Principal Investigator: William Nickell, Associate Professor, Dept. of Slavic Languages and Literatures

Research on Soviet science has often focused on its spectacular failures (genetics under Lysenko), or on its remarkable successes (the space program of the late 1950s and early 1960s). Nickell’s project paid greater attention to the latter example than former, and examined more comprehensively the production of knowledge under Marxist cultural authority, which Russian revolutionaries believed would have a powerful leavening effect as it freed public education and the sciences of the influence of capitalist markets and bourgeois values. What can be learned from the organization of the sciences that emerged from the Marxist critique of the academy as a bourgeois institution? How did government influence and the isolation of the Soviet academy both contribute to and inhibit its successes?

In the Soviet Union, knowledge was seen as a product of socio-economic context, inflected by ideology. Under the dictatorship of the proletariat, it could also become an instrument of revolutionary authority. A second strand of Nickell’s project focused on this latter question, considering the dissemination of academic knowledge as both product and agent of Bolshevik power. The Russian university, rather than the factory, had served as the hothouse of the future proletarian revolution, and when the Bolshevik Party announced the makeup of its new government on October 26, 1917, a critical role was assigned to Anatoly Lunacharsky, the Commissar of Enlightenment. From the outset, the Soviet government set forth an ambitious agenda of mass education, approaching it not only as a strategic concern, but also as an instrument of progressive politics. In the attempt to liberate knowledge from class constraints, special attention was paid to the formation of knowledge in common, which was viewed as a productive constituent of the personality, integrated within strong collective identities. Common knowledge and shared belief were treated as antidotes to alienation, and produced that stability of the later Soviet period that was also known as stagnation. Gorbachev’s reforms of the late 1980s introduced new models of knowing and information exchange, destabilizing the whole system.