Становление советской научной интеллигенции на Дальнем Востоке России

Abstract

The Development of the Soviet Scientific Intelligentsia in the Russian Far Elena Vasilieva's article investigates the development of the Soviet technical intelligentsia in the Russian Far East during the first three decades of Soviet power and gives insight into the fate of many local institutions and personalities. The very limited amount of scholars working in the Far East — mainly professors of the Vladivostok State University and Polytechnic Institute — grew noticeably during the civil war. During the 1920s, they responded to the relatively tolerant attitude of the authorities and security organs by an attitude made of apolitical expectation and growing concern about their usefulness. Starting with the proletarization of its students in 1923, the Sovietization of the Far-Eastern intelligentsia increased at the end of the 1920s when the fallout of the Shakhty Trial and the overall assault on the 'bourgeois intelligentsia' reached the region. The stratification of this particular group of the population deepened, gaining momentum during the purges, when institutes were closed and hundreds of scientific collaborators were shot or sent to labor camps. One of the consequences of the expansion and proximity of the labor camp system in the Far East was that the frontier between freedom and imprisonment was blurred. Although the consequences of the Sovietization of the technical intelligentsia undoubtedly had a negative result in terms of professionalism and level of knowledge, the way it adapted to the specific historical circumstances shows the limitations of Soviet totalitarianism.