Stalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy, 1905-1953

It is unsurprising to read that Stalin demanded science and scientists to first and foremost serve the Soviet state, their work at all times to reflect the politics of the ruling party, and that this didn't exactly work out how he imagined, especially as he took party will=Stalin's will. Yet what Ings presents here is a well researched and complex picture of the relationship between the leader and scientists/ intellectuals within Russia that had its failures, but some successes too. That I wasn't expecting. Ings may criticise the irrationality and devastating failure, but he doesn't do it from a position of superiority, but as another flawed human. As such, we see the parallels he makes with contemporary political and scientific decision making, lambasting recent failure to take into account the food and other resources we need to meet demands, waiting for scientists to pull us out of the fire with some last minute save.<br /><br />As with Hitler, it is clear that Stalin saw the significance of scientific endeavour to the internal and external power of the state, but he too believed that its direction should be moulded by his will. Science was thus subverted by party politics, or Stalin's personal desires, and only those following the party line got to play. Conversely, those who could reel out the right slogans got a seat at the table, regardless of the viability of their 'science'. His favourite scientist, Lysenko, seemed to see will as the single most important factor in scientific endeavour, the ultimate version of the 'if you want it enough, it'll happen' philosophy. The idea was conceived as a positive one <i>'If you are pure and focused- this was the Bolshevik promise- then the physical world will shape itself to your will. [..] Above all, do not accommodate reality: it will only scatter your effort'</i> [loc 7185]. Yet as some of the evidence makes clear, will alone did not solve Russia's issues with famine or child mortality. Throughout the book, the repeated threat to human life in Russia is staggering. Meanwhile, Stalin becomes obsessed with growing lemons. It's both tragic and bizarre.<br /><br />Such could be said of the whole book. I think the only reason it works so well is due to Ings ability to be entertaining. It makes the reading experience a somewhat strange one, but never boring.<br /><br /><br />Thanks to Simon Ings, Faber &amp; Faber, and Netgalley for the chance to read this review copy. All opinions are my own.<br />

<img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1390307491i/8187618.jpg" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"> Review under spoiler until nearer publication date, however I can give this a 5* and tell you that the paper book is a must for my home library.<br><br><input type="checkbox" class="spoiler__control" aria-label="The following text has been marked spoiler. Toggle checkbox to reveal or hide." onchange="this.labels[0].setAttribute('aria-hidden', !this.checked);" id="6e53bad2-1060-459e-abdd-c466d23ff28d" /><label aria-hidden="true" class="spoiler" for="6e53bad2-1060-459e-abdd-c466d23ff28d">Description: <i>Scientists throughout history, from Galileo to today’s experts on climate change, have often had to contend with politics in their pursuit of knowledge. But in the Soviet Union, where the ruling elites embraced, patronized, and even fetishized science like never before, scientists lived their lives on a knife edge. The Soviet Union had the best-funded scientific establishment in history. Scientists were elevated as popular heroes and lavished with awards and privileges. But if their ideas or their field of study lost favor with the elites, they could be exiled, imprisoned, or murdered. And yet they persisted, making major contributions to 20th century science.<br><br>Stalin and the Scientists tells the story of the many gifted scientists who worked in Russia from the years leading up to the Revolution through the death of the “Great Scientist” himself, Joseph Stalin. It weaves together the stories of scientists, politicians, and ideologues into an intimate and sometimes horrifying portrait of a state determined to remake the world. They often wreaked great harm. Stalin was himself an amateur botanist, and by falling under the sway of dangerous charlatans like Trofim Lysenko (who denied the existence of genes), and by relying on antiquated ideas of biology, he not only destroyed the lives of hundreds of brilliant scientists, he caused the death of millions through famine.<br><br>But from atomic physics to management theory, and from radiation biology to neuroscience and psychology, these Soviet experts also made breakthroughs that forever changed agriculture, education, and medicine. A masterful book that deepens our understanding of Russian history, Stalin and the Scientists is a great achievement of research and storytelling, and a gripping look at what happens when science falls prey to politics. </i><br><br><img src="https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1470284642s/30316225.jpg" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy">Available on NetGalley<br><br>Powerful, eye-opening start to the prologue: <b>Every year, between 1550 and 1800, Russia conquered territory the size of today's Netherlands, until, in the eighteenth century, it dawned on European writers that Russia had become larger than the surface of the visible moon.<br>With no natural geographical boundaries to speak of, Russia's only means of defence was to control its neighbours, using them as buffers against possible attack.</b><br><br><img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1474992613i/20667122.jpg" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy">Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky was a Russian, Ukrainian, and Soviet mineralogist and geochemist who is considered one of the founders of geochemistry.<br><br><img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1475074734i/20677956._SY540_.jpg" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy">Alexander Mikhaylovich Butlerov was a Russian chemist, one of the principal creators of the theory of chemical structure (1857–1861)<br><br><img src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1475075335i/20678021._SX540_.jpg" class="gr-hostedUserImg" loading="lazy"><a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/02/08/mendeleev-periodic-table-dream/" rel="nofollow noopener">How Mendeleev Invented His Periodic Table in a Dream</a></label></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]></["br"]>

