, more impressively than ever before. Indeed, after 1990 the State Depart- ment, which always earlier kept statistics on the numbers of exchangees, gave up keeping track. Too many scholars were going in individually arranged ways, just as has always been the case between the United States and Western countries.

Political compatibility refers to the similarity of the two different political systems of the United States and the Soviet Union. The contrast between the one- party authoritarian Soviet system and the multiparty democracy of the United States was a serious impediment to scientific exchanges. There were moments, especially during the Soviet suppression of dissidents and Jewish scientists in the 1970s, when American scientists refused to go to the Soviet Union even when their government encouraged them to do so under the bilateral exchange agreements. In the years 1976 to 1980 several thousand American scientists, including 15 Nobelists and 180 members of the National Academy of Sciences, signed pledges that they would not participate in the governmentally sanctioned exchange agreements until the political situation in the Soviet Union improved.34 Since the advent of Gorbachev, this situation has dramatically changed. Although the republics of the former Soviet Union are still not true democracies, the political compatibility between the United States and the republics has greatly improved.

Commensurability of science and technology refers not only to the similarity of the state of development of science and technology in the two countries, but to social demands placed on them. It recognizes the impediments that remain beyond diplomatic and political barriers, within science and technology themselves. Not all areas in Soviet science and technology were sufficiently interesting to Ameri- can scientists to persuade them to participate in long-term exchanges. Very few dissertation supervisors in the leading science faculties in American universities were willing to recommend that their best students spend a year in the Soviet Union. (When I went to the Soviet Union in 1960/61 with a dozen or so American doctoral students, the science majors were told by several American professors that they were wasting one of their most valuable years; belying the prediction, one of my fellow students that year, Roald Hoffmann, later won the Nobel Prize in chemistry.) Part of the American resistance to going to the Soviet Union was simple prejudice and ignorance, but many areas of science and technology in the So- viet Union were not as advanced as in the United States. However, some areas of Soviet science were always strong, mathematics and theoretical physics in the early period of U.S.-Soviet science exchanges, for example; these were areas in which Americans could learn as well as teach. An official report of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington in 1977 described Soviet research on con- densed matter theory as "some of the most innovative and important work in the world" and Soviet research in mathematics as "second to none."35

34 Linda Lubrano, "The Political Web of Scientific Cooperation," in Sectors of Mutual Benefit, ed. Jamgotch (cit. n. 32), p. 62.

35 Kaysen, ed., Review of Exchanges (cit. n. 33), p. 104.


As time passed, the degree of commensurability improved, partly because problems demanding international cooperation emerged, such as the greenhouse effect, nuclear power regulation, fusion energy, space research, ocean pollution, preservation of migratory species, and studies of the earth's crust. Some of these areas of potential cooperation were emphasized in the eleven bilateral agreements signed between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1970s, but they were eliminated or downgraded during the revival of the Cold War that followed at the end of the decade. In the last few years they reemerged. The Soviet Union became much more willing to cooperate with international science and technology agencies than in earlier years. A turning point here was the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in 1986.36 The Soviet authorities at first tried to cover up the disaster but ultimately cooperated fully with the Interna- tional Atomic Energy Association. Afterwards Soviet science and technology were in deeper contact with foreign nations than ever before. And the need for such contacts in order to deal with global problems such as pollution has become ever clearer.

V. LATE EFFORTS TO REFORM SOVIET SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Gorbachev's more general political and economic reforms, such as the policy of glasnost' (openness), liberalization of political controls, and decentralization of economic activities were aimed at Soviet society as a whole, rather than at science and technology per se. Nonetheless, these broad reforms were part of an effort to modernize Soviet society and to improve the working conditions of creative people, especially scientists, engineers, and skilled laborers.37 The release of the fa- mous physicist-dissident Andrei Sakharov from forced exile in the city of Gor'kii was a striking example of glasnost' extended to the scientific sphere. Factory workers were allowed to participate in meaningful elections of factory directors, in recognition that highly skilled workers must now be given more autonomy than was necessary during the basic drive to industrialize. And economic activities, including price formation, were decentralized, in hopes of fostering the energizing and innovative effects of competition. Gurii Marchuk, president of the Academy of Sciences, observed that one of the effects of these economic reforms was to provide feedback to researchers from industry, letting them know what kinds of products and innovations were most needed.38 Recognizing the need for such feedback already implied criticism of centralized planning.

