Many fields of scientific research in the Soviet Union were banned or suppressed with various justifications. All humanities and social sciences were tested for strict accordance with dialectical materialism. These tests served as a cover for political suppression of scientists who engaged in research labeled as "idealistic" or "bourgeois".Loren R. Graham (2004). Science in Russia and the Soviet Union. A Short History. Series: Cambridge Studies in the History of Science. Cambridge University Press. Many scientists were fired, others were arrested and sent to the Gulag. The suppression of scientific research began during the Stalin era and continued after his death.Loren R. Graham, Science and philosophy in the Soviet Union. New York, 1972
The ideologically motivated persecution damaged many fields of Soviet science.Mark Walker (2002) Science and Ideology. A Comparative History. Series: Routledge Studies in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine. Routledge.
Examples
Biology
In the mid-1930s, the agronomist Trofim Lysenko started a campaign against geneticsHudson, P. S., and R. H. Richens. The New Genetics in the Soviet Union. Cambridge, UK: English School of Agriculture, 1946. and was supported by Stalin. If the field of genetics' connection to Nazis wasn't enough, Mendelian genetics was also suppressed due to beliefs that it was "bourgeoisie science" and its association with the priest Gregor Mendel due to hostility to religion because of the Soviet policy of state atheism.Gregor Mendel: And the Roots of Genetics, Edward Edelson, p. 14. "Lysenko won the support of Joseph Stalin, the ruthless Soviet dictator, and Mendel's rules were officially outlawed in the Soviet Union and the Eastern European Countries that it controlled at that time. Under Communism, the Mendel Museum in his monastery was closed."
In 1950, the Soviet government organized the Joint Scientific Session of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, the "Pavlovian session". Several prominent Soviet physiologists (L.A. Orbeli, P.K. Anokhin, , Ivane Beritashvili) were accused of deviating from Pavlov's teaching. As a consequence of the Pavlovian session, Soviet physiologists were forced to accept a dogmatic ideology; the quality of physiological research deteriorated and Soviet physiology excluded itself from the international scientific community.Windholz G (1997) 1950 Joint Scientific Session: Pavlovians as the accusers and the accused. J Hist Behav Sci 33: 61–81. Later Soviet biologists heavily criticised Lysenko's theories and pseudo-scientific methods.
Cybernetics
Cybernetics was also outlawed as bourgeois pseudoscience during Stalin's reign. Norbert Wiener's 1948 book Cybernetics was condemned and translated only in 1958. A 1954 edition of the Brief Philosophical Dictionary condemned cybernetics for "mechanistically equating processes in live nature, society and in technical systems, and thus standing against materialistic dialectics and modern scientific physiology developed by Ivan Pavlov".«Кибернетика», Краткий философский словарь под редакцией М. Розенталя и П. Юдина (издание 4, дополненное и исправленное, Государственное издательство политической литературы, 1954. (However this article was removed from the 1955 reprint of the dictionary.) After an initial period of doubts, Soviet cybernetics took root, but this early attitude hampered the development of computing in the Soviet Union.
History
Soviet historiography (the way in which history was and is written by scholars of the Soviet UnionIt is not the history of the Soviet Union. See definitions of historiography for more details.) was significantly influenced by the strict control by the authorities aimed at propaganda of communist ideology and Soviet power.
Since the late 1930s, Soviet historiography treated the party line and reality as one and the same.Taisia Osipova, Peasant rebellions: Origin, Scope, Design and Consequences, in Vladimir N. Brovkin (ed.), The Bolsheviks in Russian Society: The Revolution and the Civil Wars, Yale University Press, 1997, . Google Print, pp. 154–76 As such, if it was a science, it was a science in service of a specific political and ideological agenda, commonly employing historical negationist methods.Roger D. Markwick, Donald J. Raleigh, Rewriting History in Soviet Russia: The Politics of Revisionist Historiography, Palgrave Macmillan, 2001, , Google Print, pp. 4–5 In the 1930s, historic archives were closed and original research was severely restricted. Historians were required to pepper their works with references – appropriate or not – to Stalin and other "Marxist-Leninist classics", and to pass judgment – as prescribed by the Party – on pre-revolution historic Russian figures.John L. H. Keep: A History of the Soviet Union 1945–1991: Last of the Empires, pap. 30–31
Many works of Western historians were forbidden or censored, many areas of history were also forbidden for research as, officially, they never happened.Ferro, Marc (2003). The Use and Abuse of History: Or How the Past Is Taught to Children. London; New York: Routledge. . See Chapters 8 Aspects and variations of Soviet history and 10 History in profile: Poland. Translations of foreign historiography were often produced in a truncated form, accompanied with extensive censorship and corrective footnotes. For example, in the Russian 1976 translation of Basil Liddell Hart's History of the Second World War pre-war purges of Red Army officers, the secret protocol to the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, many details of the Winter War, the occupation of the Baltic states, the Soviet occupation of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, Western Allied assistance to the Soviet Union during the war, many other Western Allies' efforts, the Soviet leadership's mistakes and failures, criticism of the Soviet Union and other content were censored out.