This is probably not a book I would have chosen for myself, but I was given a copy, and I found it compulsively readable, informative and surprisingly relevant to the world of Trump, Johnson and other truth-resistant populists.<br /><br />Ings's starting point was the psychologist Luria, and his account is quite heavily skewed towards biological sciences (and a little physics), but the range is impressive. This is by no means a straight denunciation of Stalin, though his role in supporting bad science and the way this contributed directly to the great famines is ruthlessly exposed - there were a surprising number of achievements too, and as Ings points out in his concluding section, recent governments have not always been blameless in their dealings with science either.

Covers western Russian history from the late 1800's to early Khrushchev era, with a particular emphasis on the biologists of the era, though some physicists and psychologists are also featured. The pulpy title is quite misleading: Stalin himself barely features in the first third, and his particular impact on Soviet science is not the primary investigation of the book. The book also looks mainly at biology and Lysenkoism, not scientists in general- anyone expecting an equally thorough examination of Soviet physics, or the nascent space program, will be disappointed.<br /><br />The book is also more interested in Soviet history more generally, with political history informing the structure of the book more than scientific and technological development. This is a shame, since the book's historical understanding is quite poor, and the basic themes and grasp of events could be found in any GCSE textbook on the era. If it is meant to be a chiefly historical text, it is inconsistently referenced, has occasionally glaring errors (p.31: Trotsky is said to be head of the Mensheviks, when this was actually Julius Martov), and has an overly intrusive author who is too willing to provide unwarranted personal opinions instead of letting the facts speak for themselves.<br /><br />The book is slightly better at covering Soviet scientists and the political and historical conditions they dealt with, though their actual work, and discoveries are not covered in any great detail, with the exception of Lysenko, who gets a repeated savaging throughout. The biographies of the figures involved are tied together in a temporal sense, but overall the book fails to coalesce into anything greater on the topic of politics and science in an unbelievably turbulent country and era. Apart from anything else, this creates quite a repetitive rhythm to the book, where one chapter passes much like the last.<br /><br />Given the subject matter, the book could have been much more interesting and relevant.

'Stalin and the Scientists' by Simon Ings<br /><br />4 stars/ 8 out of 10<br /><br />I have previously read a lot about Trofim Lysenko, and had many discussions about him; so I was interested to read this book in order to find out more about him and his contemporaries, and the environment in which they lived and worked.<br /><br />Simon Ings has written a detailed and clearly expressed book, about scientists in Russia during the period from 1905 to 1953. In addition to the bibliography, each chapter has informative endnotes.<br /><br />There is a prologue covering the period 1856 to 1905, which provides an explanatory background for the rest of the book. <br /><br />Part 1 covers 1905 to 1929. As I read this, I realised that there were several Russian scientists from this period whom I already knew something about: Luria, Pavlov and Vygotsky. This helped provide me with a context for the many unknown scientists that were introduced to me in this part. There were so many issues raised in this section that interested me eg: the shocking severity of the famines in Russia throughout the period, the work by Muller on genes, some of the details relating to eugenics and sterilisation in many countries. Other things I found fascinating included Kammerer and his toads, and Lenin's brain.<br /><br />Part 2 covers 1929 to 1941. It starts with the background to the rise to power of Stalin. The most interesting sections here for me related to Luther Burbank (the American plantsman), Gorky, Stakhanov, and the Great Purge. Lysenko appears as an overarching theme in both this Part, and in Part 3 of the book, which covers 1941 to 1953. Part 3 was interesting regarding the change in the role of specialists during this period. I learnt here of Timofeev-Ressovsky, whom I had never known about previously, and also gained much more knowledge about the gulag camps, and about the development of the Russian nuclear programme.<br /><br />Simon Ings has a clear and enjoyable writing style, suitable for a non-specialist audience. The book contains a lot of political history, which is necessary in order to put the developments in the scientific fields into context. I feel that I have learnt a lot from this book, and I recommend it to anybody who is interested in this period in Russian history, or is interested in science in general.<br /><br />Thank you to Faber and Faber Ltd and to NetGalley for an ARC.