Private Initiatives in Science and Technology

Some reforms not specifically aimed at science and technology had effects in this area, for example, the "Law on Individual Labor Activity," launched in May

36 Paul R. Josephson, "The Historical Roots of the Chernobyl Disaster," Soviet Union/Union Sovitique, 1986, 13(3):275-299.

37 For a general treatment of recent attempts to reform Soviet science, see Harley D. Balzer, Soviet Science on the Edge of Reform (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1989).

38 G. I. Marchuk, "Reconstruction of the Scientific Activity of Institutions of the Academy of Sci- ences in Light of the Decisions of the Twenty-seventh Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union" (in Russian), Vestnik Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1987, No. 1, p. 5.

64 LOREN R. GRAHAM

1987, and the "Law on the Cooperative System," adopted in May 1988.39 Under these laws private citizens, operating under a system of registration and control, were allowed to engage in profitable small-scale trade and household services. Most of these "cooperatives" had nothing to do with science or high technology; they were small restaurants, repair shops, taxi services, and studios in the arts and crafts. Soon, however, scientists and engineers began using them to provide high- tech consulting services to local industries, to establish scientific supply houses, to create innovative software programming centers, and to build scientific instruments. Here was belated recognition by Soviet administrators that giant enterprises are often less creative than individuals or small groups. By 1990 there were more than 10,000 science and technology cooperatives in the Soviet Union in- volving about 250,000 people and handling business of approximately 3.5 billion rubles a year.40 The growth of private initiative in the area of science and technology was quite remarkable. The largest single area of activity of the new cooperatives was computers (both hardware and software activities), but the movement rapidly spread throughout the communication, transport, chemical, medical, and power industries.

The work of the new science and technology cooperatives, even though impressive, was hampered by both official regulations and public resentment. According to the regulations, the cooperatives were basically moonlighting organizations whose employees worked at regular jobs during the workday. Often the cooperatives were "attached" to official scientific-research institutes and used the equip- ment of those institutes in the evenings and on the weekends. Many disputes naturally arose between official administrators and private entrepreneurs over compensation and diversion of resources. In some cases the cooperatives were so successful that they actually came to dominate their parent institutes; in other cases the official organizations tried to absorb the cooperatives. Some bureaucrats tried to squelch the cooperatives with a multitude of regulations, including puni- tive taxation. Others simply levied shakedown payments. Criminal organizations demanded protection money from the cooperatives. Ordinary citizens, indoctri- nated by years of socialist egalitarianism, often resented the enrichment of the entrepreneurs and wrote letters to the newspapers asking that the cooperatives be closed down. Thus by the early 1 990s the situation of the science and technology cooperatives was very mixed. Still, one had the impression that they filled such an obvious need that they would continue to grow unless throttled by an abrupt change in official policy.

New Official Organizational Forms

At the same time that private groups sprang up in Soviet science and technology the official administrators continued to seek a more effective system for stimulat- ing innovations. Most of their suggestions had two goals: to break down the extreme centralization of the old system, and to overcome the gap between

"9 "Law of the USSR on Individual Enterprise" (in Russian), Pravda, 21 Nov. 1981, pp. 1, 3; and Sharon L. Leiter, "Small is Beautiful: The New Soviet Scientific-Technical Cooperatives," (Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, 1990), unpublished paper.

40 Leiter, "Small is Beautiful."


academic research and industrial development. In the middle and late 1 980s the favored organizational form was "Interbranch Scientific-Technical Complexes," known by the Russian acronym "MNTK."'41 These conglomerates combined both research and production facilities and were usually under the control of institutes of the Academy of Sciences, instead of production ministries. Discouraged by the production ministries' disinclination to introduce innovations into their plants, Gorbachev turned to the Academy of Sciences, which he considered more en- lightened about modern technology and methods of management.

Within a few years about two dozen of the new MNTKs were created. They included complexes working on biotechnology, machine tools, computers, robotics, fiber optics, chemical catalysis, lasers, welding, automation, and petrochemicals. All had acronyms for titles, such as ROBOT, KATALIZATOR, BIOGEN, and PEVM (per- sonal computers).

