The Impact of the Stalinist System on Science: Nuclear, Low Temperature and Theoretical Physics in Ukraine, 1930-1960

Colby College, Waterville ME

Investigators

Abstract

Project Abstract SES 0322274 Paul Josephson, Colby College "The Impact of the Stalinist System on Science: Nuclear, Low Temperature, and Theoretical Physics in Ukraine, 1930-1960" Ukraine was a leading center of nuclear, theoretical and low temperature physics in the 1930s. Niels Bohr, Paul Dirac, P. M. S. Blackett and Boris Podolsky, among many others, visited its renowned center of research in Kharkiv, the Ukrainian Physical Technical Institute (UFTI). Kirill Sinelnikov, who studied with Ernest Rutherford in Cambridge, directed the institute for many years, while future Nobel laureate Lev Landau began his career at UFTI. Leading Soviet physicists and representatives of the Communist Party set out to establish UFTI at the beginning of Stalin's crash program for industrialization and forced collectivization of agriculture in the late 1920s. Within a few years, the Great Terror commenced, leading to the arrest, interrogation, imprisonment and execution of millions of innocent citizens. The purges seem to have reached an intensity in Kharkiv unrivaled elsewhere in the USSR. In this project, a uniquely qualified international team of researchers will examine in great detail the history of Ukrainian physics. Specifically, using materials in government and institute archives, interviews, and local newspapers, the researchers will explore the impact of the Stalinist system on the physics community. By impact of the Stalinist system we mean: centralization of science policy; an emphasis on applied science at the expense of basic research; the introduction of a new system of planning of scientific activity; the establishment of autarky or international isolation in science; and the ideologization of science. This project will make several important contributions to the history of science. First, it will add to our understanding of the interaction of Stalinism and science. Second, it will reveal to what extent the experience of Ukrainian scientists differed from that of scientists in the physics discipline elsewhere in the USSR. Third, it will add a new chapter to the growing literature on cold war science. Fourth, by providing modest funding to Ukrainian specialists and several graduate assistants, it will support science studies which we believe are important to the ongoing evaluation of the place of science in contemporary Ukraine.