Table Of ContentScience and the Soviet Social Order
Science and the
Soviet Social Order
Edited by
Loren R. Graham
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
1990
Copyright © 1990 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 21
This book is printed on acid-free paper, and its binding materials
have been chosen for strength and durability.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Science and the Soviet social order / edited by Loren R. Graham,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-674-79420-6
1. Science—Social aspects—Soviet Union. 2. Technology—Social
aspects—Soviet Union. I. Graham, Loren R.
Q175.52.S65S35 1990 89-78235
303.48'3'0947—dc20 CIP
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction: The Impact of Science and Technology
on Soviet Politics and Society 1
Loren R. Graham
PART ONE · Communications and Computers
1. New Communications Technologies and Civil Society 19
S. Frederick Starr
2. Information Technologies and the Citizen: Toward a
"Soviet-Style Information Society"? 51
Seymour Goodman
PART TWO · Biology
3. Prometheus Rechained: Ecology and Conservation 71
Douglas R. Weiner
4. The Soviet Nature-Nurture Debate 94
Mark B. Adams
PART THREE · Engineering and Big Technology
5. Engineers: The Rise and Decline of a Social Myth 141
Harley Balzer
6. Rockets, Reactors, and Soviet Culture 168
Paul R. Josephson
vi · Contents
Ρ A R Τ F 0 U R · Philosophy of Science and Technology
7. Biomedical Ethics 195
Richard T. De George
8. Fact, Value, and Science 225
Bruce J. Allyn
Ρ A R Τ FIV Ε · Literature and Art
9. The Changing Image of Science and Technology
in Soviet Literature 259
Katerina Clark
10. World Outlook and Inner Fears in Soviet Science Fiction 299
Richard Stites
11. Bridging the Two Cultures: The Emergence
of Scientific Prose 325
Mark Kuchment
12. The Response to Science and Technology
in the Visual Arts 341
Peter Nisbet
Notes 361
Contributors 429
Index 431
Preface
Most Western authors interested in Soviet science and technology have
concentrated on international security issues and military competition or,
less frequently, the history of science. The authors in this volume have a
different goal. They wish to understand the Soviet Union better by ana-
lyzing the role that science and technology have played in shaping Soviet
culture and politics. They share the assumption that Western analysts of
the Soviet Union have usually ignored or underestimated science and
technology in their efforts to understand the evolution of Soviet society.
Within two generations the USSR has made the transition from a peas-
ant society to an industrialized superpower; today it has the world's larg-
est scientific and technical establishment, surpassing that of the United
States by almost one third. Nonetheless, anyone visiting the Soviet
Union will probably conclude that this transition to modernity is strikingly
incomplete. In rural areas and even in some aspects of urban life, the
Soviet Union displays many characteristics of an underdeveloped nation.
The uneven modernization of the Soviet Union that is so evident in a
physical sense when one walks down village roads or attempts to buy
goods even in large stores in the capital cities has invisible intellectual,
cultural, and political correlates. Science and technology have heavily im-
pinged on Soviet society, but the results in politics and culture often are
distinct from what one observes in modernized societies in the West.
The modernization process has been accompanied by severe cultural and
social strains. And even where modernization has not caused social dis-
ruption, it has often produced effects that can be explained only in terms
of the context of Soviet society, including its political, ideological, and
religious traditions. This volume is a first attempt at identifying and ana-
viii · Preface
lyzing some of those effects. Its title, Science and the Soviet Social Order,
indicates that its subject is not the technical details but rather the social
consequences of Soviet science and technology.
This book is the product of a four-year collaboration of scholars from
universities in the United States and Canada who met regularly in Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts, to discuss the social and political implications of
science and technology in the Soviet Union. The members of this core
group had actually begun to meet much earlier, in the late seventies, to
study the strengths and weaknesses of Soviet science and technology for
a project supported by the Ford Foundation. During the Ford project,
chaired jointly by Mark Kuchment and myself, the group concentrated
on the nuts and bolts of Soviet science and technology, relying heavily on
the reports of scientists and engineers who had recently emigrated from
the USSR to the United States. At the conclusion of that project it was
apparent to us that the most interesting issues involving Soviet science
and technology are not technical ones but social and political ones. We
decided to deepen our knowledge of the role of science and technology
in Soviet culture and, in particular, the conflicts over values that have
accompanied scientific and technological change in the Soviet Union.
With this goal in mind we applied to the National Endowment for the
Humanities for a three-year grant aimed at creating a Coordinated Re-
search Center on the Humanistic Dimensions of Science and Technology
in the USSR, which I would chair at MIT, with the strong support of the
Russian Research Center at Harvard University. NEH decided to sup-
port this effort, but asked that we raise half the necessary money
through matching grants from other sources. We were fortunate to re-
ceive such grants from the MacArthur Foundation, the Rockefeller
Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and IBM. We are grateful to
NEH and these four matching donors for enabling us to pursue this re-
search project and to produce this book.
From an early point in the project Howard Boyer, Science Editor at
Harvard University Press, became deeply involved. He attended most
of the seminars, made suggestions for revisions of papers, and became a
full member of our group. This unusually fruitful relationship between
authors and editor is an important explanation of the fact that the book is
not merely a collection of individual chapters, but is instead the product
of a group who from the beginning worked toward a common goal, apply-
ing both intellectual and editorial criteria.
The Program on Science, Technology, and Society at MIT was the
Preface · ix
principal home of the project, but Harvard's Russian Research Center
provided cooperation and support. Gregory Crowe, a doctoral student in
the history of science at Harvard, and Jennifer Haywood of the STS pro-
gram at MIT coordinated the project, with the help of Rhea Epstein, also
of the STS program. Kenneth Keniston, director of the STS program,
and Adam Ulam, director of the Russian Research Center, helped us to
obtain financial support and gave much encouragement.
The book is divided into several parts. It starts out with an overview
of the impact of science and technology on Soviet society and politics.
The first specialized part deals with the effects on Soviet society of com-
munications technologies, and includes one chapter written by a histor-
ian, S. Frederick Starr of Oberlin College, and another by a computer
scientist, Seymour Goodman of the University of Arizona. The second
part discusses the social effects of developments in the biological sci-
ences, both chapters of which were written by historians, Douglas R.
Weiner of the University of Arizona and Mark B. Adams of the University
of Pennsylvania. The third part, concerning the place of engineers and
"big technology" in Soviet society, was written by a historian and a his-
torian-political scientist, Harley Balzer of Georgetown University and
Paul R. Josephson of Sarah Lawrence College, respectively. Part Four,
on philosophical questions of science and technology, combines the ef-
forts of a philosopher, Richard T. De George of the University of Kansas,
and a political scientist, Bruce J. Allyn of Harvard. The final part, on
literature and art, was written by researchers in four different special-
ties. They are Katerina Clark, a scholar in Russian and Soviet literature
from Yale University; Richard Stites, a social historian from Georgetown
University; Mark Kuchment, a historian of science from Harvard Uni-
versity; and Peter Nisbet, a curator and historian of art at Harvard Uni-
versity.
L.G.