Of note was the ban of the theory about the Varangian origin of Kievan Rus for ideological reasons.Leo S. Klein, "The Russian controversy over the Varangians", p.29
Linguistics At the beginning of Stalin's rule, the dominant figure in Soviet linguistics was Nikolai Yakovlevich Marr, who argued that language is a class construction and that language structure is determined by the economic structure of society. Stalin, who had previously written about language policy as People's Commissar for Nationalities, read a letter by Arnold Chikobava criticizing the theory. He "summoned Chikobava to a dinner that lasted from 9 p.m. to 7 a.m. taking notes diligently."Montefiore. p. 638, Phoenix, Reprinted paperback. In this way he grasped enough of the underlying issues to oppose this simplistic Marxist formalism, ending Marr's ideological dominance over Soviet linguistics. Stalin's principal work in the field was a small essay, "Marxism and Linguistic Questions."Joseph V. Stalin (1950-06-20). "Concerning Marxism in Linguistics", Pravda. Available online as Marxism and Problems of Linguistics including other articles and letters also published in Pravda soon after February 8 and July 4, 1950.
The term "semiotics" was banned, and the researchers used the obfuscated term "secondary modeling systems" () coined by Juri Lotman and Vladimir Uspensky in 1964;N.V. Poselyagin, О понятии «Вторичные моделирующие системы»: из истории раннего российского структурализма, Вестник РУДН, серия Теория языка. Семиотика. Семантика, 2010, No 1, CyberLeninka, also here see Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School.
Pedology Pedology was a popular area of research on the basis of numerous orphanages created after the Russian Civil War. Soviet pedology was a combination of pedagogy and psychology of human development, that heavily relied on various tests. It was officially banned in 1936 after a special decree of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union "On Pedolodical Perversions in the Narkompros System" on July 4, 1936.
Physics In the late 1940s, some areas of physics, were also criticized on grounds of "idealism".
In quantum mechanics Soviet physicists Dmitry Blokhintsev, Yaakov Terletsky and K. V. Nikolsky developed a version of the statistical interpretation of quantum mechanics, which was seen as more adhering to the principles of dialectical materialism.Olival Freire Jr.: Marxism and the Quantum Controversy: Responding to Max Jammer's Question Péter Szegedi Cold War and Interpretations in Quantum Mechanics
Special and general relativity were a matter of controversy among the Soviet scientists since 1920. Some of them argued that this theory is grounded in Machism (acutely criticized by Vladimir Lenin in his Materialism and Empiriocriticism), others were a group of so-called "mechanists" (see ), later "Young Stalinists" joined the ranks of the relativity theory. At the same time a considerable number of prominent Soviet physicists defended the relativity theory. The attacks on the relativity theory intensified in 1949 under the auspices of the struggle against the "physical idealism" in the work of Leonid Mandelstam. Initially Sergey Vavilov, President of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union, managed to defend Mandelstam, but in 1952 the political attacks on "reactionary Einsteinianism" intensified further. This pseudoscientific campaign sizzled after the death of Stalin.Вячеслав Звягинцев, Как в СССР боролись и почти победили теорию относительности
Although initially planned, the process of "ideological cleansing" in physics did not go as far as defining an "ideologically correct" version of physics and purging those scientists who refused to conform to it, because this was recognized as potentially too harmful to the Soviet nuclear program. During 1949-1951 there was "antiresonance campaign" against the theory of resonance, during which scientists who supported it were accused of "cosmopolitan" sympathies and repressed. As Anna Krylov writes on the perils of ideological intrusion into science, "Stalin rolled back the planned campaign against physics and instructed Beria to give physicists some space; this led to significant advances and accomplishments by Soviet scientists in several domains. However, neither Stalin nor the subsequent Soviet leaders were able to let go of the controls completely. Government control over science turned out to be a grand failure, and the attempt to patch the widening gap between the West and the East by espionage did not help. Today Russia is hopelessly behind the West in both technology and quality of life."
Sociology After the Russian Revolution, sociology was gradually "politicized, Bolshevisized and eventually, Stalinized".Elizabeth Ann Weinberg, The Development of Sociology in the Soviet Union, Taylor & Francis, 1974, , Google Print, pp. 8–9 In 1920s a position had formed in the Soviet Union that historical materialism is in fact Marxist sociology, and the major discussion was whether to use the terms "sociology" and "historical materialism" synonymously or to abandon the term "sociology" altogether and consider it to be an anti-Marxist bourgeois science.Романова Александра Владимировна, Развитие социологии в СССР From 1930s to 1950s, the independent discipline of sociology virtually ceased to exist in the Soviet Union. Even in the era where it was allowed to be practiced, and not replaced by Marxist philosophy, it was always dominated by Marxist thought; hence sociology in the Soviet Union and the entire Eastern Bloc represented, to a significant extent, only one branch of sociology: Marxist sociology. With the death of Joseph Stalin and the 20th Party Congress in 1956, restrictions on sociological research were somewhat eased, and finally, after the 23rd Party Congress in 1966, sociology in Soviet Union was once again officially recognized as an acceptable branch of science.Elizabeth Ann Weinberg, The Development of Sociology in the Soviet Union, p.11
Reliability of data