The Great War, the Russian Civil War, and the Invention of Big Science

Abstract

ArgumentThe revolutionary transformation in Russian science toward the Soviet model of research started even before the revolution of 1917. It was triggered by the crisis of World War I, in response to which Russian academics proposed radical changes in the goals and infrastructure of the country’s scientific effort. Their drafts envisioned the recognition of science as a profession separate from teaching, the creation of research institutes, and the turn toward practical, applied research linked to the military and industrial needs of the nation. The political revolution and especially the Bolshevik government that shared or appropriated many of the same views on science, helped these reforms materialize during the subsequent Civil War. By 1921, the foundation of a novel system of research and development became established, which in its most essential characteristics was similar to the U.S. later phenomenon known as “big science.”

Big Science and Research Infrastructures in Europe: History and current trends

“…The fate of Big Science is similar to many of those other examples, namely a conceptual dilution. A broad community of scholars has squeezed all kinds of things into the concept Big Science: the space programs of the 1980s (Smith 1989;Kay 1994), the large corporate R&D divisions of the 1970s (Hounshell 1992), state-controlled research in the Soviet Union in the early twentieth century (Graham 1992;Kojevnikov 2002), large projects in biology, ecology and geoscience (Aronova et al 2010;Kevles 1997), nineteenth-century naturalist explorer missions to Latin America (Knight 1977) and sixteenth-century astronomy (Christianson 2000), besides the usual suspects of the wartime atomic bomb project in the US (the Manhattan Project) (Hughes 2002), telescopes for ground-based astronomy (McCray 2006) and accelerator complexes for particle physics Hiltzik 2015) and materials science (Westfall 2008;Hallonsten 2016a).…”

From All Sides: Interdisciplinary Knowledge, Scientific Collaboration, and the Soviet Criminological Laboratories of the 1920s

“…Large-scale multidisciplinary research institutes, which predated the revolution, became one of the central organizational models of Soviet science during the 1920s and beyond. 21 Moreover, hybrid approaches and disciplines also came into existence, reflecting the adaptation of old practices to the new realities of Marxist ideology as well as the desire to extend the reach and relevance of scientific expertise. Such was the case with social hygiene, a distinctly Soviet field that sought to elide the traditional borders between preventive and therapeutic medicine.…”

Building Baluchitherium and Indricotherium: Imperial and International Networks in Early-Twentieth Century Paleontology

“…However, its scientific elite were able to participate in more general internationalist collaboration. As Kojevnikov (2002 and and Krementsov (2005) have illustrated, Soviet scientists in the 1920s keenly felt their isolation, and made strenuous efforts to overcome it, primarily through participating in international congresses and renewing pre-war links.…”