The subjection of Lithuanian sciences to the soviet state system: Consequences and prospects

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The 1940 occupation of Lithuania and the subsequent forty year period of sovietization is the most dramatic episode in the history of science in Lithuania. The gigantic totalitarian system that forcibly annexed the three Baltic states thereafter dominated all intellectual activity, regulating and manipulating it at will. One principal means of controlling thought was to centralize all scientific inquiry by instituting a web of subordinate departments of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. It is with this, the powerful center of Soviet Science, that we need to begin with, in order to understand the means that Lithuanian intellectuals employed to assure the survival of national traditions and the freedom of academic thought and inquiry. This is important because the first steps taken by the three Baltic republics in their struggle for regaining their independence were to recover intellectual sovereignty. This prepared the ground for the recovery of political, economic and national independence. In the early Stalinist era, the Soviet Academy of Sciences (SAS), ignoring the experience of European democracy, repudiating the ideal of the rule of law and all the humanitarian principles, subjugated science to totalitarian ends. This was accomplished through a clumsy organization based on the traditional centralization. It had, of course, strong points: Soviet ideology placed a great stress on the social nature of science; it was possible to train vast numbers of scientists (up to one-quarter of all scientists were Soviet); and the GULAG system included famous scientists who could be coerced to build nuclear weapons and even spacecraft. However, this ideology was flawed at its foundations and in the pursuit of its totalitarian goals drained all endeavors of any moral content. The sciences that suffered most were history, law, philosophy and economics. Any expressions of doubt concerning the ideology or even inattention to its dogmas led to individual and collective repression. Soviet science, despite some successes in the military sphere, lagged behind the west. It is into this system that the three Baltic states, and the Baltic scientists, were forced in 1940.