Great Soviet Research Articles

The great Soviet rescue plan

Leonid Kantorovich believed he could turn the USSR into a land of prosperity and plenty… if only its leaders would listen

Patriarch of the Soviet pharmacology (to 125 anniversary of S.V. Anichkov)

Academician of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences Professor Sergei Viktorovich Anichkov (1892-1981) is a great Soviet scientist pharmacologist, the founder of Soviet neuropharmacology. Educated in Military Medical Academy, Kazan Medical Institute, Petrograd Woman’s Medical Institute. The famous Russian Professors I.P. Pavlov, V.N. Boldyrev, N.P. Kravkov and A.A. Likhachev were his teachers. Headed Department of Pharmacology in Military Medical Academy, Leningrad (1924-1937), Department of Pharmacology in Institute of Experimental Medicine, the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences (1948-1981). The main studies of S.V. Anichkov were devoted to pharmacology of chemoreceptors of the carotid bodies, cholinergic regulation of physiological functions, pharmacology of endocrine regulation, pharmacotherapy of neurogenic dystrophies, toxicology of military toxic compounds. Published more 250 papers including 10 monographs. Under his leadership, more 10 drugs (ethimizol, sygetine, metamizil, paramion etc) were developed and adopted for wide medical practice in the USSR. Founded one of the big scientific school in the field of pharmacology in the USSR. Laureate of Lenin and State prices of the USSR.

Review, Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Disasters (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2013 (Lynne VIOLA)

Book review, Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Disasters (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 2013 done by Lynne VIOLA

Makuch, Andrij and Sysyn, Frank E. (eds) Contextualizing the Holodomor: The Impact of Thirty Years of Ukrainian Famine Studies (review)

REVIEWS 559 Polish crisis of 1980–81, the ambiguous economic relationship between the two states before 1990, the era of perestroika and the collapse of Communism, and the post-Communist trajectories of both countries. As for the relationship of the Russian Federation and ‘sovereign Poland’ since 1990, both Katarzyna Pełczyńska-Nałecz and Artem V. Malgin take the long view. The former even argues that ‘present-day problems must not obscure the fact that, in historical terms, the period of 1990 to 2010 may well be considered a golden age in Russian-Polish relations’ (p. 540). If this is true, White Spots — Black Spots should be considered one of its main achievements. Malgin, however, sees a clear and present danger in what he calls ‘historical foreign policy’ and makes the interesting observation that ‘Russia and Poland are afraid to recognize their similarities’ (p. 563). Unfortunately the recent authoritarian turn in Poland, though it may bear some comparison with political developments of the Putin era in Russia, also promises a return to the ‘historical foreign policy’ of a decade ago. It would be a shame if the Russian-Polish dialogue over their common history becomes one of its casualties. Department of History Robert Blobaum West Virginia University Makuch, Andrij and Sysyn, Frank E. (eds). Contextualizing the Holodomor: The Impact of Thirty Years of Ukrainian Famine Studies. CIUS Press, Edmonton, AL and Toronto, ON, 2015. viii + 126 pp. Notes. Works cited. $22.95 (paperback). This short volume is a high-quality primer on the state of Holodomor studies circa roughly 2013, when the conference of the same name was held at the University of Toronto. Olga Andriewsky reviews the scholarship on all the key issues: the number of deaths and the longer-term demographic losses; methods ofimplementation,includingtheblacklistingofvillagesandtheeffectofsuchan apparent ‘death sentence’ (p. 26, quoting Kul’chyts’kyi); the evidence of Stalin’s own involvement and intentions; and linkage to ‘colonialism and the practices of settlement and occupation’ (p. 31) and the case for seeing the Holodomor as a ‘cultural war’ that ‘marks the violent end of a particular social order: the end of a set of social structures, social institutions and social practices associated with Cossack history and culture in Ukraine’ (p. 39). Andriewsky also notes the areas that have so far been under-researched: strategies of survival, the fate of exiles, ‘the actual fate and history of blacklisted villages’, the role of gender and the urban experience, and the role of perpetrators (p. 38). Andrea Graziosi has written elsewhere on the strength of Ukrainian peasant resistance (at least in the early stages of collectivization) and the case for SEER, 94, 3, july 2016 560 viewing the entire period from the Bolsheviks’ initial consolidation of power as the ‘Great Soviet Peasant War of 1918–1934’. Here he makes many challenging points about ‘The Impact of Holodomor Studies on the Understanding of the USSR’. The Holodomor was far from being a brutal prelude to modernization, as argued by Valerii Soldatenko, the Director of Ukraine’s Institute of National Memory in 2010–14, and others. Soviet agriculture never worked: the compromises of 1935 allowing tiny private plots besides the collective farm behemoths simply meant that ‘the divergent interests regulating these two spheres of endeavour doomed them both to atrophy’ (p. 56). Only Stalin might have forced through collectivization through its failures and the Holodomor through its tragedies, but the whole Soviet leadership was blinded by ideology to the possibility for reform ‘in the crucial 1953 to 1964 decade, when a peasantry that could have profited from the disbanding of collective farms still existed’ (p. 63). By the Gorbachev era, there was no chance of the aged and drunken residual rural population pulling off what Deng Xiaoping achieved after 1976. But a state that could not feed itself would always be dysfunctional. Stanislav Kul’chyts’kyi makes the case for regarding the Holodomor as genocide, and for distinguishing it from both the ‘All-Union Famine of 1932–33’ and the holodomors (lower case ‘h’) in the North Caucasus and Lower Volga. As he argues, not everyone in the target group has to be killed for the label of genocide properly to apply. There...

