"Will certainly become one of the standard works on the history of modern scientific institutions."--Spencer Weart, American Institute of Physics

World-class science and technology developed in the Soviet Union during Stalin's dictatorial rule under conditions of political violence, lack of international contacts, and severe restrictions on the freedom of information. Stalin's Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists is an invaluable book that investigates this paradoxical success by following the lives and work of Soviet scientists ? including Nobel Prize-winning physicists Kapitza, Landau, and others ? throughout the turmoil of wars, revolutions, and repression that characterized the first half of Russia's twentieth century.The book examines how scientists operated within the Soviet political order, communicated with Stalinist politicians, built a new system of research institutions, and conducted groundbreaking research under extraordinary circumstances. Some of their novel scientific ideas and theories reflected the influence of Soviet ideology and worldview and have since become accepted universally as fundamental concepts of contemporary science. In the process of making sense of the achievements of Soviet science, the book dismantles standard assumptions about the interaction between science, politics, and ideology, as well as many dominant stereotypes ? mostly inherited from the Cold War ? about Soviet history in general. Science and technology were not only granted unprecedented importance in Soviet society, but they also exerted a crucial formative influence on the Soviet political system itself. Unlike most previous studies, Stalin's Great Science recognizes the status of science as an essential element of the Soviet polity and explores the nature of a special relationship between experts (scientists and engineers) and communist politicians that enabled the initial rise of the Soviet state and its mature accomplishments, until the pact eroded in later years, undermining the communist regime from within.

The true history of physics can only be read in the life stories of those who made its progress possible. Matvei Bronstein was one of those for whom the vast territory of theoretical physics was as familiar as his own home: he worked in cosmology, nuclear physics, gravitation, semiconductors, atmospheric physics, quantum electrodynamics, astro physics and the relativistic quantum theory. Everyone who knew him was struck by his wide knowledge, far beyond the limits of his trade. This partly explains why his life was closely intertwined with the social, historical and scientific context of his time. One might doubt that during his short life Bronstein could have made truly weighty contributions to science and have become, in a sense, a symbol ofhis time. Unlike mathematicians and poets, physicists reach the peak oftheir careers after the age of thirty. His thirty years of life, however, proved enough to secure him a place in theGreaterSovietEncyclopedia. In 1967, in describing the first generation of physicists educated after the 1917 revolution, Igor Tamm referred to Bronstein as "an exceptionally brilliant and promising" theoretician [268].

The classic and “utterly engrossing” study of Stalin’s pursuit of a nuclear bomb during the Cold War by the renowned political scientist and historian (Foreign Affairs). For forty years the U.S.-Russian nuclear arms race dominated world politics, yet the Soviet nuclear establishment was shrouded in secrecy. Then, shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, David Holloway pulled back the Iron Curtain with his “marvelous, groundbreaking study” Stalin and the Bomb (The New Yorker). How did the Soviet Union build its atomic and hydrogen bombs? What role did espionage play? How did the American atomic monopoly affect Stalin's foreign policy? What was the relationship between Soviet nuclear scientists and the country's political leaders? David Holloway answers these questions by tracing the dramatic story of Soviet nuclear policy from developments in physics in the 1920s to the testing of the hydrogen bomb and the emergence of nuclear deterrence in the mid-1950s. This magisterial history throws light on Soviet policy at the height of the Cold War, illuminates a central element of the Stalinist system, and puts into perspective the tragic legacy of this program―environmental damage, a vast network of institutes and factories, and a huge stockpile of unwanted weapons.

This book presents key works of Boris Hessen, outstanding Soviet philosopher of science, available here in English for the first time. Quality translations are accompanied by an editors' introduction and annotations. Boris Hessen is known in history of science circles for his “Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia” presented in London (1931), which inspired new approaches in the West. As a philosopher and a physicist, he was tasked with developing a Marxist approach to science in the 1920s. He studied the history of physics to clarify issues such as reductionism and causality as they applied to new developments. With the philosophers called the “Dialecticians”, his debates with the opposing “Mechanists” on the issue of emergence are still worth studying and largely ignored in the many recent works on this subject. Taken as a whole, the book is a goldmine of insights into both the foundations of physics and Soviet history.

Introduction: Stalin, science, and politics after the Second World War -- "A Marxist should not write like that": the crisis on the "philosophical front" -- "The future belongs to Michurin": the agricultural academy session of 1948 -- "We can always shoot them later": physics, politics, and the atomic bomb -- "Battles of opinions and open criticism": Stalin intervenes in linguistics -- "Attack the detractors with certainty of total success": the Pavlov session of 1950 -- "Everyone is waiting": Stalin and the economic problems of communism -- Conclusion: science and the fate of the Stalinist system.