Scientific History: Experiments in History and Politics from the Bolshevik Revolution to the End of the Cold War

253 Pages·2021·2.405 MB·English

by  Elena Aronova

Scientific History

Scientific History
Experiments in History and Politics from the Bolshevik
Revolution to the End of the Cold War
Elena Aronova
The University of Chicago Press :: Chicago and London
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
© 2021 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in
any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case
of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information,
contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago,
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Published 2021
Printed in the United States of America
30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 1 2 3 4 5
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 76138- 1 (cloth)
isbn- 13: 978- 0- 226- 76141- 1 (e- book)
doi: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226761411.001.0001
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Aronova, E. A. (Elena Aleksandrovna), author.
Title: Scientific history : experiments in history and politics from the
Bolshevik revolution to the end of the Cold War / Elena Aronova.
Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2020038272 | isbn 9780226761381 (cloth) |
isbn 9780226761411 (ebook)

Subjects: lcsh: Historiography—History—20th century. | Historiography—
Europe—History—20th century. | History—Methodology—History. |
Science—History—Historiography.

Classification: lcc d13 .a76 2021 | ddc 907.2—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020038272

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48- 1992
(Permanence of Paper).
Contents
Preface vii
Introduction 1
Russia as Method 6
1 The Quest for Scientific History 12
Two Unity of Science Movements 14
Positivism, History, and Henri Berr’s Historical
Synthesis 20
Historical Synthesis and the History of Science 25
The Internationalist Politics of Synthesis 29
2 Scientific History and the Russian Locale 33
Russia and the West 34
Russian Historiography on the World Stage 37
Marxism and History 41
The Great Break 47
Bukharin and the History of Science 51
London 1931 54

3 Nikolai Vavilov, Genogeography, and History’s
Past Future 60

The Geographies of History and the Genetic Archive 62
The Mendeleev of Biology 65
Vavilov’s Genogeography and the Bolsheviks’ Geopolitics 71
A “New Kind of History” 78

The Politics of History 82
CoNTENTS vi
4 Julian Huxley’s Cold Wars 87
Julian Huxley’s Two Careers 88
A Journey to a Utopian Future 94
The Crisis in Soviet Genetics and Julian Huxley’s
Cold Wars 98
Huxley’s Evolutionary History 106
5 The UNESCO “History of Mankind: Cultural and
Scientific Development” Project 110
History by Committee 111
Febvre’s Cahiers: Historical Journals and the Making
of Historical Knowledge 119
Cold War Internationalism and the Writing of History 124
6 Information Socialism, Historical Informatics,
and the Markets 132
Bernal’s Information Socialism: From London 1931
to Cold War America, via Russia 133
Envisioning History as Data Science 139
Historians and Computers 145
The Socialist Market for a Capitalist Data Product 148
Epilogue 157
Past Futures of the History of Science 160
List of Archive Abbreviations 163
Notes 165
Index 229
Preface
This book is a history, but it was shaped by my experi-
ences as a scientist. My undergraduate training and first
career were in science. I graduated from the Chemistry De-
partment of Moscow State University in 1991, precisely at
the moment that the country that had provided my educa-
tion and guaranteed my employment ceased to exist. I was
fortunate to land a position at the Institute of Bioorganic
Chemistry in Moscow, a leading institute in my field. As
I began work as a biochemist in the laboratory of Gene
Bioengineering, the economy was melting all around me.
Libraries discontinued costly journal subscriptions, labs
stopped receiving reagents, and many institutes in Mos-
cow could not even afford electricity. Any time colleagues
traveled abroad to attend a conference or do research,
they returned with reprints and lab supplies. Most often,
they would bring a bagful of Eppendorf tubes—a n indis-
pensable laboratory consumable for working with small
sample preparations, from 0.5 to 2 milliliters. Eppendorf
tubes are intended to be used one time only, but, out of

necessity, we washed and reused them many times. It was
not a good time to do molecular biology in Russia.

