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Under the Communists, science continued to be admired, but it was rigidly required to be loyal. Since, to the Marxist, the new society was the inevitable result of the inexorable evolution of natural law, Marxism appeared to be a triumph of science, and science in turn became a Marxist cult. In 1934 French Statesman Edouard Herriot observed that "Soviet rule has bestowed upon science all the authority of which it deprived religion."
The Cardinal Sins. But while heaping reward after reward upon the scientist, Stalin increasingly demanded servility. In the '30s, the party waged war on "academic individualism," and in the great purge of 1936-38, nearly half of the academy's party members were either shot or shipped to forced-labor camps. Cosmopolitanism (the idea that science could be foreign or Jewish), objectivism (the refusal to interpret new research in the light of Marxism), and idealism (a catch-all indictment) became the cardinal sins. The era of "fatherland science" had begun. By official decree, Russia claimed so many retroactive scientific "firsts" that its impressive past was discredited by exaggeration: Polzunov was declared the builder of the first steam engine; A. N. Lodygin, producer of the "Russian Sun," the first electric light; and Mozhaisky invented the airplane "20 years before the brothers Wright."
Lysenko, a second-rate biologist, was enthroned because his theory that environment could produce any desired result fitted in neatly with the Communist theology. Physicist Lev Landau was tossed into jail; Physicist Abram Joffe barely escaped being shot; and Geneticist N. A. Vavilov died in a slave labor camp, while his younger brother, the president of the academy, dutifully signed the documents destroying his brother's life work.
Quacks & Idealists. But somehow, Russian science managed to survive. The party might elevate such quacks as the former charwoman, Olga Lepeshinkaya, who insisted that a certain 1% soda solution could arrest the aging process, but most real scientists simply ignored her. The party denounced the Einstein theory, the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics, and cybernetics as "idealistic." But the scientists used the work of Einstein and Bohr to develop Russia's atomic bomb, and the Soviet began turning out calculators as fast as it could. Physicist Peter Kapitsa, who was placed under arrest for refusing to work on the atom bomb, is now back in favor and heads a research institute of his own.