The Great War, the Russian Civil War, and the Invention of Big Science

@article{Kojevnikov2002TheGW,
  title={The Great War, the Russian Civil War, and the Invention of Big Science},
  author={Alexei Kojevnikov},
  journal={Science in Context},
  year={2002},
  volume={15},
  pages={239 - 275}
}
Argument The revolutionary transformation in Russian science toward the Soviet model of research started even before the revolution of 1917. It was triggered by the crisis of World War I, in response to which Russian academics proposed radical changes in the goals and infrastructure of the country’s scientific effort. Their drafts envisioned the recognition of science as a profession separate from teaching, the creation of research institutes, and the turn toward practical, applied research… 
View on Cambridge Press
sites.bu.edu
31 Citations
Background Citations
4
Results Citations
1

31 Citations

Citation Type

Citation Type

The New Scientific Policy: The Early Soviet Project of “State-Sponsored Evolutionism”
The aim of the present paper is to show that the fundamental transformation of Russian society that had been realized by the Soviet government since the early twenties included not only the reforms…
Science and Technology (Russian Empire) | International Encyclopedia of the First World War (WW1)
Although Russia made considerable progress in the decades preceding 1914, the onset of the First World War revealed the country's continuing dependency on foreign powers in sustaining its industrial,…
The survival of 19th-century scientific optimism: the public discourse on science in Belgium in the aftermath of the Great War (ca. 1919-1930).
  • Sofie Onghena
  • History
    Centaurus; international magazine of the history of science and medicine
  • 2011
TLDR
This article strives to prove that faith in scientific progress still prevailed in the 1920s, using Belgium as a case study, which suggests that the generally adopted cultural pessimism in the post-war years did not apply to the public rhetoric of science in this country.
The Soviet Union in the twenty-first century
The subject of this article is how historians and others have understood Soviet history since the demise of the Soviet Union. It is argued that, despite the opening of archives, changes in…
Growing Links between Chemistry and Industry in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1900–1953
Abstract During the first half of the twentieth century, chemistry in Russia and the Soviet Union underwent many changes, which often were responses to the country's social and political turmoil.…
The Implications of Transnationalism
When Kritika published a special issue in 2001 on the state of the field ten years after the end of communism, it was logical to include a reassessment of the October Revolution and two pieces on the…
"We can and we must": The scientificitiy of trade-union history-writing in the Soviet Union in the 1920s
In the 1920s, the young Soviet Republic, rejecting the old social system, turned to the study of the past. Instead of engaging with professional historians, the new regime initiated a whole range of…
Physics moves to the provinces: the Siberian physics community and Soviet power, 1917-1940.
TLDR
The article describes how local and national physicists justified the institute's creation by demonstrating ties with industry and building on the presence of a cohort of locally trained physicists, whose numbers were augmented by Leningrad specialists.
Science in Central and Eastern Europe
In the 1920s, the young Soviet Republic, rejecting the old social system, turned to the study of the past. Instead of engaging with professional historians, the new regime initiated a whole range of…
Krasnoiarsk, 1917 : the making of Soviet power in central Siberia
This thesis investigates the formation of power structures in a revolutionary setting. It takes as a case study the central Siberian city of Krasnoiarsk, in which a powerful Soviet of Workers? and…
...
...

References

SHOWING 1-10 OF 154 REFERENCES
The Formation of Soviet Research Institutes: A Combination of Revolutionary Innovation and International Borrowing
  • L. Graham
  • Political Science
    Social studies of science
  • 1975
TLDR
The origin of this model for the organization of scientific research in the Soviet Union is traced back to the pre-revolutionary period, the influence of certain foreign models on Russian and Soviet developments is considered, and the uniquely Soviet innovations which were introduced after the Revolution are discussed.
War of words: the public science of the British scientific community and the origins of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, 1914–16
  • Andrew J. Hull
  • Education
    The British Journal for the History of Science
  • 1999
In late 1916 the British Government finally bowed to pressure from scientists and sympathetic elements of the public to organize and fund science centrally and established the Department of…
Big Science in the Last Years of the Big Soviet Union
TLDR
The last portions of the article will focus on reforms of the science establishment under Mikhail Gorbachev, viewing those reforms as attempted correctives to the weaknesses inherent in the earlier organization of Soviet research.
Government, Industry and Rearmament in Russia, 1900-1914: The Last Argument of Tsarism
This book provides an economic historian's perspective on major questions that confront all students of Russian history: how stable were the economic and administrative structures of late-imperial…
Physics and politics in revolutionary Russia
Aided by personal documents and institutional archives that were closed for decades, this book recounts the development of physics - or, more aptly, science under stress - in Soviet Russia up to…
Science and Russian Culture in an Age of Revolutions: V. I. Vernadsky and His Scientific School, 1863-1945
Foreword by Loren Graham Introduction CHAPTER 1 A Life for Science: Vernadsky's Development as a Scientist in Imperial Russia, 1863-1888 Chapter 2 Science and Society: The Origins of Vernadsky's…
Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia
Between 1899 and 1911, student strikes and demonstrations disrupted Russia's higher educational institutions. The universities marched to their own peculiar tempo, however, and it was not until the…
The first World War, academic science, and the “two cultures”: Educational reforms at the University of Cambridge
SHORTLY AFTER THE FIRST WORLD WAR, W i l l i a m J. Pope, professor of chemistry at the University of Cambridge, wrote to Ernest Rutherford to encourage him to return to Cambridge to succeed his…
Chemistry for King and Kaiser: Revisiting Chemical Enterprise and the European War
Today, it is widely acknowledged that war is primarily a question of technology. From this, as J.F.C. Fuller once said, it is but a short step to the conclusion that “weapons, if only the right ones…
The chemists go to war: the mobilization of civilian chemists and the British war effort, 1914-1918.
TLDR
This paper suggests four key stages in this mobilization of Britain's chemical leadership, and hints at the significance of the war for the emergence of new sub-disciplines, for the careers of chemists, for academic-government relations in research, and for the image, status, and international position of British chemistry on the threshold of the postwar world.
...
...