Comrade scientist
Subtitle: Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars
By: Ethan Pollock.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2006
Place of publication: Princeton, N.J
Language: eng
Number of pages: 269
ISBN-13: 9780691124674
Subjects: Stalin, Joseph, 1879-1953; Communism and science -- Soviet Union; Science and state -- Soviet Union; Soviet Union -- Politics and government -- 1936-1953
Description: Focusing on six major postwar debates in the Soviet scientific community, this 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.

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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Stalin, science, and politics after the Second World War; title: "A Marxist should not write like that": the crisis on the "philosophical front"; title: "The future belongs to Michurin": the agricultural academy session of 1948; title: "We can always shoot them later": physics, politics, and the atomic bomb; title: "Battles of opinions and open criticism": Stalin intervenes in linguistics; title: "Attack the detractors with certainty of total success": the Pavlov session of 1950; title: "Everyone is waiting": Stalin and the economic problems of communism; title: Conclusion: science and the fate of the Stalinist system.