SCIENCE, ORTHODOXY, AND THE
QUEST FOR HEGEMONY AT THE
SOCIALIST (COMMUNIST) ACADEMY
Bolshevik intellectuals presented their cause as a class struggle with bourgeois academia. Their primary field of battle in higher learning, however, was first and foremost institutional. When Evgenii B. Preobrazhenskii insisted in the Socialist Academy’s newly founded journal in 1922 that the academy “represents the highest scientific research institute of Marxist thought,” the academy leader was linking the Bolshevik declaration of war in organized intellectual life to his own institutional base. It has rarely been considered, but such assertions of primacy implied as many internal ramifications for the Bolsheviks as outward effects for the nonparty intellectual world.
The Socialist Academy—Preobrazhenskii elaborated on his claim to authority—“does not recognize social science not operating on the basis of Marxism. . . . The Academy must turn itself into its own kind of Gosplan in the realm of ideology.”1 In this formulation, the assertion of orthodoxy, and the vision of a new kind of planned science, or nauka, is intertwined with the claim to hegemony—not simply of a doctrine, a party, or a class, but of an institution.2
No matter that Gosplan, the central state planning agency, was of negligible importance at the time Preobrazhenskii wrote; no matter, indeed, that the Socialist (after 1924, Communist) Academy never achieved the hegemony in the Soviet scholarly world that its leaders coveted. The fact that the Party’s leading theorists at the academy treated issues of orthodoxy and the creation of a new science squarely within the context of monopolistic institutional aspirations had a profound impact on the development of party-Marxist academia in the 1920s. The history of the Communist Academy is the history of a failed quest for institutional hegemony.
“Party scholarship,” a term I use to denote a party-Marxist movement in higher learning which made the academy its flagship institution, emerged only at the end of the civil war as a confluence of developments: the suppression of the other socialist parties, the first attempts to establish sanctioned programs in the social sciences, and the foundation of Communist Party academic institutions. Although there were many feuding divisions within it, party scholarship was in its broadest outlines cohesive during NEP: it identified with an official ideology (party Marxism, or, as it was called after Lenin’s death, Marxism-Leninism), a political movement in control of the state (the Bolshevik Party), a social group (the party intelligentsia), and an institutional base (the new party institutions of theory and research). Because the Communist Academy emerged in the early 1920s as the most influential bastion of party scholarship, its evolution is a window into the entire relationship between the movement’s dreams of monopoly and the life of the mind.
In the changing world of postrevolutionary academia, the representatives of party scholarship were frequently powerful party politicians and state regulators. The academy’s presidium—a small group approved by the Orgburo with the mandate to set institutional policy, modeled more on the bureau of a party cell than the bourgeois faculty meeting—was for most of the 1920s headed by the deputy commissar of education Pokrovskii and the influential economic adviser and TsIK official Miliutin.3 Yet powerful Bolshevik officials and theorists were in the academic realm essentially parvenu competitors against established non-Marxist and nonparty scholars in discipline after discipline. This proved a compelling reason for the communist scholars to assert their own institutional base along with their scholarly authority.
The academy, in consequence, formulated an emerging set of core institutional aspirations. Articulated by academy leaders and running like a red thread through the academy’s history, these missions spurred institutional change in the course of the 1920s. They coexisted in several distinct varieties. The oldest, dating from the civil war period, was the ambition of becoming the Party’s “theoretical center,” which would influence (and, perhaps, regulate) Marxist methodology. In the midst of the rapid expansion of NEP, this overlapped with more concrete plans of establishing the academy as the premier Marxist scientific-research institution, which would (at least in the future) control or approve plans for other party institutions. Finally, hegemonic goals spilled over into higher learning as a whole. In its most grandiose moments, the Communist Academy aspired to become the dominant scholarly institution in the land, or, as Pokrovskii often put it, a party academy of sciences.
The most obsessive, if sometimes camouflaged impulse behind the monopolistic yearnings of the Communist Academy revolved around the nonparty scholars, “bourgeois” professors, and their prominent institutions. Insofar as they were perceived as the main institutional-ideological threat to Bolshevik intellectuals, the nonparty scholars received the full brunt of the Communist Academy’s institutionalized Angst. The rise of party scholarship thus occurred in a subtle dialogue with non-party academia, and the Communist Academy’s evolution is unintelligible outside this rivalry. The Communist Academy leaders not only scorned their “bourgeois” counterparts; at the same time, they coveted their prestige and the material wealth of their institutions.
The Communist Academy’s evolution was also driven by the innovations and organization of party scholarship. To justify its desired position in the new scholarly world, the academy was prompted to transform itself from a “Marxist debating club with a library”4 in 1918 to a sprawling but centrally run network of research institutes and societies in the 1920s that increasingly defined their aims in terms of service for the Party and the state. In part to reinforce its claims as an emerging “party Academy of Sciences,” the academy pressed to the forefront of the effort to put “collective work,” academic planning and “practical” tasks at the top of the scholarly agenda. Both developments significantly changed the face of Marxist scholarship in the 1920s.
The development of the Communist Academy is also connected to the problem of orthodoxy. There is an obvious distinction between the orthodoxy of Soviet Marxism of the 1920s—when a major dynamic was a competition for the claim to doctrinal truth—and the partiinost’ (party-mindedness) of the Stalin period, in which the decisions of the Party and its leadership were enshrined as the highest court. As John Barber has put it, “By the late 1920s this concept [of partiinost’] had undergone a major change from its original Leninist form. . . . [T]he principle was firmly established that the worth of intellectual work depended primarily on whether or not it assisted the achievement of the regime’s objectives.”5 Yet the key question for the historian—precisely how such a principle was “firmly established”—remains a mystery.
The enforcement and definition of orthodoxy at the Communist Academy was directly shaped by the values and ambitions of party scholarship. Inverting the twin standards of pure science and institutional autonomy associated with liberalism and nonparty academia, the academy reoriented itself more tightly around service to the party-state. In tandem with this, the new partiinost’ originated as a kind of ideological service function that superseded older Bolshevik conceptions of science.
The Bolshevik intellectuals thus set out to conquer the academic world. In several senses, theirs was a split field of vision. They dreamed about the future, yet maneuvered ceaselessly through the here and now; they tried to harness the sanction of the top party leadership, yet their yardstick of measurement was the “bourgeois” academicians. In all cases, the most striking effect was the drawn-out transformation of their own enterprise.
Three Incarnations of the Socialist Academy
The idea of founding the Socialist Academy of Social Sciences (Sotsialisticheskaia Akademiia Obshchestvennykh Nauk, or SAON) reportedly originated in early spring 1918 when Bolshevik jurist Mikhail A. Reisner, who had studied law in Warsaw and Heidelberg, complained to Pokrovskii about the poor theoretical knowledge of many comrades. Two further justifications for a new institution became apparent. As Lenin suggested when he heard Pokrovskii’s report on SAON on 25 May 1918, the academy could organize a badly needed press to publish Marxist classics and social science research.6 At the same time, the resistance of the professoriat at Moscow University to the new regime was at its height, and a new academy was attractive as a political counter-weight. The provisional budget of 3.5 million rubles in 1918, half of it reserved for 30 full members and 145 staff, indicated the new regime’s willingness to support the fledgling institution at a level not radically lower than that of the Academy of Sciences.7
Pokrovskii, in his keynote address at the academy’s gala jubilee ten years later, divided the academy’s history into three stages—1918, 1919–21, and post-1922: “If the Hindu brahmins, as is well known, are born twice, then our Academy has been born at least three times.” This periodization is indeed clearly marked by successive academy charters, membership, and missions. It is interesting that the Marxist historian, whose ultra-materialist approach to Russian history was later branded as “vulgar sociologism,” emphasized a much more subjective, even elusive factor when contemplating the history of his own institution. The evolution of the early Socialist Academy, he implied, was fueled by its articulation of its mission and its relationship with the Party.8
In its first, shortest-lived incarnation, the academy was marked by an eclectic membership and an enthusiasm for socialist unity. The academy’s 1918 charter, approved by Sovnarkom on 15 June, called for a free association promoting “scientific advancement of questions of socialism and communism.” The original membership list, approved by Sovnarkom ten days later, reads like a who’s who of international socialism and includes members (the elitist title “academician” was never used) such as Kautsky, Luxembourg, Longuet, Hilferding and others unlikely to participate in the academy’s affairs.9
Non-Marxists on the Russian Left such as Belyi, Blok, and Ivanov-Razumnik—literary figures most closely associated with the Left SRs—were also included as members. In fact, Left SRs involved in setting up the academy, including D. A. Cherepanov and D. A. Magerovskii, reportedly insisted on calling the academy “Socialist” rather than “Communist,” and this name was already established before the Left SRs were expelled following their break with the Bolsheviks in June 1918. In one of the first meetings of the academy’s “Scientific-Academic section” on 14 June a new composition of academy members was ratified by a small core group of academy founders, including Pokrovskii, Reisner, the Marxologist David B. Riazanov, and former Left Bolshevik Aleksandr A. Bogdanov. They supported Riazanov’s proposal to remove candidates for membership who belonged to the SR party.10
The scholarly mission of the academy in its first incarnation was blurry, since it was not certain whether most energies would be channeled into a socialist higher school or into advanced research. The early academy was preoccupied not with the “scientific-research” section, as the original charter termed it, but above all with the “study-enlightenment” department, consisting of a “free higher school . . . familiarizing the broad masses with the teachings of socialism and communism.” Academy members taught their areas of expertise: Skvortsov-Stepanov lectured on political economy, Proletkul’t literary critic and future head censor Pavel I. Lebedev-Polianskii on proletarian literature, Lukin on the French Revolution, and so on. But when the academy opened its doors to 1,870 students in October 1918, the toiling masses largely stayed away: almost two-thirds of the students had either completed secondary education or had attended university, and 92.4 percent were listed as engaging in “intellectual labor.”11
The 1918 charter called for an egalitarian, democratic power structure capped by a central and a student soviet. But the fifteen places on the student soviet were usurped by the Bolshevik faction in a meeting on 6 October 1918, although only 23.69 percent of the students were listed as Communists, and 55 percent of the students belonged to no party. On 29 October the communist faction passed a new regulation: SAON would accept as students only supporters of soviet power, defined as those who could present two recommendations from proletarian or Soviet organizations, or two well-known party members, confirming that they stood on a “soviet platform.”12 The original conception of a “free school” open to all over age sixteen was soon further undermined. A student meeting in February 1919 voted to accept only students with a “communist worldview,” and, in keeping with the practice of party schools, to have the bulk of them nominated directly by party, Red Army and Soviet institutions. This resolution was accepted 49–12.13 Socialist unity was being replaced by Bolshevik primacy.
In this and one other important respect the early years set the tone for the rest of the academy’s history: its leaders were from the outset acutely aware of the institution’s great historical purpose. In the fall of 1918, a proclamation written and translated into major foreign languages expressed its grandiose sense of mission. “The peasantry built cathedrals; the aristocracy, castles and palaces; the bourgeoisie created theaters and universities,” it read. “The proletariat has founded the Socialist Academy.”14 Although such romantic language went out of style with war communism, the sweep of the academy’s ambitions remained.
Another element of continuity with the future was that even the initial flush of socialist solidarity did not forstall action to stake out a position as the new republic’s authority in the social sciences. In June 1918 the Academy of Sciences attempted to expand its activities in the social sciences by founding an Institute of Social Sciences in Petrograd, which would, as academicians such as Aleksandr S. Lappo-Danilevskii envisaged it, provide a bulwark against future encroachments by Marxism. The newly founded Socialist Academy, consulted on the advisability of the project, managed to deliver a decisive veto.15
The academy’s “second birth” in 1919 was decisive in further altering the political and ideological physiognomy of the fledgling institution. In a major overhaul of its membership, nineteen of the thirty-nine academy members were new, and the socialist dignitaries abroad were dropped. In its second incarnation, the academy membership list encompassed prominent Bolshevik theorists. The new equivalents of Kautsky and Hilferding were top Bolsheviks who rarely if ever participated in the academy’s work, such as Zinov’ev, Kamenev, Krupskaia, Kollontai, and Trotskii. The list also included prominent party intellectuals who participated as much as time and politics would allow, such as Radek, Bukharin, and Lunacharskii; and the active core participants including Miliutin, Lukin, Skvortsov-Stepanov, Friche, the historian of utopian socialism Viacheslav P. Volgin, and the other founders mentioned earlier. There remained several major exceptions to the new rule: Menshevik leader Iulii Martov was a new member in 1919 and remained in the academy until 1921, along with leftists such as Maxim Gor’kii, Nikolai N. Sukhanov, and Vladimir A. Bazarov, the former Bolshevik “godbuilder” then associated with the Mensheviks.16
Documentation on the academy’s activities during the civil war is sparse, but a shift in emphasis in the second phase is clearly discernible. The chief goal now was to become a theoretical center. The civil war academy was essentially a forum for papers and a sponsor of a few high-profile publications. The best-known example was Bukharin and Preobrazhenskii’s ABC of Communism, drafts of which were reviewed in academy sessions.17
This move toward a center of theory came about because of the collapse of the enlightenment section. Academy members later referred to the “crisis of 1919,” when virtually all the students were sent off to fight at the front. The entrance of at least some top Marxists into the universities and creation of social science faculties (the academy itself helped set up the FON at the new university in Smolensk), depreciated the value of the instution’s preoccupation with socialist education. In the laconic second charter, approved by TsIK in April 1919, the new membership was approved and the enlightenment section dropped. The academy’s function was now defined in terms of promoting “scientific-research work.”18
Amid the hardening political battle lines of civil war the academy was drifting toward a full indentification with the Party. There would be no decree, of course, defining the Bolshevik nature of the academy’s “scientific” work. The anarcho-communist Grosman-Roshchin, petitioning for membership to the academy in 1920, had been informed of the academy’s intention to admit only Communists as members. But he professed confusion about whether this meant only Marxists, since he considered himself a non-Marxist communist.19 But despite ambiguities, by the introduction of NEP the membership of the academy included a leading cast of the most prominent Bolshevik scholars and politicians of intellectual bent, and this advanced the equation of academy goals with those of a specifically party scholarship.
This equation was also strengthened when the enlightenment section was replaced with a much more selective and party-oriented educational function. The “courses in Marxism,” a party school considered higher than Sverdlov University and lower than the Institute of Red Professors, was founded in 1921 to train rising party apparatchiki in Marxist theory.20 The presence of these important pupils ensured that the academy intellectuals could never fully retreat within the institution into a rarified world of high Marxist theory.
Not only membership and the party school, but also early service functions bolstered the academy’s turn toward a party-oriented mission. Efforts were made to better organize the aid the academy, as a body of Marxist experts, could render the Party and the state. This initiative grew naturally out of the academy’s high-level membership. Rotshtein, for example, the head of one of the SAON bureaus (kabinet) on foreign policy and an official in the commissariat of foreign affairs, asked that institution and the Comintern to send questions requiring analysis to the academy.21 In addition, the Party began to use the academy for tasks demanding a discerning command of doctrine. Beginning at the end of 1918, for example, the Central Committee called on the academy to compile lecture outlines for inexperienced party workers involved in educational work in the Red Army.22
No matter how much the academy’s second, civil war phase established the academy’s political-ideological identification, the institution still could not articulate a genuine mission either in terms of academia or Marxist science. The reasons for this were obvious; in the midst of war the academy’s activities were so modest that plans to augment its role were all but superfluous. Some academy meetings consisted of nothing more than seven or eight shivering people attempting to eat frozen potatoes.23
It was thus only in its third incarnation, which coincided with the introduction of the NEP order, that party scholarship’s identification with the academy reacted with plans to become the center of Marxist science. The mixture proved volatile. Pokrovskii’s formulation captured the thrice-born academy’s NEP-era ambitions: “We had the opportunity to turn away from pacifist illusions and become an institution that is, as I have often said, our party Academy or, at least, a very firm basis for a Communist academy of sciences.”24
Enmity and Emulation:
Proletarian versus Bourgeois Science
The cult of nauka was embraced by party intellectuals with a particular twist. Science was linked, as in broad segments of the nonparty academic intelligentsia, with progress and better societal organization. But party scholarship invested the authority of nauka in revolutionary, “proletarian,” collectivist, and politically partisan values (portrayed as diametrically opposed to “bourgeois” institutional autonomy, “pure” science, and nonpartisan neutrality). While Bolshevik attacks on the nonparty academic intelligentsia’s ethos of “science for its own sake” were something of a caricature—given that it was precisely a commitment to social reform and opposition to tsarism that had shaped the liberal academic intelligentsia—the communist linkage of pure science with institutional autonomy was substantially accurate and indeed went to the heart of liberal academic ideology well beyond Russia’s borders. The concept of “pure science” arose in the 1840s in the German context to distinguish professional scholars from the “learned amateur” and historically was closely linked to ideals of academic autonomy informing the Humboldtian university reforms in Berlin.25
Inverting these two tenets of liberal academic ideology, the Bolsheviks retained the link between them. For the Bolshevik intellectuals nauka was never neutral, above all in the social disciplines, and institutions were always partisan. In his 1922 article in the Vestnik, Preobrazhenskii called for a “united front of scientific communism against bourgeois pseudo-science,” to be led, of course, by the academy.26
Yet for party intellectuals building the new society, one of the main tests of scientific worth (nauchnost’) was practical utility; and this put the Marxist theorists at the academy in a painfully awkward situation. By virtue of the name and pretensions of the Socialist Academy, its natural “bourgeois” enemy was the internationally renowned Academy of Sciences, which had quickly demonstrated the enormous practical utility of its bourgeois science to the proletarian state.27
In contrast to the stance of the nonparty professoriat, a majority of academicians had expressed their willingness to work with the new regime as early as the general assembly of 24 January 1918. In this they were prompted by deeply felt priorities centered around the preservation of Russian science. Yet it is crucial to recognize they were also motivated by the desire to preserve the Academy of Science’s place as Russia’s premier scientific institution, which had been partially eroded in relation to the universities in the decades before 1917.28 The accommodation the Academy of Sciences won from the Soviet government, beginning with the negotiations in the spring of 1918, was based on an explicit agreement to provide help to the state on questions of economic and technical importance. In return, the Academy of Sciences received government funding, protection of its material base and publications, and extensive institutional autonomy. This settlement was supported energetically by Lenin, who forbade communist “mischief-making” around the academy.29
With growing strength in the natural and applied sciences, the Academy of Sciences, only nominally under the jurisdiction of Narkompros, developed working relationships with Sovnarkom, VSNKh, and other commissariats.30 The Bolshevik intellectuals most closely associated with the Socialist Academy, with few exceptions, were clearly not representatives of those wings of the Party most inclined to support such a modus vivendi with the old Academy of Sciences or reliance on the “bourgeois” specialists. Pokrovskii, who never concealed his sharply honed animosity toward the old academic world, was among the “mischief-makers” responsible for one of the unrealized motions brought to the collegium of Narkompros in 1918 to dissolve the Academy of Sciences as an anachronism and create a state-organized association of Russian science in its place. Others, such as Bogdanov and his collaborators in the movement for proletarian culture, heralded the opening of the Socialist Academy as the signal for the collapse of outmoded bourgeois science and the birth of a new scientific collectivism.31
Bogdanov’s prediction proved premature. After the introduction of NEP, the Academy of Sciences’ relationship with the state was preserved by an influx of funds and commitments to scientists that were approved at the highest levels of the Party.32 This impeded outright assaults from the party intelligentsia and Bolshevik Left. In 1923, Vladimir I. Vernadskii, the renowned geochemist and one of the Academy of Science’s leading representatives in its relations with the government, was able to write Ivan I. Petrunkevich in Paris: “The Russian Academy is the single institution in which nothing has been touched. It remains as before, with full internal freedom. Of course, in a police state this freedom is relative and it is necessary to defend it continually.”33 Before the elections of 1929, there was not a single academician who was a member of the Communist Party.
