by James Millar
The era of Nicholas I ended on a sour note: Overreacting to the revolutionary waves in Western Europe in 1848, the government made it illegal for young Russians to attend Western universities in search of advanced scientific training. The Academy, which traditionally supervised the selection for foreign training, lost one of its prized functions. The government also abrogated Paragraph 33 of the 1836 charter, which stipulated that “scholarly books and journals, subscribed to by the Academy or full members of the Academy are not subject to censorship.”
Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War in 1855 and 1856 created an atmosphere favoring liberal reforms of a large magnitude in both the political system and social relations. The emancipation of the serfs topped the list of changes that earned the 1860s the title of “The Epoch of Great Reforms.”
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Scientists monitor the control desk at the Academy of Sciences Atomic Electric Station. © HULTON ARCHIVE The restive intelligentsia viewed science and its critical spirit as the safest path to lifting Russia on the scale of social, political, and economic progress.
Among the new members of the Academy were several Russians whose scholarly reputations were firmly established in and outside Russia. The mathematician Pafnuty Lvovich Chebyshev’s contributions to number and probability theories made a strong impression on the Paris Academy of Sciences, which elected him an associ? ?tranger. In addition to his many other contributions to chemistry, Nikolai Nikolayevich Zinin reduced aniline from nitrobenzene; this introduced the industrial production of paints. The historian Sergei Mikhailovich Soloviev, elected a member of the Academy in 1871, was deeply involved in writing his multivolume History of Russia since Ancient Times, a grand synthesis of the nation’s political, social, and cultural developments.
The Academy established closer contact with university professors by allowing more space in its journals for their contributions. It also improved its public image through intensive involvement in the national festivities commemorating the centennial of Lomonosov’s death. On this occasion it published a number of books covering the multiple sides of Lomonosov’s scientific and literary activities. After the celebrations, Peter Pekarsky, a member of the Academy, wrote a two-volume history of his institution, based exclusively on the archival material and casting penetrating light on the early history of Russian science. For the first time, a Russian was appointed permanent secretary of the Academy, and annual reports were presented in the Russian language. The use of the Russian language in the Academy’s publications increased by the establishment of the journal Zapiski (Memoirs).
In the early 1880s, the Academy became a target of public attacks provoked by its refusal to elect Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleyev, the discoverer of the periodic law of elements, to its membership. The Academy was now referred to as a “German institution” and the novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky went so far as to suggest the establishment of a Free Russian Academy supported by private endowments. The Mendeleyev incident helped bring an
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end to inviting foreign scholars to fill the vacant positions in the Academy.
All distinguished university professors, the new members of the Academy provided a significant index of rapidly advancing Russian scholarship. At the end of the nineteenth century, the growing fields of science were represented by the neuro-physiologist and expert on conditioned reflexes Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, the first Russian recipient of the Nobel Prize; the mathematicians Andrei Andreye-vich Markov and Alexander Mikhailovich Lya-punov, who raised the theory of probability to new heights; Alexei Nikolayevich Krylov, an expert in naval architecture and the translator of Newton’s Principia; and Nikolai Yegorovich Zhukovsky, a pioneer in aerodynamics.
The Academy welcomed the February Revolution in 1917, which brought an end to the autocratic system. The academician Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky was the moving spirit behind the law abolishing the multi-ramified system of censorship in all phases of written expression. The Academy acquired a new name-the Russian Academy of Sci-ences-and the geologist Alexander Petrovich Karpinsky became the first elected president. The organization of the first research institutes heralded the appearance of research focused on the burning questions of modern science. They quickly became the primary units of the Academy. The first institute concentrated on the use of physical methods in chemical analysis.
At the end of Imperial Russia, the Academy had fourty-one full members. It had one of the country’s richest libraries, several museums, and a small number of underequipped laboratories. A solid majority of academicians worked in the humanities and the social sciences. This distribution was reversed under the Soviet system. The academicians were supported by a staff of specialists in individual fields and laboratory technicians.
The Bolshevik victory in October 1917 brought two instant changes affecting the Academy. The new government reintroduced censorship that in some respects was more comprehensive and rigid than that of the tsarist era. It took some time, however, for the new system of censorship to become an effective system of ideological control, in part because of persisting ambiguity in the definition of its tasks.
The new government acted quickly and resolutely in founding the Socialist Academy (in 1923 renamed the Communist Academy) with the primary task of preparing dialectical materialism-the Marxist philosophy of science-to serve as an ideological clearinghouse for scientific ideas. Its task was also to create the theoretical base of the social sciences and the humanities. The efficiency of the Socialist Academy, intended to be a competitor to the “conservative” Academy of Sciences, was drastically reduced by deep disagreements among Marxist theorists in interpreting the revolutionary waves in modem science. At this time, the Bolshevik government was not ready to engineer drastic changes in the Academy of Sciences.