The Estonian Language as Presented in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia: Language Descriptions and Ideology

The Estonian Language as Presented in the Great Soviet Encyclopaedia: Language Descriptions and Ideology

Senior Management of the Russian Union of Pediatricians

The article tells about the chairmen of the Russian Union of Pediatricians — Members of the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, Honored Workers of Science, senior management of the professional community of pediatricians during the period of over 90 years since the establishment to the present time. The publication presents the results of studying the biographies and scientific works of the luminaries of Russian pediatrics such as A. A. Kisel and G. N. Speranskiy, who linked the Tsarist and Soviet medicine. The basic milestones of professional activities of the great Soviet pediatricians Y. F. Dombrovskaya and A. F. Tur are shown. The biographies of the World War II veterans V. P. Bisyarina, M. Y. Studenikin and A. V. Mazurin, decent representatives of Russian pediatrics at the end of the Soviet era, are described. The outstanding contribution of the Academician of the Russian Academy of Science A. A. Baranov, who initiated the creation of the Russian Union of Pediatricians as the legal successor of the All-Union and All-Russian Society of Pediatricians, is emphasized.

GREAT THEORETICAL LEGACY IN THE SPORT - THE GUARANTEE OF A SUCCESSFUL FUTURE

The article discusses the concept of training-process of sports training periodization, rational in structure, sequence as part of a yearlong training. Shows the necessity of the use of the theoretical heritage of Russian scientists for the discovery of new, modern ways of development of sports science. The periodization of athletic training is seen as a key theme in debates and scientific disputes specialists. Raise issues Proto vostoyaniya views of Soviet and foreign theorists sport. The analysis of the works of the great Russian and Soviet theorists in the diverse st different format. The necessity of modern ‒ relationship technologies with the assimilation of the fundamental theories, laws, hostages who were great Russian and Soviet scientists-practice. The conclusions about the inevitability of using the sport together ta- cal knowledge, the symbiosis of past and present.

Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters by Kate Brown (review)

Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters by Kate Brown (review)

Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters

Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters

“The host of heaven is far…” (my recollections of Ya B Zeldovich)

Recollections about one of the great Soviet theoretical physicist Academician Ya B Zeldovich and his influence on the scientific work of the author and the author's colleagues.

Thought Censorship under Totalitarianism: A Precarious Relationship between Thought and Voice in Mandelstam

