Professional Affiliation

Senior Researcher, St. Petersburg Branch, Institute For The History of Science and Technology, Russian Academy of Sciences

Expert Bio

I was born in Kokand, a small provincial city in Uzbekistan--then a republic of the USSR--in 1957, and in 1973 I entered the School of Biology at the University of Rostov-on-Don, a city in Southern Russia. I graduated with distinction in neurophysiology holding a deep belief in the omnipotence of experimental science. Strangely enough for those years of "parents' lift" and "personal connections," although I did not have any, I was invited to continue my experiments and to prepare a dissertation in the Soviet physiological "Mecca"--the Pavlov Physiology Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences in Leningrad. After three years of nights conducting experiments in the lab and days teaching biology at a secondary school, I became deeply disappointed by both experimental neurophysiology and the atmosphere of a Soviet research institute. I left the institute for Leningrad University to "expand" my education in ecological and environmental studies. Disappointment followed me. I decided to stop all academic activity and joined the community of "freedom-lovers"--in the summers I worked as a carpenter in various regions of the Soviet Union, and in the winters enjoyed the countless cultural treasures of Leningrad. By a pure accident, in 1986, I became a historian of science and using my previous personal experience started working on an "intellectual" history of Soviet evolutionary and behavioral sciences, which became the subject of my dissertation defended at the Institute for the History of Science and Technology in 1990. I found "pure intellectual" history, however, to be a little bit of a disappointment too, so parallel to my work on the dissertation I started collecting documents in various archives on the interrelations between the scientific community and the party-state control apparatus in the 1930s and 1940s. Ever since I have been quite satisfied with what (but not always how) I have been doing.In the 1990s, the radical transformation of what used to be the Soviet Union made my life and work both easier and much more difficult. It opened borders and archives, giving me a never-dreamt-of opportunity to explore documents of various party-state agencies and to establish good contacts with colleagues abroad. But at the same time, it made living on the salary of a Russian researcher almost impossible. Like many of my colleagues I faced a dilemma: either get two, three or even four extra jobs to make a living (and thus forget research), or find a way to get funding for my exploits from abroad (which I did). Thus since 1992 I have led the life of a "Flying Dutchman," living for a year in Russia working in archives, then a year abroad writing, then back to Russia, and so on, and so on, and so on. The first result of this nomadic life was my book Stalinist Science (Princeton University Press, 1997), in which all those thousands of documents I collected over almost a decade were used in an attempt to understand the workings of the Soviet science system during Stalin's era. During my archival research for Stalinist Science I happened upon a very interesting story of a husband-and-wife team who developed a promising anticancer treatment in Stalin's Russia, only to see their discovery entangled in Cold War rivalries, ideological conflict, and scientific turf wars. I told this incredible story in my recent book The Cure (University of Chicago Press, 2002).

 

Education

Undergraduate studies (1978), awarded diploma with honors, Biology School, Department of Human and Animal Physiology, Rostov-on-Don University; Graduate Studies, I.P. Pavlov Institute of Physiology, Department of Neurophysiology, The USSR Academy of Sciences; Graduate Studies (1981), Department of Ecology, Leningrad University; Ph.D. (1990) History of Science, Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Department of the History of Evolutionary Theory, The USSR Academy of Sciences (dissertation, "The Interaction of Evolutionary and Behavioral Studies in Twentieth century Russian Science")

 

Subjects

Russia

 

Experience

• Senior Researcher, St. Petersburg Branch, Institute For The History of Science and Technology, Russian Academy of Sciences, 1986-present
  
   
• Senior Fellow, The Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology, Cambridge, MA, 2000-01
  
   
• Senior Associate Fellow, The Remarque Institute, New York, 2000
  
   
• Visiting Professor, The Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, 1998
  
   
• Visiting Hannah Professor in the history of medicine, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada, 1996-97
  
   
• Visiting Fellow, Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, Edinburgh University, Edinburgh, UK, 1995
  
   
• Research Scholar, Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington, DC, 1994
  
   
• Mellon Research Fellow in the history of 20th century biology, The Science & Technology Studies Program, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 1993-94
  
   
• Mellon Resident Fellow, The American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, PA, 1992

 

 

Expertise

 

 

History of science and medicine; history of 20th century Russia

Wilson Center Project

"Nationalistic Internationalism: Science and International Politics between the World Wars: International Scientific Congresses in Stalin's Russia"

Project Summary

Nationalistic Internationalism is an exploration of the historical origins, political and social contexts, and policy trends in the "conflict of interests" between national and international science policies in the interwar period. Through the prism of a series of international scientific congresses organized in Stalin's Russia, this study will seek to better understand how science entered the policy agenda, whose interests were represented in this process, and how the new policy concerns affected scientific priorities and organizing. It will explore the interplay between scientists' international aspirations and national interests, how international scientific meetings reflect the larger international politics of their time, and how the patronage system influences international scientific activities.

Major Publications

• Stalinist Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.
  
   
• The Cure: A Story of Cancer and Politics from the Annals of the Cold War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002.
  
   
• "Russian Science in the Twentieth Century." John Krige and Domenique Pestre, eds., Science in the Twentieth Century. London: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997, pp. 777-794.

Previous Terms

Jun 01, 1994 - Dec 01, 1994: "Soviet Science at the End of the Stalin Epoch"