The postrevolutionary entrenchment of two rival academies led the Communist Academy to find its outlet for competition with the Academy of Sciences primarily in the realm of symbolism and rhetoric. Before 1925, Bolshevik intellectuals complained that the Academy of Sciences’ special relationship with Sovnarkom endowed it with de facto all-union status, which the Communist Academy lacked. When the Academy of Sciences won formal all-union status in 1925 on its 200th anniversary, the Communist Academy reacted quickly, ensuring that it followed suit with all-union designation in 1926. The Communist Academy was acutely aware of this competition with the Academy of Sciences over status; in this case Pokrovskii enlisted the aid of TsIK secretary and party politician Avel’ S. Enukidze to ensure the Communist Academy maintained official parity with its rival.34
The phraseology of party resolutions on the Socialist Academy, notably at the Twelfth Party Congress in 1923, were accorded the status of writ there not least because they seemed to bolster the status and prestige of the institution. It seemed the recognition of primacy that the Communist Academy sought could only come from the Party.
As in tsarist times, the Academy of Sciences was recognized as the “highest scientific institution” in the land. Yet it has rarely been observed that this same title was also bestowed upon the Communist Academy in its 1926 VTsIK charter.35 The situation was not clarified by other contradictory signals coming from the Party and the state. Hoping to garner international prestige for Soviet science, the Politburo ensured the 200th jubilee of the Academy of Sciences in 1925 produced a windfall of official recognition and promises of support for that institution.36 Yet when Sovnarkom founded the Lenin Prize on 23 June 1925 for a scientific work “of great practical significance” in any field, the terms of the award were sent to the Communist Academy presidium for ratification; the committee judging the prize, headed by Pokrovskii, was formed at the Communist Academy, even though the first winners were prominent natural and applied scientists. The question of which institution would ultimately triumph remained unresolved throughout the 1920s: “Would the Academy [of Sciences] become a truly Soviet institution or would it have to be replaced?”37
The rivalry with bourgeois academia held concrete financial implications as well. It was a constant complaint at the Communist Academy that the nonparty scholars received large salaries and support from the Soviet government, while Marxist scholars struggled with inadequate means. The relatively low salaries offered to young researchers (sotrudniki) at the Communist Academy, indeed, was a frequently mentioned gripe in the broader competition for academic cadres that the academy perceived with its nonparty rivals. As Pokrovskii put it starkly in 1924, if “we do not take and use” the young scholars, they will “go to the [bourgeois] professoriat.” This sense of competition explains the academy’s policy, maintained until the late 1920s, of allowing many non-party sotrudniki to work at the academy.38
The caustic Riazanov thundered against the inferior financial position of Marxist science in the Soviet state, expressing the long-held sentiments of the party intelligentsia in particularly inflammatory terms. Although conditions improved toward the middle of the decade, the complaints continued throughout the 1920s. If a young scholar earned as little as 80 rubles a month, Riazanov charged, why would he want to work in a “pitiful institution” on Marx and Engels, when “working against Marxism, on Soviet money, against the proletariat, he earns 300 rubles (applause). All this is done on our money, our means . . . . [We must make] Marxism, Marxology a privileged discipline, just as others were in the old, prerevolutionary times.”39
Beneath the loud declarations there lurked an exaggerated respect for scientific prestige. Party scholarship’s relationship to “bourgeois” science cannot be simplified to differing degrees of animosity, with “hard-line” radicals bent on destruction and moderates ready for greater accommodation. The Socialist Academy leadership clearly hoped to emulate its more established rival. At the end of 1922 Pokrovskii revealed to his academy’s general assembly that he frequently met with Academy of Sciences officials in his capacity at deputy commissar of education. Almost wistfully he recalled how such “arch-practical” projects of the rival academy such as earthquake observation centers had aroused the interest of military and transportation officials. “Allow me to inquire,” he drily remarked, “how our activity is connected to real life. We imagine that the Academy is a gathering of scholars. That was in the eighteenth century, but we live in the twentieth . . . . [O]ur academy will become like [the Academy of Sciences] only when all our sections find truly practical work for themselves.”40 What he neglected to say was that the ethos of the academicians still favored fundamental research, and that he was comparing apples and oranges by pitting a new “practical” mission for Marxist social science against natural and applied research.
The surest indication of this relationship of simultaneous emulation and enmity with the nonparty rivals is that major organizational changes in the Socialist Academy were always surreptitiously measured against the Academy of Sciences. On 2 November 1919, Riazanov’s proposal to organize the academy by “study centers” (kabinety) was first acted upon. Each study center was designed to focus on a theme, such as the history of the revolutionary movement in the West. These centers achieved very few results other than some bibliographical compilations. Next, these centers were upgraded to “sections” (sektsii), which became the basic units of the academy. When Riazanov proposed transforming these sections into more consolidated, semi-independent institutes run by one prominent director, he drew an explicit comparison to the Academy of Sciences, which had by 1919 begun to realize goals dating back to the early 1910s to create a series of research institutes.41
It has seemingly gone unnoticed that the resulting reform of the Socialist Academy’s structure in the 1920s helped decide the unique solution the Soviet Union eventually adopted toward the macro-organization of science. The “scientific-research institute,” championed well before the Revolution by a segment of the scientific intelligentsia, could be seen as an advanced imitation of European networks of research institutes. But because they flourished primarily after 1917, supporters could also claim them as an inherently “revolutionary” structure. Of 88 institutes in the RSFSR in 1925, 73 were founded after the Revolution, most in the natural and applied sciences; only 19 of these focused on the humanities and pedagogy. These institutes were largely autonomous and administered for the most part by Narkompros or the Scientific-Technical Department (NTO) of VSNKh. The idea of research institutes was widely embraced by both the Soviet authorities and the scientific intelligentsia in the 1920s, but the question remained: how much of this new structure would be based on foreign (largely German) borrowing and how much on “revolutionary innovation?”42
The key innovation from the Bolshevik point of view was centralization and planning; and this could be achieved under the control of an academy. Riazanov, whose views on the subject turned out to be perhaps the most influential within the Komakademiia, by 1924 wished not only to emulate the Academy of Sciences but to surpass it by turning the entire Communist Academy into a network of research institutes.43
Riazanov certainly had grounds for viewing a network of institutes as a model more suitable for modern research than the honorary academies. The example Riazanov invoked, as others did, was the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft (KWG), the German organization founded in 1910–11 to coordinate a union of scientific and technical research institutes, in this case sponsored by industry with significant aid from the state. Riazanov’s enthusisasm for adapting the German example to Soviet imperatives of centralization garnered the cachet of progress for party scholarship. It also reflected another sidelong glance at the bourgeois academicians, since Academy of Sciences permanent secretary Sergei F. Ol’denburg maintained close ties with German colleagues in the Gesellschaft. Riazanov’s views were in yet another sense representative of Bolshevik thinking in that he ignored altogether the research university. His opinions diverged from those of the nonparty scientific intelligentsia—which in the 1920s often saw in the formation of institutes a chance to protect autonomy and institutionalize specialized fields—in that he envisaged the academy as the “organizing center,” with institutes as the building blocks of expansion.44
When the Communist Academy, in its impatience to adopt the most advanced structure for twentieth-century research, began the process of transforming its “sections” into institutes in 1924, it marked a de facto ratification of a new ideal in Bolshevik academic organization: a centralized, umbrella academy presiding over an expanding network of semi-autonomous research institutes. In this sense, the changes in the structure of the Communist Academy presaged the organizational model adopted during the bolshevization of the Academy of Sciences in 1929–32. As we shall see, many of the same people, notably Riazanov and other Communists elected to the Academy of Sciences, laid the first plans for that institution’s reorganization. The universities, because of the political landscape of postrevolutionary academia and the perception that they posed a continuing threat to party scholarship, were ruled out as the research centers of the future. For a moment in 1928, Riazanov did suggest that the research institutes would eventually become independent and that academies in general would be rendered obsolete. Yet Pokrovskii and others dismissed this on the “political” grounds that it would eliminate central control; Riazanov himself soon reversed his position. What is significant is not Riazanov’s short-lived rhetorical rejection of academies (representing a threat to the Academy of Sciences during the bolshevization campaign) but the fact that Bolshevik intellectuals had come to treat an expanding network of research institutes under the centralized leadership of an academy as a given necessity at the summit of higher learning.45
If the Academy of Sciences in the 1920s served as an organizational model partly to be emulated, partly to be overtaken, in terms of values it represented the epitome of what the Bolshevik intellectuals wished to reject. Yet even rejection can imply an important influence, since it helps define what is adopted instead. The Socialist Academy consciously inverted the most cherished ideals of the liberal wing of the academic intelligentsia. Under the last tsar, liberal academia had become convinced that institutional autonomy represented the highest prerequisite for the advancement of nauka; this belief was ingrained during the decades spent in opposition to the notorious 1884 university charter, which allocated many administrative functions to the state. The ideals of institutional autonomy and professional rights were given new impetus after the February revolution, only to be assaulted once again after October.46
The Bolshevik critique of academic liberalism was advanced by party theorists grouped around the academy as they set about organizing their own institution. The professoriat was portrayed as a closed caste, lecturing on esoteric topics from a high pedestal, avoiding political and social commitment, and displaying the cowardly wavering of the bourgeois intelligent. A 1918 advertisement for the Socialist Academy proudly announced that there were no titles, just positions; members were elected for five-year terms, not for life; and there are “no privileged priests or formal authorities, hollow titles or caste powers. All people in the Academy, beginning with the students and ending with the members, are comrades and brothers.”47
In the struggle over university administration culminating in the imposition of the university charter of 1922, nonparty critics of the Bolsheviks repeatedly protested that only institutional autonomy could guarrantee free thought, scholarly creativity, and “freedom for nauka.” One further result of the heated struggle over party-state involvement in university administration in the half-decade after 1917, therefore, was that a whole complex of “liberal” academic ideals were thoroughly discredited by the Bolsheviks. They were therefore inaccessible in almost any form for the Bolshevik intellectuals as they entered into their formative period of institution-building in the 1920s. The Communist Academy shunned the notion of institutional autonomy, replacing it with the ideal, difficult to maintain in practice, of comradely collectivism.48
As leading Bolshevik intellectuals became personally involved in exposing the “alien” goals of academic freedom and institutional autonomy, something they also attempted to do on a theoretical level to “neutrality” in the social sciences, the academy was drawn to an alternate set of values. In the years of expansion after 1922, these values were linked to missions that meshed with claims to one-party monopoly in the political sphere, which promised to harness the power of the regime for party scholarship.
Hegemonic Missions and Service to the State
As a counter-ideal, the Communist Academy embraced service to the party-state. In March 1922, the academy’s presidium, headed by Pokrovskii with Preobrazhenskii as his deputy, resolved to work “in the closest manner” with Gosplan, the commissariats, and other organs of the Party and the state which the Socialist Academy could aid. A special commission including Preobrazhenskii and Bubnov, the head of Agitprop, was formed to work on the project.49 A year later, Bubnov graphically demonstrated how far certain academy members were willing to go in promoting the institution’s service function. The Agitprop department was concerned about the “unlimited quantity of all types of deviations” among youth, he recalled, including the influence of the tract by the ultra-materialist Enchmen. As Bubnov put it: “We needed to mobilize several comrade-specialists with the task of defeating this book in nine days time. That should be the affair of the Academy. . . . But this was not done. I consider this one of the shortcomings in the work of the Academy.”50 Bubnov seemed to view the academy’s mission as that of a kind of short-order theorist for the party high command.
Such sentiments formed the backdrop to the resolutions of the Twelfth Party Congress in April 1923, which sanctioned several new tasks for the academy in the first such pronouncement about the institution. In theses drafted by Bubnov’s Agitprop department, the academy was charged with moving beyond the boundaries of social science, connecting its work “in the closest manner” with various “institutions and organs,” including the commissariats, thus “gradually turning itself into a scientific-methodological center.” In return, the resolution held out the promise that the academy would eventually “unite all scientific-research work.”51
Pokrovskii gave the congress’s resolution the widest possible publicity within the academy, focusing his report of the presidium on the resolution in October 1923. The nature of the academy’s work, he predicted, would become “much different from the expectations that obtained at the Academy at the beginning of its existence.” Changes would occur because “the Academy has been given a specific party function, assigned to it by the resolution of the congress.” Pokrovskii did not interpret this function in Bubnov’s narrow sense of simply fulfilling ideological assignments important to the Party. Rather, the Bolshevik mandarin called it “perfectly clear” that the academy’s party function included a “struggle with the views of the bourgeois professoriat” and the role of arbitrating methodological differences within the Marxist camp.52 Characteristically, in this variation on the congress’s theme Pokrovskii once again brought out the connection between the expanding service role of the academy and the promise of future monopolistic powers.
It might seem that this reorientation of 1922–23 consisted more of paper resolutions than of dramatic change. The Institute of Scientific Methodology, which was founded directly as a result of the Twelfth Congress, never developed into the influential center of theory coordination which was at first envisaged; however, an official redefinition of the academy’s goals in the direction of service was itself an important development. This was dramatized in the academy’s next general meeting in 1924. In the wake of Lenin’s death, the assembly voted to change the name of the institution to the Communist Academy, a decision which followed on the heels of one of the most revealing public discussions of institutional goals in the academy’s history.
The promulgation of the incipient Lenin cult had galvanized party scholarship to codify the discipline of Leninism. The report of the presidium, delivered by Dvoilatskii, adapted the academy’s agenda to this upsurge in attention by calling on the academy to become the center of research on Leninism. Since studying the heritage of Lenin raised “the great danger of various deviations,” control over scholarly work on Leninism was required: “The Lenin Institute does not propose to fulfill this task,” the report concluded, “and none other than the Academy will be able to do so.”
The specter of a new area of monopolistic control for the academy sparked off a virtual barrage of motions to expand the institution’s power. Riazanov proposed working with Narkompros to examine “various institutions which are organized in an anarchistic way,” in order to liquidate them and incorporate them into the academy. Legal theorist Petr I. Stuchka brought up the FONy as examples of institutions that “from the Marxist point of view offer nothing.” The talk ranged so far that Lukin spoke out against “those predatory plans which are being developed here,” and Pokrovskii backed off from concrete measures to incorporate other institutions. Finally, the meeting returned to Leninism as the proper outlet for the academy’s aspirations, and a motion was accepted to lobby for the “unification of all work on the scientific study of Leninism around the Academy.”53
The renamed Communist Academy no more succeeded in monopolizing theoretical work on Leninism than it did in creating a single center of Marxist methodology, but the resolutions and plans expressed in the general meetings set the tone for the academy’s work as a smorgasbord of new institutes, societies, and journals were founded between 1923 and 1925.54 The additions included Pokrovskii’s Society of Marxist Historians, the Society of Marxist Statisticians, and the upgrade of one “section” into the Institute of World Economy and Politics. And 1925–26 marked the founding of the section on economics, an agrarian commission (including a cooperative commission), and the Institute of Higher Neural Activity, among others. Three of these organizations deserve special mention as instrumental in augmenting the Communist Academy’s function of state service.
In 1925 an Institute of Soviet Construction (Sovetskogo Stroitel’stva, a term that carried roughly the same connotation as state-building) was approved by the Orgburo with rising party functionary Lazar M. Kaganovich at its head, and including prominent politician and science administrator Enukidze. This represented a qualitatively new kind of “practicality” within the academy: a program headed by high-level party praktiki, conferring on them the prestige of association with the Communist Academy. The institute was charged by its charter with conducting research “according to the assignments of leading state institutions.” It was divided into sections on federal government, local government, and local economy and began to promote such papers as “The Latest Mass Campaigns and the Low-Level Soviet Apparat” and “The Condition and Development of Local Budgets.”55
The reference “leading state institutions” in fact meant the Worker-Peasant Inspectorate (RKI, or Rabkrin), which in 1923 was joined to the TsKK and was “transformed into the control arm of the Politburo over both the party and the state apparatus,” as well as a preserve of the emergent Stalin faction.56 At an inaugural speech at the Institute of Soviet Construction Valerian V. Kuibyshev, the head of TsKK-RKI and a leading Stalin loyalist, defined the new institute as a research wing of the RKI. Indeed, the deputy director of the institute, A. V. Ivanov, was also a deputy commissar of the inspectorate. The low level of the institute’s work was exacerbated by problems at both the top and the bottom: in 1927 the fearless Riazanov protested against the “abnormal” situation in which the head of the institute, Kaganovich, was almost never in Moscow; and the institute staff (sotrudniki) were mostly young law students with no research experience.57
Although in public the academy leaders loudly trumpeted the value of the soviet construction institute to the state, behind closed doors they were acutely aware that their institute’s output was according to their conceptions “publicistic” as opposed to “scientific-research work.” What passed as research there, one presidium member scoffed, most frequently resembled “an article of a newspaper-like character.” Yet by 1927, according to the institute’s administrator (uchennyi sekretar’), Vetoshkin, it had become the “largest institution at the Communist Academy.” When Vetoshkin complained that despite its size the institute’s budget was lower than other units of the academy, Miliutin cut him off curtly by replying that those other units were “worth more in terms of scholarly work than your Institute.”58
A second area that led the development of policy studies in Soviet academia was the academy’s efforts to advise the formulation of Soviet foreign policy. Rotshtein’s foreign affairs section in the academy evolved between 1922 and 1925 into what one scholar calls the “scholarly-technical arm” of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. In April 1925 the Institute of World Economy and Politics was founded with Rotshtein as director, followed by Jenő Varga in 1927. Another observer has speculated that foreign policy consulting developed first within the discipline of “orientology” in the early 1920s largely because Bolshevik leaders considered themselves experts on Europe; but by the mid-1920s the Stalin leadership needed a group of experts that would go beyond Comintern reports on the “situation of the working class” to study finance and politics in Europe and the United States. The Institute of World Economy filled this gap, from the days of its foundation fielding queries from the party leadership and the editorial board of Pravda. The institute seemed likely to become a mere service organization. Indeed, Riazanov sardonically suggested that if Budennyi, the famed cavalry commander of the Red Army and a crony of Stalin, discovered the institute he would tie all its work to horses.59
Finally, the academy’s agrarian section, established in July 1925 under Lev N. Kritsman, quickly became the major center of scholarship of the agrarian Marxists and their school of rural sociology.60 The agronomists were highly concerned with carving out a consulting and policymaking role, and their work typified the manner in which active serviee became incorporated into the everyday functioning of the academy’s various parts, especially during the expansion of the mid-1920s. For example, on 24 November 1927 Molotov gave Kritsman a week to come up with a decade’s worth of statistical information on peasant taxes, with interpretation of their effects on the poor, middle, and kulak strata. The following September, Molotov informed Kritsman of the necessity to help draft the theses for the party resolution “On Work in the Countryside” for the upcoming Fifteenth Party Congress.61
Such activities threatened to overwhelm basic research. During the course of the 1920s, the academy’s “service functions sometimes predominated over its research. . . . [S]tate and party organs assumed that the Academy was always on tap, usually at short notice, to do minor or esoteric work.”62 Yet service increased its allure to the party scholars, because work done under the auspices of the academy was often considered in high state and party councils.63
Communist Academy of Sciences?
