Soviet Organization of International Scientific Contacts

Abstract

International scientific contacts have been a priority for most Soviet governments, with the notable exception of Stalin’s years in power, although even under Stalin the Soviets continued to pay close attention to Western technology and, to a lesser degree, to science. Governments, rather than individual scientists or scientific institutions were put in charge of these contacts early on. Since the early 1920s specialists responsible for foreign relations in Soviet science have been posted in major embassies, first in Berlin, and later in Paris, London, and elsewhere. Science has figured most prominently among Soviet official priorities. Indeed, science has been essential to the very legitimacy of the Soviet Union. The Bolsheviks appeared to be carrying out a scientific¹ prediction of Marx and Lenin who inferred from their understanding of “‘the Laws of History” that the old capitalist order must be supplanted by the new socialist one. At certain times it was even claimed that Soviet Communists were engaged in nothing else but ‘“applied social science”: they were simply experimenting with Marxian social laws on the scale of a country.² This perception strongly influenced the attitudes on the part of a significant segment of Western scientific communities, particularly in Britain and France, to Soviet science. In the 1930s Soviet science provided inspiration for the organizers of France’s Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), for a pleiade of talented leftist scientists associated with Bernal in Britain and many others. Science appeared as one of the more attractive features of the new Soviet society.