Science at the Crossroads was an anthology of the contributions of the delegation from the Soviet Union which attended the Second International Congress of the History of Science. Joseph Needham provided a foreword. It was republished with a new foreword and introduction in 1971. Alfred Rupert Hall wrote a scathing review, claiming that it had little impact in the Soviet Union and that most of the contributors careers led, rather, to the prison camp and the execution squad.[1]
Contents
editThe 1971 edition included:
| Author | Institution | Title | Summary | Fate of author |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Joseph Needham | Master of Caius College, Cambridge | New Foreword | Died at the age of 94 at his Cambridge home | |
| P. G. Werskey | Lecturer, Science Studies Unit, University of Edinburgh | On the Reception of Science At The Cross Roads in England | Retired academic | |
| Foreword | Heralds Dialectical Materialism as a new culture providing a single method with ever increasing penetration into all scientific disciplines | |||
| Nikolai Bukharin | Member of the Academy of Sciences, Director of the Industrial Research Department of the Supreme Economic Council, President of the Commission of the Academy of Sciences for the History of Knowledge. | "Theory and Practice From The Standpoint of Dialectical Materialism" | Arrested on 27 February 1937, tried at the Trial of the 21 and shot on 15 March 1938, age 49 | |
| Abram Ioffe | Member of the Academy of Sciences, Director of the Physico-Technical Institute, Leningrad, later renamed the Ioffe Institute | "Physics and Technology" | In 1950 sacked during Stalin's Anti-cosmopolitan campaign, but declared a Hero of Socialist Labor in 1955. Died 1960 shortly before his 80 birthday | |
| Modest Rubinstein | Professor at the Institute of Economics, Moscow; Member of the Presidium of the Communist Academy, Moscow; Member of the Presidium of the
State Planning Commission (Gosplan). |
"Relations of Science, Technology, and Economics Under Capitalism, and in the Soviet Union" | Had a long and successful career as a Soviet academic. Member of the Soviet Pugwash Committee who participated in the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs. Died in 1969 aged 74 | |
| Boris Zavadovsky | Director of the Institute of Neuro-Humoral Physiology, Director of Timiryazev Biological Museum | The "Physical" and "Biological" in the Process of Organic Evolution" | Criticised by the supporters of Lysenko, but remained unscathed. Died in 1951, aged 56 | |
| Ernst Kolman | "Dynamic and Statistical Regularity in Physics and Biology" | President of the Association of the Scientific Institute of Natural Science, Professor of the Institute of Mathematics and Mechanics, Moscow; Member of the Presidium of the State Scientific Council. | Already had the role of ideological watchdog in scientific community, before 1931. Involved in framing Nikolai Luzin in 1936 during the Great Purge. Posted to Czechoslovakia after the Second World War, to establish communist party control over the Czechoslovak scientific community. However in 1948 he criticised Rudolf Slánský and Klement Gottwald of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. As a result he was brought back to the USSR and jailed for three years. He was released after Stalin's death, and became an active participant in Soviet Cybernetics. In 1976 at the age of 84 he applied for political asylum in Sweden. In 1978e published The adventure of cybernetics in the Soviet Union, where he admitted his crimes, shortly before dying in 1979, age 86 |
References
edit- ^ Hall, A. Rupert (1975). "Review of Science at the Cross Roads. Papers Presented to the International Congress of the History of Science and Technology, 1931. By the Delegates of the U. S. S. R". The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. 26 (3): 265–267. doi:10.1093/bjps/26.3.265. ISSN 0007-0882. JSTOR 686284.