The Foray into Natural Science
Like the preoccupation with consulting and policymaking, the academy’s expansion into natural science research was an attempt to increase its general authority. It challenged an unwritten “division of labor” between the Communist Academy as a bastion of Marxist social sciences and the Academy of Sciences as the preserve of the natural sciences (with humanities divisions, although clearly resented by the Marxist scholars, that could be justified by proficiency in noncontemporary topics and specialized subfields). Each step the Communist Academy took to bolster the natural sciences within its walls, then, could be interpreted as an implicit threat to the coexistence of the two academies, as well as an attempt to expand the domain of Marxist methodology into virgin soil.
After the Twelfth Congress authorized the Socialist Academy to go beyond the bounds of social science in 1923, it quietly dropped the reference to “Social Sciences” in its name. Since then, the foundation of the natural and exact science section—and later the physiological laboratory, the Society of Marxist Biologists, and the Institute of Higher Neural Activity—provoked controversy on purely theoretical grounds. The Society of Marxist Biologists in 1926 defined its task as “elaboration of biological problems from the point of view of dialectical materialism” and “propaganda among biologists of the methods of dialectical materialism in the life sciences.”64 This program at the academy in the mid-1920s, in its move beyond the debate over applied versus natural science that was in part prompted by the publication of Engels’s Dialectics of Nature in 1925, anticipated and indeed represented the first swelling of the movement to apply dialectical methods to natural science that came to the fore in the party Marxist camp in the late 1920s.65
It was possible to maintain, as most “mechanists” among Marxist philosophers did in the 1920s, that the methodologies of natural science required no “working over” by Marxism, because Marxism was compatible with all genuine science. The physicist Arkadii K. Timiriazev and Skvortsov-Stepanov, academy members who headed the mechanist school, intensively opposed the Deborin group of philsophers over the applicability of “dialectical method” to natural science. The varying degrees of reductionism inherent in the mechanists’ stress on material forces were countered by the Deborin-led school of “dialecticians,” who denounced the mechanists for allegedly ignoring the dialectical structure of nature and the importance of Hegelian dialectics for Marxism in general. The Deborinites emerged triumphant for a time in the field of philosophy in the late 1920s. Some Marxists, especially the younger “dialecticians” in the 1920s, actively advocated a kind of proletarianization of natural science by “filtering” it through the core methodology of dialectical materialism. Such a project, however, met more resistance in the 1920s than the causes of proletarian art or literature. Although it was hardly without consequences, it proved far more problematic to effect even after the victory of the Deborinites—in comparison to the hegemony achieved during the Great Break by proletarian culture groups after their own triumph—since, few could forget, natural science and technology held one of the immediate keys to industrialization.66
The academy’s embrace of natural science, modest though it remained, gained support primarily because of its political importance to the institution. Riazanov was bitterly opposed to “infecting” Marxism with methods from natural science, but he was virtually alone in actively opposing what he derogatively called the “dog institute,” the Institute of Higher Neural Activity, which he charged was simply duplicating work done in Leningrad by academician Ivan P. Pavlov’s laboratory.67
Other leading academy members countered Riazanov’s salvos not out of a commitment to research on dogs or perhaps even to a dialectic of nature, but primarily because the extension into natural science, like the services rendered to state and party organs, enhanced the academy’s plans for securing preeminence among scholarly institutions. Pokrovskii underlined that the academy was not “only a social science institution—that is certain.” He continued:
[It is] the seeds of a Communist Academy of Sciences. Attempts to narrow the work of the Academy in any way would be attempts to weaken the significance of this “scientific-methodological center.” And since there is only one center in any cirde, then it follows—we will not be afraid of words—that our Academy has a certain monopoly on the leadership of party-scientific work in all its dimensions.68
The implications of the academy’s excursion into natural science were revealed when a proposal surfaced in the bureau of the academy’s presidium in 1927 to hand over the Institute of Higher Neural Activity, which was apparently staffed by an embarassingly low number of qualified Marxists, to the Commissariat of Health. Pokrovskii strenuously objected that this would create the impression that the academy had failed in its involvement in natural science, and this would “overjoy both the All-Union Academy of Sciences and similar institutions.” In a revealing monologue, Pokrovskii raised the larger issues at stake:
Where are we going, what course are we taking? Are we planning to transform the Communist Academy into a Communist Academy of Sciences? This would mean the creation of a whole range of institutes, laboratories, etc. We have taken this path up until now. . . . Or are we only trying to concentrate Marxist natural scientists in the Communist Academy in order to create a kind of methodological “fist,” which through criticism and so on can influence the general course of natural science in the country as well as the work of other institutions, including the same All-Union Academy of Sciences.69
Pokrovskii here clearly favored the more ambitious task, but in practice the natural science section in the second half of the 1920s was pursuing the more modest attempt to create a Marxist foothold in new fields. In 1926, for example, the section reported that it chose research problems that “had the most relevance toward supporting the materialistic worldview” and was engaged in such tasks as collating excerpts from Marxist classics that related to the natural sciences.70 Yet Pokrovskii’s two alternatives were not mutually exclusive; the academy, as usual, pursued modest, short-term goals and still harbored large long-term ambitions.
The tensions between the aggressive extension of Marxism, on the one hand, and the relative insulation of the natural and technological sciences against remaking of their core methodologies, on the other, were never fully resolved by the academy or, for that matter, in Soviet higher learning. The academy’s entry into natural science nevertheless bolstered Marxist demands that natural scientists should master Marxism and that dialectical materialism be incorporated into their work. At the same time, the more radical exponents of the academy’s embrace of natural science were dealt a blow at the 1927 Orgburo meeting on the academy at which Stalin spoke three times. According to Miliutin: “When I talked about the work of the section of natural and exact sciences, Stalin said: it is hardly worth it to develop strongly in that direction, you should pay attention primarily to social problems.” Kritsman responded by actually brandishing a copy of the Twelfth Party Congress resolution authorizing the academy to expand into natural science, but Stalin only retorted that this was not a basic part of the academy’s work.71 This blunt rejoinder may have prompted academy leaders to consider the benefits of merging party scholarship’s dominance in social science with the Academy of Science’s preeminance in natural science.
“Scholarly Organ”: The Making of a
Central Committee Resolution
The academy evolved not only as a result of long-term shifts in party scholarship, but also through the institution’s direct negotiation with the Party’s top leadership. In 1927 leaders of the United Opposition who were members of the academy brought their struggle against the leadership into academy forums in the half-year leading up to their expulsion from the Party. At the same time, the first plans for industrialization were laid. With these two developments commanding their attention, the Orgburo and Politburo conducted a review of the Communist Academy that resulted in the first party position statement on the institution since 1923. Published in Pravda in the name of the Central Committee, the declaration gave new import both to the institution’s service functions and its ideological accountability by declaring that “the Communist Academy must pay special attention to the theoretical preparation of vital [aktual’nye] contemporary economic and political problems on the agenda of the Comintern and the Party.” In a clause with even more potential resonance, the resolution declared the Communist Academy to be the “scholarly organ” of the Central Committee.72
The story of how this influential decision came to be made reveals how the academy leadership balanced disparate political and scholarly concerns as it strove to secure maximum benefit from its interaction with the top party organs. On 2 April 1927 Kritsman gave a detailed report to the academy presidium on an Orgburo meeting he and Miliutin had attended. In the lengthy Orgburo discussion following Kritsman’s report on the academy, Molotov and Stalin had expressed their views of the academy’s work. “In particular,” Kritsman revealed with a dramatic touch, “Stalin took the floor three times on this report”: “It became clear from the speeches of the Orgburo members [Stalin and Molotov] that they perceive insufficient ties with the work of the Central Committee of the Party. . . . Comrade Molotov formulated this by saying that of course one cannot even talk about the Academy becoming a department of the TsK, but the Academy nevertheless must become the scholarly organ of the TsK.” At this point Riazanov interjected: “Maybe then they’ll give us the privileges [prava].” Kritsman rejoined: “They said it is necessary that the Academy become the organ of scholarly work for the Central Committee and that in this sense it would get the rights of a department [otdela].”73
The party leadership was thus dangling in front of these ambitious Bolshevik intellectuals the prospect of converting the Communist Academy into an official party administrative center for academia and science. Such a step was never implemented, but the academy seemed closer than ever before to securing a formal role in making personnel, fiscal, and doctrinal policy in higher learning.
As the academy leadership met to discuss the designation of the academy as the “scholarly organ of the Central Committee,” the concrete advantages of such status could not be far from anybody’s mind. The academy’s potential reward for drawing closer to the Central Committee’s administrative apparat included not only heightened political authority but also access to classified, censored, or unpublishable information. In 1925, for example, Sovnarkom had neglected to include the academy’s library on the list of institutions authorized to receive so-called secret editions, probably because nonparty scholars were employed as researchers in various branches of the academy. The academy stopped receiving these works, which the censorship agency Glavlit defined to include those that bore the stamp “only for members and candidates” of the Party. In his protest to Sovnarkom, Pokrovskii tellingly defended his institution’s rights by invoking the stock formula that the academy represented “the highest scientific institution of the USSR, called upon to produce scientific work on the basis of Marxism and Leninism.“74
The trade-off in 1927, however, was that the academy would have to commit itself, at least on paper, to those “vital questions” on the agenda of the Party and Comintern. A heated discussion in the academy presidium erupted on this wording and all that it implied. Kritsman strongly opposed such a subordination of the academy’s scholarly mission: “I believe that this formulation is misguided, not only in the sense that one should not write it, but that it is wrong in essence.” Kritsman cited Einstein’s theory of relativity, the subject of controversy among physicists and philosophers, as a “genuine problem for us” that was hardly vital to the Central Committee. “If you try to turn the Academy into an apparat, which compiles answers for the Central Committee on current problems, then you won’t have an Academy; you will have just that, an apparat.”75
Miliutin, the second most influential member of the academy after Pokrovskii, took a sophistic but evidently persuasive tack against Kritsman’s arguments. The Central Committee was not proposing to adopt a new academy charter, he argued, but only a resolution. Thus the overall tasks of the academy would not change even if such a directive emphasized current goals of analyzing politically relevant issues. Compromise was necessary, Miliutin urged, if “you want to receive a directive from the Central Committee.”76 In his eagerness to secure political capital, Miliutin expressed confidence that the directive would not irrevocably change the academy’s course.
Kritsman bowed to this reasoning; the process for approving the official resolution on the academy was set in motion. The Orgburo formed an ad hoc commission that included not only high Agitprop officials but the academy troika of Pokrovskii, Kritsman, and Miliutin to prepare a report on the academy for the Politburo. A draft Politburo resolution, virtually identical to the Central Committee pronouncement later published in Pravda, can be found in Kritsman’s papers, with Kritsman’s handwritten additions. This paper trail confirms that the “Central Committee resolution” of 1927 was really a published version of a Politburo directive that originated, moreover, in an Orgburo commission that acted with significant input from the academy presidium.77 As this implies, the process of channeling the academy into more “practical work” encompassed a subtle process of adaptation on the part of the academy to the blandishments and perceived desires of the Stalin leadership.
The danger of this 1927 gamble was that the academy, having traded its commitment to address the Party’s “vital questions” in return only for vague promises, would instead of gaining monopolistic powers cede influence over the fundamental direction of its own work. Service to the Party was now the official standard by which the academy’s work would be judged. The principle of validating party scientific-research work outside the scholarly world was enhanced by the long-standing academy practice of underlining service rather than science as a way of enhancing its prestige.78
The academy leadership thus swallowed its misgivings and once again reoriented its mission. By 1929, public explanations of the Communist Academy’s role had progressed further to assert that all theoretical problems must have practical implications for socialist construction.79 The academy now could hardly retreat into neutrality when it came to the most “vital questions” of all, the inner-party oppositions and accompanying ideological disputes.
Orthodoxy, Oppositions, and a New Partiinost’
In the history of Marxism, “orthodox” trends cannot be assigned a single programmatic core. Orthodoxy was to no small degree a state of mind, a determination to avoid revisionism or deviation. The Bolsheviks, moreover, interpreted orthodoxy to mean an acceptance of the axiom that there is only one correct view. When orthodoxy became the official mantle of the party-state, a web of other factors also intruded on its definition. To be orthodox was to become open to pressures, the most obvious of which were the codified positions of and the outright ideological directives issued by the Party,80 the least obvious being, of course, self-censorship. Between these two extremes, the institutional environment in which party science developed could mediate the definition of orthodoxy.
By the expansion beginning in 1922, as we have seen, the academy’s membership was largely Bolshevik and its interests were identified with party scholarship. The next year marked one of the most significant controversies over orthodoxy at the academy since this reorientation. The affair centered around Lenin’s old rival Bogdanov, the former Vperedist and Proletkul’t leader who had been widely attacked in 1920 when the proletarian culture movement was brought under the wing of the Party. A more sustained round of attacks came in 1922–23 in connection with the suppression of the left-wing Bolshevik opposition group the Workers’ Truth, which, it was charged in a party-wide campaign, had been inspired by Bogdanov.81 Because Bogdanov was a founding member of the academy and one of the most active members of its presidium, the problem for the academy was acute. The Bogdanov affair of 1923 is a case study of how a party-wide political campaign impinged on the definition of orthodoxy publicly maintained in the actions of the institution.
In two handwritten letters dated 6 and 7 November 1923, Bogdanov challenged the academy to respond to the campaign against him. At the time, academy members may have been uncomfortable to learn that Bogdanov had been arrested in connection with the Workers’ Truth and held by the secret police from 8 September to 23 October of that year. Bogdanov’s main line of defense both to his GPU interregators and later to the academy drew heavily on a kind of theoretical elitism that is interesting because it may have been calculated to appeal to his audience. Comparing himself to Galileo, he derided the notion that a theorist as advanced as he was connected to the opposition group’s “juvenile” theories of an exploiting Soviet “new bourgeoisie” drawn from the “organizing intelligentsia.” As he outlined his position on the most controversial of theoretical questions, the nature of the regime, he demonstrated he had moved away from his civil-war era theories of the October Revolution as a barracks communist worker-soldier “uprising” (vostanie) (as early as November 1917 he applied the term “war communism” in a letter to Lunacharskii). In 1923, he denied ever having referred to “anything resembling” a “worker-soldier rebellion [bunt]”; a “communist block” of workers, working peasantry, and working intelligentsia was the basis of the Soviet order.82
“My arrest,” he wrote to the academy, “was the result of three years of literary-political persecution, during which I kept my own mouth shut. During this persecution my clear yet undisseminated ideas were distorted and perverted to such a degree that it became possible to attribute to me a childishly naive article in the ‘Workers’ Truth,’” whose adherents were the target of a wave of arrests in September 1923.83
Bogdanov appealed in writing to GPU chief Dzerzhinskii, his former colleague in the Bolshevik underground, who at one point appeared in person at one of the interrogations. In lengthy statements addressed to the GPU and its head, Bogdanov repeatedly emphasized that he was now an “apolitical,” a nonparty theoretician and researcher; the academy, he claimed, “was considered . . . not a political but a scientific organization” that studies political phenomena. It is noteworthy, however, that Bogdanov in several ways distanced himself ironically from these distinctions even as he made them, not least by always putting “apolitical” in quotation marks. Later, Bogdanov maintained he convinced Dzerzhinskii he was innocent of underground political work, but the press campaign against him had not stopped; provincial reports linked him to anarcho-syndicalism, opposition to Soviet power, and even the Polish secret service. Bogdanov turned to the presidium of the Socialist Academy as the only institution that could clear his name.84
Bogdanov’s letter to the academy was directed solely against distortions in the party journals. The anonymous “materialist” of Pod znamenem marksizma had branded him a political renegade and “theoretical opportunist . . . having no relation to the working class”: “Can the Socialist Academy ignore a statement . . . that one of its members has ‘long been a political renegade?’ Can it allow itself to be considered a refuge for political renegades? . . . The Academy must answer all these questions, whether it wants to or not. Even silence is an answer—and the worst possible one for it.” Bogdanov called on the presidium either to expel or defend him.85
The academy presidium, however, chose not to accept this challenge; it passed a curt resolution professing no need to react to polemical attacks on Bogdanov or to discuss “in connection to such attacks” whether the academy should maintain his membership.86 In a second letter dated November 7 Bogdanov took up the subject of the academy’s own conduct. Bogdanov charged that during the campaign against him the academy declined to give him normal lecture assignments, had not published his article because of “political-tactical considerations,” and had even refrained from inviting him to formal academy functions.
“I have acted honestly and seriously toward the Socialist Academy,” Bogdanov wrote. “It has remained my last organizational connection after I left Proletkul’t two years ago, convinced that my participation jeopardized that organization. And now it is truly not only in my own personal interests that I hope that [the academy] will rise to the heights of that historical role which it can and must fulfill.”87
One of the only pieces of evidence of how the academy leadership responded to the Bogdanov affair is a 1927 report to the VTsIK by Miliutin. The academy’s new second-in-command at that time reported that Bogdanov, along with Bazarov, Ermanskii, and Sukhanov, were still the only prominent non–party members left in the academy. In the early part of the decade, Bogdanov and Ermanskii especially had “a certain influence, if you will,” especially in the academy’s Vestnik. But the “line” at the journal was tightened up to permit only “more or less trustworthy Marxism,” and their active participation in academy affairs “somehow annulled itself.”88
In 1923, in the full glare of publicity, the academy ostracized one of its founders from its affairs; it would take no action to swim against the tide. In at least one respect, however, Miliutin’s later report was not accurate; in 1927, Bogdanov’s papers at the academy were still being respectfully received.89 How can we explain the differing conduct in the academy in 1923 and 1927? The answer to this question points to another dimension of the problem of orthodoxy.