“Russia’s political elites embraced science, patronized it, fetishized it and even tried to impersonate it,” Simon Ings writes in “Stalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy 1905-1953.” <br /><br />Ings takes a light tone with the dark history of a nation so big, it has “more surface area than the visible moon”(eep! I still haven’t web-surfed that one, but I trust it must be so). All that land, yet most of it cannot sustain its population. A full third of this empire is in the permanent grip of ice and snow. Where the soil is fertile, the climate is cold. In warmer regions, the soil is poor. There’s a narrow belt of fertile black earth with enough rainfall to grow crops.<br /><br />In Russia there were no institutions for reformers to reform; no councils, no unions, no guilds, few roads, schools or hospitals. “For the masses, modernization consisted of containment, regimentation, curfew and exemplary punishment.” <br /><br />What a country!<br /><br />“Quite simply, whenever capitalism tried to penetrate Russia’s heartland, it caught a cold and died,” Ings quips.<br /><br />So many fascinating facts and insights in this history of Russian scientists, particularly under Stalin! I want to comment on every chapter, but I also want to read dozens more books, and it's ever a balancing act, deciding how much to rave about one book before moving on to the next one. "The Patriots" by Sana Krasikov is the next Russian-themed novel on my list. I loved "The Bear and the Nightingale" by Katherine Arden, which reads like a fairy tale. <br /><br />This book is straight non-fiction, but Simon Ings brings it to life with a conversational tone, as if telling us these stories over a pitcher of beer (er, vodka!). He makes the Russian people *real* in a way that history books seldom do.<br /><br />Below, some of my favorite excerpts:<br /><br />-- Alexander Romanovich Luria, in a career full of astonishing achievements, accomplished the extraordinary feat of leading a normal life. He betrayed no one, nor was he betrayed. He led a happy family life.<br /><br />-- Austrian scientist Enrst “Speed of Sound” Mach argued that science makes no pronouncements about ultimate reality. One body of knowledge can lead scientists to several, equally valid conclusions. Lenin hated Mach’s “empirionmonism."<br /><br />-- “The Bolsheviks’ philosophy preached optimism as a virtue, even a moral duty.”<br /><br /> -- “The communist ideal did not fail; it was never really tried.” The shadow of the Prussian solution over all. Western commentators bemoaned Russia’s failure to adopt capitalism: without a free market, how would Russia ever emerge from a dark age?<br /><br />-- A Russian poet in 1906 returned from Stockholm to St Peterbsurg, and you must read the book to see why this caught my eye. It's sad. That's all I want to say about that.<br /><br />-- Stalin’s forced collectivization of agriculture took tsarist megalomania to new depths.<br /><br />-- Stalin believed science should serve the state. Pure research was counterproductive. Politicians, philosophers, and scientists intruded onto each other’s turf.<br /><br />Ings summarizes the most life changing work of scientists before Stalin’s time: Edwin Hubble measuring the distance to the nearer spiral galaxies, for example, and Marconi’s longwave radio signals. <br /><br />With the transformative and traumatic 20th Century, impatient believers turned on the scientific community and demanded that the future happen right away. Gone was the mutual understanding that characterized 19th Century Europe’s religion, science and politics. Stalin “invested recklessly in Russian science even while having individual scientists sacked, imprisoned, murdered”– many vanished without a trace. Psychoanalysis was made illegal.<br /><br />If this review makes me look lazy, allow me to share the Outline:<br /><br />Part One: Control (1905-1929) )<br />Scholars, revolutionaries, entrepreneurs, workers<br /><br />Part Two: Power (1929-1941<br />Eccentrics, office politics, <br /><br />Part Three: Dominion (1941-1953)<br />Lysenko<br /><br />I read the book, and others should, too. I just can't justify taking time to write the review it deserves.<br /><br />NOTE: I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for my honest feedback.

