Osiris, Volume 23: Intelligentsia Science: The Russian Century, 1860-1960

by Michael D. Gordin, Karl Hall, Alexei Kojevnikov

Overview

The newest annual volume of Osiris, Intelligentsia Science explores the transformations in science in the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, from serfdom to Sputnik, as a series of developments in Russian culture.
            The contributors argue that it was the generation of the 1860s that transformed “intelligentsia” into a central notion of Russian popular discourse, cementing its association with revolutionary politics—and with science.  Science became the cornerstone of the intelligentsia’s ideological and political projects, either as an alternative to socialism, or more often as its nominal raison d’être.  The Russian century may in fact be over, but the interrelation of the intelligentsia and science to form “intelligentsia science” proves enduring.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226304571
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press Journals
Publication date:	09/15/2008
Series:	Osiris , #23
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	316
Product dimensions:	6.80(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Michael D. Gordin is professor of the history of science at Princeton University.


Karl Hall is assistant professor of history at Central European University in Budapest.

Alexei Kojevnikov is associate professor in the Department of History, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

Read an Excerpt

Osiris

Intelligentsia Science: The Russian Century, 1860-1960

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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2009 The University Of Chicago Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-30457-1

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Chapter One

The Heidelberg Circle: German Inflections on the Professionalization of Russian Chemistry in the 1860s

By Michael D. Gordin

ABSTRACT

The success of the "second importation" of science to Russia during the Great Reforms of the 1860s is illustrated by examining the extended postdoctoral study of chemists in Heidelberg. While there, they adapted the Russian intelligentsia institution of the "circle," or kruzhok, to cope with their alienation from the German culture they were confronting. Upon their return to Russia, they felt the lack of the communicative network they had established while abroad and reimported the kruzhok to serve as a central model for the formation of the Russian Chemical Society in 1868.

INTRODUCTION

Science, as everyone knows, was not native to Russia. Although there were limited cosmological, medical, and metallurgical concepts and practices employed across the space now identified with Russia, it was not until the very late seventeenth century that large-scale imports of engineers from central and western Europe began to affect governance and the military. As for elite science-the collection of high-level theories, mathematics, experimentalpractices, and conceptual frameworks usually understood on the model of western European natural knowledge from the Renaissance onward-that had a very specific birth date in Russia. Tsar Peter the Great (r. 1689-1725), in one of his final decisions, acted upon a suggestion by the noted natural philosopher Gottfried Leibniz and created an Academy of Sciences in his new capital, St. Petersburg. Of course, Peter not only had to arrange for the institution but also had to provide the professionals qualified to staff it. He imported a collection of central European savants in various areas of the arts and sciences to be his first academicians. Thus science was a foreign import.

However, science, as everyone knows, has been immensely successful in Russia. By whatever measure one chooses-numbers of scientists, rate of publication, important discoveries, peer recognition-Russian scientists have been at the forefront of international scientific developments for at least the last 150 years. So, although science was a foreign import, it was one that took exceptionally well to Russian soil.

Or did it? For over a century after the introduction of the main eighteenth-century institution of Western natural philosophy, the scientific academy, it is difficult to find any significant penetration of science or scientific institutions outside St. Petersburg. Most (although certainly not all) of the achievements of Russian science took place after the transformation of Russian governance during the so-called Great Reforms of the 1860s and 1870s, under the leadership of Tsar Alexander II (r. 1855-1881). Something very specific seems to have happened at the cusp of the 1860s that mobilized a scientific intelligentsia out of what had earlier been a shallow system that had relied on foreign talent. This essay will explore what those transformations were and how they altered the structures by which Russian science was organized. (2)

What happened to alter the fundamental structure of Russian science is fairly easy to map out schematically: upon the loss of the Crimean War (1853-1856), the Russian state realized that it would risk its future fiscal and military stability if it did not modify features of the Russian polity that made it, in contemporary Russians' terms, relatively "backward" with respect to western Europe. What came to be called the Great Reforms were initiated formally by the abolition of serfdom in February 1861, a reform that had actually been in the planning stages for some time. Similar self-conscious "modernizing" reforms ensued in the areas of technical education and technical institutions. Instead of bringing the mountain to Muhammad, as they had done with the Academy of Sciences, Russian bureaucrats decide to send their talented graduate students and "postdocs" abroad, largely to the German states, thereby taking Muhammad to the mountain. As this essay will argue, using the specific example of chemistry and chemical postdocs, this technical emigration (especially its reverse flow back to Petersburg) led to the creation of a specific form of professionalization of the sciences in postreform Russia, one that both drew from and reacted to the German milieu in which the Russians lived while abroad.