Even when his life depended on it in the prisons of the secret police, Bogdanov could argue that nauka was apolitical only with irony. Party scholarship as a movement was even less willing to invoke a division of spheres between science and politics. But this did not prevent the Bolshevik intellectuals from nonetheless remaining deeply convinced that nauka was higher, more rigorous in its forms and methods, and hence qualitatively different from mass Marxism and political work. In academy policies a distinction—troubled, blurry, but perceptible nonetheless—was maintained between the realm of nauka and the realm of party politics. Bogdanov’s very presence as a politically disreputable nonparty Marxist at the academy testified to the enduring validity of this distinction.
The academy leadership in the early 1920s was consciously determined to maintain scholarship at the institution on a plane distinct from party publicistics. The editorial board of the academy’s Vestnik, for example, took a formal resolution at the end of 1922 to “consider it essential to delimit the functions of the journal Pod znamenem marksizma so that the latter takes on the character of a “fighting Marxist polemical organ, as opposed to a scientific-research one.” This resolution reveals a belief in a hierarchy of publications, with research and high theory distinct from more propagandistic genres. A kind of protected forum for scholarly discussions was given institutional form in the academy’s tradition of giving papers (doklady) that could be both public disputations and scholarly presentations followed by discussions. The discussions, unlike many of the papers, were rarely published and have survived only in the academy archives.90
Since this belief system, which conceived of nauka as a special preserve, was itself riddled with tensions, with its concomitant urge to declare that knowledge could never be neutral and must be made to serve the revolution, the conception of “scientific-research work” as a privileged genre not fully identified with politics was vulnerable. The evolution of orthodoxy at the academy is to a large extent the story of the continued erosion of the privileged conception of nauka in the party institution.
The distinction between scholarship and propaganda, for example, did not negate the Bolshevik intellectuals’ wholehearted acceptance of responsibility for the academy’s ideological line. The controversy over “revisionist” translations of György Lukács’s 1923 Geschichte und Klassenbewußtsein in the Vestnik in 1924 is instructive in this regard. On the one hand, the proposition that in a scholarly as opposed to a “mass” publication it was possible to be more lax in publishing heterodox views was closely related to the conception of nauka’s higher sphere. This at least was the argument advanced when the presidium was criticized in the cell for publishing the translations. Interestingly enough, however, a month before the academy presidium had already instructed the philosopher Deborin to compose a response; the latter then attacked Lukács for idealism and overestimation of the role of consciousness.91 With the academy not hesitant to commission official commentary on sensitive questions of theory, it could be lobbied or pressured to make such pronouncements. In 1924, for example, one academy member, exasperated by Timiriazev’s swipes against Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, petitioned the presidium to pass a resolution certifying that Einstein’s theory was not reactionary!92
This delicate, contradictory situation—in which Bolshevik intellectuals embraced the high calling of nauka yet could conceive of the most contested scientific problems being resolved by decree—shifted above all under the influence of the inner-party political-ideological battles of the decade. This occured primarily after 1924; in 1923—24 the Trotskyist opposition had less impact at the academy than at other institutions, causing less overt restructuring than, for example, at IKP.93
This stemmed in part from the circumstance that the academy’s party cell was far less important than those of the other party educational institutions.94 The prominent members of the academy rarely if ever appeared at the cell; their primary party organization affiliation was invariably elsewhere. Until the influx of young nauchnye sotrudniki into the academy in the latter half of the 1920s, the cell was dominated by students from the academy’s courses in Marxism. Given the fact that the academy was a sprawling institution to begin with, the cell at first was of negligible significance. Until the latter part of the decade, this situation freed the Bolshevik intellectuals at the academy from the pressures of party cell politics so palpable at IKP and Sverdlov; in a way it institutionalized the generational division between Old Bolshevik theorists and the red professors.
After 1923—24, for example, Preobrazhenskii and Radek, Trotskii’s closest oppositionist colleagues, continued to play leading roles at the academy. Preobrazhenskii was not officially listed as main editor of the academy’s Vestnik; but a presidium resolution from January 1926, appointing Dvoilatskii as temporary “leader” of the journal during Preobrazhenskii’s absence from Moscow, confirms that as late as 1926 the oppositionist theoretician was the de facto head of the editorial board.95
At the Communist Academy, developments surrounding the suppression of the United Opposition represent the major turning point that was reached three or four years before at institutions lower in the hierarchy. As the political fight with the opposition wore on in 1926, Preobrazhenskii lost his influence in the presidium. But his book Novaia Ekonomika still went through two editions in the academy publishing house in 1926. In the meantime, Pokrovskii and the academy press took pains to disassociate the academy as an institution from Preobrazhenskii’s oppositionist views. Finally, in 1927 the academy presidium voted not to publish a third edition of this work after Miliutin warned that copies had been snapped up as part of an “oppositionist sensation.” The contrary Riazanov unsuccessfully supported a third edition by appealing to the perogatives of scholarship: the book was “a serious work by a person who seriously studies economic problems.” Riazanov was voted down, but Preobrazhenskii’s other work was still being published in the Vestnik as late as 1927.96
Between 1924 and 1926, however, cell politics at the academy, as well as the balance of forces preserving scholarship outside the immediate nexus of party politics, shifted noticeably. Those years can be regarded as the time when a younger generation of party scholars, educated with different traditions and priorities, launched its career at the academy. The numbers are striking: before 1 January 1925 there were only 20 nauchnye sotrudniki at the academy; by 1 May 1926 there were 67, and by 1928 the number had jumped to 156. Of these young scholars at the academy in 1927, a full 75 percent had graduated from the Institute of Red Professors.97 This represented a significant change in the life of the academy; the red professors brought with them their distinctively combative political culture. The younger generation, not as heavily taxed with the time-consuming responsibilities the older Bolshevik intellectuals had assumed outside the academy, was capable of altering the tone of the institution as a whole.
The academy’s party school, the courses in Marxism, also contributed to changes in the atmosphere at the institution. As the courses expanded from about sixty students in 1921 to over a hundred in 1926, the party qualifications and percentage of students listed as proletarian increased dramatically. This was due to the fact that by the mid-1920s the courses were geared toward promising and experienced party workers mostly from the regional party committees, who were rising politicians in their own right.98 Among the students with the highest party posts were several who actively used the academy cell as a base for their work in support of the United Opposition. As the cell increased in importance and as new, unprecedented measures were taken to defeat the opposition, the political struggles within the cell came to affect the entire institution.
In 1926 two students from the courses in Marxism, Bakaev and Nikolaeva, the first a member of the Central Control Commission, traveled to Leningrad to speak at factories on behalf of the United Opposition, causing an uproar in the cell. A separate investigation was launched into the distribution of secret factional documents at the academy, with which Bakaev was also involved. These and other materials from 1926–27 reveal the political tactics of the party majority. To force the hand of active oppositionists, the Central Committee passed a barrage of regulations so stringent that oppositionists either had to recant their views or violate party disciplinary rules.99
For example, it was illegal for Bakaev and Nikolaeva to travel to Leningrad because TsK-TsKK resolutions forbade opposition speeches in front of other party cells, as well as travel without permission of the cell leadership. In September 1927, distribution of the opposition’s “new platform” at the academy was interpreted by the cell as an anti-party act. In a move reminiscent of what Bogdanov had experienced in 1923, the academy cell reportedly segregated the oppositionists into a separate group which was deprived of its outside teaching and lecturing assignments. In 1927 the cell required all potential sympathizers of the opposition to answer questions about their political beliefs in written form, resulting in a wave of recantations.100
Meanwhile, the position of the opposition leaders at the academy was in grave jeopardy. Pokrovskii paved the way for the academy’s disassociation from them by invoking the axiom of party scholarship that science was never neutral. In early 1927 the historian avowed that bourgeois scholars were eclectics, “But with us there is one line, one scientific method. If in our midst two opinions are encountered, then for us it is completely clear that one of them is undoutedly wrong.” He also added: “At least I did not hear a single indication even from the opposition that such an important scholarly institution should be neutral in high politics. Thank God, all of us are sufficiently Marxist, Leninist, and communist that no one said that.”101
With the opposition demonstrations at the tenth anniversary of October, grounds were finally available for expulsion of oppositionists from the Party. On 24 October 1927 a large meeting of the academy and Lenin Library voted its symbolic approval for the exclusion of Trotskii and Zinov’ev from the Central Committee in a vote reported as 197–1. On 12 November, the academy presidium—made up of Pokrovskii, Miliutin, Kritsman, Pashukanis, Timiriazev, and Krinitskii—held a meeting to discuss the expulsion of Preobrazhenskii and Radek from the academy. Other leading academy members such as Deborin, Varga, and Friche were also present. Pokrovskii justified expulsion of the oppositionists by citing the newly passed 1927 Central Committee directive that anointed the academy “the scholarly organ” of the Central Committee (raising the possibility that this directive had been conceived with the oppositionist academy members in mind). “Some comrades have declared war on what the Party officially calls Marxism and Leninism. We support this official opinion and cannot support any other, since the Party supports it, and the Academy is, as it is said in the directive . . . the scientific organ of the Party, the center of communist science.”102
Almost half the academy membership had always been filled symbolically by leading party figures who in fact rarely or never took part in the academy’s work. In early 1927 Miliutin had reported that of sixty-seven “academicians” only thirty participated regularly in academy affairs. Accordingly, the general assembly of the academy had to approve the dismissal of Trotskii, Smirnov, and Rakovskii along with Preobrazhenskii and Radek. At around the same time, the assembly proffered new, equally symbolic memberships in the academy to Molotov, Rykov, and Stalin.103
The struggle with the opposition undermined the tradition of unpublicized scholarly disputation when the 1927 debates degenerated into partisan confrontations and Miliutin had transcripts of opposition comments in the question and answer periods distributed outside the academy.104 Explicit curtailment of the tradition followed in 1928. The presidium resolved that “as a rule, if a paper is scheduled at the Communist Academy with which it, as institution, does not agree, then it must propose its own co-speaker.”105 The more the affairs of party scholarship became the affair of the entire Party, the more the privileged position of nauka slipped away.
It was not just political affiliation with opposition groups that carne to be monitored, but ideas voiced in theoretical debates that could be connected with oppositionist platforms. Questionnaires from purges conducted at the academy cell in 1929 about membership in opposition groups demanded to know “your relationship to the discussion on industrialization at the Institute of World Economy” or simply queried, “Participation in controversial historical questions?”106
Since the academy cell acted as the main agent in the struggle against the United Opposition, it emerged after 1927 for the first time as a major player in academy affairs. The internal dynamics of academy politics altered as the academy cell became noticeably more capable of exerting pressure on the presidium. The cell chided the academy leadership for avoiding the self-criticism campaign, shirking planning in scholarly affairs, employing non–party members in academy work, and even for failure to heed cell recommendations on financial affairs.107 As the senior generation of Bolshevik intellectuals found itself suddenly vulnerable to militant atack in 1929, the cell even staged a power play by demanding the presidium present all plans and reports to the cell before issuing them.108
Finally, the conception of nauka standing above current politics faltered under the overriding political imperative for the party majority to endow its pronouncements with an air of infallibility. As one oppositionist resolution at a general meeting of the academy cell in 1928 charged: “Party members are being taught the lesson that the Central Committee cannot make mistakes, that one can in no circumstances criticize it and everything that it says must be accepted by the Party as 100 percent Leninist truth.” Only three people out of the two hundred present dared to vote in favor of such a resolution.109 Around the same time, official formulations of the academy’s theoretical and scholarly responsibilities were being touched up to include a novel component, the active defense of majority party policy.
In a striking fashion, defense of the party line was tied into the academy’s service role as it had been articulated earlier in the decade. Active advancement of the Party’s interests through nauka was portrayed as one additional obligation of the institution, a new service added to the list that had already been drawn up. As one commentator phrased it: “The Academy represents the scholarly opinion of the Party and it will not hide behind so-called objectivity in disputed questions; attack on all perversions of the party line enters into its responsibilities.”110 In essence, this represented a new ideological service function.
The emergence of the basic component of Stalinist-type partiinost’ at the Communist Academy—the notion that scholarship and theory must actively advance the interests of the Party—thus occurred not after Stalin’s 1931 letter to Proletarskaia revoliutsiia111 but before Stalin had consolidated power as undisputed party leader. It emerged in part out of party scholarship’s embrace of service to the party-state and was facilitated by the slow collapse of the Bolshevik intellectuals’ privileged conception of nauka.
These origins of the new party-mindedness at the leading center of party social science say something about its nature. This was not merely an ideological diktat, which in moments of crisis could force obedience to an officially sanctioned line. As we have seen, such “reconciliations with reality” had happened before. Rather, partiinost’ began to supersede nauchnost’ as the organizing principle of party scholarship. The identity of party scholarship began to revolve more around service—including ideological service—than its special capabilities for conducting “scientific-research work.” The shift deepened as party scholarship struggled more fully to distinguish itself from bourgeois scholarship, to cast itself as an intellectual movement that accorded fundamentally with the new socioeconomic order.
Collectivism, Planning, and Marxist Scholarship
Like the new orthodoxy, the innovations the academy attempted to make in introducing “collective” work in the 1920s cannot be understood outside the perspective of the academy’s aspirations. Collectivism would set party scholarship apart in its methods as well as methodology. Advancement of collective endeavors in academy scholarship, which began around 1924, became a way of boosting the institution’s credentials.112 Collective research was touted as efficient and intrinsically suited to a socialist economy; nonparty scholars who believed in the creativity of genius were indicted for individualism.
In fact, many of the first “collective” projects from the Communist Academy in the 1920s—bibliographies, reference works, and specialized encyclopedias—represent some of the institution’s most enduring scholarly work. Most notably, the presidium of the separately administered Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia (Great Soviet Encyclopedia, or BSE), one of the most ambitious projects of the Bolshevik intellectuals of NEP, was virtually identical with the academy’s top leadership.113
The idea for a “socialist encyclopedia,” so attractive to the Bolshevik intellectuals because of the images it raised of the Enlightenment Encyclopédie, first took shape in a Communist Academy resolution of 1923. By 1925 the society “Soviet Encyclopedia” was formed by the academy to administer the project; the first volume appeared in 1926 under the general editorship of Otto Shmidt. The project showcased some of the academy’s most cherished ideals for a new nauka. As the opening editorial proclaimed, it was based on collaborative work, was intended as “scientific” yet accessible to a broad audience (at the level of someone with a secondary or rabfak education), and social science entries were thoroughly Marxist. Special emphasis was given to “practical” areas: economics, current politics, the Soviet system in the social sciences, and agriculture and technology in the natural and exact sciences.114
The party historian Nevskii, reviewing the first volume of the encylopedia in 1926, coyly professed uncertainty whether Pokrovskii or Shmidt would go on to play the role of Diderot or d’Alembert, although he favorably compared the Soviet encyclopedia to its Enlightenment predecessor. In the privacy of the academy presidium, Kritsman asserted in 1927 that “of all the large projects which the Komakademiia has undertaken, [the encyclopedia] is the only one that can to some degree strengthen the prestige of the Academy in comparison to the All-Union Academy of Sciences.” But in one sense this impressive achievement became something of an embarassment for the academy. According to the annoyed activists of the academy’s party cell, of the 160 scholars working on the project in 1928 only 13 were Communists.115 The true labor force behind the Great Soviet Encyclopedia was despised “bourgeois” science. The editorial board was made up of the leading lights of the academy, and the social science topics were controlled by them, but the weakness of party scholarship was nonetheless glaringly apparent. Perhaps because of this predominance of nonparty scholars, the Communist Academy never took formal credit for the project, and the name of the institution did not appear in the published volumes.
If the encyclopedia taxed the academy’s capabilities, other forms of collective work interfered with the institution’s research capacity. In the latter half of the 1920s collective work increasingly carne to mean textbooks, compilations, and anthologies (khrestomatiia).116 Like consulting work, these projects began to inhibit advanced research. Work linked to “political enlightenment” insulated the academy from association with “scholasticism.” Pokrovskii’s maxim was ostensibly a startling declaration for the head of an academy: “The Communist Academy is distinguished from all other ‘academic’ institutions by the fact that there has to be as little academicism as possible in its activities.”117 Yet the academy’s preoccupation with textbooks also reflected party scholarship’s concern with official mass publications that increasingly, in the words of one historian, came to play the “special role” of providing the “point of orientation for researchers” and marking the “boundaries of the permissible.” Miliutin touted textbooks as a major job for the academy, and in early 1928 Pokrovskii announced that a textbook was no less important than “the most profound Marxist monographic research.”118
Collective work assumed an important place in the academy’s pantheon of tasks to be fulfilled. The quantity of collective work and practical projects—like statistics on the percentages of party members or proletarians—became a standard element of any academy report after around 1924. A firm acceptance of the necessity of planning science became widespread among Marxist academics as well as among many party and government officials. A literature on the “scientific organization of scientific labor” (nauchnaia organizatsiia nauchnogo truda, or NONT) centered around issues ranging from collectivized research to efficient note-taking.119
The irony was that planning of scholarship, supposedly intrinsic in the new collectivism, was feeble at best before 1927. Limited ties were established with a few other institutions, such as the department of Marxism-Leninism at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.120 To improve this record, a series of special commissions beginning in October 1927 and continuing through 1928 examined the issue of coordinating the activities of Marxist-Leninist research institutes.121
No matter how little planning actually occurred, the issue was intimately tied to the academy leadership’s oft-repeated certainty that the academy could become the future center of planning, hence organizing and controlling, the world of higher learning. The problem was that the academy, as was suggested at the outset, never rigorously distinguished between dominating party-Marxist institutions and academia as a whole. It had never needed to; yet the distinction assumed critical importance once planning became, as it were, an all-union question in 1928. A 1928 Orgburo commission under Pokrovskii met with few results, but in 1929 the Orgburo nevertheless designated the Communist Academy a “planning center” of Marxist-Leninist scientific-research institutions. The first and second conferences of Marxist-Leninist Scientific-Research Institutions in 1928 and 1929, initiated and orchestrated by the Communist Academy, included Ukrainian and Belorussian delegations and featured much discussion of planning. These gatherings also presented the Communist Academy with a degree of control over coordinating research plans, if only for the “Marxist-Leninist” institutions.122 Yet if all higher learning were up for grabs, the far greater question was who would gain control of scientific planning on an all-union level.
