Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars

Ethan Pollock

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Between 1945 and 1953, while the Soviet Union confronted postwar reconstruction and Cold War crises, its unchallenged leader Joseph Stalin spearheaded a discussion of "scientific" Marxist-Leninist philosophy, edited reports on genetics and physiology, adjudicated controversies about modern physics, and wrote essays on linguistics and political economy. Historians have been tempted to dismiss all this as the megalomaniacal ravings of a dying dictator. But in Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, Pollock draws on thousands of previously unexplored archival documents to demonstrate that Stalin was determined to show how scientific truth and Party doctrine reinforced one another.