Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date.
For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now.
Narrated by Tim Bruce
Simon IngsUnabridged — 15 hours, 27 minutes
Narrated by Tim Bruce
Simon IngsUnabridged — 15 hours, 27 minutes
Free with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription | Cancel Anytime
Already Subscribed?
Sign in to Your BN.com Account
FREE
with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription
…Ings is an entertaining storyteller who often captures the essence of things…Filled with priceless nuggets and a cast of frauds, crackpots and tyrants, this is a lively and interesting book…
12/19/2016
English novelist and science writer Ings (The Eye: A Natural History) takes an expansive look at scientific life in the Soviet Union from the waning years of the Russian Empire to Stalin’s death. Faced with grave challenges in the immediate aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, and driven by a Marxist philosophy that envisioned a future universal science that encompassed politics and society, Soviet elites endeavored to make the Soviet Union “the world’s first scientifically run state.” These leaders embarked on an ambitious struggle to place science in “the service of society” and bring vast practical and humanitarian benefits to mankind. The pursuit of science was soon trumped by politics, ideology, and the whims of leaders, as Stalin’s “cult of personality expanded into the natural realm.” Ings sympathetically details the experiences of scientists who lived a complex, precarious, and harrowing existence as shifts in prevailing ideological winds exposed many to severe repression, including purges, arrests, and executions. The stories and anecdotes of individual scientists provide narrative bridges throughout the book, as Ings ably documents the challenges, failures, and achievements of Soviet science during this period in such areas as psychology, physiology, genetics, neuroscience, and cybernetics. Though he can be long-winded, Ings engagingly fuses history, science, and storytelling. (Feb.)
Praise for Stalin and the Scientists:
Longlisted for the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction
“Ings’s research is impressive and his exposition of the science is lucid . . . Filled with priceless nuggets and a cast of frauds, crackpots and tyrants, this is a lively and interesting book, and utterly relevant today.”—Simon Sebag Montefiore, New York Times Book Review
“[Ings] is a gifted writer . . . A good single source for anyone approaching Soviet science for the first time . . . Stalin and the Scientists deserves attention . . . It is based on an impressive amount of study, and most readers will learn a great deal.”—Loren Graham, Wall Street Journal
“Ings’s finely crafted and informative book is a must read for understanding how the ideas of scientific knowledge and technology were distorted and subverted for decades across the Soviet Union, all in the service of the most ambitious experiment in social engineering the world has ever witnessed.”—Washington Post
“[A] monumental chronicle . . . Ings ably tweezers the discoveries and disasters out of this political train-wreck.”—Nature
“In Stalin and the Scientists, Simon Ings, culture editor at New Scientist (UK), very effectively relates a set of stories—compelling, often horrifying, sometimes both at once—of the most singular period in the history of Russian science.”—American Scholar
“An engrossing and disturbing cautionary tale illustrating the dangers that arise when rigid state ideology collides with scientific reality.”—Booklist
“[A] lively book . . . This is a fascinating story of brilliant scientists and charlatans, of visionaries and careerists, of civic courage and moral cowardice. The author explains the scientific issues in a clear and simple way, so the reader is aware of the issues at stake.”—Guardian
“Endlessly entertaining . . . An amusing book . . . [Ings’] storytelling skill is everywhere evident; the book . . . is lively, dramatic, intriguing, and often very funny. Ings also has a wonderful ability to explain complex notions.”—Times (UK)
“Ings tells his story with vigour . . . The bewildering array of scientists, philosophers and politicians is matched by the impressive range of topics that Ings discusses.”—New Statesman (UK)
“An artful synthesis of basic science and political infighting.”—Daily Telegraph (UK)
“[Ings] has an eye for the interactions between the worlds of the laboratory, the print room and the corridors of power . . . Stalin and the Scientists is a fascinating read. Well researched and written in a lively and engaging style, it grips like a good novel would.”—Sunday Business Post (UK)
“A great book . . . A vast tapestry of Russian history from the mid-19th century . . . The great themes and contributions of Russian science . . . are illustrated with detailed examples, anecdotes and apt quotations.”—Scotland on Sunday
“In Stalin and the Scientists, Simon Ings has produced one of the finest, most gripping surveys of the history of Russian science in the twentieth century. Deeply researched and written with a sense of burning importance, Ings’ book ranges widely from politics to philosophy, from economics to biography to recount the monumental successes of Russian scientists and the Soviet State’s Mephistophelean embrace of the scientific community. It is a fascinating work that both inspires and terrifies.”—Douglas Smith, author of Former People: The Final Days of the Russian Aristocracy