One of the most impressive of the MNTKs was BIOGEN, founded by Academi- cian Iurii Ovchinnikov at the Shemiakin Institute of Bio-organic Chemistry of the Academy of Sciences. BIOGEN was modeled in part on the form of a Western corporation; indeed, there was a Western company of the same name involved in the same business. To avoid confusion, Shemiakin's MNTK was known interna- tionally as BIOTAN (Biological Technology of the Academy of Sciences).

MNTKs such as Ovchinnikov's represented a radical departure in the organization of Soviet science and technology. Never before had the Academy of Sciences been put in charge of actual industrial production. Ovchinnikov was given his own plant facility near Riga, a factory that earlier had belonged to the Ministry of Chemical Technology. In addition to the factory and the Shemiakin Institute, BIOGEN included a research facility in Pushchino (outside Moscow), two special construction bureaus, and eighteen other "associated" organizations.42 The accu- mulation of such a large number of organizations, including production facilities, under one institute of the Academy of Sciences was a significant growth in the power and influence of the Academy at the expense of the industrial ministries.

Despite this promising start, by the beginning of the 1990s the movement toward MNTKs slowed. Ovchinnnikov died prematurely of leukemia, and his ab- sence affected BIOGEN. More important, the private initiatives in science and technology cooperatives drew away the creative energy of official organizations like the Academy institutes. The industrial ministries continued to resist the Academy's encroachment on their prerogatives and managed to prevent it from entirely taking over the MNTK movement. Furthermore, radical critics began to attack the Academy itself as an example of centralized research. Thus criticized both from the right (the bureaucrats of the centralized industrial ministries) and from the left (the reformers who wanted a scientific establishment like those in Western nations and therefore questioned the need for Academy institutes) the MNTK movement with its principle of research complexes dominated by Acad- emy institutes lost some of its steam.

41 The MNTKs were established 12 Dec. 1985; see Pravda, 13 Dec. 1985. Gorbachev discussed them at the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR.

42 Interview of Iurii Ovchinnikov and other staff members of Shemiakin Institute by Loren Gra- ham, for "Nova" (PBS), Moscow, 17 Nov. 1986.

66 LOREN R. GRAHAM

Reforms in the Academy of Sciences

Under Gurii Marchuk, who was elected president of the Academy of Sciences in October 1986, the Academy's presidium enacted several reforms, sometimes under heavy pressure from the government or from younger researchers.43 The changes were designed to focus the Academy more tightly on the most important problems of research (especially with practical applications), to reequip the Acad- emy with more modern instruments and computers, to revitalize the subsidiary academies in the Soviet republics, to democratize the system of choosing leading administrators, to loosen controls on travel and access to foreign publications, and to enforce retirement of older administrators.

An unprecedented protest against the senior administration of the Academy broke out in the spring of 1989.44 The demonstration was provoked by the Acad- emy presidium's refusal to accept the voting results among its workers and to nominate several reformers to the new Soviet legislature, including Andrei Sakharov and Roald Sagdeev, the longtime head of the Academy's institute of space research. Several thousand Academy workers gathered in the driveway before the presidium building just off Lenin Prospect in Moscow and jeered the decision, waving signs called for President Marchuk and the members of the presidium to resign, and urging democratic reforms within the Academy structure. In reply, the presidium relented under the pressure and nominated Sagdeev and Sakharov to the legislature. The presidium also supported greater decentralization of the Academy's administration and the election of institute directors.

Despite these reforms, many intellectuals in Gorbachev's Soviet Union in- creasingly saw the Academy as a rather conservative bureaucracy. A direct product of the 1989 protest was the formation of a "Union of Creative Scientists," an informal group that called for thoroughgoing reform throughout Soviet science and education and that also defended professional rights. These reformers established their own newspaper and they often criticized the central Academy.

Some of the critics, such as Maksim Frank-Kamenetskii, saw the very idea of a central Academy controlling so much of the country's best scientific talent as a vestige of Stalinism and Stalin's command-administrative economy.45 Would it not be better, these critics asked, if the Academy were merely an honorific society, like the Royal Society in England and the National Academy of Sciences in the United States? Under such a system scientists, even those who are members of the Academy, would work elsewhere, in a dispersed system of universities, governmental laboratories, and industries.

