“Science Has No Fatherland: This Slogan Is Both True and Not” (Foreign Scientists' Responses on the 220th Anniversary of the USSR Academy of Sciences)
Authors:   Dostoevsky Omsk State University, Gruzdinskaya Victoriya S. , Korzun Valentina P. ,   Dostoevsky Omsk State University
Published: February 2023

In this article, the responses of foreign scientists to the jubilee commemoration dedicated to the 220th anniversary of the USSR Academy of Sciences (June 15-30, 1945) are analyzed. The aim of this article is to clarify the trend of reformatting the communicative field of science in a unique historical period suffused with the pathos of the Victory, fresh memories of the joint struggle within the anti-Hitler coalition, hopes for building a better world. The source basis of the study is representative. It includes interviews of foreign guests published both in the Soviet Union and abroad, ego sources, reports, and questionnaires. Many of them were collected and preserved in the papers of the All-Union Committee for the 220th Anniversary of the USSR Academy of Sciences in the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences (No. 519) and among the personal papers of Academician V.L. Komarov (No. 277). One of the reports of the British delegation is preserved among the personal papers of Sir Henry Dale in the Archives of the Royal Society. V.S. Gruzdinskaya, one of the authors of this article, and M. V. Kovalev co-published this document. The indicated subject is studied fragmentary in modern historiography, the exception is an article by N.A. Kuperstoch, “The image of science in the post-war world: the anniversary conference of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences in June 1945”, which analyzes the responses to the anniversary in the framework of one of the sessions. The anniversary is treated as a communicative platform. In the present article, it allows clarifying the ideas and concepts of national-state science and the ideas of academic internationalism, which involves the use of methods of social and intellectual history. In the space of the anniversary, the idea of a common world science was expressed clearly. Science is international by nature and cannot be confined within the borders of one country. Programs for the formation of a common communicative space were proposed. It was planned to organize an international scientific publishing house, an international abstract journal, an intensive exchange of scientists and students, holding of symposiums, conferences, seminars, and unification of the scientific language. The idea of institutionalizing the “unity of science” emerged. Joseph Needham, an English biochemist, put forward an initiative to create an International Service for Scientific Cooperation. He prepared a memorandum, “The Place of Science and International Scientific Cooperation in Post-war World Organisation”. The responses of the foreign participants of the commemoration show the image of Soviet science and some of its national features. One of them was called rootedness in popular culture, which reflected the scale of scientific achievements' popularization. The reverse side of popularization was the exaggeration of Russian scientists' achievements as a means of inflating national pride. Thus, one of the participants of the celebration, Sir Eric Ashby, captured the specifics of the opposition of Soviet science to the rest of the world - Soviet means excellent. This trend was clearly manifested somewhat later in other international and domestic political contexts.