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Osiris

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Contents

MICHAEL D. GORDIN AND KARL HALL: Introduction: Intelligentsia Science Inside and Outside Russia...............................................1MICHAEL D. GORDIN: The Heidelberg Circle: German Inflections on the Professionalization of Russian Chemistry in the 1860s.....................23ANDY BYFORD: Turning Pedagogy into a Science: Teachers and Psychologists in Late Imperial Russia (1897-1917)..................................50SONJA D. SCHMID: Organizational Culture and Professional Identities in the Soviet Nuclear Industry............................................82ALEXEI KOJEVNIKOV: The Phenomenon of Soviet Science...........................................................................................115OLGA VALKOVA: The Conquest of Science: Women and Science in Russia, 1860-1940.................................................................136NILS ROLL-HANSEN: Wishful Science: The Persistence of T. D. Lysenko's Agrobiology in the Politics of Science..................................166SLAVA GEROVITCH: Stalin's Rocket Designers' Leap into Space: The Technical Intelligentsia Faces the Thaw......................................189KIRILL ROSSIIANOV: Taming the Primitive: Elie Metchnikov and His Discovery of Immune Cells....................................................213KARL HALL: The Schooling of Lev Landau: The European Context of Postrevolutionary Soviet Theoretical Physics..................................230ASIF SIDDIQI: Imagining the Cosmos: Utopians, Mystics, and the Popular Culture of Spaceflight in Revolutionary Russia.........................260NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS.........................................................................................................................289INDEX.........................................................................................................................................291

Chapter One

ABSTRACT

The success of the "second importation" of science to Russia during the Great Reforms of the 1860s is illustrated by examining the extended postdoctoral study of chemists in Heidelberg. While there, they adapted the Russian intelligentsia institution of the "circle," or kruzhok, to cope with their alienation from the German culture they were confronting. Upon their return to Russia, they felt the lack of the communicative network they had established while abroad and reimported the kruzhok to serve as a central model for the formation of the Russian Chemical Society in 1868.

INTRODUCTION

Science, as everyone knows, was not native to Russia. Although there were limited cosmological, medical, and metallurgical concepts and practices employed across the space now identified with Russia, it was not until the very late seventeenth century that large-scale imports of engineers from central and western Europe began to affect governance and the military. As for elite science-the collection of high-level theories, mathematics, experimental practices, and conceptual frameworks usually understood on the model of western European natural knowledge from the Renaissance onward-that had a very specific birth date in Russia. Tsar Peter the Great (r. 1689-1725), in one of his final decisions, acted upon a suggestion by the noted natural philosopher Gottfried Leibniz and created an Academy of Sciences in his new capital, St. Petersburg. Of course, Peter not only had to arrange for the institution but also had to provide the professionals qualified to staff it. He imported a collection of central European savants in various areas of the arts and sciences to be his first academicians. Thus science was a foreign import.

However, science, as everyone knows, has been immensely successful in Russia. By whatever measure one chooses-numbers of scientists, rate of publication, important discoveries, peer recognition-Russian scientists have been at the forefront of international scientific developments for at least the last 150 years. So, although science was a foreign import, it was one that took exceptionally well to Russian soil.

Or did it? For over a century after the introduction of the main eighteenth-century institution of Western natural philosophy, the scientific academy, it is difficult to find any significant penetration of science or scientific institutions outside St. Petersburg. Most (although certainly not all) of the achievements of Russian science took place after the transformation of Russian governance during the so-called Great Reforms of the 1860s and 1870s, under the leadership of Tsar Alexander II (r. 1855-1881). Something very specific seems to have happened at the cusp of the 1860s that mobilized a scientific intelligentsia out of what had earlier been a shallow system that had relied on foreign talent. This essay will explore what those transformations were and how they altered the structures by which Russian science was organized. (2)

What happened to alter the fundamental structure of Russian science is fairly easy to map out schematically: upon the loss of the Crimean War (1853-1856), the Russian state realized that it would risk its future fiscal and military stability if it did not modify features of the Russian polity that made it, in contemporary Russians' terms, relatively "backward" with respect to western Europe. What came to be called the Great Reforms were initiated formally by the abolition of serfdom in February 1861, a reform that had actually been in the planning stages for some time. Similar self-conscious "modernizing" reforms ensued in the areas of technical education and technical institutions. Instead of bringing the mountain to Muhammad, as they had done with the Academy of Sciences, Russian bureaucrats decide to send their talented graduate students and "postdocs" abroad, largely to the German states, thereby taking Muhammad to the mountain. As this essay will argue, using the specific example of chemistry and chemical postdocs, this technical emigration (especially its reverse flow back to Petersburg) led to the creation of a specific form of professionalization of the sciences in postreform Russia, one that both drew from and reacted to the German milieu in which the Russians lived while abroad.

To the extent that this "German captivity" has been discussed with respect to Russian science by commentators, it has received mixed or negative reviews. Either the transformation in Russian institutions is seen as autochthonous, and essentially unrelated to the two- or three-year sojourns the Russians spent abroad, or the exposure to German institutions is seen as deleterious. For those who hold to an essentialist vision of the Russian national character, to the extent that the returning Russians borrowed anything from the Germans, that borrowing was destructive and only served to hold back some form of authentic Russian science:

The educational system was borrowed from Germany, its negative qualities were intensified while the most important positive qualities were partially or completely suppressed. The Russian national character was not taken into account by that system foreign to its...