“A dazzling, often astonishing prism through which to view the Soviet experiment”—Peter Pomerantsev, author of Nothing is True and Everything is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia
11/01/2016
In examining the historical development of Soviet science before and after the Russian Revolution of 1917, novelist and science writer Ings (The Eye) focuses on the many ideological controversies that shaped the discipline during that era. With only a few introductory chapters on the transition from the Tsars to the Bolshevik Revolution, general readers may not be adequately prepared to understand the complexities given prominence in the book. There is substantial coverage of Joseph Stalin's personal and political interference in the development of science in the Soviet Union as well as the resulting controversies relating to genetics, biology, chemistry, and physics—in which Stalin established himself as the ultimate authority, often at the expense of many lives. VERDICT With an excellent bibliography, this book is recommended for sophisticated readers who appreciate the intricacies of Russian and Soviet political and scientific controversies and the dangers they brought to a society in turmoil. Those new to the subject might do well to consider Ethan Pollock's Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars or works by science historian Loren Graham.—Amy Lewontin, Northeastern Univ. Lib., Boston
2016-11-02
Picking through a minefield of Soviet utopia and paranoia.All sciences would coalesce into one, and this science would usher the new socialist being—so believed the Soviet state in its promulgation and censoring of brilliant Russian scientists from the establishment of the Bolshevik order onward. British novelist and science writer Ings (A Natural History of Seeing: The Art and Science of Vision, 2008, etc.) builds from the utopian vision of lofty scientism advocated by Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov in 1904 to the surviving crop of nervous scientists under Stalin, who were busy trying to make thermonuclear weapons in the late 1940s. The first hurdle for true scientists—e.g., the mineralogist and geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky—was the crippling material conditions in Russia, a situation caused largely by successive famines in the early 1920s and the rampant backbiting in the Academy of Sciences and other official agencies that effectively monitored and restricted intellectuals. The new order was in a hurry to bring on a "revolutionary generation," and above all, the Bolsheviks needed engineers, removing specialists from universities and ensconcing them in well-appointed institutes that became hives of bureaucratic and competitive disgruntlement. After Lenin died, Stalin moved to industrialize the country by fiat and quickly "rattle through the stages by which true communism might be achieved." Ings moves somewhat unevenly through these stages of increased authoritarianism, beginning with Stalin's Great Purge, which sacrificed many brilliant scientists and intellectuals such as Nikolai Vavilov, an internationally revered botanist whose fall was startling ("We shall go to the pyre," he predicted). "Pure science" did not exist, and many scientists were galvanized in Stalin's "Plan for the Great Transformation of Nature," a grand deforestation and dam-building project to make even the natural world yield to the plan. A provocative and increasingly chilling work that shows how scientists in the nascent Soviet Union were sacrificed to the Soviet dream of building the ideal state.
| BN ID: | 2940171286583 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Recorded Books, LLC |
| Publication date: | 02/21/2017 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
CHAPTER 1
Scholars
In the late nineteenth century in Russia there existed something of fundamental importance – a solid, middleclass, professional intelligentsia which possessed firm principles based on spiritual values. That milieu produced committed revolutionaries, poets and engineers, convinced that the most important thing is to build something, to do something useful.
Physicist Evgeny Feinberg on his mentor Igor Tamm
Head south-east out of Moscow in the morning, and by nightfall you will reach the city of Tambov and, in nearby woodland, a handsome, single-storey wooden structure that but for the modern signage might have sprung magically from the pages of a novel by Ivan Turgenev. It is a museum now. You can wander round Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky's study, his library and his living room. There is some simple information here about his life; his politics; how he anticipated, by over a century, James Lovelock's 'Gaia' theory of how living things and the planet's geology work as one system; rather less about his being the godfather of Russian atomic energy.
Vernadsky's father Ivan was a professor of economics and statistics in the Alexandrovsky Lycée. His first wife was Maria Shigaeva, one of Russia's early feminists and its first female economist. She died prematurely of tuberculosis in 1860, and in 1862 his father married again, to a distant relative of his first wife, Anna Petrovna Konstantinovich, who would be Vladimir's mother. She was a music teacher, a lively and warm personality, but she did not share the intellectual interests of Ivan's first wife.