It was still hard to predict whether a single central planning agency for science and scholarship would emerge from the bureaucratic cacophony of NEP (none ever did). But already in 1928, all signals prompted academy leaders to surmise that if such an agency were set up, Gosplan or a party organ would assume priority over the Communist Academy.123 Nonetheless, new vistas were rapidly appearing. An unmistakable signal for an assault on bourgeois specialists and the non-party intelligentsia was given in the wake of trumped-up charges of specialist sabotage in the coal-mining region of Shakhtii. A Central Committee circular announcing the affair to all party members rang with a novel intensity of anti-specialist rhetoric; this clarion call was proposed by Stalin, Bukharin, and Molotov for Politburo consideration and approved with corrections on 7 March 1928, three days before the Shaktii affair became public with a front-page Pravda editorial.124 In the new atmosphere of sanctioned specialist-baiting this unleashed, the real prize that the planning campaign proferred party scholarship was the suddenly vulnerable institutions of nonparty academia.
Mikhail Nikolaevich Pokrovskii speaks from the podium at the First All-Union Conference of Marxist-Leninist Scientific-Research Institutions, organized by the Communist Academy in 1928. Reprinted by permission of the Museum of the Revolution, Moscow, Russia.
A curious phenomenon began to manifest itself in the midst of the discussions of planning. In the na me of rational planning, academy members plotted the appropriation and dismemberment of other institutions. This proclivity is present in an especially blunt policy document, resembling more a manifesto for party scholarship, sent to the Central Committee by the executive secretary (Upravliaiushchii delami) of the Communist Academy.
The recommendations began conventionally enough: “It is necessary to introduce planning in the realm of scientific research. . . . We need to end this anarchistic disorder and outlive all unneeded parallelism in scholarly work.” In this text, however, planning became but one new, brightly colored thread to be woven in to the academy’s traditional tapestry of orthodoxy and hegemony. The Communist Academy must lead a “merciless struggle” against all deviations, first of all in its own midst; “The Communist Party must seize science just like in its own time it seized the Soviets, the Trade Unions, and the Cooperatives. . . . . The Communist Academy must become the headquarters of the new front.”125
The academy’s reorientation around service, the new partiinost’, the erosion of nauka’s privileged sphere within the Party, and the tendency for collective forms to undermine research brought party scholarship to the brink of a potentially fatal crisis as the NEP era drew to a close. But instead of perceiving danger, academy leaders saw the anti-specialist offensive as a golden opportunity. After a decade of pursuing hegemonic goals, with endless internal ramifications but to little outward effect, it suddenly became possible to believe they might actually be achieved.
Denouement: RANION and the
Academy of Sciences
One of the academy’s assaults targeted a mixed institution, a symbol of uneasy coexistence with the nonparty intelligentsia. RANION, which by the end of NEP included fifteen social science research institutes where many nonparty scholars were based, originated in a coalition of institutes first formed in 1921–22 around the social science faculty (FON) of Moscow University.126 The presidium of the association and the collegia of the member institutes had been stacked with leading party Marxists since 1923, which of course colored all pronouncements put out in the association’s name. Although Communists took administrative control, the foundation of RANION nonetheless represented a concession to the nonparty professoriat after the imposition of the 1922 university charter. At that time, many of Moscow’s communist student and teacher activists were outraged by the degree of autonomy the non-party professors were offered in these research institutes.127 During the course of the 1920s, the scientific-political section of GUS, led by Pokrovskii, carried out an incremental but persistent policy of boosting the percentage of Communists at RANION and attempting to strengthen Marxist scholarship there.128
RANION thus ended up in a weakened position as it slowly twisted under a two-pronged assault. At the center of the institution, leading lights of party scholarship were imported into the presidium of the association (by 1927, thirteen of the fourteen presidium members were party Marxists). As one spokesman admitted, however, before 1925 the subordination of the institutes to the presidium was “purely nominal.” Those institutes not formerly associated with the First Moscow University (including four in Leningrad) were even financially independent from the presidium and controlled personel and graduate admissions. But a series of measures, beginning in the fall of 1925 and culminating in a May 1927 order from Glavnauka, substantially strengthened the presidium’s powers and created a central admissions committee.129
The second prong of the assault came from within. The association was beset by a growing contingentof young communist students who viewed their mission as a struggle against the nonparty professors in their institutes. “There is a constant battle there, sometimes assuming fairly heated forms,” Lunacharskii acknowledged. Indeed, a report by the RANION communist faction sharply criticized the association’s “tendency to study anti-Marxist problems.” The faction derided RANION’s publication of the prominent agronomist Chaianov: “The usual authors are . . . Chaianov and X, Chaianov and Y, etc.”130 Before the fall of 1925, there were only nine communist graduate students of seventy in RANION; but in the following years both the graduate program and the number of Communists was boosted rapidly. In contrast, only 25 percent of the “scientific workers” at RANION as late as 1928 were party members; and this figure was inflated, because the number of communist faculty who actually took part in the life of the institution was “significantly lower.”131
Perhaps the decisive factor in the demise of RANION, after it suddenly became vulnerable because of the deteriorating position of nonparty intellectuals in 1928, was the enactment of long-standing hegemonic goals within the Communist Academy. In an assault on RANION, the causes of party scholarship, promoting Marxism, and aggressive expansion of the academy happily coincided. In a meeting of leading academy scholars in April 1928, Volgin termed the lack of party members at RANION “alarming.”132 Yet an influx of Marxists was no solution, since it would leave little justification for the association’s continued existence: rational scientific planning could not sanction wasteful institutional “parallelism.”
As various party figures, Marxist societies, and disciplinary groups whipped up criticism against RANION, a special commission on reorganization at the Communist Academy worked behind the scenes. Among its first decisions were to incorporate RANION’s Philosophy Institute and History Institute into the academy. RANION’s Timiriazev Agrarian Academy, the major center for non-Marxist agrarian scholars, was divided up in a process beginning in September 1928 and in part transferred to the academy as well. In May 1928 a special meeting convened by the bureau of the Communist Academy presidium (with Pokrovskii, Miliutin, Kritsman, Shmidt, Friche, Deborin, and fifteen other high-level academy members present), met to hear Pashukanis’s report on the “reorganization of the academy’s institutions.” The resolution, giving the example of RANION’s philosophy institute, carne to the understated but unambiguous conclusion that “parallel existence” of such institutions with those of the Communist Academy was undesirable.133
In 1929–30 the Communist Academy absorbed RANION’s Institute of Economics, Institute of Soviet Law, and three divisions of its Academy of Artistic Studies. By 1930, RANION had ceased to exist. One historian suggests that the Academy’s absorption of the Leningrad Institute of Marxism (which became the Leningrad Branch of the Communist Academy, or LOKA) was also an act against RANION, since the takeover was carried out just after Narkompros had merged that institute with RANION’s history institute.134
The Communist Academy, and hence party scholarship, was strengthened by the demise of RANION. The academy in most cases quickly absorbed the budgets and incorporated personnel that its nonparty rivals had formerly enjoyed. It was in part on the ruins of the institutional base of mixed communist and nonparty social science scholarship that the academy entered into a period of rapid expansion from 1928 through 1932. For example, the academy’s constituent parts numbered 16 in 1927, 22 in 1928, 29 in 1929 and 34 in 1930. Excluding clerical and other staff, the total number of its “scientific workers” increased from 140 in 1927–28 to 378 by the end of 1930.135
Yet the expansion of the Communist Academy, reaching its height in 1930, did not lead to the consolidation of its preeminence in the academic world. On the contrary, this moment of organizational triumph coincided with the academy’s decline as a research center. In February 1930 the presidium resolved to transform the Vestnik into an “informational . . . organ” focusing on Marxist-Leninist research institutions and the training of cadres.136 The Communist Academy had reaped the fruits of quick victory over RANION. But in the course of the campaign to transform the Academy of Sciences, the ultimately more decisive question of the future preeminent center of scientific-research work was also determined, and not in the favor of the Communist Academy.
The “bolshevization” of the Academy of Sciences became a pivotal moment in the establishment of the Soviet organization of science. It began with the ratification of new election rules in that institution’s charter in 1927 and 1928, continued in the campaign to elect Communists and new regime-approved members in 1928–29, and culminated in the expansion and thoroughgoing reorganization of the institution in 1929–30, accompanied by widespread arrests and dismissals.137
Despite a flood of recent archival materials, the roots of bolshevization in the decade-long rivalry of the Communist Academy have remained obscure. While key roles in the complex and drawn-out drama were played by the Politburo, the secret police, and the Leningrad party organization, among others, the major impetus behind the vast expansion and takeover of the Academy of Sciences, which also sealed the fate of the Communist Academy, can be traced to the aspirations of party scholarship centered at the Komakademiia.138
The Communist Academy leadership’s involvement in the affairs of its venerable rival can be traced to oversight committees beginning as early as 1924, when bids to curtail the unique autonomy enjoyed by the Academy of Sciences began. In September 1924 Pokrovskii wrote to Rykov, the head of Sovnarkom, to lobby for a draft Academy of Sciences charter put out by Narkompros’s Glavnauka, which would have placed the rival academy tightly under the jurisdiction of Glavnauka over the protests of Academy of Sciences permanent secretary Ol’denburg and vice-president Steklov. This attempt to subordinate the Academy of Sciences failed, and in 1925 the Politburo decision to confer all-union status coincided with the its 200th jubilee; the whole extravaganza, for which the Politburo approved 60,000 rubles, produced a windfall of publicity for the older academy.139
The public triumph for the Academy of Sciences galvanized its rivals; new plans to subdue it emanated from party scholars. The Politburo had created a special commision to oversee the jubilee headed by Communist Academy second-in-command Miliutin, who took the opportunity to recommend the formation of a new commission for “oversight of the work of the Academy of Sciences.”140 This led to the creation of the so-called Enukidze commission that eventually ran the bolshevization campaign.
Miliutin was already the head of yet another commission, this one under Sovnarkom, which worked from July 1925 to March 1926 on changes to the Academy of Sciences charter. It was this commission which first conceived the crucial rules governing the election of academicians; these were approved by the Politburo in May 1927 and, with further changes in April 1928, provided the basis for the election of the first Communists and party-backed candidates to the academy.141 As early as October 1927 Communist Academy members Pokrovskii, Miliutin, Volgin, Lunacharskii, and Riazanov received top secret copies from the head of Sovnarkom’s Section on Scientific Institutions, Voronov, listing suggested candidates for election to the Academy of Sciences and the openings of new places at the academy (which were later in part reserved for the Marxist social sciences and technical and applied sciences).142 Party scholars, especially Pokrovskii and Miliutin, who unofficially played the roles of president and vice-president of the Communist Academy, were key players in the oversight of the Academy of Sciences.
The most striking aspect of this monitoring of the Academy of Sciences by the party scholars beginning in the mid-1920s was that the Bolsheviks at first were determined to undermine the stature of the older academy. In 1927 Miliutin was again put in charge of still another Sovnarkom commission to review the Academy of Sciences’ newly required annual report; Pokrovskii and Riazanov were also included.143 Pokrovskii produced an alternately witty, sarcastic, and bitter broadside against the nonparty institution. Depicting the academy as a bastion of “truth-seekers, observing a well-intentioned neutrality toward Soviet power,” he condemned it as unable to meet the scientific needs of the present and unwilling to engage in planning. “It is necessary either to radically reorganize the composition and activities of the humanities division of the Academy or to shut it down altogether,” Pokrovskii concluded. In a special plea with fundamental implications for his own academy, the Marxist historian called for consideration of whether the Academy of Sciences should be confined to study of the natural and exact sciences.144
The other reports of the 1927 Miliutin commission comprised a powerful indictment designed to curtail the old academy’s activities. For example, Vyshinskii, the jurist and former rector of Moscow University who would later ·preside over the show trials of the 1930s, pointed to a “whole range of institutions” at the Academy of Sciences that “do not have any right to exist altogether.” Volgin, himself later the permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences from 1930 to 1935 and its vice-president from 1942 to 1953, charged that the humanities division at that institution suffered from “some kind of organic defect” and was characterized by “vulgar, atheoretical empiricism.” The Communist Academy stalwart added pointedly: “If we compare the publications of the Academy of Sciences with those of the Communist Academy, despite all the scholarly-technical advantages of the Academy of Sciences publications, . . . the works of the Communist Academy are noteworthy for the fresh scientific thought that runs through them.” It is especially noteworthy that Volgin opposed filling the humanities sections of the Academy of Sciences with Marxists, because “in current conditions” this would weaken institutions such as the Communist Academy and the Marx-Engels Institute. Instead, Volgin proposed dismembering the Academy of Sciences and attaching its humanities institutions to various VUZy.145
It seems evident that party scholars used the new situation in 1927, coinciding with the first plans for a new socialist offensive and the rise of the Communist Academy as the Party’s scholarly organ, to press more concretely for measures that would diminish the Academy of Sciences. In this effort they united with party-oriented allies in the technical sciences grouped in the newly founded All-Union Association for Workers in Science and Technology for Advancement of Socialist Construction (VARNITSO), the establishment of which was overseen by Molotov and Bukharin. The agenda enunciated at the first convocation of VARNITSO’s founders on 7 April 1927 minced no words, resolving to work to “strengthen the material base” of research institutes under Narkompros, the Scientific-Technical Administration of VSNKh and other agencies and “weaken” that of the Academy of Sciences.146
Communist Academy leaders like Shmidt took part in VARNITSO’s founding events, but the organization’s guiding light was the soon-to-be academician A. N. Bakh, who not coincidentally was also a member of the 1927 Miliutin commission. Bakh, a biochemist and VSNKh official who was brought into the Academy of Sciences in 1929, punctuated his report to Miliutin by calling for a cap on the Academy of Sciences budget and “unburdening” the academy of “a whole range of institutions.”147 VARNITSO became a willing ally, but still a fledgling junior partner, to the Communist Academy scholars who were pursuing their long-standing preoccupation with the Academy of Sciences.
As concrete plans to reorganize the membership and activities of the Academy of Sciences materialized in 1927, the same group of prominent Bolshevik intellectuals emerged to spearhead the effort. In August 1927 Miliutin, in the name of the Sovnarkom Section on Scientific Institutions, sent out the top secret list of forty-six potential candidates for membership in the Academy of Sciences, with a request that Pokrovskii write evaluations of each one.148
Perhaps the most important body dealing with the Academy of Sciences for the entire period 1925–29, however, was the so-called Enukidze commission. Designed as a special Sovnarkom link to the old academy after the jubilee, it met irregularly in 1926, to the chagrin of the old academy’s leadership, primarily to discuss budgetary issues and foreign travel. Its membership (apart from its namesake and chair) in 1926 included Miliutin as a representative of the Communist Academy and top Agitprop official Knorin, as well as Lunacharskii and Gorbunov. Yet the Enukidze commission was not as idle as the academicians believed. Although it was formed as a Sovnarkom organization, this affiliation seems to have been a fiction put out for the public and the academicians; Politburo protocols show the oversight body in fact became a special commission of the Party’s highest organ. By 1928 it defined its role as “political leadership over the Academy of Sciences.” Along with the Leningrad obkom of the Party, it directed the election campaign to the Academy of Sciences and took the crucial decision to unleash a “broad campaign” in the press on the elections.149
In March 1928 the Enukidze commission submitted its final report to the Politburo, which approved the commission’s list of potential candidates for membership in the Academy of Sciences. The list was divided into the party candidates, the first group of Communists later to be elected to the academy; figures “close to us”; and “acceptable candidacies.” The commission was authorized to change the list as circumstances dictated; the press campaign and an overhaul of the academy apparat (which took place in the major purge of 1929) were also approved. Given the persistent efforts of the party scholars to undermine the activities of the Academy of Sciences, one of the most striking resolutions the Politburo approved was to “decline the request of comrades Pokrovskii and Riazanov to remove their candidacies and to require them to agree to their election to the Academy [of Sciences].”150 Could it be that the two Communist Academy leaders were reluctant to defect to the rival academy and undermine their own party institutions?
The Politburo had recognized the need for tactical flexibility in upcoming elections to the Academy of Sciences; and the special disciplinary commissions took on the character of protracted negotiations between the academicians and a delegation of party scholars, diseR-genuously styled “representatives of the Union republics,” who insisted on narrowing down the number of candidates to the exact number of vacancies before the elections.151 Thus all-out crisis erupted when the three most controversial Marxist candidates—the dialectician Deborin, the French Revolution scholar (and Bukharin’s brother-in-law) Lukin, and the Marxist literary critic Friche—failed to receive the requisite two-thirds vote in a secret ballot of the academy’s general assembly on 12 January 1929. This inflammatory rejection of the tacit arrangements between party andacademy leaders was in an underlying sense logical and in its immediate manifestation accidental. Tolz has convincingly shown that majority of the old core of academicians from before 1917—and not just the most prominent scientists like Pavlov and Vernadskii—were more openly and resolutely critical of Marxism and Bolshevism up until 1929 than has previously been assumed. In addition, academicians seem to have underestimated the regime’s response as well as overestimated their own importance to it. But this famous episode was also an unexpected result of the Academy of Sciences’ traditional secret ballot, since academicians were determined not to sanction the ignomy of electing the three unanimously. Ironically, party scholars had traded so many concessions to get their handful of Marxists elected that the new post-election composition of the Academy of Sciences was even more inclined toward resistance, providing motivation for further reorganization and the secret police action known as the “academic affair” of 1929–30.152
During the siege of the Academy of Sciences following the rejection of three communist candidates, the threat to dissolve the institution into its component parts became a distinct possibility, which might have given the Communist Academy an unprecedented opportunity to step into its place. Dissolution was certainly used as a threat both before and after the rejection of the three communist candidates. In negotiations, the “representatives of the union republics” had raised the specter of the break-up of the institution as leverage. After the election debacle, a delegation of academicians was summoned from Leningrad to an emergency meeting in the Kremlin to convince the authorities to allow the three blackballed Communists to be reelected. While the conciliation was successful, Politburo member Kuibyshev still demanded the old academy be treated to “fire and sword.”153
It is unlikely the Academy of Sciences was genuinely close to destruction in 1929, but the fact that the Communist Academy was waiting in the wings did give the threat some bite. It is again ironic that what may have tilted the balance was the resolution of the new “faction of communist academicians,” the party scholars who had just established a communist bulwark at the venerable academy. The faction’s deliberations, sent to the Politburo in February 1929, argued that “the task in regard to the Academy of Sciences consists not in the destruction of this institution, but in its lengthy reconstruction.”154
In an extraordinary volte-face, the newly elected communist academicians, including Communist Academy luminaries Pokrovskii, Riazanov, Deborin, Bukharin, and Friche, now gave their imprimatur to a defense of the old academy.155 Moreover, it is in the deliberations of the “faction of communist academicians,” the leading representatives of party scholarship, that the future course of the Communist Academy first became perceptibly linked to a sudden shift in attitudes toward the Academy of Sciences. After establishing a bulwark for party scholarship within the venerable Academy of Sciences, the party scholars obviously began to perceive the decade-Iong institutional rivalry in an altered light.
