Maria Rogacheva begins a chapter of her study of the scientific center of Chernogolovka with Andrei Sakharov's recollection of being a “soldier … of the scientific-technical war” (49). The great physicist's awakening of conscience and his role in the human rights movement has colored popular views of the late Soviet scientific intelligentsia, according to which scientists were natural dissenters against the Soviet order. In this well-crafted and persuasive monograph, Rogacheva argues that most Soviet scientists refused to follow Sakharov in rejecting the USSR's “scientific-technical war,” instead remaining its soldiers until the regime's collapse.
The Private World of Soviet Scientists pursues this agenda through a microhistory of the scientific town of Chernogolovka in Moscow province, a research testing ground for the military-scientific complex in the 1950s that then developed into a “full-fledged scientific center dedicated to fundamental research” (2). Unlike the better-known Akademgorodok in Siberia, Chernogolovka's status as a hub of science came from the efforts of its founders, including Nobel Prize laureate Nikolai Nikolaevich Semenov, to exploit the “room for innovation” (20) that emerged in the Soviet system after Stalin's death. While the book discusses the institutional development of the city, its main thrust is a collective biography of Chernogolovka's scientists, which is pursued using extensive oral research and archival work.
The author explains the scientists’ commitment to the Soviet state in different frames. Adopting a generational approach, she argues that the scientists’ commitment to the Soviet project emerged from childhood experiences in the Great Patriotic War and its aftermath, Nikita Khrushchev's support of science as a means to reinvigorate socialism, and the autonomy that scientists came to enjoy under developed socialism. The book then turns to social history, providing an account of everyday life in the science city as being marked by relative privilege and a strong local identity.
The heart of the book is its discussion of the political situation in Chernogolovka in the Brezhnev period. In a masterfully researched chapter, Rogacheva shows that party organizations were an integral part of the town's everyday life, as scientists enjoyed the relatively liberal dispensation of power the party allowed for the scientific intelligentsia while also actively shielding themselves from the inroads of the communist apparat. The scientists were so reconciled to party power that they sought to smooth over moments of political disruption, with the scientists closing ranks against isolated voices of dissent that arose during the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia and the arrest of a resident of the town, the dissident Kronid Liubarskii, four years later. A final chapter addresses scientists’ travel abroad, taking aim at the common narrative that Soviet citizens’ contact with the wider world, and particularly the west, triggered political opposition. While acknowledging that international travel contributed to a “diversity of thinking” among Chernogolovka's scientists (174), Rogacheva stresses that it also provided an opportunity to take pride in Soviet scientific achievements.
As is inevitable with any strongly-argued scholarly work, The Private World of Soviet Scientists is not beyond questioning on some points. An attempt to categorize the spectrum of beliefs of the scientists in Chapter 5 is cursory, while the treatment of the “exuberant atmosphere of the Thaw” (37) will give pause to scholars who see uncertainty and confusion as characteristic of the Khrushchev years. Far more notable are the book's many merits. The monograph shows that professional interests, meaning large-scale state support for relatively autonomous scientific research, was more important to scientific elites in the postwar USSR than political freedoms or wider liberalization. The positing of a “trustworthy relationship between scientists and the state” (118) challenges longstanding views of a reformist or “liberal” intelligentsia, which should spark new thinking about the place of educated elites in the late Soviet Union. In a wider sense, the book presents a novel account of the informal yet decisive “rules of the game” (151) through which the conservative Soviet state of the Brezhnev years maintained the loyalty of an elite social group. In the process, the book sheds light on the roles of localism, social privilege, and personal relationships that are too often passed over in discussions of conformity and dissent in the Soviet context.
The Private World of Soviet Scientists is an important contribution to historical scholarship on the post-Stalin period as well as on Soviet science, and it deserves a wide audience.
