Suppressed research in the Soviet Union refers to scientific fields which were banned in the Soviet Union, usually for ideological reasons. Science and humanities were placed under a strict ideological scrutiny in the Soviet Union. All research was to be founded on the philosophy of dialectical materialism. All humanities and social sciences were additionally tested for strict accordance with historical materialism. These tests were alleged to serve as a cover for political suppression, to terrorize scientists who engaged in research labeled as "idealistic" or "bourgeois".[1]
In several cases the consequences of ideological influences were dramatic. The suppression of research began during the Stalin era and continued after his regime.[2]
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Certain scientific fields in the Soviet Union were suppressed primarily after being labeled as ideologically incorrect.[1][3]
At different moments in Soviet history a number of research areas were declared "bourgeois pseudosciences", on ideological grounds, the most notable and harmful cases being these of genetics and cybernetics. Their prohibition caused serious harm to Soviet science and economics. Soviet scientists never won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine or a Turing Award. (In comparison, they received seven Nobel Prizes in Physics.) This is one of the factors that resulted in the USSR historically lagging in the fields of computers, microelectronics and biotechnology.
Research which was not banned was often subject to political pressure to conform to certain schools of science seen as "progressive."
Further, research was subject to censorship. Hence, scientists and researches were denied access to some publications and research of the Western scientists, or any others deemed politically incorrect; access to many others was restricted. Their own research was similarly censored, some scientists were forbidden from publishing at all, many others experienced significant delays or had to agree to have their works published only in closed journals, to which access was significantly restricted.
| Repression in the Soviet Union |
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| General |
| Political repression • Economic repression • Ideological repression |
| Political repression |
| Red Terror • Collectivization • Great Purge • Population transfer • Gulag • Holodomor • Mass killings under Communist regimes • Political abuse of psychiatry |
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Ideological repression |
| Religion • Suppressed research • Censorship • Censorship of images |
In the mid-1930s, the agronomist Trofim Lysenko started a campaign against genetics[4] and was supported by Stalin. Between 1934 and 1940, many geneticists were executed (including Agol, Levit, Nadson) or sent to labor camps (including the best-known Soviet geneticist, Nikolai Vavilov, who died in prison in 1943). Genetics was called "the whore of capitalism" (продажная девка капитализма) and stigmatized as a "fascist science", hinting at its closeness to eugenics, popular in Nazi Germany. If the field of genetics' connection to Nazis wasn't enough, Mendelian genetics particularly enraged Stalin due to its founder Gregor Mendel's being a Catholic Christian priest, a fact that flew in the face of the Soviet Union's official atheism and antitheism.[5][6][7][8][9]
However, some geneticists survived and continued to work on genetics, dangerous as this was.
In 1948, genetics was officially declared "a bourgeois pseudoscience"; all geneticists were fired from work (some were also arrested), and all genetic research was discontinued. The taboo on genetics continued even after Stalin's death. Only in the mid-1960s was it completely waived.
Ivan Pavlov's theory of higher nervous function was used to denounce Western influence in physiology. In 1950, the Soviet government organized the Joint Scientific Session of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, the "Pavlovian session". Several prominent Soviet physiologists (L.A. Orbeli, P.K. Anokhin, A.D. Speransky, I.S. Beritashvily) were attacked for deviating from Pavlov's teaching. As a consequence of the Pavlovian session, Soviet physiologists were forced to accept a dogmatic ideology; the quality of physiological research deteriorated and Soviet physiology self-excluded itself from the international scientific community.[10]
In 1951, an attempt was made to reform organic chemistry in the spirit of Lysenkoism. The culprit was the theory of structural resonances by Linus Pauling, declared "idealistic" (since it speaks about the "resonance" of nonexistent molecular structures). The planned victim was the Chemical Department of the Moscow State University that carried out the related research. In June 1951 The All-Union Conference on the State of the Theory of Chemical Composition in Organic Chemistry was held, where the resonance theory was declared bourgeois pseudoscience, and the corresponding report was sent to Stalin.