The future of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR also got caught up in the debates over nationalism. Many scientists, both in Russia and the other republics, called for the breakup of the entire "big" Academy of Sciences of the USSR into its constituent parts, with each republic having its own academy of sciences. The significance of this proposal was greatest for the Russian republic; only it

43 Marchuk, "Reconstruction" (cit. n. 38). See Vestnik akademii nauk SSSR, 1986, No. 1 1, pp. 38- 45; and Vera Tolz, "Academy of Sciences Criticized for Lack of Democracy," Radio Liberty Report, 30 Jan. 1987.

44 Based on interviews in Moscow by Loren Graham, Dec. 1990-Jan. 1991. 45 Maksim Frank-Kamenetskii, interview by Loren Graham, Columbus, Ohio, 26 Oct. 1990.


- ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

The Presidium Building of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in Moscow. Photo courtesy of the Institute of the History of Science and Technology, Academy of Sci- ences of the USSR, Moscow.

among the fifteen republics of the old USSR did not already have its own academy, although most of the big Academy's institutes were within the Russian republic. Creating a Russian Academy of Sciences (as distinct from the existing big Soviet one) was a threat to the Soviet academy, since the new Russian academy would want most of the institutes and other assets of the old Academy. Some scientists suggested just renaming the big Academy the Russian one. Others proposed making the Siberian department of the big Academy, located in Novosibirsk, the core of a new Russian Academy, perhaps with the addition of some of the best institutes in Moscow.

The demise of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR was determined first by its reaction to the attempted military coup of August 1991, and second by the breakup of the Soviet Union at the end of that year. During the several days when it appeared that the coup might be successful, the leaders of the big Academy were silent, creating the opinion that they could easily live with the new right-wing leaders. This behavior confirmed the suspicions of the critics of the old Academy, who had long associated it with conservative Communist Party rule. Even more important, of course, was the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself at the end of 1991. Now there was no central government that could support the big Academy.

Even before the end of the Soviet Union, ethnically Russian scientists formed their own academy, which challenged the old central Academy for authority. Many of the members of the new Russian Academy of Sciences were from the provinces and considered the old Academy a closed elite of the capital cities. At the end of 1991 a way out of the dilemma of having two rival academies fighting for the loyalties of Russian scientists was found; a hybrid of the two disputing academies was created by combining the approximately 250 full members of the old academy with the 39 full members of the new Russian academy. The resulting synthesis was named the "Russian Academy of Sciences," and it became the heir

68 LOREN R. GRAHAM

to almost all of the institutes and property of the old Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Its new president was the applied mathematician Iurii Osipov, a science advisor to the president of the Russian Republic, Boris Yeltsin.

As time goes on, the new Russian Academy of Sciences seems to look more and more like the old "big" Academy. The new academy has a slightly more democratic system of governance than the old one, including representatives of the research institutes in its General Assembly, but in most other regards the new and the old academies are highly similar. The reformers and radicals who called for a major reorganization of Russian science that would shift the locus of fundamental research from the academy system to the universities were unsuccessful. It is, of course, still too early to know just what lasting organizational changes in science will be caused by the demise of the Soviet Union, but at the moment the system looks much like the old one, with the term Russian substituted for Soviet.

Changes in the Financing of Research and Development

The traditional method of funding research in the Soviet Union was through block funding of large institutes.46 Every year each institute usually received an incremental increase in its budget; that sum would then be split up among the various departments of the institute. This method of funding gave great authority to the institute director. Individual researchers within the institute were not free to apply to outside organizations for funds.

Even under Gorbachev's predecessors this system was not absolute. It was sup- plemented by contracts between institutes and various other government organizations, civilian and military, for task-directed research. These contracts also were under the control of the institute directors. Within the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, the sum of such contracts was normally restricted to 25 percent of any institute's total budget; the purpose of this policy was to prevent the Academy from being too involved in applied rather than fundamental research. This policy did not normally apply to institutes and universities outside the central Academy; some of them became heavily dependent on industrial and military contracts.