In 1868, during a heated debate at the Free Economic Society, Ivan suffered a stroke. He resigned his post at the Lycée, and the family relocated from St Petersburg to Kharkov, where he ran the Kharkov branch of the State Bank. Vladimir's childhood here was a happy one, his memories beginning not with St Petersburg, but in the capital of the Ukraine, listening for hours to his opinionated, white-bearded uncle Evgraf Korolenko, who lived with the family.
In 1886, Vernadsky wrote to his future wife:
I recall dark, starlit winter nights. Before sleep, he loved to walk and, when I could, I always walked with him. I loved to look at the sky, the stars. The Milky Way fascinated me and on these evenings I listened as my uncle talked about them. Afterwards, for a long time I couldn't fall asleep. In my fantasies, we wandered together through the endless spaces of the universe ... These simple stories had such an immense influence on me that even now it seems I am not freed of them ... It sometimes seems to me that I must work not only for myself, but for him, that not only mine, but his life will have been wasted if I accomplish nothing.
In 1876 the family returned to St Petersburg. Vladimir was now thirteen years old, and was scouring the bookshops for anything and everything to do with the home they had left. He taught himself Ukrainian and, since a lot of books about the Ukraine were in Polish, he taught himself that language as well.
As a university student in St Petersburg, Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky was 'very soft in appearance but very determined once he had set himself a goal'. Vladimir Posse, a medical student who went on to become a leading Marxist journalist, recalled that Vernadsky and Sergei Oldenburg, one of Vernadsky's closest friends, 'had already set themselves the goal not only of becoming professors but also members of the Academy of Sciences'.
Vernadsky and his university friends were better off than most of their fellow students. Vernadsky, born in St Petersburg, Russia's imperial capital, and brought up in Kharkov, capital of the Ukraine, was among the wealthiest of them, having inherited from his father the 750-hectare estate of Vernadovka.
During one all-night conversation among the brotherhood, someone suggested they buy an estate together. It was going to be called 'The Haven'. The plan fell through, but it gave the group a name: Bratstvo Priutino or the 'Haven Brotherhood'. The influence of the novelist Leo Tolstoy on the group is palpable. In devoting their lives to the good of the Russian people, they swore (to quote Oldenburg's formula) 'to work and produce as much as possible, to consume as little as possible, to treat the needs of others as if they were one's own'.
They attracted a lot of girls. Deprived of the right to a higher education, bright young women of their generation constantly sought whatever intellectual outlet they could. They supported and helped run the Brotherhood's St Petersburg Committee of Literacy, preparing reading materials and reading lists, and setting up lending libraries.
Vernadsky's was not the only marriage to come out of this meeting of minds. The Brotherhood could be dreadful prigs, though: the wedding of Vladimir to Natalia Staritskaya, complete with frock coats, wedding gowns, engraved invitations and an orchestra, was boycotted by his abstemious friends.
Vernadsky, a mineralogist, had arrived to study at St Petersburg University at an opportune time. Mendeleev, Butlerov, and Dokuchaev were his mentors. Vasily Vasilievich Dokuchaev held the chair in mineralogy at St Petersburg University, and dispatched Vernadsky on fascinating, exotic, and sometimes dangerous scientific missions to various corners of the Russian Empire. Alexander Mikhailovich Butlerov was one of the pioneers of modern chemistry. More than ten years before Becquerel's discovery of radioactivity in France in 1896, Butlerov was arguing that the atom was divisible, and Vernadsky was witness to the lively debates he had with Mendeleev over this issue. Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev had formulated the periodic table of elements. When he lectured, the halls were packed. Listening to him, 'we entered a new and wondrous world ... as if released from the grip of a powerful vise'. From these men, Vernadsky acquired a view of an earth in constant flux, its elements flowing and spiralling through the earth's crust over geological time.
Like all his generation, Vernadsky went abroad to further his studies. He went to the University of Naples, and the world-renowned crystallographer Professor Arcangelo Scacchi, only to discover that the old man was succumbing to senility. He went on to Munich, and the laboratory of mineralogist Paul Groth. From his letters we know Vernadsky had a fine time there, a kid locked in an intellectual candy store.