To the extent that this "German captivity" has been discussed with respect to Russian science by commentators, it has received mixed or negative reviews. Either the transformation in Russian institutions is seen as autochthonous, and essentially unrelated to the two- or three-year sojourns the Russians spent abroad, or the exposure to German institutions is seen as deleterious. For those who hold to an essentialist vision of the Russian national character, to the extent that the returning Russians borrowed anything from the Germans, that borrowing was destructive and only served to hold back some form of authentic Russian science:

The educational system was borrowed from Germany, its negative qualities were intensified while the most important positive qualities were partially or completely suppressed. The Russian national character was not taken into account by that system foreign to its spirit which was put as it were into a straight-jacket and had its wings clipped by the two most efficient tools in the hands of autocracy-censorship and espionage.

This (clearly bigoted) quotation raises a series of intriguing questions: Was the system in fact borrowed from Germany? What features made it "German"? How was "Russian national character" understood, and how did it relate to the sciences? The only way to get at these questions is to back away from facile generalizations and really examine the local dynamics of what happened.

For those dynamics were very much local ones, as well as broader cultural transformations. The most important social group for the development of science in Russia-and then eventually the domestication and appropriation of that system of knowledge into Russian science-was the intelligentsia. The intelligentsia, like any other social institution, had to organize itself somehow, and the basic structure of the Russian intelligentsia was subdivision into kruzhkí ("circles"; singular, kruzhók). (The accents are used here to clarify pronunciation.) In this essay, I argue that the organization of chemistry in Petersburg into a Russian Chemical Society in November 1868 was in large part mediated by the adaptation of the urban social institution of the kruzhok under the culturally adverse conditions of the German scientific emigration. Understanding the kruzhok, therefore, leads directly into the nexus between the formal structures of Western science and the social structures of the Russian intelligentsia. Although the kruzhok provides far less than a total explanation of the professionalization of scientists in Russia, its specific features do go a long way toward explaining the rapidity and vehemence of Russian national identification in the sciences, particularly in chemistry.

It is quite difficult to formulate a precise definition of the kruzhok, which is somewhat of a cross between a concentrated, topical salon and an intellectual Stammtisch. Kruzhki were usually relatively small (fewer than twenty people) and had a defined membership; you could only become a member of a kruzhok if proposed by a standing member, and other members could blackball you if you were perceived as unreliable. Given the political stakes of a compromised kruzhok-Fyodor Dostoevsky was exiled to Siberia when a police mole reported on proscribed political discussions within the Petrashevskii kruzhok, of which the writer was a member-this insularity and exclusiveness were vital adaptations to a highly controlled political climate. They also offered remarkable communicability across increasingly divergent disciplines, as intellectuals and aristocrats tended to belong to several kruzhki at a time, carrying concerns from one into another. Most scholarship of kruzhki among Russian historians has focused on the two outstanding exemplars from the 1840s-the Westernizers and the Slavophiles-although the tradition extended earlier in time as well as later. With emancipation in 1861, the historiography stresses these institutions as staples of student culture in the demographic boom of Moscow and Petersburg university populations, where they would eventually serve as kernels of Marxist, populist, and terrorist politics, or as circles of artists and literati. Daniel Alexandrov-the only historian of science to take the kruzhok seriously as an organizing principle for Russian knowledge production-traces his genealogical line from these student kruzhki into the Soviet period, and his work gives a picture of the versatility of this institution in Soviet Russia (and abroad, in the case of the famous Kapitza Club at Cambridge). I propose that the kruzhok's legacies were far richer than just this contribution to radical student culture: it was also a seedbed of the established, albeit idiosyncratic, professional culture.

Before beginning with the origins of the emigration, a word of defense is required with respect to the choice of chemistry as the focus of this paper. Although the implications of the argument here for the formation of a professional scientific culture are of necessity broader than merely in one field, there are good reasons to focus on this specific science when exploring the "second importation" of the sciences to Russia. Chemistry was the dominant science in late imperial Russia, partially because of its utility to the state in the areas of mining, oil exploitation, agriculture, and munitions; partially because it was at the time the leading science internationally; and partially because it was simply the first science to cross the horizon of modernity by acquiring a professional society and official government recognition. The chemical community is vital to our historical understanding of the nature of professional organization in Russia because it subsequently served as a model for essentially all communities of scientists (and other technical experts) formed in the spaces of the Russian empire. Studying chemistry, then, provides the historian of science a tracer for the evolution of Russian nationalist conceptions precisely at a site where one would least expect it: at the heart of the most international and cosmopolitan physical science. And these Russian developments could not have occurred-or would have occurred rather differently-without the midwifery of a specific German university town.

HEIDELBERG: THE CENTER OF THE CIRCLE

Generally speaking, there have been two strategies that states have followed for introducing Western science into a new cultural context, executed either individually or in combination: importing the scientists as retainers from foreign lands, thus outsourcing the talent (think of Peter the Great and his academy project); or sending one's countrymen abroad to receive their training, then bringing them back, thus outsourcing the training. It was this latter strategy that became increasingly common among Russian institutions of higher education and tsarist bureaucrats in the mid-nineteenth century. This strategy was not completely new to Russia after the Crimean War. Medical doctors, for one, had been sent abroad for "improvement" since the mid-eighteenth century, and-after a brief hiatus from 1803 to 1817-continued to be so well into the nineteenth. Likewise, legal scholars had been sent abroad for many years, most notably under the sponsorship of the pivotal legal bureaucrat Mikhail Speranskii in the late 1820s. Nevertheless, the scale of the effort that emerged in the late 1850s dwarfed these earlier qualified attempts to siphon some of the cream off the Western educational establishment.