After a couple of years, I began considering other op-
tions. I took a friend’s offer to kickstart a lab that applied
the then- new technique of the polymerase chain reaction,
or PCR, to detect sexually transmitted diseases in screening
PREFACE viii
tests administered through the Russian Ministry of Public Health. It was
the first lab of this kind in Moscow, and the job paid well, but my col-
leagues and I still lacked basic gear and washed our Eppendorfs, which
risked contaminating the test samples. Given the stakes involved, a do-
it- yourself approach to molecular diagnostics felt scary and very wrong.
It was around this time that I first encountered the history of science.
Initially, I thought of the history of science as a way to continue doing
science, just by other means—i t seemed to be an ideal compromise solu-
tion in my situation. I entered a doctoral program at the Institute for the
History of Science and Technology in Moscow while continuing to work
in a wet lab and wrote a dissertation on the conceptual history of im-
munology, earning a degree in biology. By then, however, I had become
genuinely interested in history and ended up pursuing another doctorate,
this time in history, at the University of California, San Diego.
My journey from the lab to the archives made me observant of par-
allels between scientific method and historical method. As a scientist,
I had collected, processed, described, compared, and interpreted data.
I backed my analysis with evidential support to corroborate my con-
clusions. Historians do pretty much the same. I was curious to find out
whether the parallels extend further than that. This book is my attempt
to think through a history of disciplinary crossovers by mapping out var-
ious ways in which historians and scientists have exchanged and shared
methodologies, approaches, and subject matters.
Today, a growing number of scholars in the humanities are calling
for a reengagement with the natural sciences. Taking their cues from
recent breakthroughs in genetics and the neurosciences, the advocates
of “biohistory” and “deep history” call for a reassessment of long- held
assumptions about the very definition of history, its methods, and its
evidentiary base.1 The most polemical of the present- day revisionist
projects, Big History, seeks to unite what C. P. Snow called the “two cul-
tures” of the sciences and the humanities under the umbrella of the his-
tory of the universe, from the big bang to the present day, putting human
history in the context of cosmic history and historians into conversation
with practitioners in biology, geology, and other sciences.2 Digital hu-
manities is another area in which the two cultures of the sciences and the

humanities have come together after a period of what was perceived as a
separation. After the cultural, linguistic, transnational, and other histo-

riographic “turns” that marked the writing of history in the later part of
the twentieth century, the historiography is, as some claim, experiencing
a “scientific turn” in the first decades of the twenty- first century.
One of the things I learned in my professional training as a histo-
PREFACE ix
rian is that historiographic turns often have longer histories than their
claims of novelty would suggest and that historicizing the turns brings
to the fore a more sophisticated inventory of approaches, possibilities,
and intellectual trends than turning talk alone allows.3 Looking back at
their own past, contemporary historians recognize that their nineteenth-
century counterparts shared interests and methodologies with natural
scientists. These connections have, however, become submerged in his-
torians’ accounts of their own discipline in the twentieth century. This
collective amnesia makes the present-d ay scientific turn in history appear
revolutionary and new. But, as the account I provide in this book shows,
there was a scientific turn in history at every turn since history was estab-
lished as a discipline.
There was, of course, a scientific turn in the late nineteenth century
when Leopold von Ranke’s seminars in Berlin established scientific
standards of evidence as a norm of professional historical research. But
there was also a scientific turn driven by biology, first in the form of
nineteenth- century movements to analogize biological evolution and his-
torical development, and then in the form of early twentieth- century at-
tempts to use genetics as a resource to overcome the historical determin-
ism inherent in evolutionary explanations of history. In the first decades
of the twentieth century, many scientists and historians regarded the his-
tory of science as a bridge between the humanities and the sciences, and
it was practiced accordingly. In the 1940s and 1950s, the scientific turn
was driven by a demand for a less Eurocentric and more global world
history. In the following decades, the arrival of computers prompted
new practices of data mining and promoted already-e xisting quantita-
tive conventions and practices of collecting, aggregating, and processing
data. All these can legitimately be viewed as scientific turns. None, how-
ever, figure in contemporary historians’ calls to rearticulate their inqui-
ries as enterprises “distinct” from “yet complementary to” those in the
natural sciences.4 This book maps out the submerged history of histori-
ans’ continuous engagement with the methods, tools, and values of the
natural sciences throughout the twentieth century. I call this engagement
scientific history.
The history of scientific history, in all its forms, would be a very big

story. The book is necessarily selective and does not claim to offer a
comprehensive account of scientific history in all its different variations.

Rather, this is an outline history of how people have thought about what
perspectives from genetics, botany, or computer sciences could do for
history as well as about what history could do for these sciences and why
scholars should be concerned with these matters. In the same way that
PREFACE x
my motivations for this project were driven by my own trajectory and
experiences, I ground this historical account in the life trajectories of in-
dividuals. Many of them, such as the historians associated with the An-
nales school of historiography and the biologists Julian Huxley, Niko-
lai Vavilov, and John Desmond Bernal, will be familiar to readers from
existing historiographic literature. However, the interactions between
these historians and these and other biologists have escaped the atten-
tion of the historians and receded from our historical memory. I argue
that these interactions drove the scientific turns of their time.
My points of departure and arrival for this story are also a reflection
of my own personal and professional trajectory, which took me from
Russia to the United States via extended stays in France and Germany.
I was naturally interested in these countries’ cultural outlooks and the
experiences of individuals involved in similar cross- cultural exchanges.
All the stories in this book involve transnational encounters, particu-
larly French scholars’ interactions with Soviet scientists. These encoun-
ters, I found, profoundly shaped the writing of history in the twentieth
century, but the Soviet part of the story has become separated from the
history of historiographic thought by an intellectual iron curtain. More
often than not, however, it is the submerged parts of history that are
most interesting. As we shall see, the story of scientific history looks very
different if we consider the histories of historiographic thought and the
histories of science in Russia/the Soviet Union together.