In 1887 a son was born (George Vernadsky would later find modest fame as a historian in the USA). While Natalia returned to her family's dacha in Finland to look after the baby, Vladimir developed friendships and contacts that would shape his later career. In the summer of 1888, walking in the Alps, he had his epiphany: he saw that mineralogy, studied the right way, as a science of change and energy transfer, could connect cosmological history with the history of life itself. Vernadsky's fascination with earth's development at a cosmic scale would last him his whole career, though he worried that men like Groth would 'take me for a fantasiser'.
Moving to Paris in 1889 ('really the most grandiose city I ever saw'), Vernadsky went to work at the Collège de France. To a Russian, the Collège must have seemed an odd institution: there were no students as such, just professors (who were, however, obliged to deliver lectures), small labs and a staggeringly good library. Here, study was being given room to breathe. Researchers were well-resourced and their ideas were taken seriously. Here, leading a life of the mind was unlikely to land you in trouble with the authorities. It was a different kind of life.
In Vernadsky's homeland, universities were teaching institutions, not centres of research, and most certainly not intellectual melting pots. (The tsarist bureaucracy itself recruited from just a handful of expensive institutes, closed to everyone but the children of the aristocracy: the Corps of Pages, the Alexandrovsky Lycée, the Institute of Law.)
Repression of higher education was a fixed policy, dating from the thirty-year reign of Nicholas I. Inspectors watched the students, meting out punishments for scruffy uniforms or long hair. One student in Kiev University who appeared at a compulsory religious service without a proper uniform was thrown out of the church by an inspector and expelled from the university the next day.
When Nicholas I died in 1855, the government had tried undoing the harsh regime he had imposed. In Kiev, delighted Polish students marched through the streets in national dress. In Kazan, they wore animal skins. In Moscow and St Petersburg, students took to wearing peasant costumes, showing solidarity with the soon-to-be-liberated serfs. Appalled at what it had unleashed, the government promptly raised tuition fees, banned student assemblies, and reintroduced all the old rules on behaviour and uniform. This new repression lasted decades. Student-run organisations, 'reading rooms, dining halls, snack bars, theatres, concerts, balls, any meetings not having an academic character', were banned – and God forbid you should show any 'signs of approval or disapproval at lectures'. Punishments included admonitions, confinement in the kartser (the university jail) for terms ranging up to four weeks, suspension and expulsion.
Returning to Russia and a professorship at Moscow University, Vernadsky found little had changed in his absence. The city was dusty and provincial, and it literally stank. It was also oppressive. Middle-aged men in bowler hats passed by his home each morning as he set off to work. He used to offer them a cheerful greeting until one day, as he was leaving for a European trip, he spotted one of them tailing him through the railway station, and realised they were undercover policemen.
In the beginning of the 1890s [the police report runs] Vernadsky moved ... to live in Moscow, where he continued his dubious acquaintanceships, took an active part in evenings organised by students of Moscow university where he gave speeches about the necessity of coming together of professors and students for purposes of political education of youth and struggle with the present regime.
Life at the university was dismal. It lacked even the most basic texts in his subject, and the mineralogical collection had not been catalogued since the 1850s – nor, for that matter, dusted. The place was riddled with corruption and the junior administrators were the worst of the lot, cutting up rooms meant for laboratories into unofficial student housing. Vernadsky had a good idea how this was all going to end, and spent time outside Moscow sorting out and refurbishing Vernadovka in case he lost his job.
Vernadsky reckoned that if push came to shove, and he and his family had to live there all year round, they could comfortably make do on what their acreage could provide. In the autumn of 1891, however, came the catastrophe that galvanised Vernadsky's political career. Famine struck Tambov and many places besides, razing the harvest across Russia's vital belt of black earth.
The crisis had been building for a year. In 1890, a dry autumn had delayed the sowing of winter cereals, and then winter had arrived much earlier than usual. It was dry, too: there was not enough snow to provide a blanket from the cold, so the winter crop froze to death.
Spring brought further trouble. Harvests in eastern Europe were equally dismal, and these countries had money to hand, so Russia's spring crop, instead of feeding its own mouths, was immediately snapped up for export.
Bread was scarce even in Moscow and St Petersburg. Lenin described the hunger bread of that time as 'a lump of hard black earth covered with a coating of mould'. In the countryside, people bulked out their dough and porridge with straw and weeds.
As 1891 wore on, conditions went from poor to calamitous. Five months passed without rain. The summer was far too hot and dry to plant out vegetables, but farmers had little choice but to chance it. Their plants withered and died. And after all that, a deluge: winter cereals planted that autumn were washed out of the soil by torrential rains.