The restructured older academy, not its communist counterpart, was now for the first time portrayed as the Soviet Union’s dominant scholarly institution of the future. “From the point of view of long-term prospects, it is imperative to hold the course for a single scientific institution, embracing various disciplines with a single method,” the communist academicians advised the Politburo. “The Academy of Sciences must be radically reformed, remade, and reconstructed.” It was simultaneously resolved that “the Communist Academy . . . must remain a scholarly center of communism in, so to speak, its pure culture.”156 Although the party intellectuals were perhaps unwilling to speIl out the fill implications for the Communist Academy so soon after their assumption of the title of academician, this formulation was damaging enough for an institution that had for a decade groomed itself for hegemony. The significance of this vote by the communist academicians was accentuated when the Poliburo terminated the Enukidze commission in March 1929 and in its place appointed the faction of communist academicians to a new Politburo commission, headed by Pokrovskii, which would plan the reorganization of the academy.157
The startling “change in landmarks” in the attitudes of the Bolshevik intellectuals is brought into sharp relief by successive statements by Riazanov. Immediately following the initial rejection of the three black-balled Bolsheviks by the academy assembly, Riazanov addressed the academicians in the tone frequently heard before at the Communist Academy. “We hypnotized ourselves with the name of the Academy of Sciences,” Riazanov provocatively phrased it. Referring to the closure of the French academy in an earlier revolution, he claimed that “we forgot that the bourgeoisie was considerably more daring than we. At the end of the eighteenth century they reckoned with the Acad~my in the cruelest, the most ferocious way.”158 Of course, Riazanov was likely to unleash this harsh attack immediately following the academicians’ initial rejection of the three communist candidates. But in a private letter to permanent secretary Ol’denburg shortly afterward, Riazanov was still unwilling to countenance a long-term commitment to the Academy of Sciences. While he retracted his previously discussed statements that “the time of Academies is past, they have outlived their epoch,” he now affirmed that only time would tell if the Academy of Sciences could live up its new all-union, Soviet role.159
Soon after the elections were over, Riazanov radically changed his attitude. He now assured his new colleagues that having spent “colossal energy” on the “winning” of the Academy of Sciences, he and his communist compatriots were unlikely to destroy it from within. Rather, they were interested in reforming and strengthening the institution. Most startling of all, Riazanov now permitted himself to disparage the achievements of the Communist Academy, in which he had been a guiding force from the beginning. This, he now said, was only a “pale copy of the organization of the Academy of Sciences. “160 It is likely Riazanov’s disillusionment with the Communist Academy, and by the same token that of other communist academicians, was stimulated by the increasingly militant infighting of the younger generation of academy workers and red professors, who were gathering strength in the institution and stepping up attacks on the Marxist authorities of the 1920s.161
Long-held attitudes about the future of the Communist Academy did not vanish overnight. Indeed, for several reasons they would persist for a few more years. For one thing, the Communist Academy retained its significance as a counterweight in scholarship as campaigns continued against the Academy of Sciences, its membership was overhauled, and calls for cultural revolution continued. During the wave of arrests that hit the Academy of Sciences in the “academic affair,” Communist Academy members justified the fabricated charges ideologically. A mass of as yet circumstantial evidence has linked Pokrovskii in particular to the suppression of his nonparty rivals. Yet the persecution of nonparty scholars had the effect of further opening Up the Academy of Sciences to party scholarship, since two-thirds of the approximately 150 scholars known to have been arrested were in the humanities.162 With the influx of party Marxists, it became virtually impossible for the Communist Academy to justify dominance over its former competitor.
It is difficult to escape the ironic conclusion that for the Communist Academy, the bolshevization of the Academy of Sciences was a Pyrrhic victory. Although it would not become apparent to all until after the upheaval of the Great Break, much of the party institution’s purpose, and its drive, had in one stroke withered away. As the Academy of Sciences vastly expanded, taking on an influx of young graduate students in 1929–30, admitting a flood of Marxist scholars, and boosting the number of communist staff members from 2 in 1928 to almost 350 by 1933, the Communist Academy’s claim to primacy among all Soviet scholarly institutions lost much of its political significance and practical allure.163 For the first time, the academy lost its place as chief institutional outlet for the aspirations of party scholarship. The quest for hegemony had become a double-edged sword.
The full Sovietization of academia would not occur, however, until after the downfall of its leading Marxist authorities of the 1920s. The group of Bolshevik intellectuals at the helm of the Communist Academy—Riazanov, Pashukanis, Friche, Kritsman, and the others—were virtually all overthrown in their disciplines, and their authority, like the careers of many of their younger followers, was wrecked. The old leadership of the Communist Academy lost most of its power in June 1930.164 The physically ailing Pokrovskii tenaciously weathered the storm, but met a similar, if delayed (and in his case, posthumous), fate.
The Communist Academy soon spiraled into rapid decline. The sudden political zig-zags of the Great Break—such as the escalation of the collectivization drive, which had caught the agrarian Marxists at the academy completely unprepared—undermined the institution’s position as the Party’s “scholarly organ.” Moreover, the rampant factionalism of the Great Break ended by “discrediting and demoralizing the participants,” making a mockery of the Communist Academy’s vaunted service role. While the reckoning inherent in the bolshevization of the Academy of Sciences could be partially postponed during the upheaval of 1930–32, the rehabilitation of the bourgeois specialists in the latter year stripped the Communist Academy of its former prominence. In its twilight existence in the 1930s its staff and institutions were whittled away; its own leaders increasingly abstained from the notion of methodological or organizational control over other institutions. In a stroke of supreme irany, the Communist Academy, by Sovnarkom decree of 8 February 1936, was finally swallowed by the Academy of Sciences.165
The bolshevization of the Academy of Sciences signaled that the movement of party scholarship—which had emerged toward the end of the civil war as its champions claimed the Communist Academy as its own—could no longer define itself as the opposite of a domestic, bourgeois, nonparty rival; the demise of RANION signaled that nonparty scholarship in the social sciences, as well, was no longer possible in the non-Marxist, semi-autonomous guise that had persisted there in the 1920s. These twin developments laid the groundwork for the emergence of a more integrated Soviet higher learning.166 In the merger of party and nonparty traditions, the Communist Academy’s monopolistic goals were conveniendy forgotten; but were they not in a sense achieved in the gargantuan, dominant new Academy of Sciences? Values the Communist Academy had embraced in the course of its protracted NEP-era quest for hegemony, such as the primacy of a service role and the principal of party-mindedness, were now proclaimed official standards for Soviet science as a whole.
1. E. Preobrazhenskll, “Blizhaishie zadachi Sotsialisticheskoi Akademii,” Vestnik Sotsialisticheskoi Akademii (henceforth cited as VSA), no. 1 (November 1922): 7, 9.
2. “Hegemony” is employed not in tbe Gramscian sense, but in the blunter meaning most frequently implicit in tbe Bolshevik use of tbe word gegemoniia, denoting wide-ranging domination, political subordination, and control over activities and resources.
3. Miliutin superseded Preobrazhenskii as the informally designated second-in-command in the presidium after the latter became a leader of the Trotskyist Opposition in 1923. In 1922 the presidium induded a Politburo member (Bukharin), Pokrovskii, Preobrazhenskii, Miliutin, an academy founder and member of the collegium of the commissariat of foreign affairs (Fedor A. Ro.tshtein), and a leading Bolshevik intellectual and editor of Izvestiia (Ivan 1. Svortsov-Stepanov). In 1924 it was expanded by adding the head of Agitprop, Bubnov; the historian of the French Revolution, Nikolai M. Lukin; and party scholars Volgin, Timiriazev, and Riazanov. “Vypiska iz protokola zasedaniia Orgbiuro TsK ot 14/VIII-22 g. No. 46,” RTsKhIDNI f. 147, op. 1, ed. khr. 33, 1. 2; for other Orgbiuro protocols from August 1922 and October 1924, see 1. 4 and 13. For a fulllisting of presidium members, see Joel Shapiro, “A History of the Communist Academy, 1918–1936” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1976), 356–59. A bureau of the presidium was created in 1926.
4. The phrase is in Fitzpatrick, Education, 68.
5. John Barber, “The Establishment of Intellectual Orthodoxy in the U.S.S.R., 1928–1934,” Past and Present 83 (May 1979): 153–54. On the origins and transformation of the concept of partiinost’, see the classic account in “Lenin and the Partyness of Philosophy,” chapter 2 of Joravsky, Soviet Marxism, 24–44.
6. “Primechanie M. Pokrovskogo,” VSA, no. 1 (November 1922): 38–39; V. A. Doroshenko, “Kommunisticheskaia Akademiia i ee rol’ v razrabotke voprosov otechestvennoi istorii (1918–1935)” (Candidate of Sciences diss., Moscow State University, 1968, 22).
7. M. N. Pokrovskii, “Kommunisticheskaia Akademiia (kratkii ocherk),” Informatsionnyi biulleten’ [Kommunisticheskoi Akademii], no. 3–4 June–December 1926): 1; Shapiro, “Communist Academy,” 38–40; Kendall Bailes, “Natural Scientists and the Soviet System,” in Koenker et al., Russian Civil War, 271.
8. “10 let Kommunisticheskoi Akademii. Vstupitel’noe slovo M. N. Pokrovskogo na iubileinom zasedanii plenuma Kommunisticheskoi akademii 25 maia 1928 g.,” Vestnik Kommunisticheskoi Akademii (henceforth cited as VKA), no. 28, (1928): 8–18.
9. “Polozhenie o Sotsialisticheskoi Akademii Obshchestvennykh Nauk,” no date, 1918, ARAN f. 643, op. 1, d. 158, l. 2–3; Shapiro, “Communist Academy,” 20–23, 31–38. The appendixes of this dissertation contain lists of academy members and the composition of its presidium from 1918 to 1930.
10. A. Udal’tsov, “Ocherk istorii Sotsialisticheskoi Akademii (1918–1922 g.g.),” VSA, no. 1 (November 1922): 14; “Protokol No. 1 zasedaniia Nauchno-Akademicheskoi sektsii Sotsialisticheskoi Akademii Obshchestvennykh Nauk,” 14 June 1918, GARF f. 3415, op. 1, d. 5, l. 1–3; “Protokol No. 2 Soedinennogo obshchego sobraniia Nauchno-Akademicheskoi i Uchebno-Prosvetitel’noi sektsii Sotsialisticheskoi Akademii Obshchestvennykh Nauk,” 8 August 1918, ibid., 1. 4–6. Early core members also included the Marxist literary critic Vladimir M. Friche, jurist Aleksandr G. Goikhbarg, and several others.
11. “Polozhenie o Sotsialisticheskoi Akademii,” 1918 (cited in full at note 9); “Raspisanie lektsii i zaniatii po sotsial’no-istoricheskomu razriadu Sotsialisticheskoi Akademii Obshchestvennykh Nauk na I1-i trimestr 1918–1919 uch. g.,” ARAN f. 597, op. 3, d. 5, l. 3; “Svedenie o sostave slushatelei Sotsialisticheskoi Akademii k 15 oktiabria 1918 g.,” GARF f. 5221, op. 4, d. 103, l. 2–3.
12. Udal’tsov, “Ocherk,” 23; “Protokol komiteta po delam slushatelei ot 21-go noiabria 1918,” GARF f. 3415, op. 1, d. 36, l. 1; Doroshenko, “Kommunisticheskaia Akademiia,” 33.
13. “Protokol obshchego sobraniia slushatelei Sotsialisticheskoi Akademii Obshchestvennykh Nauk” 21 February 1919, GARF f. 3415, op. 1, d. 26, l. 2.
14. Quoted in Udal’tsov, “Ocherk,” 17.
15. Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge, 97–98; Shapiro, “Communist Academy,” 43–45.
16. Shapiro, “Communist Academy,” 352.
17. “Protokol zasedaniia prezidiuma Sotsialisticheskoi Akademii Obshchestvennykh Nauk, 15 oktiabria 1921,” GARF f. 3415, op. 1, d. 86, l. 10. Even in 1922, because of “the poor condition of the Academy archive,” an academy member could not reconstruct a list of papers given there a few years before. Udal’tsov, “Ocherk,” 37.
18. Pokrovskii, “Kommunisticheskaia akademiia (kratkii ocherk),” 1–2; S. Lopatkin, “10 let Kommunisticheskoi akademii,” Revoliutsiia i kul’tura, no. 21 (15 November 1928), 41; Shapiro, “Communist Academy,” 68–73.
19. I. Grosman-Roshchin to A. V. Lunacharskii, 10 January 1920, GARF f. A-2306, op. 1, d. 429, l. 169.
20. “Protokol No. 5 Komissii po vyiasneniiu nuzhd vysshikh kommunisticheskikh uchebnykh zavedenii,” no date, RTsKhIDNl f. 17, op. 60, d. 4, l. 15.
21. D. A. Mikhailov, “Podgotovka rukovodiashchikh i teoreticheskikh kadrov partii v usloviiakh stroitel’stva sotsializma (1918–1932 gg.)” (Candidate of Sciences diss., Akademiia Obshchestvennykh Nauk pri TsK, Moscow, 1968), 121.
22. “Chlen prezidiuma S[otsialisticheskoi] A[kademii] M. Reisner deistvitel’nomu chlenu Akademii N. I. Bukharina,” 4 October 1918, GARF f. 3415, op. 1, d. 7, l. 136.
23. “10 let Kommunisticheskoi Akademii. Vstupitel’noe slovo M. N. Pokrovskogo.”
24. Ibid.
25. The University of Berlin then became the undisputed model for university reformers throughout Europe in the late nineteenth century, the formative period in the rise of the modern research university. See especially Björn Wittrock, “The Modern University: The Three Transformations,” in Sheldon Rothblatt and Björn Wittrock, eds., The European and American University since 1800: Historical and Sociological Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 303–62.
26. Preobrazhenskii, “Blizhaishie zadachi,” 6.
27. Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge, 91–122; Bailes, “Natural Scientists,” 271–80.
28. See Vera Tolz’s prosopographical work on the academicians, “Combining Professionalism and Politics: Russian Academicians and the Revolution” (ms. based on Ph.D. diss., University of Birmingham, 1993), chapo 2.
29. See especially I. D. Serebriakov, “Nepremennyi sekretar’ AN akademik Sergei Fedorovich Ol’denburg,” Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 1 (January–February 1994): 225, 229; K. V. Ostrovitianov, ed., Organizatsiia nauki v pervye gody sovetskoi vlasti (1917–1925). Sbornik dokumentov (Leningrad: Nauka, 1968), 24, 103–5.
30. Robert A. Lewis, “Government and the Technological Sciences in the Soviet Union: The Rise of the Academy of Sciences,” Minerva 15 (Summer 1977): 779–81.
31. V. P. Leonov et al., eds., Akademicheskoe delo, 1929–1931, vol. 1 (St. Petersburg: Biblioteka RAN, 1993), xiii, xiv; Kendall Bailes, Science and Russian Culture in an Age of Revolutions: V. I. Vernadskii and His Scientific School, 1863–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 153; “Otkrytie Sotsialisticheskoi Akademii,” Izvestiia, 2 October 1918, 3.
32. L. D. Trotskii to V. I. Lenin, 4 November 1921, in “Chetyre milliarda rublei uchenym Petrograda,” Vestnik Rossiiskoi akademii nauk, 64, no. 12 (1994): 1100–108.
33. Bailes, Science and Russian Culture, 157, citing 10 March 1923 letter in Vernadsky Collection, Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University.
34. “Stenogramma zasedaniia Biuro Prezidiuma Kommakademii,” 27 February 1926, ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 53, l. 2; see also “Protokol No. 1 Zasedaniia Biuro Prezidiuma ot 11/XII 1924 g.,” ibid., d. 26, l. 1.
35. The phrase, “vysshee uchenoe uchrezhdenie Soiuza SSR,” was actually ambiguous, carrying the meaning “supreme” and “higher” (as in higher education) at the same time. Only in the 1935 charter of the Academy of Sciences is the ambiguity resolved by adding the phrase, “uniting the most outstanding scientists in the country.” For successive Academy of Sciences charters, see Ustavy Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1724–1974 (Moscow: Nauka, 1974).
36. “Protokol No. 70 zasedanii Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) ot 8 iiulia 1925 goda,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 510, 1. 6; also ed. khr. 509, l. 1, 3, and ed. khr. 516, l. 1.
37. Loren Graham, The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party, 1927–1932 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), 74–77; on the Lenin Prize, A. V. Kol’tsov, Razvitie Akademii Nauk kak vysshego nauchnogo uchrezhdeniia SSSR, 1926–1932 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1982), 22.
38. “Protokol obshehego sobraniia ehlenov Kommunisticheskoi Akademii,” 17 April 1924, 385, 390. The policy of aecepting nonparty sotrudniki was criticized in the mid-1920s; certain parts of the academy (such as the Institute of World Economy) were known for employing more non-party members. A policy was set to reduce the nonparty ranks, and this became a major preoccupation in 1928. See “Protokol zasedaniia Prezidiuma Kom. Akademii ot 28 aprelia 1928 goda,” ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 190, l. 56–57, and also 1. 61, 87.
39. “Pervaia vsesoiuznaia konferentsiia marksistsko-leninskikh nauchno-issledovatel’skikh uchrezhdenii (22–25 marta 1928 g. Stenograficheskii otchet),” VKA, no. 26 (1928): 253. Cited hereafter as “Pervaia konferentsiia.”
40. “Obshchee sobranie chlenov Akademii. 19 dekahria 1922,” ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 8, l. 3.
41. “Protokol ohshchego Sohraniia Sotsialisticheskoi Akademii, 2-go noiahria 1919,” GARF f. 3415, op. 1, d. 64, l. 5; G. D. Alekseeva, “Kommunistieheskaia akademiia,” in M. V. Neehkina et al., eds., Ocherki istoni istoncheskoi nauki v SSSR (Moscow: Nauka, 1966), 4:202; V. A. Ul’ianovskaia, Formirovanie nauchnoi intelligentsii v SSSR, 1917–1937 gg. (Moscow: Nauka, 1966), 68–69.
42. F. N. Petrov, “Nauchno-issledovatel’skie instituty SSSR,” Molodaia gvardiia, no. 9–11 (October 1925): 146–49; the quotation is from the most signifieant piece of research on this topic, Loren R. Graham’s, “Formation of Soviet Research Institutes: A Combination of Revolutionary Innovation and International Borrowing,” Social Studies of Science 5 (August 1975): 317.
