
The Soviet Science System - lermontov
http://thepointmag.com/2014/politics/soviet-science-system
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mojuba
Interesting article and some interesting insights into how marxism-leninism
actually played well with the scientific method.

There was another pathology, as the author calls it, in the Soviet scientific
system: pretty much like what it did to genetic science, some ignorant
officials essentially outlawed computer science, or what was called
_cybernetics_ back then. I don't know much about the motivations and how
exactly banning cybernetics was in line with marxism-leninism, but needless to
say what a fatal mistake it was. Bringing back computer science later, I think
in the 1970s didn't help much: the Soviets were already light years behind in
the area. All the Soviet computer scientists and engineers could do at the
time was to steal and copy. If anyone here remembers ДВК - that was an almost
exact copy of PDP-11 and its OS. (My God, I think I can even remember its
smell now.)

Bottom line being, all arguments regarding political and economic systems
aside, you can't trust one person or a single "ideologized" organization on
anything, ever. There should always be alternatives and eventual consensus.
Kind of obvious today, isn't it.

~~~
tedks
>you can't trust one person or a single "ideologized" organization on
anything, ever

All organizations are ideologized; if you can't see the ideology, that just
means you agree with it.

~~~
jszymborski
I think he was going for the argument that your decisions should come from the
integration and evaluation of different ideologies, rather than any one single
ideology.

Then again, if you follow that too closely, it might become dogmatic itself :P
so iunno. Epistemology is hard.

~~~
tedks
But decisions only come from ideology in a tertiary sense. _Goals_ are the
central contribution of any ideology. What criteria are you basing your
decisions on? That is your ideology, and you can't just elide it; your goals
come from somewhere and not all goals are interchangable.

------
jpfr

        But if you teach a whole nation a powerful philosophy of science, some of them
        might find it useful. Vladimir A. Fock (1898-1974) reported that his engagement
        with the ideology enabled him to devise a new set of harmonic coordinates for
        general relativity. Yakov I. Frenkel (1894-1952) developed his notion of “holes”
        and “collective excitations” in condensed-matter physics through extensive
        reflection on contemporary Soviet political thought.
    

Yeah. Right. You ever wondered why people suddenly agree with the political
system they live in, when otherwise said system would send them on extra
holidays in a Gulag for comitting thought-crimes?

~~~
walterbell
At least one Gulag scientist influenced TRIZ, which influenced Western
industry,
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrich_Altshuller](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrich_Altshuller)

~~~
avmich
Well, Korolev also spent some months in GULAG. But I believe the point in
article was not that people in system were "suddenly" agreeing with system -
rather that system's concepts lead them to some discoveries.

------
alricb
Side note: "Tsar Peter I (also known as “the Great,” although the
appropriateness of that moniker is one of the most debated questions of
Russian history)"

I don't think very many people dispute Peter's moniker, except for total
haters. Even if you think his influence was on the whole negative, you have to
admit that it was very, very large and that the changes he made were profound
(though they may have been continuations of movements started by his
predecessors). He may not have been great in the sense of having a positive
influence, but he was great like the Great Barrier Reef.

------
fiatmoney
If you're interested in this topic, the quasi-novel Red Plenty is fantastic.
Its primary characters are members of the Soviet scientific community,
particularly the nascent computer scientists of the 60s-70s.

~~~
throwaway344
I totally agree with the recommedation of Red Plenty. It's really a lucid set
of stories about the Soviet system. I can't say I really knew a lot going into
it, but it doesn't fall into the trap of saying "damn commies" every few
pages.

The scene with the Gosplan planner trying to solve the problem of allocation
of resources is a particularly damning indictment of central planning.

------
alricb
If you look at science and technology/engineering as a unified field, you can
see that not everything conforms to the "American" model: the military is
arguably just as important to American science/technology as it was to Soviet
science (the Manhattan Project, the Army Corps of Engineers, the Air Force
owned forging presses, ARPANet, the DoE, Boeing, the Dodge Brothers plant to
manufacture recoil cylinders, etc.)

~~~
s_q_b
Don't forget the Valley's own government-sponsored roots: Navy money funded
the Federal Telegraph Corporation and later Moffet Field, which begat Eitel-
McCullough, a wartime manufacturer of radios and vacuum tubes. Varian
Associates, another wartime manufacturer, was instrumental in getting Stanford
Industrial Park built, where HP was founded.

NACA (later NASA) brought Lockheed to the area, and worked hand-in-glove with
Fairchild as its only supplier of the transistors needed in the Space Race for
years, which firmly centered the semiconductor revolution in the area.

Of course, this is to say nothing of the Federal research dollars which still
constitute a massive portion of university research funding, including at
Stanford itself.

And of course, to add to the countless examples outside the Bay area, there's
the National Laboratory system.

If you look closely, the American and Soviet science systems don't appear all
that different. The chief difference is that the Soviets preferred to keep
everything under direct governmental control, while the United States prefers
to use government contracts and grants to drive scientific progress through
the private sector and university system.

That, and there's significantly less chance of being thrown in prison for
espousing political views in the modern US.

~~~
avmich
You forgot separation of research and teaching.

------
jkot
Stalinism was the worst dissaster which happened to Russia since the
napoleonic wars or even mongols. It is also responsible for one of the bigest
genocide of all times (slavic peasants). I really have hard time to grasp why
articles even debating this ideology are here.

~~~
m0skit0
Without Stalinism the USSR would have probably lost WW2, which in turn means
Hitler would not have been defeated. Sad but true.

~~~
avmich
Stalin purged so many military commanders it's doubtful USSR wouldn't have
advantages in WW2 without Stalin. The war would likely be fought very
differently - or not fought at all, as Hitler wouldn't be so careless with his
Barbarossa plan.

~~~
mercurial
Just look at the performance of the Red Army in the Winter War for an example.