Cybernetics was also outlawed as bourgeois pseudoscience, "mechanistically equating processes in live nature, society and in technical systems, and thus standing against materialistic dialectics and modern scientific physiology developed by Ivan Pavlov". A more radical description was "the mercantile whore of global imperialism". As with genetics, the taboo continued for several years after Stalin's death, but ultimately served as a rallying point for the destalinisation of Soviet science. The symbolic significance of cybernetics in the reformation of Soviet science after Stalin - as well as its position as a label for interdisciplinary research - accounts for much of the subject's popularity in the Soviet Union long after its decline as a distinct field of research in the West. By suppressing cybernetics, Stalin was arguably responsible for its dramatic growth after his death.
Soviet historiography - the way in which history was and is written by scholars of the Soviet Union[11] - was significantly influenced by the strict control by the authorities aimed at propaganda of communist ideology and Soviet power.
| “ | Historians are dangerous and capable of turning everything upside down. They have to be watched. Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1956[12] |
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Since the late 1930s, Soviet historiography treated the party line and reality as one and the same.[13] As such, if it was a science, it was a science in service of a specific political and ideological agenda, commonly employing historical revisionism.[14] In the 1930s, historic archives were closed and original research was severely restricted. Historians were required to pepper their works with references — appropriate or not — to Stalin and other "Marxist-Leninist classics", and to pass judgment — as prescribed by the Party — on pre-revolution historic Russian figures.[15]
Many works of Western historians were forbidden or censored, many areas of history were also forbidden for research as, officially, they never happened.[12] Translations of foreign historiography were often produced in a truncated form, accompanied with extensive censorship and corrective footnotes. For example, in the Russian 1976 translation of Basil Liddell Hart's History of the Second World War pre-war purges of Red Army officers, the secret protocol to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, many details of the Winter War, the occupation of the Baltic states, the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, Western Allied assistance to the Soviet Union during the war, many other Western Allies' efforts, the Soviet leadership's mistakes and failures, criticism of the Soviet Union and other content were censored out.[16]
At the beginning of Stalin's rule, the dominant figure in Soviet linguistics was Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr, who argued that language is a class construction and that language structure is determined by the economic structure of society. Stalin, who had previously written about language policy as People's Commissar for Nationalities, read a letter by Arnold Chikobava criticizing the theory. He "summoned Chikobava to a dinner that lasted from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. taking notes diligently."[17] In this way he grasped enough of the underlying issues to coherently oppose this simplistic Marxist formalism, ending Marr's ideological dominance over Soviet linguistics. Stalin's principal work in the field was a small essay, "Marxism and Linguistic Questions."[18] Although no great theoretical contributions or insights came from it, neither were there any apparent errors in Stalin's understanding of linguistics; his influence arguably relieved Soviet linguistics from the sort of ideologically driven theory that dominated genetics.
Pedology was a popular area of research on the basis of numerous orphanages created after the Russian Civil War. Soviet pedology was a combination of pedagogy and psychology of human development, that heavily relied on various tests. It was officially banned in 1936 after a special decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union "On Pedolodical Perversions in the Narkompros System" on July 4, 1936.
Philosophical research in the Soviet Union was officially confined to Marxist-Leninist thinking, which theoretically was the basis of objective and ultimate philosophical truth. During the 1920s and 1930s, other tendencies of Russian thought were repressed (many philosophers emigrated, others were expelled). Joseph Stalin enacted a decree in 1931 identifying dialectical materialism with Marxism Leninism, making it the official philosophy which would be enforced in all communist states and, through the Comintern, in most communist parties. Following the traditional use in the Second International, opponents would be labeled as "revisionists". From the beginning of Bolshevik regime, the aim of official Soviet philosophy (which was taught as an obligatory subject for every course), was the theoretical justification of Communist ideas. For this reason, "Sovietologists", whom the most famous were Józef Maria Bocheński and Gustav Wetter, have often claimed Soviet philosophy was close to nothing but dogma. However, since the 1917 October Revolution, it was marked by both philosophical and political struggles, which call into question any monolithic reading. Evald Vasilevich Ilyenkov was one of the main philosophers of the 1960s, who revisited the 1920s debate between "mechanicists" and "dialecticians" in Leninist Dialectics & Metaphysics of Positivism (1979). During the 1960s and 1970s Western philosophies including analytical philosophy and logical empiricism began to make a mark in Soviet thought.