Thought Censorship under Totalitarianism: A Precarious Relationship between Thought and Voice in Mandelstam Takayuki Yokota-Murakami “Brain-washing” technology became known for the first time during the Korean War. In the Chinese hospital where war captives were held, attempts at “thought reform” were regularly performed. Many of them had been converted to communism, which alerted American society. This led to an investigation and findings concerning “communist mind control.” Studies have been made, of which Brain-Washing in Red China: The Calculated Destruction of Men’s Minds by Edward Hunter, which popularized the term “brainwashing,” is probably best known. Although it was the Chinese military service that gave the practice its name of “brain-washing,” the prototype of the technique had been developed in Soviet Russia in the 1930s. Let me quickly note, though, that it has been debated whether the science of brainwashing had been studied and developed in Communist Russia, which subsequently transmitted the knowledge to China, or whether China developed its technique independently. The historical relationship has never been sufficiently established. It is, however, largely acknowledged that the trial procedures used by the Stalin regime were essentially what one might call “mind control” or “brain-washing” in the broad sense from today’s standpoint, and so was the tradition introduced by the secret police of the post-Stalin Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe. The psychologist Lifton argues in his book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: The Russian Communist contribution to thought reform is immediately apparent in much of the content and many of the forms of the process: the allegedly scientific Marxist-Leninist doctrine; the stress upon criticism, and confession as features of ‘ideological struggle’; the organizational techniques of iron discipline; the demands for purity of belief and absolute obedience; and the practice of informing upon others in [End Page 43] the service of the party. Certainly, many of the pressures used to extract confessions in penal thought reform [in China] closely resemble techniques used by the Russians during the great Soviet purge trials of the late 1930’s....Eastern European Communist nations have employed similar confession methods. (389)1 The difference between Russia and China is that while the Soviet totalitarian regime was interested in deleting thought and memory from a “culprit” and coaxing “confession,” China went further. China wanted to transform human personality completely with new beliefs, ideas, logic, etc. The purpose of this paper, however, is to explore the nature of thought and non-thought vis-à-vis language through the life and works of Osip Mandelstam in his confrontation with Soviet mind control and in relation to the psychologist/linguist Lev Vygotsky. I will limit my scope of analysis of brainwashing to its Soviet version, but not to the Chinese. Lifton in the above-mentioned book lists the fundamental principles of the techniques of “brain-washing.” The first stage is termed a “struggle,” in which a captive is confined to a small cell and is under constant and disturbing interrogation that combines “hint, threat, and promise.” The threat often concerns people who are close to the “convict”: family members, relatives, close friends, and so on. Isolation is an important part of the technique. It is accompanied with humiliating treatment in the prison cell, normally in solitary confinement, often without a guard, which gives a greater sense of isolation, and with the deprivation of sleep. In this process of “struggle,” the interrogated can wipe out his/her own pre-existing thought and become a tabula rasa, into which any new memory or doctrine can be overwritten. Thus, the whole procedure may lead to a wild confession, not based on any fact. Mandelstam was one of the victims of the interrogation of Liubianka during the Great Terror. On the very early morning of May 16, 1934, the officers of the GPU (Joint State Political Directorate; formerly Cheka, the Central Committee) visited him and after a lengthy house search that lasted for six hours, Mandelstam was arrested.2 The charge was for his composing a satirical poem referring to Stalin, a copy of which was in the possession of the authorities. The poem reads: We live, not feeling the ground under our feet...

Professor Georgy Nestorovich Speransky (1873–1969): A great soviet paediatrician

This paper is a biography of a great Soviet paediatrician, Professor Georgy Nestorovich Speransky, known as the founder of Russian neonatology. He was the organizer, Director and scientific leader of the first State Research Institute of Maternity and Infant Care in the USSR which later was reorganized as the State Research Institute of Paediatrics of the Academy of Medical Sciences of the USSR. He organized the first Russian medical department of childhood diseases at the Central Institute of Continuing Education for Medical Doctors, where he and his colleagues taught physiology and pathology. He was one of the initiators of a free state system of maternity and infant health care and infant mortality was decreased tenfold.

Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters by Kate Brown (review)

