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That's very moot. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism There is a well known story, when Stalin met with Vavi

by shmerl 7y ago

That's very moot. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism There is a well known story, when Stalin met with Vavilov¹ to hear his concerns about issues related to genetics, and was ridiculing his ideas, making fun of him, saying that all he does is "playing with pestles and stamens". Vavilov died of starvation in prison. I don't call such regimes intellectual. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Vavilov

Tade0 7y ago
And yet they had a successful space program - after Stalin died in 1953 that is.
- shmerl 7y ago
  Despite, not thanks to the government. They surely were very competitive, but that was not due to intellectual pursuit. Science was seen as valuable to weaponize, not to make life better. If you want examples of how government officials handled progress, see: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedelin_catastrophe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedelin_catastrophe * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ybnj4jcnwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ybnj4jcnwg The above catastrophe occurred, due to government disregarding safety warnings and pushing personnel to do the test before some official anniversary event. So I'd differentiate between scientists themselves and the regime, which was hardly intellectual.
  - Tade0 7y ago
    Science was seen as valuable to weaponize I don't think they were much of an outlier in this. Some of the greatest accomplishments of the US were done either to compete with the Soviet Union, or to make better weapons.
    - mirimir 7y ago
      The tragic irony of the Cold War (and maybe all wars) was that both sides saw themselves as threatened, and that they were being justifiably defensive.
Mediterraneo10 7y ago
You shouldn’t extrapolate from Stalin’s regime to the whole Soviet era. Stalin is infamous for making the USSR backward in genetics, history, archaeology, and linguistics. Yet as soon as he died, those fields recovered and significant progress on even a global level was made. My own academic background is in the latter three subjects, and I cite work by Soviet scholars in any publication I write. Most academic libraries in the West keep Soviet academic publications from the Stalinist era in the closed stacks, because no one ever asks for them. There is a reason for that: the level of scholarship is poor, and the author feels compelled to praise the “Great Leader” (вождь) even if he was writing on something so removed from the modern Soviet Union and Communist ideology as e.g. 3rd-century CE grave finds. However, from the Khrushchev era on, Soviet scholarship in many fields was as strong as in the West and, as I said, some of those works are standard references for the field regardless of where on earth you live and work. I would consider the late Soviet Union a fairly “intellectual” culture, because even as in the West the attraction of many such academic careers declined in the 1970s and 1980s (i.e. the belief that such degrees were useless and there was no way to make a living from them), in the USSR it was still very respectable to enter such fields. Naturally, however, that was only possible under an overall planned economy that turned out to be deeply flawed and inhuman, and as I mentioned elsewhere here Russia’s intellectual culture declined after the fall of Communism, but still.
- shmerl 7y ago
  It did change in the later period, but again, scientists were moving progress rather despite the regime, than thanks to it. Stalin was just one of the most egregious examples of that sort.
  - Mediterraneo10 7y ago
    > scientists were moving progress rather despite the regime, than thanks to it. No, it is more nuanced than that. Those scientists only had their positions because the state chose to allocate resources to keep them employed. With the fall of Communism, when academia was exposed to market forces, those departments were often gutted. Also, certain fields gained considerable state support precisely because the regime felt they served its own foreign policy goals. For example, the USSR was a powerhouse for the study of the Iranian language family. This was not only because a number of Iranian languages were spoken within the USSR, but also because the USSR wanted good Central Asian areal studies so that it could better extend its influence over Iran and Afghanistan. The same is true of many of the Third World nations where the USA and USSR were fighting for influence: name a language in Africa or Asia, and there is often a very well-written Soviet-era grammar or lexicon that linguists everywhere still cite today.

by shmerl 7y ago

Tade0 7y ago

And yet they had a successful space program - after Stalin died in 1953 that is.

shmerl 7y ago
Despite, not thanks to the government. They surely were very competitive, but that was not due to intellectual pursuit. Science was seen as valuable to weaponize, not to make life better. If you want examples of how government officials handled progress, see: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedelin_catastrophe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nedelin_catastrophe * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ybnj4jcnwg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ybnj4jcnwg The above catastrophe occurred, due to government disregarding safety warnings and pushing personnel to do the test before some official anniversary event. So I'd differentiate between scientists themselves and the regime, which was hardly intellectual.
- Tade0 7y ago
  Science was seen as valuable to weaponize I don't think they were much of an outlier in this. Some of the greatest accomplishments of the US were done either to compete with the Soviet Union, or to make better weapons.
  - mirimir 7y ago
    The tragic irony of the Cold War (and maybe all wars) was that both sides saw themselves as threatened, and that they were being justifiably defensive.

Mediterraneo10 7y ago

You shouldn’t extrapolate from Stalin’s regime to the whole Soviet era. Stalin is infamous for making the USSR backward in genetics, history, archaeology, and linguistics. Yet as soon as he died, those fields recovered and significant progress on even a global level was made. My own academic background is in the latter three subjects, and I cite work by Soviet scholars in any publication I write. Most academic libraries in the West keep Soviet academic publications from the Stalinist era in the closed stacks, because no one ever asks for them. There is a reason for that: the level of scholarship is poor, and the author feels compelled to praise the “Great Leader” (вождь) even if he was writing on something so removed from the modern Soviet Union and Communist ideology as e.g. 3rd-century CE grave finds. However, from the Khrushchev era on, Soviet scholarship in many fields was as strong as in the West and, as I said, some of those works are standard references for the field regardless of where on earth you live and work. I would consider the late Soviet Union a fairly “intellectual” culture, because even as in the West the attraction of many such academic careers declined in the 1970s and 1980s (i.e. the belief that such degrees were useless and there was no way to make a living from them), in the USSR it was still very respectable to enter such fields. Naturally, however, that was only possible under an overall planned economy that turned out to be deeply flawed and inhuman, and as I mentioned elsewhere here Russia’s intellectual culture declined after the fall of Communism, but still.

shmerl 7y ago
It did change in the later period, but again, scientists were moving progress rather despite the regime, than thanks to it. Stalin was just one of the most egregious examples of that sort.
- Mediterraneo10 7y ago
  > scientists were moving progress rather despite the regime, than thanks to it. No, it is more nuanced than that. Those scientists only had their positions because the state chose to allocate resources to keep them employed. With the fall of Communism, when academia was exposed to market forces, those departments were often gutted. Also, certain fields gained considerable state support precisely because the regime felt they served its own foreign policy goals. For example, the USSR was a powerhouse for the study of the Iranian language family. This was not only because a number of Iranian languages were spoken within the USSR, but also because the USSR wanted good Central Asian areal studies so that it could better extend its influence over Iran and Afghanistan. The same is true of many of the Third World nations where the USA and USSR were fighting for influence: name a language in Africa or Asia, and there is often a very well-written Soviet-era grammar or lexicon that linguists everywhere still cite today.