Survival before science. 10 Survival before science. Recently, one of the big wheels of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences was asked what would happen if Soviet scientists went on strike. Nobody would notice, he said, until the country found itself lagging far behind in modern technology.
Science is one of the few areas in which the Soviet Union has operated more or less at world levels.
But the crisis gripping the society has shaken the very foundations of its scientific enterprise. The crisis has exposed major faults and contradictions in the Soviet way of doing science. In the Soviet Union, this division is reflected in the two kinds of government institutions charged with doing scientific research. But 96 percent of new technology transferred to industry actually has come from the Academy's work, and only 4 percent has come from applied science. The simple explanation for this paradox is that while the Academy may have many shortcomings, problems in the NII are much worse.