Reviewed by: Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters by Kate Brown Rodney Carlisle (bio) Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. By Kate Brown. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. 416. $27.95. This work presents the histories of both the Soviet and the American plutonium-producing facilities and the communities built around them: Hanford, Washington, and Ozersk, in the southern Urals. The author evokes many parallels between the two, most growing out of such shared 1940s and ’50s values as militarism, racism, sexism, and an oblivious disregard of long-term environmental and health impacts of radiation. Many of the parallel developments, such as the attempt to build a “classless” community in which both manual workers and professionals lived in a managed society, derived from the imperatives of constructing and operating plutonium production reactors rapidly to fuel the nuclear arms race. Both the American and Soviet facilities were hurriedly built under the pressure of World War II and the cold war, producing some expected similarities. For example, the military and civilian executives running both operations showed very little concern with the long-term disastrous health effects of radiation exposure to replaceable reactor workers, and only slightly more concern with the health threats to professionals. And the regions near Hanford and Ozersk were soon heavily polluted with radioactive waste; both plants were operated haphazardly and with hardly any regard for long-term environmental impact on the surrounding countryside. In both cases, there were a few technical and scientific personnel who pointed out the hazards. The author recognizes that it is ahistorical to wish that the managers and officers of the 1940s and ’50s should have applied twenty-first-century values of gender sensitivity and environmental awareness to their work. However, the appalling record of cover-ups, harassment of whistleblowers, and human tragedy from radiation poisoning in later decades reveals that the imperatives of profit and production continued to override good sense well into recent years, in both “plutopias.” The author’s research included not only the vast records of the Manhattan Project and successor agencies, but a close review of Soviet publications and documents. She tracked down and interviewed veterans and survivors of both facilities, lending a recurrent personal flavor to a story whose focus is the institutional and social history of a technological development. Among the many fresh insights and observations in this work is a profound understanding of how and why DuPont and later General Electric managers designed and built the community of Richland, Washington, as a company town (with none of the trappings of self-government) that established working-class families in individual homes with the appearance of a [End Page 269] middle-class suburb. That “classless” community, centered around “nuclear” families (in both senses of the word), she suggests, served as a model for the mass-produced Levittowns and other suburbs of the postwar decades. In the Soviet Union, after first struggling with prisoner and Gulag workers and near-prison camp conditions, Ozersk eventually reflected some of the features of Richland. Despite American preconceptions of the Soviet Union and of the Gulag in particular as highly regulated, police-controlled societies, the author demonstrates that the construction and operation of the facility at Ozersk was disorganized, highly insecure, primitive in methods, and wasteful of resources and manpower. The overloaded and ill-managed Soviet Gulag was on the verge of collapse in the late 1940s and 1950s, retarding the construction of the reactor and processing facilities by years. In the American case, the author attributes the failure of DuPont to meet construction deadlines at Hanford during World War II to refusal to employ available African-American and Mexican-American labor. While American workers in Richland seemed content to allow corporate direction of the community, in the Khrushchev era, workers in Ozersk began to exercise a measure of self-government to provide social services lost by the disappearance of the extended family and its replacement by the nuclear family. The work goes far beyond this reviewer’s own historical study, Supplying the Nuclear Arsenal (1996), with its focus on nuclear special-interest politics, and Michel Gerber...

Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. By Kate Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. x, 406 pp. Notes. Index. Photographs. Maps. $27.95, hard bound.

Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. By Kate Brown. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. x, 406 pp. Notes. Index. Photographs. Maps. $27.95, hard bound. - Volume 73 Issue 1

The Great Citizen and Soviet Cinema Politica

The Great Citizen and Soviet Cinema Politica

Kate Brown. Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters; Gretchen Heefner. The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland.

Kate Brown. Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters; Gretchen Heefner. The Missile Next Door: The Minuteman in the American Heartland.

Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters. By Kate Brown. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. x + 406 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, and index. Cloth $27.95.

Carlisle reviews Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters by Kate Brown.

Plutopia: nuclear families, atomic cities, and the great Soviet and American plutonium disasters

While many transnational histories of the nuclear arms race have been written, Kate Brown provides the first definitive account of the great plutonium disasters of the United States and the Soviet Union. In Plutopia, Brown draws on official records and dozens of interviews to tell the extraordinary stories of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia-the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium. To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias--communities of nuclear families living in highly-subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Fully employed and medically monitored, the residents of Richland and Ozersk enjoyed all the pleasures of consumer society, while nearby, migrants, prisoners, and soldiers were banned from plutopia--they lived in temporary staging grounds and often performed the most dangerous work at the plant. Brown shows that the plants' segregation of permanent and temporary workers and of nuclear and non-nuclear zones created a bubble of immunity, where dumps and accidents were glossed over and plant managers freely embezzled and polluted. In four decades, the Hanford plant near Richland and the Maiak plant near Ozersk each issued at least 200 million curies of radioactive isotopes into the surrounding environment--equaling four Chernobyls--laying waste to hundreds of square miles and contaminating rivers, fields, forests, and food supplies. Because of the decades of secrecy, downwind and downriver neighbors of the plutonium plants had difficulty proving what they suspected, that the rash of illnesses, cancers, and birth defects in their communities were caused by the plants' radioactive emissions. Plutopia was successful because in its zoned-off isolation it appeared to deliver the promises of the American dream and Soviet communism; in reality, it concealed disasters that remain highly unstable and threatening today. An untold and profoundly important piece of Cold War history, Plutopia invites readers to consider the nuclear footprint left by the arms race and the enormous price of paying for it.