43. “Protokol obshehego sobraniia,” 17 April 1924, 385 (cited in full at note 38).
44. Jürgen Nötzold, “Die deutsch-sowjetischen Wissenschaftsbeziehungen,” in Rudolf Vierhaus and Bernhard von Brocke, eds., Forschung im Spannungsfeld von Politik und Gesellschaft: Geschichte und Struktur der Kaiser-Wilhelm-/Max-Planck-Gesellschaft (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlag, 1990), 778–800; “Plenarnoe zasedanie prezidiuma Komm. Akademii, 15-go iiunia 1926 g.,” ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 45, l. 4.
45. “Pervaia konferentsiia,” 266; Graham, “Formation,” 322; Fitzpatrick, Education, 231–32.
46. O. N. Znamenskii, Intelligentsiia nakanune velikogo oktiabria (fevral’-oktiabr’ 1917 g.) (Leningrad: Nauka, 1988), 152–79. The most illuminating discussion of the values of the academic intelligentsia in prerevolutionary Russia is in James C. McClelland, Autocrats and Academics: Education, Culture, and Socicty in Tsarist Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 58–94.
47. Quoted in Udal’tsov, “Ocherk,” 17. Pokrovskii gives a critique of bourgeois academic conventions in his introduction to Trudy IKP, 3–5.
48. On the struggle in academia after 1917 from the non-Bolshevik perspective of university participants, see Mikhail M. Novikov, Ot Moskvy do N’iu Iorka: Moia zhizn’ v nauke i v polinke (New York: Izdatel’stvo im. Chekhova, 1952), and Sergei Zhaba, Petrogradskoe studenchestvo v bor’be za svobodnuiu shkolu (Paris: I. Povolozky, 1922). On Bolshevik rejection of “liberal” academic ideals, S. A. Fediukin, Bor’ba s burzbuaznoi ideologiei v usloviiakh perekhoda k Nepu (Moscow: Nauka, 1977), 95–96 and passim. The breakdown of this communitarian ideal is a major theme in Shapiro’s dissertation.
49. “Protokol zasedaniia Prezidiuma Sotsialisticheskoi Akademii Obshchestvennykh Nauk, 26/III-22 g.,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 230, l. 4–5.
50. “Protokol obshchego sobraniia chlenov Sotsialisticheskoi Akademii,” 11 October 1923, VSA, no. 6 (October–December 1923): 429–30.
51. “Rezoliutsiia po voprosam Propagandy, pechati i agitatsii priniatsia [sic] Agitpropsekts. XII-go parts”ezda 25.423,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr; 367, 1. 24–42; KPSS v resoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh s”ezdov, konferentsii i plenumov TsK, 5th ed. (Moscow: Politizdat, 1984), 3:106.
52. “Protokol obshchego sobraniia,” 11 October 1923, 420–21 (cited in full at note 50).
53. “Protokol obshchego sobraniia,” 17 April 1924, 373–93 (cited in full at note 38).
54. “10 Jet Komrnunisticheskoi Akademii,” 17.
55. “Vypiska iz protokola No. 70 zasedaniia Orgbiuro TsK ot 13/III-25 g.,” RTsKhIDNI f. 147, op. 1, d. 33, l. 15; “Polozbenie ob Institute Sovetskogo Stroitel’stva pri Kommunisticheskoi Akademii,” no date, ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 33, l. 57; “Institut sovetskogo stroitel’stva,” Informatsionnyi biulleten’, no. 9 (March–May 1928): 33.
56. E. A. Rees, State Control in Russia: Tbe Rise and Fall of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate, 1920–34 (London: Macmillan, 1987), 93.
57. Unitided speech by Kuibyshev, no date, prob. 1925, ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 39, l. 1–34; “Stenogramma Zasedaniia Prezidiuma Kommunisticheskoi Akademii, 11/VI-27,” ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 97, l. 18–27; “Zasedanie Prezidiuma Kommunisticheskoi Akademii. 2/IV-27 g.,” ibid., d. 93, l. 19–23.
58. “Stenogramma Zasedaniia Prezidiuma Akademii, 11/VI-27,” 1. 18–19, 26, and d. 91, l. 10 (cited in full at note 57).
59. Oded Eran, The Mezhdunarodniki: An Assessment of Professional Expertise in Soviet Foreign Policy (Tel Aviv: Turtledove Publishing, 1979), 17–43; Gerhard Duda, Jenö Varga und die Geschichte des Instituts für Weltwirtschaft und Weltpolitik in Moskau, 1921–1970 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994), 45–71.
60. Solomon, Soviet Agrarian Debate; on consulting see 26, 215–16 n. 73.
61. Viacheslav M. Molotov to Kritsman, 24 November 1927, ARAN f. 528, op. 4, d. 45, l. 1; Molotov to Kritsman, 2 September 1927, ibid., 1. 2.
62. Shapiro, “Communist Academy,” 112–13; see also 43–48.
63. For example, see Knorin to Stalin, Molotov, Kossior, 22 April 1926, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 800, l. 4.
64. “Ustav Obshchestva Biologov-Marksistov,” no date, ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 163, l. 6.
65. Although “important professionals who genuinely believed that science could be enriched by a dialectical perspective” joined the materialist-biologists in the early days, by 1930 I. I. Prezent, who in fact graduated with a social science degree from Leningrad University in 1926 and later became Lysenko’s closest partner, was president of the Society of Materialist-Biologists and a major force in the Leningrad branch of the Communist Academy (LOKA). See Douglas R. Weiner, Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 123–33.
66. See V. Egorsbin, “K voprosu o politike marksizma v oblasti estestvoznaniia,” PZM, no. 7–8 (June–August 1926): 123–34, esp. 134. The classic work on the subject is joravsky’s Soviet Marxism and Natural Science. Loren Graham emphasizes the creative role Marxism played in the work of some scientists in “The Role of Dialectical Materialism: The Authentic Phase,” in his Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 99–120. On natural science policy and institutional development in the natural sciences during NEP (focusing on physics) see especially Paul Josephson, Physics and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), and (centering on ecology and the life sciences) Weiner, Models of Nature.
67. “Pervaia konferentsiia,” 252–53, 263; Joravsky, Soviet Marxism, 119–69.
68. M. N. Pokrovskii, “O deiatel’nosti Kommunisticheskoi Akademii,” no date, 1928, ARAN f. 540, op. 4, d. 31, l. 8.
69. “Stenograficheskii otchet Zasedaniia Biuro Prezidiuma Kommunisticheskoi Akademii. 24/XII-27,” ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 119, l. 36.
70. “Osnovnye momenty godovoi raboty sektsii estestvennykb i tochnykh nauk Komakademii,” no date, 1926, ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 58, l. 8–9.
71. “Zasedanie Prezidiuma Kommunisticheskoi Akademii 2/IV-27 g.,” ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 93, l. 3. During a 1931 reorganization of the academy, the Politburo ordered the natural science section to be eliminated, provoking a protest from Pokrovskii. M. N. Pokrovskii, “Politbiuro TsK VKP(b). Kopiia L. M. Kaganovichu,” no date, RTsKhIDNI f. 147, op. 1, d. 33, l. 73.
72. “O rabote Komakademii (Postanovlenie TsK VKP(b) ot 22 iiulia 1927 g.),” Pravda, 26 July 1927, 6.
73. “Zasedanie Prezidiuma: Kommunisticheskoi Akademii 2/IV-27 g.,” 1. 1–2 (cited in full at note 71).
74. “M. N. Pokrovskii. V Upravlenie delami Sovnarkom 12 maia 1926,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 4, d. 170, l. 3–4. Materials from the academy library in 1928 refer to a “secret office” where such editions were perhaps shelved. “Plan rabot Biblioteki Kom. Akademii na 1928/29 akademicheskii god,” no date, ARAN f. 528, op. 3, d, 5, l. 6.
75. “Zasedanie Prezidiuma Kommunisticheskoi Akademii. 2/IV-27 g.,” 1. 14–15 (cited in full at note 71).
76. Ibid., 1. 16.
77. “Vypiska iz protokola No. 100 zasedaniia Orgbiuro TsK ot 28.III.27 goda,” RTsKhIDNI f. 147, op. 1, d. 33, l. 19; “Proekt Politbiuro,” no date, 1927, ARAN f. 528, op. 3, d. 31, l. 19–20. See also ARAN f. 1759, op. 1, d. 317, l. 1. The Politburo approved the text drafted by tbe Orgburo commission in its meeting of 27 June 1927; see RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. kbr. 641, 1. 5. Miliutin’s copy can be found in GARF f. 3415, op. 2, d. 4, l. 22–23.
78. Pokrovskii, “O deiatel’nosti Kommunisticheskoi Akademii,” 1–17 (cited in full at note 68); and “Kommunisticheskaia akademiia (kratkii ocherk),” 5.
79. S. Lopatkin, “Kommunisticheskaia akademiia—tsentr nauchnoi kommunisticheskoi mysli,” Kommunisticheskaia revoliutsiia, no. 14 (June 1929): 83–84.
80. One of the more spectacular ideological directives of NEP can be reconstructed from Riazanov’s letter of resignation to the presidium of the academy in 1931; he gave as his reason for leaving the editorial board of Pod znamenem marksizma the ban on criticizing Bukharin’s Historical Materialism, a chief party textbook. See Riazanov, “V prezidium Kommunisticheskoi Akademii,” 8 February 1931, RTsKhIDNI f. 147, op. 1, d. 33, l. 52–59. Riazanov appears to have left the editorial board between issue 4–5 in 1923 and the third issue of 1924. If Riazanov’s description of this interdiction is accurate, it explains Vucinich’s puzzled exclamation about Bukharin’s treatise: “It had no competition. The Communist Academy could not find either an individual or a team to prepare a comprehensive textbook on historical materialism.” Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge, 82–83.
81. For example, Ia. Iakovlev, “Menshevizm v proletkul’tovskoi odezhde,” Pravda, 4 January 1923, 2.
82. Antonova and Drozdova, Neizvestnyi Bogdanov, 2:190–92, 198, 209; Petr Alexandrovich Pliutro, “Alexandr Bogdanov on the Period of ‘War Communism,’” Revolutionary Russia 5 (June 1992): 46–52; John Biggart, “Alexandr Bogdanov and the Revolutions of 1917,” Sbornik, no. 10 (Summer 1984): 8–10, and “Alexander Bogdanov and the Theory of a ‘New Class,’” Russian Review 49 (July 1990): 265–82. Bogdanov’s 1923 formulations to the GPU, it hardly needs to be said, undoubtedly cast his newer theoretical stance toward the Soviet state in a favorable light.
83. A. A. Bogdanov, “V Prezidium Sots. Akademii,” 6 November 1923, RTsKhlDNI f. 259, op. 1, d. 63, l. 1–7. Lengthy statements to his interrogators from the former KGB archives have been published in “‘Delo’ A. A. Bogdanova (Malinovskogo),” Voprosy istorii, no. 9 (1994): 6–11, 14–15, but the journal failed to supply archival identification information for these documents. His diary notes of “five weeks with the GPU,” composed on his release on 25 October 1923, has been published in Antonova and Drozdova, Neizvestnyi Bogdanov, 1:34–44.
84. “‘Delo’ A. A. Bogdanova,” 7–10, 14–16; Bogdanov, “V Prezidium,” 6 November 1923 (cited in full at n. 83).
85. “Materialist,” review of N. Lenin and G. Plekhanov, Protiv A. Bogdanova (Moscow: Krasnaia nov’, 1923), in PZM, no. 8–9 (August–September 1923): 285–86; Bogdanov, “V Prezidium,” 6 November 1923 (cited in full at n. 83).
86. “Protokol zasedaniia prezidiuma Sotsialisticheskoi akademii 17-go noiabria 1923,” ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 20, l. 25.
87. A. A. Bogdanov, “V Prezidium Sotsialisticheskoi Akademii,” 7 November 1923, RTsKhlDNI f. 259, op. 1, d. 63, l. 8–13.
88. “Zasedanie komissii uchenogo komiteta TsIK Soiuza SSR po obsledovaniiu nauchnykh uchrezhdenii pri Kommunisticheskoi Akademii. 17 fevralia 1927,” ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 145, l. 5–6.
89. See the discussion in A. A. Bogdanov, “Peredely nauchnosti rassuzhdeniia,” 14 May 1927, ARAN f. 350, op. 2, d. 144, l. 1–67.
90. “Protokol zasedaniia redaktsii ‘Vestnika,’” 30 December 1922, ARAN f. 370, op. 1, d. 1, l. 10; for example, see the discussion of censorship in A. V. Lunacharskii, “Teatral’naia politika sovetskoi vlasti,” 2 October 1926, ARAN f. 350, op. 2, d. 90, l. 1–68.
91. “Protokol no. 64 Otkrytogo sobraniia iacheiki RKP(b) Komakademii ot 17 dekabria 1924,” RGAODgM f. 477, op. 1, d. 4, l. 124–26; “Protokol zasedaniia prezidiuma Sotsialisticheskoi Akademii, 1. 25 (cited in full at note 86); A. Deborin, “G. Lukach i ego kritika marksizma,” PZM, no. 6–7 (June-July 1924): 49–69.
92. Ia. Metunovskii, “Sekretariu Sotsakademii. 19/II-1924,” ARAN’!. 370, op. 1, d. 1, l. 15.
93. Trotskii’s adherents did achieve a significant degree of support in the academy cell, but outright opposition majorities like those found at other party schools did not materialize there. “Protokol No. 28 zakrytogo sobraniia iacheiki pri Sots. Akademii 12/XII-23 g.,” RGAODgM f. 477, op. 1, d. 2, l. 25 ob.-26; for other cell protocols from 1923–24, see 1. 33, and d. 4, l. 107–12, l. 50–51.
94. Until the mid-1920s the cell united the party organizations of the academy with the Marx-Engels Institute and the Lenin Library, because of the small numbers of Communists at those institutions. The cell thus spent an inordinate amount of time on the professional disputes and other problems outside the academy. See RGAODgM f. 477, op. 1, d. 2, l. 1; d. 6, l. 14; and d. 9, l. 57.
95. “Protokol zasedaniia Prezidiuma Kommunisticheskoi Akademii ot 30/I-1926 g.,” ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 46, l. 21.
96. “Zasedanie Prezidiuma Kommunisticheskoi Akademii. 2/IV-27 g.,” 1. 36–37 (cited in full at note 71); Shapiro, “Communist Academy,” 167–69.
97. Cherepnina, “Deiatel’nost’,” 70–71.
98. “Kursy po izucheniiu marksizma pri S. A.,” VSA, no. 4 (April–June 1923): 459–64; “Khronika,” VKA, no. 12 (1925): 369–70; “Khronika,” VKA, no. 15 (1926): 338; Shapiro, “Communist Academy,” 114–17; “Protokol zasedaniia Biuro iacheiki i Kurskoma [Kursov marksizma] Komakademii 29-go Maia 1925,” RGAODgM f. 474, op. 1, d. 6, l. 43.
99. According to one informer, these documents ineluded artieles by Zinov’ev and Trotskii on international and inner-party questions. “Protokol 39 Zasedaniia Biuro iacheiki VKP(b) Kommunisticheskoi Akademii ot 12-go oktiabria 1926 g.,” RGAOOgM f. 477, op. 1, d. 9, l. 62–64; “Otvetstvennyi sekretar’ iacheiki Kom. Akademii Mutnov. V Tsentral’nuiu kontrol’nuiu komissiiu VKP(b). Kopiia: V Sekretariat TsK VKP(b),” 22 October 1926, ibid., 1. 70. On the Central Committee measures, “Po Rossii,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, 16 October 1926, 14, and 1 November 1926; “Posles”ezdovskaia bor’ba s oppozitsiei,” Sotsialisticheskii vestnik, 31 March 1926, 13–14.
100. “Protokol 23 zasedaniia Biuro iacheiki VKP(b) Kom. Akademii ot 26/IX-27 g.,” RGAOOgM f. 477, op. 1, d. 15, l. 83–85; “Protokol obshchego zakrytogo sobraniia iaclteiki VKP(b) Kom. Akademii 28/IX-27 g.,” ibid., d. 13, l. 28–29; and RGAOOgM f. 477, op. 1, d. 15, l. 37–39, 175–76, 179–83, 187–89.
101. “Stenograficheskii otchet Plenuma Kommunisticheskoi Akademii. 29-go ianvaria 1927 goda,” ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 85, l. 21–22.
102. RGAODgM f. 477, op. 1, d. 13, l. 57; “Stenograrnma zasedaniia Prezidiuma. 12 noiabria 1927 g.,” ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 99, l. 52.
103. “Zasedanie komissii uchenogo komiteta TsIK,” 1. 8 (cited in full at note 88); “Plenum Komm. Akademii 20 marta 1928 g.,” Informatsionnyi biulleten’, no. 9 (March–May 1928): 3; “Plenum Kommunisticheskoi Akademii,” ibid., no. 5 (January–March 1927): 1.
104. “Protokol zasedaniia Biuro iacheiki VKP(b) Kom. Akademii ot 11/III-1927 g.,” RGAODgM f. 477, op. 1, d. 15, l. 26. Pokrovskii charged that in 1927 some papers had been “masked” or “half-masked” statements for the opposition; neither in the realm of theory or polities would the aeademy become a “parliament of opinions.” Pokrovskii, “O deiatel’nosti Kommunistieheskoi Akademii,” 1. 16 (cited in full at note 68).
105. “Protokol No. 14/31 zasedaniia Prezidiuma Kommunistieheskoi Akademii ot 8/XII-1928 g.,” ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 172, l. 36–37.
106. “Protokol No. 4 obshehego otkrytogo sobraniia iaeheiki Kom. Akademii ot 16/VIII-29 g. po chistke t. Arutiuniana,” RGAODgM f. 477, op. 1, d. 26, sviazka 2, 1. 76–77, also 1. 78–79, 82–85, 108–9, 111.
107. “Otehet Biuro iaeheiki VKP(b) Kom. Akadernii za vrernia s oktiabria 1926 po mai 1927 g.,” RGAODgM f. 477, op. 1, d. 15, l. 55–59; “Protokol No. 12 sobraniia iacheiki Kom. Akademii, 23/IX-27,” ibid., d. 26, sviazka 2, 1. 122–38; “Rezoliutsiia biuro iacheiki Kom. Akademii po dokladu uchenogo sekretaria prezidiuma K. A.,” no date, late 1928, ibid., d. 22, l. 226–27; “Protokol no. 7 zasedaniia Biuro iacheiki VKP Kom. Akademii 20 fevraIia 1928,” 1. 56–57; “Protokol no. 8 zasedaniia biuro iacheiki VKP(b) Kom. Akademii 27 fev. 1928,” ibid., 1. 64–66.