In the late 1940s, some areas of physics, especially quantum mechanics but also special and general relativity, were also criticized on grounds of "idealism". Soviet physicists, such as K. V. Nikolskij and D. Blokhintzev, developed a version of the statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics, which was seen as more adhering to the principles of dialectical materialism.[19][20] However, although initially planned,[21] this process did not go as far as defining an "ideologically correct" version of physics and purging those scientists who refused to conform to it, because this was recognized as potentially too harmful to the Soviet nuclear program.
To circumvent ideological pressure in the 1960s and 1970s on "formalistic tendencies in linguistics", Soviet researchers in semiotics introduced an obscure synonym, theory of secondary modeling systems ("вторичные моделирующие системы"), the language being the "primary modelling system". See also Japhetic theory (linguistics).
After the Russian Revolution, sociology was gradually "politicized, Bolshevisized and eventually, Stalinized".[22] From 1930s to 1950s, the discipline virtually ceased to exist in the Soviet Union.[22] Even in the era where it was allowed to be practiced, and not replaced by Marxist philosophy, it was always dominated by Marxist thought; hence sociology in the Soviet Union and the entire Eastern Bloc represented, to a significant extent, only one branch of sociology: Marxist sociology.[22] With the death of Joseph Stalin and the 20th Party Congress in 1956, restrictions on sociological research were somewhat eased, and finally, after the 23rd Party Congress in 1966, sociology in Soviet Union was once again officially recognized as an acceptable branch of science.[23]
| “ | "Cunning Figures".
This is the translation of a widely cited article ("Lukavaya Tsifra") by journalist Vasily Selyunin and economist Grigory Khanin, in Novy Mir, February 1987, #2: 181-202[24] |
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The quality (accuracy and reliability) of data published in the Soviet Union and used in historical research is another issue raised by various Sovietologists.[25][26][27][28] The Marxist theoreticians of the Party considered statistics as a social science; hence many applications of statistical mathematics were curtailed, particularly during the Stalin's era.[29] Under central planning, nothing could occur by accident.[29] Law of large numbers or the idea of random deviation were decreed as "false theories".[29] Statistical journals and university departments were closed; world renowned statisticians like Andrey Kolmogorov or Eugen Slutsky abandoned statistical research.[29]
As with all Soviet historiography, reliability of Soviet statistical data varied from period to period.[28] The first revolutionary decade and the period of Stalin's dictatorship both appear highly problematic with regards to statistical reliability; very little statistical data were published from 1936 to 1956 (see Soviet Census (1937)).[28] The reliability of data has improved after 1956 when some missing data was published and Soviet experts themselves published some adjusted data for the Stalin's era;[28] however the quality of documentation has deteriorated.[27]
While on occasion statistical data useful in historical research might have been completely invented by the Soviet authorities,[26] there is little evidence that most statistics were significantly affected by falsification or insertion of false data with the intent to confound the West.[27] Data was however falsified both during collection - by local authorities who would be judged by the central authorities based on whether their figures reflected the central economy prescriptions - and by internal propaganda, with its goal to portray the Soviet state in most positive light to its very citizens.[25][28] Nonetheless the policy of not publishing - or simply not collecting - data that was deemed unsuitable for various reasons was much more common than simple falsification; hence there are many gaps in Soviet statistical data.[27] Inadequate or lacking documentation for much of Soviet statistical data is also a significant problem.[25][27][28]
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