One of the reforms of the Gorbachev era was to move toward a system of funding more like that of the National Science Foundation in the United States. Sev- eral central funding organizations were established, and principal investigators were encouraged to submit applications for peer review. This reform obviously increased the authority of individual researchers and diminished that of institute directors, even though directors still possessed administrative review powers over the individual proposals (as is usually the case in the United States and other countries).

In recent years self-financing, or khozraschet, was another prominent element in Soviet policy for research and development. The idea was that each institute should pay its own way on the basis of the grants it received, its normal state budget, and contracts with industry. Self-financing was aimed toward making Soviet researchers much more responsive to the industrial market and also to government priorities exercised through the central foundations.

Self-financing obviously is likely to work much better in some areas than in oth-

46 See Gustafson, "Soviet Science" (cit. n. 28); and Balzer, Soviet Science(cit. n. 37), pp. 180-186.


ers. Institutes with clear conections to industry, such as those in computers and automation, might be entirely self-financing. Others, such as those in pure mathematics, theoretical physics, astronomy, and the humanities, may not find many opportunities for lucrative contracts. The Soviet science establishment was working through these problems and opportunities. If the reform projects proceed under the breakup and succeed, the result will be a growing similarity between the funding of science and technology in the former Soviet Union and in Western countries.

With the end of the Soviet Union and the concurrent financial crisis, the situation of Russian science at the moment is bleak. Inflation has severely eroded salaries and budgets. Many scientists and engineers from the former Soviet Union have tried to emigrate abroad, and several thousands are currently working in the United States. The American government has offered to help keep former weapons scientists at work in Russia, in order to discourage them from selling their expertise to third-world countries like Iraq, but the fates of rank-and-file scientists and engineers in the former Soviet Union are uncertain.

Vestiges of Centralized Bigness

Centralized and technocratic approaches die hard, however, and the Soviet Union frequently reverted to the old pattern. In 1990 N. P. Laverov, chairman of the USSR State Committee on Science and Technology, announced the establishment of a "technopolis" in the city of Troitsk with the assistance of an American firm, Bechtel International. According to a news release from Bechtel, Troitsk was to be converted into "a 21 st century city of the future" with a conference center, international hotel, U.S.-style housing, and recreational facilities.47 A Bechtel spokesman proudly observed that the Soviets had picked Bechtel to develop the new science city because of its past experience in creating "regional mega- projects." Another such technopolis was being established in Zelenograd, about 45 kilometers from Moscow. These high-technology conglomerations are pat- terned on companies in Silicon Valley in California and on Route 128 near Boston.

This Soviet attempt to duplicate by government policy what grew up in the United States on the basis of private initiative (although, of course, influenced by governmental policy) smacks of the old centralized approach, despite Soviet as- surances that the new communities were to nurture entrepreneurial ventures. Laverov revealed the similarity of the new policy to older ones when he continued: "Actually we established technopolises of a sort much earlier. When we were making breakthroughs in space exploration and nuclear power, we established a series of technopolises, near Moscow and in some other areas." Space exploration and the early phase of nuclear power, however, were efforts in which centralized direction was much more appropriate than in such fast-breaking and innovative industries as computer technology. And as for nuclear power the record of the centralized Soviet bureaucracy, which concealed a host of safety problems until Chernobyl revealed them to the entire world, does not inspire confidence in efforts that follow this pattern.

47 "News from Bechtel" (San Francisco: Bechtel Corporation News Release, 5 April 1990), pp. 1-2.

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The role of the American company Bechtel in the Soviet project to build giant "technopolises" also reveals that the United States may not necessarily help the Russians break out of their old technocratic habits. Americans, too, are technocratic. Offered a lucrative contract, Bechtel probably did not suggest that a wiser approach than building a centralized science-and-technology city was to formulate social and economic policies that would let Soviet entrepreneurs form research ventures in any location where they think they will succeed. Large construction companies like Bechtel are more similar to the old Soviet state construction agencies that brought the Soviet republics their present monotonous visage and inefficient modes of operation than either Americans or the former Soviets usually realize.