In 1925 the government gave financial support to the Academy of Sciences to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of its founding, an event attended by a large contingent of Western scientists. Now renamed the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, the institution received the first government recognition as the country’s supreme scientific body. The next year, the Academy was given a new charter-the first since 1836-which made it an institution open to activities by such “public organizations” as the trade unions and proliferating Communist associations. The new charter abolished the traditional privilege of academicians to be the sole authority in selecting candidates for new members of the Academy.
The process of making the Academy a typical Soviet institution was generally completed in 1929, with Stalin now at the helm of the government and the Communist Party. The first large-scale election of new members included a group of Marxists. Dialectical materialism was proclaimed the only philosophy admitted in the Academy-and in the country-and loyalty to the Communist Party (the so-called partynost, or “partyness”) prescribed behavior. A group of leading historians and an eminent mathematician were exiled to provincial towns.
At the same time, the government approved the Academy’s proposal to admit students to work for higher degrees and to acquire research experience. Upon completion of their studies, most of these students were absorbed by the Academy’s research staff. Some advanced to the rank of full members of the Academy.
The history of the Academy in the Stalin era (1929-1953) has two dominant characteristics. On the one hand, the Soviet government made vast financial investments in building the Academy into a gigantic network of institutes and laboratories, concentrating on both scientific research and train6
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ing new cadres of scientists. On the other hand, Stalin encouraged and patronized Marxist philosophers in their mounting attacks on the leaders of the scientific community accused of violating the norms of Marxist theory. In the years of Stalin’s reign of terror in the late 1930s, a long line of Academy personnel landed in political prisons, from which many did not return.
In 1936 the government abolished the Communis
t Academy and transferred its members to the Academy of Sciences, where they became part of the newly founded Department of Philosophy, the center of an intensified crusade against “idealism” in both Western and Soviet science. For a long time, “physical idealism,” as manifested in quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, was the main target of Marxist attacks.
Even in the peak years of Stalinist oppression, the Academy’s physicists-led by Abram Fyodor-ovich Ioffe, Vladimir Alexandrovich Fock, and Igor Yevgenievich Tamm-made bold efforts to resist philosophical interference with their science. Their basic arguments were that Marxist philosophers were not familiar with modern physics and were guilty of misinterpreting Marxist theory. At a later date, Nikolai Nikolayevich Semenov, a Nobel laureate, stated publicly that only by ignoring Marxist philosophers were the physicists able to add fresh ideas to their science. More general criticism of Marxist interference with science came from the academicians Ivan Petrovich Pavlov and Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky: They opposed the monopolistic position of Marxist philosophy.
Physics and biology were the main scientific arena of Stalinist efforts to establish full ideological control over scientific thought. The two sciences, however, did not undergo the same treatment. In physics, Stalin encouraged Marxist philosophers to engage in relentless attacks on the residues of “idealism” in quantum mechanics and the theory of relativity, but refrained from interfering with the ongoing work in physics laboratories.
The situation in biology was radically different. Here, Stalin not only encouraged a sustained ideological attack on genetics and its underlying “bourgeois” philosophy but played a decisive role in outlawing this science and abolishing its laboratories. Academicians Peter Leonidovich Kapitsa and Igor E. Tamm, experienced warriors against Stalinist adverse interference with the professional work of scientists, were among the leading scholars whose sustained criticism swayed the government ten years after Stalin’s death to abandon its stand against modern genetics.
The process of the de-Stalinization of the Academy began soon after Stalin’s death in 1953. By the mid-1960s, there was no science in the outside world that was not recognized and closely followed in the Soviet Union. The Academy played the leading role in reestablishing sociology and the rich national tradition in social psychology dominated by the internationally recognized legacy of Lev Se-menovich Vygotsky. At the same time, Marxist philosophers were encouraged to explore paths to a reconciliation with leading Western philosophies of science and to search for “the kernels of truth” in “bourgeois” thought.
In the meantime, the Academy continued to grow at a rapid pace. In 1957 it established a string of research institutes in Novosibirsk-known as the Siberian Department or Akademgorodok (Academic Campus)-concentrating, among other activities, on the branches of mathematics related to the ongoing computer revolution, the latest developments in molecular biology, and the new methodological requirements of the social sciences, particularly economics. In 1971 the Department had fourty-four research institutes, fifty laboratories, and a research staff of 5,600. It also supported a new university known for its high academic standards. A new complex of research institutes in nuclear physics was established in Dubna, and another group of institutes engaged in physico-chemical approaches to biological studies was built in Pushkino. A scientific center engaged in geophysical studies was established in 1964 in Krasnaya Pakhta. The scientific center in Noginsk concentrated on physical chemistry. The Academy also helped in guiding and coordinating the work of the Union-Republican academies.
In 1974 the Academy had 237 full members and 439 corresponding members. In the same year the professional staff of the Academy numbered 39,354, including 29,726 with higher academic degrees. The Academy published 132 journals, a few intended to reach the general reading public. It continued the tradition of publishing collections of essays celebrating important events in national history or commemorating major contributors to science. One of the last and most memorable collections, published in 1979, marked the centennial of Einstein’s birth.