I have a several remarks about this book:<br />1) Authors attempts to explain caveats of Russian language<br /> - author says that there is no work "scientist" in Russian, the closest analog is "ученный"(uchenniy) which means educated. Remark is correct for 17-th century Russian. This day it means nothing else except scientist.<br /> - Russian does not have a word for favor, it actually does: "услуга"(usluga).<br />2) WW2 description, I might be wrong here but author says that that in 4-6 weeks Minsk was taken, that sounds to soon.<br />3) Stalin appears only in the middle of the book.<br />4) The book is not really about science in general, it is almost completely devoted to biology, agronomy and genetics

Disclosure: I received a review copy of this book from NetGalley.<br /><br />Even a casual student of Soviet history must remark upon the strange relationship the USSR had with science. It forms major themes in specialist works by historians such as Stephen Kotkin and Loren Graham, and forms an undercurrent in works by Robert Conquest and others. Whereas these writers use Soviet science as a way to explore the internal contradictions which ended the experiment in Socialism, Simon Ings is far more interested in the reason why Soviet science had such a relationship with the state.<br /><br />For this reason, <i>Stalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy, 1905-1953</i>, is probably best understood as the story of Trofim Lysenko. This is not to say that the book follows Lysenko exclusively, but rather the rise and dominance of the man and his pseudoscientific theories is the climax and falling action of the narrative. The work “describes what…failure meant to a state that justified itself through science, and regarded its own science, Marxism, as the capstone…” Lysenko was the origin of many failures.<br /><br />Simon Ings is a novelist and science writer based in Britain, and this is his second foray into book-length non-fiction. Similar to Loren Graham’s <i>Ghost of the Executed Engineer</i>, Ings approaches his rather broad topic from the perspective of individuals in Russia and the Soviet Union. Beginning with members of the first generation of scientists who were born and educated under the Tsarist bureaucracy, Ings tracks the general trends in Russian science. Under the Tsar, science was recently brought into a similar state as the rest of Europe; with a national academy of sciences being formed and research institutes beginning to be established, albeit with less capital investment. Russia was, and is, capital poor. These Tsarist experts became necessary for the very existence of the Soviet state: whether it was army officers, engineers, factory managers, or, even, biologists. Under Lenin, these experts were generally accepted and flourished, especially during the NEP.<br /><br />This intellectual prosperity changes, however, when Stalin begins to solidify power. Philosophically, Socialism could not fail: so therefore failures needed to be blamed on something. These scapegoats could be under foreign influence, as many scientists were claimed to be. Because Germany was a leader in science, and rapidly fell to Nazism, those who followed German theories were easy targets. Other groups were associated with left or right opposition groups, mostly fictional, but nevertheless always lurking in shadows. Some were “wreckers”, counter-revolutionary figures intentionally damaging the Soviet system. But, most victims of Stalin’s terror were people in the wrong place at the wrong time. The constant failures of the political system to accomplish its goals led the government to create a frenzy of internal enemies, neighbors denounced neighbors, children their parents, and scientists their lab partners. Quotas of arrests, deportations, and executions ensured that the innocent would be punished.<br /><br />Into this arose Trofim Lysenko. A peasant, he rose through the bureaucracy based on his political acumen rather than his scientific abilities. Politically correct in a system which required it, his particular brand of quackery rapidly became the state scientific gospel. He is the central figure in the narrative for good reason. Lysenko was a man who took the rather normal concept of vernalization and used it as a hammer against genetics. This simple biological concept is so central to science that it destroyed the intellectual abilities of generations of Soviet scientists. Notable exceptions include nuclear research and the Soviet space program. As useful as Lysenkos could be in controlling knowledge, neither Stalin or any other leader allowed quackery into what really mattered.<br /><br /><i>Stalin and the Scientists</i> is very readable, which is the best thing going for it. It was originally published in Britain last year; this is a review of the US release. So, it is a polished work. Ings is able to use his experience as a science writer to condense some very dense and technical science into easy-to-understand language. As an historian, I appreciated this quite a bit. While he isn’t bringing much new to the table—he appears to use entirely secondary or published primary sources; and only English-language (or translated)—he doesn’t claim to be reinventing the wheel. He lacks a clear argument, but succeeds in his stated goals for the book. While specialists will find little they are not aware of, it nevertheless serves an important role in the literature of Soviet history. I can recommend this book highly to casual readers, students, and non-specialists looking to bone up on the era of Stalin.

Interesting premise and I did learn new things about Soviet genetics, agriculture and the nuclear bomb project. However, the books main focus is biology and the lives of the scientists rather than Soviet scientific policies, ideologies and general trends which was disappointing. Additionally, Stalin's views on science barely featured, which was a shame as finding out about that was one of the biggest appeals of the book for me.

Vynikajúce. So záberom širším ako by indikoval názov.