VI. CONCLUSIONS

The evolution of the Soviet science establishment during the decades of Soviet history is filled with meaning both for the former Soviet republics and for other nations. For the first time in history the leaders of a nation consciously set out to devise and construct a system of research and development that would, they were confident, be superior to all others. This new system would avoid all the problems of science in capitalist countries: secretive competition, subservience of science to the profit motive, lack of planning. The Bolshevik leader N. I. Bukharin announced in London in 1931 at the historic Second International Congress of the History of Science: "It is not only a new economic system that has been born. A new culture has been born. A new science has been born."48

This enthusiasm for a new vision of science and technology was also shared by quite a few leftist writers and scientists in the West, such as J. G. Crowther, J. D. Bernal, and Henry Sigerist. Crowther wrote in 1936 in a book entitled Soviet Sci- ence that the planning of science as envisioned in the Soviet Union represented a new era, and that "The State Planning Commission is the most original product of the Bolshevik Revolution."49 Bernal maintained in 1952 that "a new world has come into being" in the Soviet Union; he further observed that in a capitalist country "it would be absurd even to think of planning science, when production itself remains subject to the whims of private profit and monopoly, which restricts it except for military ends. But in a socialist state this restriction is removed and science falls naturally into its place as the normal means of improving productivity in a continuous and progressive way."50 Sigerist wrote in 1937 that medical science would never be the same after the Soviet experiment, and that "I have come to the conclusion that what is being done in the Soviet Union today is the beginning of a new period in the history of medicine."'"

Today the science administrators of the former Soviet Union are looking in every direction for help in deconstructing the unique research and development system that they earlier created. The principal object of their criticism before the

48 N. I. Bukharin, "Theory and Practice from the Standpoint of Dialectical Materialism," Science at the Crossroads (London: Kniga, 1931), p. 23.

49 J. G. Crowther, Soviet Science (London/New York: E. P. Dutton, 1936), p. 15. 50 J. D. Bernal, Marx and Science (London: Laurence & Wishart, 1952), pp. 50-51. 51 Henry E. Sigerist, Socialized Medicine in the Soviet Union (New York: W. W. Norton, 1937),

p. 308.


breakup was the "administrative-command method," the idea of centralized planning that was so attractive to Crowther and Bernal. The main model to which they have turned is the United States. In sharp contrast to their behavior in the 1920s and 1930s, when the United States represented a counterexample for the organization of research, they now come to Washington, New York, Boston, and San Francisco by the dozens, alone and in delegations, with questions such as the following: How does one organize peer review? What authority does a principal investigator have vis-a-vis his department head or laboratory director? What is the difference between a private foundation and a governmental one? What sorts of ties have been established between American universities and private industries. How were the great centers of industrial research in Silicon Valley and around Route 128 in Boston established? If a computer is purchased by a university on a research grant from a foundation, what happens to that computer after the grant expires? (In 1991 a Soviet visitor and I spent a week at MIT and Harvard trying to answer the latter question.)

A simple (and I think mistaken) reaction by Western science administrators to the dramatic shift in Soviet attitudes-and to the breakup in which they culminated-would be the following: "There is one best way of organizing scientific research, and the Western nations, particularly the United States, have found it. The Soviet effort to find a novel and better way was a tragic and pathetic failure." If such a reaction would be a gross exaggeration, as I believe it to be, what can we conclude from the Soviet experience? I would draw two contrasting conclusions. (1) The Soviet Union has taught us that there are dramatically better and worse ways of organizing research. A relativistic vision of the organization of research and development is clearly inadequate. Science may be a social construction, but it can be socially constructed in strikingly more and less effective ways. Centralized planning does not work in the economy, and it does not work in science. Diversity in organization, funding, and methodological approach are essential for scientific creativity. The need for political freedom is not a cliche but a reality. (2) There is no one best way of organizing research and development. The United States has certainly not found that one best way, as evidenced by the present debates over Japanese and American approaches to industrial innovation and production. Constant improvement is necessary. Unregulated capitalism can easily lead to abuses in science and technology, even though a socialized economy promises nothing better. Quite a few of the criticisms of Western science and technology by socialists in the 1920s and 1930s continue to have merit today, even though the solution they recommended has now proven manifestly mistaken.

Expanding on these conclusions would call not for a few more pages in this article, but a whole book. I offer them in the hopes that they may lead to discussion and debate.

Big Science in the Last Years of the Big Soviet Union

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