Science in the early Soviet Union became a precarious profession. If scientists were bureaucratically astute and in the right fields of study, they could receive lavish amenities and countrywide fame. If not, scientists were as much at risk as any other perceived enemy of the revolution and subject to exile, torture or execution. They had to tread a political minefield with every publication, a labyrinth of social considerations where objective truth meant far less than adherence to Marxist philosophy, or, increasingly as time went on, the whims of one ruthless amateur scientist--Joseph Stalin.
In Stalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy, 1905-1953, Simon Ings, editor at New Scientist and author of A Natural History of Seeing, chronicles the catastrophic collapse of certain sciences under the Soviets. The brutal first years of revolution and civil war brought most academic and research organizations to their knees. Once the state stabilized (to a relative degree), scientists faced two challenges: overcoming the stigmatization of any "Old Guard" group that existed under the tsars, and wrapping new research in the guise of Marxism.
The latter proved a fatal barrier to genetics. Soviets were obsessed with Lamarckian evolution, in which traits gained during a parent's lifetime could be passed to offspring. Geneticists who advocated Darwinian evolution and genes as physical objects faced dismissal and even death. Trofim Lysenko, an amateur agrobiologist, led the charge against genetics (with the personal backing of Stalin) while his own unscientific methods exacerbated crop failures. Ings skillfully relates this maddening chapter of science history, but doesn't neglect the eventual triumphs that did come from Soviet science. --Tobias Mutter, freelance reviewer