108. Untitled report on party cell activities, probably May 1929, RGAODgM f. 477, op. 1, d. 28, sviazka 2, 1. 64.
109. “Rezoliutsiia na obshchem sobranii iacbeiki pri Komakademii 15/IX-28 g.,” RGAODgM f. 477, op. 1, d. 13, l. 20–21.
110. Lopatkin, “Kommunisticbeskaia akademiia,” 84.
111. Stalin’s famous intervention on the historical front is discussed, among others, by George Enteen, in his Soviet Scholar-Bureaucrat, 160.
112. See Miliutin’s report in “Zasedanie komissii uchenogo komiteta TsIK,” 1. 7–8 (cited in full at note 88).
113. See the materials on the BSE from 1924–29 in ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 7.
114. “Zapiska Komakademii v Prezidium TsIK SSSR ob izdanii Bol’shoi Sovetskoi Entsiklopedii,” in Ostrovitianov, Organizatsiia nauki, 222–23; “Ot redaktsii,” in BSE, 1st ed., 1:i–ii.
115. V. Nevskii, “Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia,” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, no. 7 (October-November 1926): 113; “Zasedanie Prezidiuma Kommunisticheskoi Akademii 2/IV-27 g.,” 1. 7 (cited in full at note 71); “Protokol No. 7 Zasedaniia Biuro iacheiki,” 1. 56–57 (cited in full at note 107).
116. See, for example, the request from Glavlit censor and academy member Lebedev-Polianskii to compile an anthology on cultural questions as a favor to the MK. “V Prezidium Komm. Akademii. 18/II-28,” ARAN f. 597, op. 3, d. 7, l. 1; “Protokol No. 8 Zasedaniia Prezidiuma Kommunisticheskoi Akademii ot 12-go maia 1928 g.,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 12, l. 40–42.
117. Quoted in Lopatkin, “Kommunisticheskaia akademiia,” 84.
118. “Pervaia konferentsiia,” 246, 273; on textbooks, Enteen, “Soviet Historiography.”
119. Graham, Soviet Academy of Sciences, 43–79.
120. “Otchet o rabote kafedry Marksizma-Leninizma pri U.A.N. za vremia s 1-go aprelia 1926 g. po 1 marta 1928 g.,” ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 170, l. 111–66; “Pervaia konferentsiia,” 246.
121. These committees, manned by virtually the entire Communist Academy leadership, were largely limited to discussing the Communist Academy and its closest neighbors, the Lenin Institute and the Marx-Engels Institute. “Pom. Direktora Instituta Lenina Vl. Sorin. V Prezidium Kommunisticheskoi Akademii. 29 oktiabria 1927,” ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 138, l. 2; “Protokol No. 11 Zasedaniia komissii po soglasovaniiu deiatel’nosti nauchno-issledovatel’skikh uchrezhdenii ot 28 aprelia 1928,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 10, l. 23–24; M. N. Pokrovskii, “V sekretariat TsK. 31/V-28 g.,” RTsKhIDNI f. 147, op. 1, d. 33, l. 26.
122. “Vypiska iz protokola No. 122 zasedaniia Orgbiuro TsK ot 27.V.29,” RTsKhIDNI f. 147, op. 1, ed. khr. 33, 1. 28–29; “Pervaia konferentsiia"; “Protokol zasedaniia komissii po sozyvu 2-i konferentsii marksistsko-leninskikh nauchno-issledovatel’skikh uchrezhdenii ot 28 ianvaria 1929,” ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 247, l. 1, also 1. 22, 31, 101; “2-aia konferentsiia marksistskikh-Ieninskikh nauchnykh uchrezhdenii. 8-go aprelia 1929. Stenogramma,” ibid., d. 250, l. 2–79.
123. This seems why Pokrovskii continued to push the TsK Secretariat for a “party commission” to found an “all-union scientific Gosplan, if not an all-union Glavnauka,” in which the Communist Academy would be given a leading role along with Agitprop. Pokrovskii, “V Sekretariat TsK VKP(b). Kopiia APO TsK,” no date, probably March 1929, RTsKhIDNI, f. 147, op. 1, ed. khr. 33, 1. 75–77.
124. RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 676, 1. 7, 11–12. Kendall Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin: Origins of the Soviet Technological Intelligentsia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 76.
125. S. Melent’ev, “Chem dolzhna byt’ Kommunisticheskaia Akademiia,” no date, GARF f. 3316, op. 45, d. 34, l. 1–5.
126. On the successive changes in RANION’s structure, see G. D. Alekseeva, “Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia nauchno-issledovatel’skikh institutov obshchestvennykh nauk (RANION), 1924–1929,” in Nechkina et al., Ocherki istorii, 4: 233–37.
127. “Protokol obshchego sobraniia professorov, prepodavatelei i nauchnykh sotrudnikovchlenov RKP,” 12 January 1923, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 492, l. 1–3. The RANION charter is in RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 60, d. 486, l. 30–31. On the circumstances in which RANION was organized as a concession to the nonparty professoriat, which were apparently known to only a few of the top Bolsheviks involved in academic affairs, see “Stenogramma vystupleniia Riazanova D. B. na soveshchanii pri Agit-prop TsK,” no later than 6 March 1928, RTsKhIDNI f. 301, op. 2, d. 14, l. 2–3.
128. “Soveshchanie Narkomprosov Soiuznykh i Avtonomnykh Respublik. I-e zasedanie–27 oktiabria 1924,” ARAN f. 1759, on. 2, d. 5, l. 64. Pokrovskii, Udal’tsov, and Friche were also on the presidium of RANION in the mid-1920s and helped shape admission policies there. “Instruktsiia o priemnoi i stipendial’noi komissiiakh pri Prezidiuma RANION na 1926 g.,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 10, l. 21–22.
129. D. A. Magerovskii, “Rossiiskaia assotsiatsiia nauchno-issledovatel’skikh institutov obshchestvennykh nauk (RANION),” Pechat’ i revoliutsiia, no. 7 (October-November 1927): 276–84.
130. “Zapiska Biuro Fraktsii Nauchno-Issledovatel’skogo Instituta (RANION),” no date, ARAN f. 528, op. 3, d. 2, l. 2; A. V. Lunacharskii, “Nauka v SSSR,” transcript of lecture, no date, probo 1928, RTsKhIDNI f. 142, op. 1, d. 179, l. 47.
131. “Pervaia konferentsiia,” 257–60; “Sostav nauchnykh rabotnikov nauchno-Issledovatel’skikh institutov, vkhodiashchikh v RANION na 1 ianvaria 1928 g.,” RTsKhIDNI f. 150, op. 1, d. 92, l. 42.
132. “Protokol No. 11,” 1. 23 (cited in full at note 121).
133. “Protokol zasedaniia Biuro Prezidiuma Kommunisticheskoi Akademii ot 19-go maia 1928 g.,” ARAN f. 1759, on. 2, d. 12, l. 19. On the Institute of History, “Vypiska iz protokola No. 105 zasedaniia Orgbiuro TsK ot 8 marta 1929 g.,” RTsKhIDN1 f. 147, op. 1, d. 33, l. 27; T. 1. Kalistratova, Institut istorii FON MGURANION (1921–1929) (Nizhnii Novgorod: Izdatel’stvo “Nizhnii Novgorod,” 1992).
134. “Skhema otchetnogo doklada o rabote Komm. Akademii na konferentsii marksistskoleninskikh nauchno-issledovatel’skikh uchrezhdenii 8-go aprelia 1929 g.,” ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 248, l. 1, 6; “Proekt Reorganizatsii RANION-a,” no date, 1929, ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 10, l. 27–30; Shapiro, “Communist Academy,” 215–16. On the Timiriazev Academy, see Solomon, Soviet Agrarian Debate, 156–57, and “Protokol soveshchaniia po voprosu o Timiriazevskom nauchno-issledovatel’skom institute, 3/VII-29,” ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 240, l. 94.
135. “Vypiska iz protokola No. 2 zasedaniia Biuro Prezidiuma Kommunisticheskoi Akademii ot 16-go fevralia 1929 g.,” ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 240, l. 5–6; Shapiro, “Communist Academy,” 218; Alekseeva, “Kommunisticheskaia akademiia,” 206.
136. “Protokol No. 8 Zasedaniia Prezidiuma Kom. Akademii ot 31 fevralia 1930 g.,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 12, l. 59–61; Shapiro, “Communist Academy,” 258-61. The Vestnik also resolved that the aeademy must respond to “current political campaigns” in addition to conducting “scientifie-researeh work.” “Ob itogakh raboty i novykh zadaehakh, stoiashehikh pered Komakademiei na novom etape,” VKA, no. 37–38 (1930): 11.
137. Graham’s Soviet Academy of Sciences remains the classic work on the topic. See also Aleksey E. Levin, “Expedient Catastrophe: A Reeonsideration of the 1929 Crisis at the Soviet Academy of Sciences,” Slavic Review 47 (Summer 1988): 261–80. The most important piece of seholarship to date in Russian is by the late F. F. Perehenok, “Akademiia nauk na ‘velikom perelome,’” in Zven’ia: Istoricheskii almanakh, vypusk 1 (Moscow: Feniks, 1990), 163–235.
138. A full-fledged exploration of the relationship between the two academies is contained in Michael David-Fox, “Symbiosis to Synthesis: The Communist Academy and the Bolshevization of the Soviet Academy of Scienees, 1918-1929” (fortheoming).
139. “M. N. Pokrovskii. Predsedateliu Sovnarkoma RSFSR A. 1. Rykovu. 25.XI.1924,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 4, d. 96, l. 1–2; “Tezisy po dokladu Glavnauki o Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk,” no date, 1925, ibid., op. 2, d. 18, l. 4–5; “Protokol No. 70 zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK RKP(b) ot 8 iiulia 1925 goda,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 510, 1. 6; also ed. khr. 509, 1. 3, and ed. khr. 516, 1. 1.
140. “Protokol No. 86 zasedaniia Politbiuro ot 29-go oktiabria 1925 goda,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 526, 1. 5. A new set of theses from Glavnauka called for close “ideological and organizational ties” between the Academy of Sciences and the Narkompros organs Glavnauka and GUS (the State Scholarly Council headed by Pokrovskii). “Tezisy po dokladu Glavnauki o Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk,” 1. 4–5 (cited in full at n. 139).
141. “Ustav Akademii Nauk SSSR. Proekt komissii SNK SSSR–Pred. V. P. Miliutin,” 3 March 1926, ARAN f. 350, op. 1, d. 284, l. 14–27; “Protokol zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) ot 26-go maia 1927 goda,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 636, 1. 4–5. At this meeting the Politburo ordered the number of academicians to be boosted from forty to seventy and ratified the infamous clause in the AN charter that allowed for dismissal of academicians if their activities “were clearly to the detriment of the USSR.” See also Graham, Soviet Academy of Sciences, 87–91.
142. E. Voronov to V. P. Miliutin, October 1927, GARF f. 3415, op. 2, d. 5, l. 29. Twelve copies of this document were sent. Others who received it were Gorbunov, Krinitskii, Litvinov, and Vyshinskii.
143. “Protokol No. 1 Zasedaniia Komissii SNK SSSR po rasmotreniiu otcheta Akademii Nauk SSSR,” 21 June 1927, ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 18, l. 49.
144. M. N. Pokrovskii, “K otchetu o deiate!’nosti Akadenili Nauk za 1926 g.,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 18, l. 88–102; published in Zven’ia, 2d ed. (Moscow–St. Petersburg: Feniks, 1992), 580–99.
145. V. P. Volgin, report for 1927 Miliutin commission (untitled), GARF f. 3415, op. 2, d. 3, l. 29–30.
146. I. A. Tugarinov, “VARNITSO i Akademiia nauk SSSR (1927–1937 gg),” Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki, no. 4 (1989): 46–55.
147. A. N. Bakh, “Otzyv ob otchete o deiatel’nosti Akademii Nauk za 1926 g.,” GARF f. 3415, op. 2, d. 3, l. 40–42.
148. “Zav. Otedelom nauchnykh uchrezhdenii pri SNK SSSR M. N. Pokrovskomu. 29/VIII-27 g.,” ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 18, l. 378–80. Pokrovskii’s responses are on 1. 381–83.
149. “Protokol No. 91 zasedaniia Politbiuro ot 19–go noiabria 1925 goda,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 531, 1. 9; “Povestka zasedaniia komissii SNK SSSR po sodeistviiu rabotam Akademii Nauk Soiuza SSR,” 9 December 1926, GARF f. A-2306, op. 1, d. 3438, l. 79–80; for other materials, see 1. 18–41, 47, 70–73, 77; M. N. Pokrovskii to A. S. Enukidze, June 1928 (no day given), RTsKhIDNI f. 147, op. 1, d. 33, l. 80. It seems that a troika of party scholars was also closely involved with the Enukidze commission: the ubiquitous Pokrovskii; Sverdlov Communist University rector Martyn N. Liadov; and Otto Iul’evich Shmidt, a prominent figure in the Communist Academy and its leading authority in the natural sciences. “K voprosu o rashirenii funktsii Komissii A. S. Enukidze,” no date, ARAN f. 1759, op. 2, d. 18, l. 384–85.
150. “Protokol No. 16 zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) ot 22-go marta 1928 goda,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 678, 1. 3; “Postanovlenie komissii Politbiuro po voprosu o vyborakh akademikov,” approved by Politburo 22 March 1928, ibid., 1. 11–13.
151. The “republican” representatives included Moseow-based Communist Aeademy members Miliutin, Shmidt, the rising Marxist legal theorist Pashukanis, and younger members I. K. Luppol and P. M. Kerzhentsev. Tbe voluminous stenographic reports of the commissions are in GARF f. 3316, op. 45, d. 1–34.
152. Tolz, “Combining Professionalism and Politics”; Perchenok, “Akademiia nauk,” 186 and passim; Elena Grigor’evna Ol’denburg, “Zapiska o rabote Sergeia Fedorovicha Ol’denburga v kaehestve nepremennogo sekretaria Akademii Nauk v 1928–1929,” in ARAN (St. P.) f. 208, op. 2, ed. khr. 57, 1. 120 and passim. I am grateful to Daniel Todes for presenting me a copy of this unique diary.
153. Perchenok, “Akademiia nauk,” 184–85, 183, 188.
154. “V Politbiuro TsK VKP(b). Protokol zasedaniia fraktsii kommunistov-akademikov ot 25.II.29 g.,” RTsKhIDNI f. 147, op. 1, d. 33, l. 105; original emphasis.
155. After the application of enormous pressure on the Academy of Sciences, the three black-balled party scholars were elected in a hastily called second vote in early 1929. In this meeting of communist academicians, then, only Lukin and another Communist Academy member, G. M. Krzhizhanovskii, were absent.
156. “V Politbiuro Tsk,” (cited in full at note 154). Academicians Pokrovskii, Riazanov, Friche, Bukharin, Deborin, and Gubkin and Sovnarkom’s Gorbunov took part in the discussion. Of these communist academicians all but Gubkin were Ieaders of the Communist Academy.
157. “Protokol No. 68 zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK VKP(b) ot 14-go marta 1929,” RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 3, ed. khr. 730, 1. 5.
158. “Stenogramma vystupleniia Riazanova D. B. na zasedanie Akademii Nauk,” no earlier than 12 January 1929, RTsKhIDNI f. 301, op. 1, d. 80, l. 1–14.
159. D. B. Riazanov to S. F. Ol’denburg, no date, RTsKhIDNI f. 301, op. 1, d. 80, l. 41–50. Of the patty scholars, Ol’denburg and other academicians judged Riazanov and Bukharin as least inclined to radically disrupt the work of the Academy of Sciences and viewed Pokrovskii as the most hostile. The political fortunes of the former two, of course, were at their low ebb in 1929–30. Elena Ol’denburg, “Zapiska,” 105, 108, 149–50, 166, esp. 177.
160. Untitled letter by Riazanov, RTsKhIDNI f. 301, op. 1, d. 80, l. 57–69.
161. In his remarkable letter of resignation to the presidium of the Communist Academy in February 1931, Riazanov claimed he had not taken part in its work in two years. Outspoken until the end, he scathingly indicted the Communist Academy for its role in vilifying the philosopher Deborin and accepting a subservient partiinost’, and he openly mocked the cult of Stalin in Marxist scholarship. Riazanov, “V prezidium Kommunisticheskoi Akademii,” 8 February 1931 (cited in full at note 80). Ten days later, Riazanov’s fonner assistant at the Marx-Engels Institute signed confessions to GPU interrogators about Riazanov’s “anti-patty” activities–the harboring of Menshevik documents. “Materialy o D. B. Riazanove,” 18 February 1931, RTsKhIDNI f. 17, op. 85, d. 378, l. 2–14. See also “Teoreticheskoe zaveshchanie akademika D. B. Riazanova,” Vestnik Rossiiskoi akademii nauk 63, no. 11 (1993): 1035–44, and Rokitianskii, “Tragicheskaia sud’ba akademika D. B. Riazanova,” 107–48.
162. V. S. Brachev, “‘Delo’ Akademika S. F. Platonova,” Voprosy istorii, no. 5 (May 1989): 117–29, and “Ukroshchenie stroptivoi, ili kak AN SSSR uchili poslushaniiu,” Vestnik Akademii nauk SSSR, no. 4 (1990): 120–27; Perchenok, “Akademiia nauk,” 209; B. V. Anan’ich, “O vospominaniiakh N. S. Shtakel’berg,” in A. I. Dobkin and M. Iu. Sorokina, eds., In Memoriam: Istoricheskii sbornik pamiati F. F. Perchenka (Moscow: Feniks, 1995), 85; “‘Mne zhe oni sovershenno ne nuzhny’ (Sem’ pisem iz lichnogo arkhiva akadelnika M. N. Pokrovskogo),” Vestnik Rossiiskoi akademii nauk 62, no. 6 (1992): 103–14.
163. Graham, Soviet Academy of Sciences, 148.
164. Shapiro, “Communist Academy,” 248–53; “Dokladnaia zapiska k Proektu Rezoliutsii TsK o deiatel’nosti Kom. Akademii,” no date, 1930, RTsKhIDNI f. 147, op. 1, d. 33, l. 89–94.
165. On the agrarian Marxists, see Susan Gross Solomon, “Rural Scholars and the Cultural Revolution,” in Fitzpatrick, Cultural Revolution, 148–49; Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Revolution as Class War,” in Fitzpatrick, Cultural Revolution, 36; on the Communist Academy from 1931 to 1936, see Shapiro, “Communist Academy,” 291–331.
166. But the 1920s bifurcation of academia into party and nonparty camps never fully disappeared, since certain fields, institutions, and a powerful segment of the intelligentsia remained either more party-oriented or closer to the party leadership than others.