The Academy produced voluminous literature on its own history. The Soviet period of the Acad7
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emy was presented in a glowing light with no place for a critical analysis of the underlying philosophy and internal organization of this gigantic institution. In 1991, with the dismemberment of the Soviet union, the name of the Russian Academy of Sciences was again made official. The new Academy brought an end to the monopoly of a single philosophy of science. See also: CENSORSHIP; COMMUNIST ACADEMY; SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY POLICY; UNIVERSITIES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Graham, Loren R. (1967). The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Vucinich, Alexander. (1984). Empire of Knowledge. Berkeley: University of California Press. Vucinich, Alexander. (1963-1970). Science in Russian Culture. 2 vols. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
ALEXANDER VUCINICH
ADMINISTRATION FOR ORGANIZED RECRUITMENT
The Administration for Organized Recruitment (Russian acronym, Orgnabor) was a labor recruitment agency that existed in the USSR from 1931. Its essential feature was that the recruiting organization, not the potential employee, initiated the recruitment process. In the 1930s it was mainly concerned with the recruitment of peasants for seasonal and permanent work in nonagricultural jobs.
During the New Economic Policy (NEP) the USSR had high unemployment, and relied on labor exchanges to bring supply and demand for labor into balance. It also had substantial numbers of peasants migrating to the towns in search of work, and substantial numbers of these peasants found seasonal employment away from their villages. With the abolition of unemployment in 1930, it was thought that there would be no further need for market economy instruments such as labor exchanges.
Given the huge demand for labor in industry and construction, and the collectivization of agriculture, it nonetheless became necessary to establish a procedure for recruiting peasants from collective farms. Hence the creation, in 1931, of a new type of recruitment for the rapidly growing construction and industrial sectors: organized recruitment. In this new system, state-owned enterprises or administrative organizations such as the People’s Commissariats recruited a number of workers for regular or seasonal work by entering into an agreement with a collective farm, group of collective farms, or rural area.
The Administration for Organized Recruitment offered a planned, socialist mechanism for placing workers where they were most needed, and was intended to replace the traditional practice of recruitment from among those peasants who happened to turn up at the factory gate. In many cases the new recruits were promised much better employment conditions than actually existed, which was one of the reasons for the high rate at which the newly recruited workers left their jobs.
According to official statistics, 3.6 million people were recruited by Orgnabor in 1932, an average of 2.6 million per year between 1933 and 1937, 1.7 million in 1938, and 2.2 million in 1939. For many of the peasants concerned, the process was essentially an economic conscription. After 1946 the role of organized recruitment declined. In this later period, organized recruitment often concerned urban workers recruited for coal mining, construction, and as lumberjacks. In 1946 organized recruitment recruited 2.2 million people (mainly to coal mining, textiles, industrial and military construction, and forestry). Between 1947 and 1950, an average of about 0.6 million people were recruited per year, mainly to industrial and military construction, coal mining, and forestry. Organized recruitment remained at about 0.6 million per year between 1951 and 1955, but fell to only 0.1 million per year between 1966 and 1970.
The administrative framework for organized recruitment varied. In the 1930s there were commissions for organized recruitment, but between 1953 and 1956, republican administrations (in the RSFSR and Ukraine chief administrations) for organized recruitment. In the late Soviet period organized recruitment was mainly administe
red by regional or local authorities. The program of organized recruitment experienced numerous problems, however, and was never the predominant form of labor recruitment in the USSR. Decisions by individual workers as to where they wanted to work were always more important. See also: COLLECTIVE FARM; LABOR; NEW ECONOMIC POLICY; SOVNARKOM
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
Barber, John. (1986). “The Development of Soviet Employment and Labour Policy, 1930-1941.” In Labour and Employment in the USSR, ed. David Lane. Brighton, UK: Wheatsheaf. Filtzer, Donald. (2002). Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Dyker, David. (1981). “Planning and the Worker.” In The Soviet Worker, ed. Leonard Shapiro and Joseph Godson. London: Macmillan. Stalin, Joseph. (1955). “New Conditions-New Tasks in Economic Construction.” In Works, Vol. 13. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.
MICHAEL ELLMAN
ADMINISTRATION, MILITARY
The term militiary administration was used to identify both the techniques and system of state agencies involved in the management of the armed forces.
Russian writers long distinguished between the agencies for military command and those for administration (management), and Soviet theorists added a distinction between those providing leadership of the armed forces as such, and those for overall leadership of the country’s defense. Whereas the latter involves participation by the political leadership in decision making, the former deal with the military professionals’ implementing of the resulting policies. And if the lines between command and management, and between the two types of leadership, sometimes blur in modern conditions, this was commonplace in the premodern periods of Russia’s history.