The End of an Era: Remembering Sigurd Ottovich Shmidt (1922–2013)

Sigurd Ottovich Shmidt, who died at age 91 on 22 May 2013, was one of the last of an important generation of Russian historians and arguably the most influential of them. His breadth, energy, and colossal productivity have left their mark across the entire landscape of the study of Russian history, from medieval to contemporary. He liked to cite the famous French historian Marc Bloch about how important it was to understand the study of any historical topic with reference to the times in which it was being studied. Following Shmidt's lead, our best tribute to Sigurd Ottovich would be to look at the circumstances that shaped his career and try to understand the outpouring of warm tributes to him which marked his last decades and his passing. To review merely the published record of his books, articles, interviews, and reviews does not suffice, even if it were humanly possible--his bibliography is said to number more than 2,000 items, of which more than 500 are counted as scholarly publications. Shmidt was a child of the Arbat, if slightly younger than that spoiled generation enshrined in Anatolii Rybakov's novel. (1) He was born in and, but for the war years, lived all his life in the same apartment in the old Arbat neighborhood of Moscow. This malaia Rodina, as he termed it, a home to intelligentsia and artists, would inspire some of his most important work in his last decades, when he assumed a leading role in organizing efforts at historical preservation, the recording of its memories, and the writing of its history. When asked in an interview several years ago whether it was difficult growing up as the son of one of the most famous Russian scholars, the geophysicist and mathematician Orto Iul'evich Shmidt (1891-1956), Sigurd Ottovich indicated that for a long time he tried to distance himself from that heritage, wanting instead to be valued for his own work. The elder Shmidt made his name as an explorer of the Arctic and then for years was the responsible editor of the first edition of the Bol shaia sovetskaia entsiklopedia (Great Soviet Encyclopedia). Shmidt's mother, Margarita Emmanuilovna, was also an academic. As a boy, Sigurd Ottovich on occasion accompanied his father to receptions in the Kremlin, where he remembers standing at only arm's length from Stalin while applauding him. Even as Otto Iul'evich's colleagues then began to disappear in the Purges, he merely fell out of favor but was never sent to the Gulag. After 1937, Otto Iul'evich would not mention Stalin at home or breathe a word about the Purges, perhaps in an attempt to protect his family from the possible consequences of being overheard discussing forbidden topics. The young Sigurd Ottovich must have had about him something of the air of privilege, as one of his female classmates at the university remembered first seeing him dressed, she thought, rather formally, in a gray outfit--suit jacket and knickers. On my first meeting with him decades ago, I was put off by what I would now term a kind of patrician air. Those who became his students, though, all emphasize his accessibility and the warm interest he displayed in their work. He and several of his admirers have noted that one of the two most important women in his life (the other being his mother) was his nanny, Frantsiska Aleksandrovna Teterskaia, whose death in 1989 left Sigurd Ottovich (then 671) with no one to remind him to put on his warmest boots before going out into Moscow's winter weather. Of course, the important thing we should emphasize here is his roots in the traditions of the old intelligentsia, where encyclopedic curiosity was encouraged along with a sense of openness to alternative viewpoints even as one might be willing to argue against them. Those traits carried over into his teaching. Sigurd Ottovich began his historical training at Moscow State University (MGU) in 1939 justas the war began. He remained in Moscow as one of the few men in a history cohort that now carne to be populated mostly by women. …

Outstanding Economist Developing from the Great Mathematician (to the Centenary of Leonid Kantorovich)

The article considers the life and creative achievements of the great Soviet scientist academician Leonid Kantorovich, the only Nobel Prize winner in economics in our country. Basic spheres of his scientific interests are noted, the contribution to the world science is assessed. The problems connected with the implementation of optimization methods of planning in the Soviet economy are shown.