Even at this point, however, the procedure was implemented on a trial basis. A trickle of scholars-almost always very talented graduate students who had already completed their magisterskaia, the second-highest academic degree-were sent abroad to various universities in central and western Europe. Almost none undertook the trip to England. A few ventured to Paris. The vast majority of those who went abroad chose to affiliate with an institution in one of the German states. (This includes medical students who by and large went to Vienna, which in the era before German unification made for a plausible German university.) When the program was instituted on a wider scale in the early 1860s, this trend only deepened.

This migration of students, especially in the early period, was not of a random character. Generally, postdocs in specific fields (legal scholars, chemists, physicians, classicists) tended to congregate at specific sites. For a variety of reasons, the small number of chemists-in the late 1850s not more than twenty-concentrated in Heidelberg, although they almost all traveled widely in Europe during their two- or three-year stay abroad. This core of Russian Heidelbergers proved to be a vital kernel for the institutionalization of a professionalized chemistry in St. Petersburg, and then in the Russian empire more broadly.

There were (as there still are) numerous attractions for the young student who opted to take his stipend in Heidelberg, at Heidelberg University. Founded in 1386, it was the third-oldest German university-and the oldest within the confines of present-day Germany (the older two being in Prague and Vienna). The somewhat tortured and lengthy history of the institution had reached a brighter passage by the early nineteenth century, as Heidelberg University began to transform itself into the very model of a modern research university. The direct impetus for the reorganization of the university in 1803 was the establishment, by Napoleon, of new confines for the grand duchy of Baden, in which Heidelberg is located. Baden was perhaps unique among the German states for maintaining a vibrant culture of liberalism, which was especially important in the period between the Congress of Vienna (1815) and the abortive revolutions of 1848. The attraction for German students from various Länder (states or administrative regions) was quite strong, and Heidelberg offered a counterpart to the famous exaltation of Wissenschaft and academic freedom in the Prussian north, but in a more congenial political environment. As a result, the student population-undergraduate and graduate-and the professoriate boomed.

Those populations did not boom haphazardly. As Peter Borscheid argued in a seminal monograph thirty years ago, after 1848 a distinct emphasis was placed on the natural sciences, then a part of the philosophy faculty. (This narrative runs counter to the typical presentation of Heidelberg as a seat of German Romanticism-which, of course, it also was.) According to Borscheid, southern German states perceived the revolutions to be at their roots agricultural disturbances caused by instability in crop production. Justus von Liebig (1803-1873), at the time the doyen of German chemistry from his post in tiny Giessen, argued that substantial development of chemistry in a university context would foster future political stability among the lower classes in two ways: advanced agricultural chemistry would guarantee greater crop stability across harvests, and the development of a cadre of technical experts within universities would encourage the maturation of the chemical industry, which could absorb an impoverished proletariat. Liebig was heavily courted by Baden to take charge of the development of the sciences in Heidelberg, but he accepted an offer from Bavaria instead and shortly thereafter moved to Munich. The second choice in the southern German bidding war was Robert Wilhelm Bunsen (1811-1899). Bunsen had taught in many different German universities throughout his career before moving to Heidelberg in 1854, where he remained until his death.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Intelligentsia Science: The Russian Century, 1860–1960

Introduction: Intelligentsia Science Inside and Outside Russia
Michael D. Gordin and Karl Hall

Intelligentsia as Social Organization

The Heidelberg Circle: German Inflections on the Professionalization of Russian Chemistry in the 1860s
Michael D. Gordin

Turning Pedagogy into a Science: Teachers and Psychologists in Late Imperial Russia (1897–1917)
Andy Byford

Organizational Culture and Professional Identities in the Soviet Nuclear Power Industry
Sonja D. Schmid

Intelligentsia as Political Agent

The Phenomenon of Soviet Science
Alexei Kojevnikov

The Conquest of Science: Women and Science in Russia, 1860–1940
Olga Valkova

Wishful Science: The Persistence of T. D. Lysenko’s Agrobiology in the Politics of Science
Nils Roll- Hansen

Stalin’s Rocket Designers’ Leap into Space: The Technical Intelligentsia Faces the Thaw
Slava Gerovitch

Intelligentsia as Utopia

Taming the Primitive: Elie Metchnikov and His Discovery of Immune Cells
Kirill Rossiianov

The Schooling of Lev Landau: The European Context of Postrevolutionary Soviet Theoretical Physics
Karl Hall

Imagining the Cosmos: Utopians, Mystics, and the Popular Culture of Spaceflight in Revolutionary Russia
Asif A. Siddiqi

Notes on Contributors

Index