Expedient Catastrophe: A Reconsideration of the 1929 Crisis at the Soviet Academy of Science

In: Slavic review: interdisciplinary quarterly of Russian, Eurasian and East European studies, Band 47, Heft 2, S. 261-279

Abstract

The year 1929 was a watershed in the long history of the St. Petersburg Imperial, later Russian, and, finally, Soviet Academy of Sciences. In that year the leadership of the academy, its membership, and personnel were drastically and irreversibly changed. Even during the first postrevolutionary decade the academy retained semi-autonomy in its traditional capacity as a local scholarly body. The modern Soviet Academy of Sciences, however, is known to be a huge bureaucratic "empire of knowledge." It is rigidly controlled by the party apparatus and regarded as an important instrument for the realization of the scientific, technological, and ideological policy dictated by the Soviet leadership and the general political interests of the Soviet ruling class. Undoubtedly, the historical transformation of the academy passed through many stages, but the process itself originated in 1929.