Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars
Regular price
€46.99
A01=Ethan Pollock
Abram Ioffe
Academician
Academy of sciences
Agitprop
Agricultural Academy
Andrei Sakharov
Andrei Zhdanov
Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Author_Ethan Pollock
Biology
Bolsheviks
Bourgeoisie
Bureaucrat
Capitalism
Category=NHD
Category=PDX
Central Committee
Communism
Comrade
Cosmopolitanism
Criticism
Criticism of capitalism
Dacha
Dialectical and Historical Materialism
Dialectical materialism
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_science
Foray
Georgy Malenkov
Ideology
Imperialism
Intelligentsia
Jews
Lavrentiy Beria
Lecture
Linguistics
Literature
Loren Graham
Lysenkoism
Mao Zedong
Marxism
Marxism-Leninism
Modern physics
Moscow State University
Nuclear weapon
Orgburo
Party leader
Party secretary
Patriotism
Philosopher
Philosophy
Philosophy of science
Physicist
Physiology
Politburo
Political economy
Politics
Presidium
Princeton University Press
Proclamation
Pseudoscience
Publishing
Rhetoric
Russian Academy of Sciences
Science
Scientific theory
Scientist
Self-criticism
Socialist state
Soviet atomic bomb project
Soviet Union
Stalinism
Textbook
The Philosopher
Trofim Lysenko
Product details
- ISBN 9780691138251
- Weight: 425g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 23 Nov 2008
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
Between 1945 and 1953, while the Soviet Union confronted postwar reconstruction and Cold War crises, its unchallenged leader Joseph Stalin carved out time to study scientific disputes and dictate academic solutions. He spearheaded a discussion of "scientific" Marxist-Leninist philosophy, edited reports on genetics and physiology, adjudicated controversies about modern physics, and wrote essays on linguistics and political economy. Historians have been tempted to dismiss all this as the megalomaniacal ravings of a dying dictator. But in Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, Ethan Pollock draws on thousands of previously unexplored archival documents to demonstrate that Stalin was in fact determined to show how scientific truth and Party doctrine reinforced one another. Socialism was supposed to be scientific, and science ideologically correct, and Stalin ostensibly embodied the perfect symbiosis between power and knowledge.
Focusing on six major postwar debates in the Soviet scientific community, this elegantly written book shows that Stalin's forays into scholarship can be understood only within the context of international tensions, institutional conflicts, and the growing uncertainty about the proper relationship between scientific knowledge and Party-dictated truths. The nature of Stalin's interventions makes clear that more was at stake than high politics: these science wars were about asserting that the Party was rational and modern, and about codifying the Soviet worldview in a battle for the hearts and minds of people around the globe during the early Cold War. Ultimately, however, the effort to develop a scientific basis for Soviet ideology undermined the system's legitimacy.
Ethan Pollock is Assistant Professor of History at Brown University.
