Stalin and the Scientists by Simon Ings
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Today's Times reviewed Stalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy (1905-1953) by Simon Ings, a new book coming out this Thursday.
Published by Faber & Faber
https://www.faber.co.uk/shop/non-fiction/9780571290079-stalin-and-the-scientists.html
Quote:Longlisted for the The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction 2016
An epic story of courage, genius and terrible folly, this is the first history of how the Soviet Union's scientists became both the glory and the laughing stock of the intellectual world.
Simon Ings weaves together what happened when a handful of impoverished and underemployed graduates, professors and entrepreneurs, collectors and charlatans, bound themselves to a failing government to create a world superpower. And he shows how Stalin's obsessions derailed a great experiment in 'rational government'.
It was a very interesting review and the link for subscribers is here
Quote:The Bolshevik view of science held that "if you are pure and selfless and focused … then the physical world will shape itself to your will … do not accomodate reality"and concludes
Quote:In a particularly grotesque way, the Stalin era reveals the evil and devastation that occurs when politics shapes science.just reading about one of the works of sci-fi writers censored as 'bourgeois pseudo-science' in the name of 'communism'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magellanic_Cloud
Quote:When the novel was first published, parts of it were censored by the Communist authorities. Lem famously denounced[citation needed] the censored version, calling it too optimistic about Communism. At the time, this was a bold sign that demonstrated Lem's confidence that his singular status as a Polish author of international renown would protect him from state repression. A complete version was published in the 1990s after the fall of Communism.Because at the time of writing cybernetics was a banned "bourgeois pseudoscience", Lem invented the term mechaneurystyka ("mechaneuristics").It wasn't like that all the time, that situation only took place during the time of Stalin who wanted to speed the production of agriculture, but the Soviet Union made many advances in Biology and Genetics. The educational system of the Soviet Union in a certain moment was in better stand than others parts of the world including Western Europe and the USA. This this what a Trotskyist newspaper said about that period before the emerge of Joseph Stalinhttps://www.wsws.org/en/articles/1999/02/sov-gen.html
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