The Scientific Community of the Early Soviet Era in the Context of the Social History of Russian Science

Abstract

The article analyzes the study of Moscow historian E. A. Dolgova, dedicated to the structural transformations of the Russian scientific community in the 1920s–1930s. Working in the problematic field of the social history of science, the author managed to consider and analyze a significant complex of sources. There are interesting materials extracted from a number of federal and regional archives. The results of E. A. Dolgov’s research work is reflected in the monograph “The Birth of Soviet Science: Scientists in the 1920s–1930s”, published in 2020. Analyzing the scientific community in the focus of socio-economic policy of the 1920s–1930s, the author provides valuable data on the size of the academic ration, the distribution of scientists by category, the number of scientists-members of the party and candidates of the CPSU(b) in Moscow, Petrograd-Leningrad and the provinces. It was concluded that the scientific community in the period under study functioned as a hierarchical one. Among the factors determining the status position of a scientist in this hierarchy, the leading ones were non-partisanship/ partisanship and social origin. In the study, the special attention paid to the analysis of scientist and scholars’ public role. The demand for a positive representation of Soviet science, including in the international arena, found expression in the expansion of forms of popularization of its results, the rise of science fiction literature and the emergence of popular science cinema. In general, E. A. Dolgova’s monograph is major fundamental research, and, no doubt, will take its rightful place in modern Russian history of science historiography.