Graduate School of the Integrated Arts and Sciences, Hiroshima University

Department of History, University of British Columbia

Abstract
The cultural authority of science reached its peak during the period of high modernity. Various countries and societies partook in this trend, but it found its ultimate expression within the communist, Soviet-type polity. This article discusses the cultural underpinnings of this characteristic feature of Soviet society and examines one of its major ramifications, the key role of scientific actors in creating and shaping the basic features of Soviet civilization. Examples illustrate this role in different time periods: from building the foundations of the Soviet state in the 1920s, through determining the major vectors of Stalinist economic expansion and industrialization, to designing some key priorities of post-Stalin reforms and the later perestroika. Different types of actors drew their power and inspiration from the cultural authority of science- "bourgeois specialists," amateur enthusiasts, engineers-turned-politicians, and nuclear physicists. Some of the important legacies they left behind continue to persist today, even if often misattributed, so that a historical analysis is required to uncover their original roots.

Keywords
cultural authority, science and modernity, Soviet polity, experts and political advice

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The postwar period is often viewed as the "Golden Age" of Soviet mathematics, yet the mathematical community in that period faced serious constraints. Restrictions on foreign travel, limited access to foreign literature, obsessive secrecy regulations, an obsolete university curriculum, the declining level of the faculty, discriminatory policies in university admissions and employment, and limitations on physical access to universities and research institutions - all these factors worked against the creation of a fully functional research community. This article argues that the thriving of Soviet mathematics in that period was due to the creation of a parallel social infrastructure. Soviet mathematicians organized a network of study groups ("math circles"), correspondence courses, and specialized mathematical schools in major cities, opened free courses for students barred from top universities, offered employment at applied mathematics institutions to talented researchers who were denied academic positions, and developed an extensive system of open research seminars, bringing together multigenerational groups of researchers and fostering collaboration and the spread of new ideas.

Keywords
Soviet Union, mathematics, education, politics, discrimination

Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Tokyo Institute of Technology

This paper examines the relationship between Soviet scientific community and authority in the Stalin era by investigating how specialists of physical sciences and communist ideologues deal with interpretation of physical theories or concepts in the 1920s and 1930s. Soviet physico-philosophical disputes have often been regarded as a persistent attack on modern physical theories by well allied ideologues or ignoramuses. Minute study of historical documents with a consideration of socio-political context tells us, however, that this veiw must be radically revised. Attacks on leading physicists were not well formed, except for the comparatively short period of the Great Terror. Physicists also sought to find the way of description of physics, which is compatible with Marxist ideology dialectical materialism. We will suggest that it will be suitable to grasp the process of dispute as one of acquiring "Soviet Newspeak", not as a success on showing the correctness or usefulness of physics by leading physicists.Ÿ

Keywords
Dialectical Meterialism, Science in the Soviet Union, Sergei Vavilov, Ideology and Science, Philosophy of Physics

Graduate School of the Integrated Arts and Sciences, Hiroshima University

Around the beginning of "the Cold War," a series of philosophical "discussions" began in various fields of science in the Soviet Union. An intense dispute arouse also in the field of physics. We must not, however, exaggerate the ideological aspect of this issue. Using the newly declassified documents, the author tries to shed a new light on the material and emotional factors behind the ideological guise of this dispute. During the war the majority of the institutes of the Academy of Sciences continued scientific research mainly for military purposes. Significant results were achieved in varous fields of science. At the same time, the wartime experience deepened "rift" between scientists inside and outside of the Academy. Particularly the wartime evacuation of the scientific research institutes and the institutions of higher education to the different places resulted in strenghening the tendency of the functional separation between the Academy of Sciences and universities. The initiation of this assumingly ideologically-motivated campaign in the field of physics rekindled jealousy and hatred accumulated on the side of university professors and lecturers towards some of their "colleagues" with a record of splendid academic and scientific achievements.Ÿ

Keywords
Soviet Physicists, Soviet Ideology, the Academy of Sciences, Moscow State University, Wartime Research, Wartime Evacuation

Tokyo Institute of Technology

This paper takes up some cases of resistance to Lysenko developing inside and around the Institute of Genetics of the USSR Academy of Sciences from 1939 to 1940. Based on these cases, it reconsiders Lysenko's intervention in the Institute of Genetics, offering a revision of previous interpretations of it. It thus presents a new picture of Lysenko's relationship with the Institute of Genetics before Nikolai Vavilov's arrest. Lysenko's intervention in the Institute of Genetics was not noticed immediately. Geneticists of the Institute of Genetics were still more influential than biologists of the agrobiology school of Lysenko around April 1940. So Lysenko "strove to" establish his own base in the Institute of Genetics, causing resistance from geneticists.Ÿ

Keywords
The Institute of Genetics, The USSR Academy of Sciences, Lysenko, Vavilov, Soviet genetics