Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars by Ethan Pollock (review)

Abstract

reviews 739 extensive material on socio-economic and political trends in BiH in the decades preceding thewar, and delves into important aspects of social history without which an understanding of Partisan success is impossible. By mid-1942 BiH was a complex and chaotic patchwork of competing fiefdoms.The increasinglymarginalized Croatian fascist regime controlled the larger townswhile the countryside was held by different rebel groups, either Partisans, Chetniks or, in some cases, local Muslim militias. Hoare argues convincingly that the Bosnian Partisans, despite their predominandy Serb base, led an uprising under non-sectarian Bosnian lines, building the founda tions of the futureBosnian state.This was no simple undertaking, for in the firstyear of the revolution much of the Serb rank and file shifted between the Partisans and Chetniks, who were committed to a programme ofGreat Serbian statehood that leftlittleroom fornon-Serbs. The tenuous alliance that had existed at firstbetween the twomovements collapsed in spring 1942.The Partisan leadership now saw theChetniks as theirprincipal enemy and placed greater emphasis on educating its followers to renounce Great Serbian nation alism, to adopt the brotherhood and unity of Serbs, Muslims and Croats on an all-Bosnian basis, with the goal of building a patriotic Bosnian conscious ness within a Yugoslav socialist framework. The Partisans upheld themodel of a secular and modern BiH as the common, self-governing homeland of Serbs, Muslims and Croats. This model appealed to a large segment of the Bosnian Serb population, and many Muslims and Croats. The Partisans' secular modernist programme also promoted gender equality and social change, speaking tomodernizing tendencies inBiH, a society already experi encing profound socio-economic change. The multinational appeal of this programme gave the Partisans a decisive political advantage over their Chetnik adversary, whose support was limited to a segment of the Bosnian Serb rural population, and ultimately sealed theirvictory. As Hoare convincingly argues, however, the long term success of the Partisan programme was hardly assured. The War of Yugoslav Succession (1991-95) showed that, even though the Communists devoted themselves to instilling a new consciousness among their followers and the citizenry, they never fully succeeded. The Bosnian conflict of 1992 to 1995 was inmany respects a replay of the conflict played out five decades earlier. But as Hoare perceptively points out, the outcome of the more recent conflict has been equally paradoxical: a formally independent Bosnian state, now under international rather thanYugoslav tutelage, unified but divided between two entities and among its three constituent peoples. Department of Justice Canada MarkBiondich Ottawa Pollock, Ethan. Stalin and theSoviet ScienceWars. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ and Oxford, 2006. ix + 269 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Biographical Notes. Index. ?22.95. One of themost apparently puzzling aspects of post-war Soviet history iswhy, at a timewhen the Soviet economy lay in ruins,millions were threatened by 740 seer, 86, 4, October 2008 starvation and international crisis loomed, Josef Stalin embroiled himself in a series of esoteric debates in fields such as genetics, linguistics and economic theory.Many authors have sought to provide a coherent explanation for thisbehaviour, most notably Nikolai Kremsentsov. The answer put forward by Ethan Pollock, in Stalin and theSoviet ScienceWars, is that Stalin believed producing a coherent fusion between Leninist theoryand science provided the secret to legitimizing the socialist system and, ultimately, winning the confron tation with capitalism. These post-war debates were not 'games' intended to discipline the Soviet intelligentsia, but represented sincere attempts by a convinced Marxist to iron out the inconsistencies in an all-encompassing worldview. The book provides a detailed, chronological analysis of the philosophical and scientificdebates which plagued the Soviet academic community between 1946 and 1953, taking in philosophy, genetics, physics, linguistics, physiology and economics. Pollock suggests that in each case Stalin hoped to provoke genuine debate amongst experts, but that each debate only succeeded in throwing up further ideological contradictions: each debate was therefore conditioned by those which preceded it.Thus, for instance, debates on the natural sciences in the later 1940swere partially prompted by the philosophy discussion of 1947,which drew attention to unresolved issues in the history and philosophy of science. Pollock argues, in contrast toNikolai Krementsov, thatStalin's goal was not directly linked to events unfolding abroad and...