Academic Science and Secrecy in the Late Stalin Period

Abstract

Since 1917 the Russian Academy of Sciences had been under intense pressure of the state, and from 1947 the pressure on the Academy of sciences of the USSR increased due to some new ideological campaigns in the internal policy adopted in the late Stalin Soviet Union, which affected a large number of scholars in all fields of science. Introduction of total secrecy in all kinds of scientific researches and resorting to isolationism as a basic trend of development of Soviet science caused inner opposition in the scientific milieu: in spite of the pressure from non-scientific bureaucratic institutions, Soviet scholars sought ways to continue regular research work, and sometimes this resistance proved to be effective. As a result, scientific councils of the institutes in Humanities and Social sciences of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR were given the right to decide independently whether a work had to be examined for secrecy or not. This opened up opportunities for publication of the majority of works by historians, philologists and other scholars in Humanities of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Of course, the situation was far from ideal; party and ideological supervision over scientists was rigid, but scientists managed to defend the principle of scientific nature of their work. This article provides some previously unpublished documents from the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Russian State Archive of Social-Political History, letters to Soviet leaders (I. V. Stalin, L. P. Beria, G. M. Malenkov).