Come the spring of 1892, farmers were watching in horror as the wind blew away their precious black earth in dust storms, 'concealing the sun's rays and turning day into night. Witnesses unanimously testified that the phenomenon had such a dreadful and frightening character that everyone expected "the end of the world",'9 recalled soil scientist Per Zemyatchensky. Trains were halted by drifts of earth, and crops killed by blasts of dust. Swathes of the country were stripped of all vegetation; not even weeds remained. Farmers killed their livestock for food.
The catastrophe was epic. The commercial attaché in the British embassy in St Petersburg, E. F. G. Law, reckoned that the Russian government had 'to find the means of supplying a deficit of food to 35,500,000 people in sixteen provinces'. Even in the relatively well-off province of Tambov, the peasants lost over half their livestock. Vernadsky's estate manager wrote to tell his employer that they were selling their animals to the local gentry for a pittance, and about a quarter of them were already making 'famine bread', mixing their dwindling supplies of rye flour with hay, and even brick dust. They were knocking on the doors of Vernadovka for help.
Vernadsky did not immediately rush home. He realised that he could do more good by remaining in Moscow. A gifted bureaucrat, he assembled a relief effort among his friends. A retired neighbour, V. V. Keller, travelled tirelessly, informing him of the situation across the district. With another friend, L. A. Obolianinov, Keller visited Leo Tolstoy to study his methods of famine relief, and reproduced his organisation in Vernadovka. In Moscow, the historian Alexander Kornilov quit his government job to back the relief effort. The medievalist Ivan Grevs joined in; there were several future politicians, and even, under conditions of strict anonymity, the tsar's own uncle, Grand Duke Nikolai. This skilled, ad hoc administration made people's efforts count in a way liberal good intentions had never counted before. By July 1892, as the crisis eased, there were 121 famine relief kitchens in Tambov feeding 6,000 people; 1,000 horses had been saved and 220 more were gifted by lottery to horseless families.
And this raised a question: if a bunch of professors could do this sort of thing, why couldn't the government?
1891 had given liberal opponents of the regime – the impotent intellecty parodied in the stories of Turgenev and Chekhov – a brief taste of civic power. They had enjoyed it, made the most of it, proved to their own satisfaction that they were worthy of it, and they wanted more. Their model response to the famine – scientific, rational and, in the best sense, bureaucratic – had given hope to Russia's demoralised educated class. Vernadsky and his friends had shown by example what it would be like for capable people to really participate in the running of their country. The vision spread. To realise that vision, however, required organisation.
The Union of Liberation was founded in July 1903 and campaigned publicly (and peacefully) for an end to autocracy. Its tiny membership – just twenty liberals and radicals – held meetings in Vernadsky's apartment in Moscow. Vernadsky wrote to his wife: 'I consider that the interests of scientific progress are closely and inextricably tied to the growth of a wide democracy and humanitarian attitudes – and vice versa.'
The difficulty was in attracting political support outside the tiny, well-heeled liberal coteries of Moscow and St Petersburg.
On Sunday 22 January 1905, more than 300,000 striking workers and their families walked towards the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, bearing icons and singing hymns. They came to petition the tsar for better labour conditions and an eight-hour working day. The Imperial Guard opened fire on them, leaving a thousand dead or wounded. Passing through the Alexander Gardens that day, suitcase in hand, was a young field geologist, B. A. Luri, Vernadsky's most promising student. Soldiers shot him twice in the back. In an angry article to a leading liberal newspaper, Vernadsky declared that 'one more victim has fallen in the long martyrology of the Russian intelligentsia'. But the time for writing stiff letters to the papers was long past.
Following the massacre, the students went on strike. The government, in an uncharacteristic gesture, polled the faculty councils on whether or not to resume classes. Perhaps they meant to give professors the impression that their opinions mattered. Whether they mattered or not, the professors spoke out. Not one university agreed to resume teaching. The councils declared that political reforms were necessary to secure peace in the universities. Vernadsky made a public appeal to his academic colleagues to break with tradition. They were independent scholars and teachers, not state hacks. They couldn't go on letting themselves be pushed around as if they were 'teaching on some godforsaken Philippine Island'.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Stalin and the Scientists"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Simon Ings.
Excerpted by permission of Grove Atlantic, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
