[page 29]
In the first article in what will become a regular section on science in the MIR son writes on the development of science and technology in Russia from revolution to today
Pete Dickenthe October
Science and Stalinism
THE LAUNCHING of Vostok 1 in 1957 ushered in a new era of space exploration for mankind. The fact that the Soviet Union had beaten America in the race into space was proof of the massive strides Soviet science had taken since the October revolution. Linked to a planned economy, it showed the potential of technology to help transform society, in a country whose technical achievements were pitifully small before 1917.
Today, though, the prestige of the space programme must be wearing thin for the working class. They can see that the advanced technology exists, but they don't feel the benefit. It is much easier for the bureaucracy to arrange oneoff prestige projects than it is for them to organise efficient mass production in new high technology fields. The question they face is how to transform advances in research into raising the general material level of society. As industry and technology have become more complex, the problems and failures of the Stalinist system have got worse.
Lenin-'Specialists under
workers control'
Before the revolution technology was imported lock, stock and barrel from other capitalist countries, mainly France and Germany. Most engineers were from abroad, who fled after 1917. In 1914 there were less than 7,000 engineers in all the tsarist technical institutions put together, to serve a population of about 150 millions. Some leading engineers, such as Krasin, realised the impossibility of developing society under capitalism and joined the Bolsheviks.
After the October revolution, Lenin's attitude to the technical specialists and scientists was clear. He did not advocate some abstract 'socialist science', which would have been utopian in the devastation of the civil war, but ad-
vised that the knowledge of the existing bourgeois specialists should be used, even if this meant paying them much higher wages than industrial workers.
The Bolsheviks, however, insisted that they would, in Lenin's
...surround the words:
specialists with workers' control and... enforce the rule: 'He who does not work neither shall he eat'."
This meant that the engineers, although inevitably a privileged group, were nevertheless accountable to the working class. The policy of the government was to use the latest 'Western' technology to begin to raise Soviet Russia to the level of the imperialist powers.
Lenin supported the introduction of the Taylor system of time and motion study to try to raise efficiency in industry, even though he had condemned it as oppressive in capitalist countries. This was done with the perspective of buying time while the revolution remained isolated. If the revolution in Germany had been successful, the latest technical expertise would have been available to Soviet industry.
Trotsky rejected the ideas of the 'Proletarian Culture' movement who thought that science could be divided into 'socialist' and 'bourgeois' categories. At the time this controversy was part of a lively and healthy debate about the extent to which technology developed in capitalist countries was appropriate to be used in a workers' state. It was later that Stalin personally championed the idea of a separate and superior 'workers' science' , which he put into practice with disasterous consequences.
As the bureaucracy consolidated its grip on society in the late 1920s, Stalin adopted the reactionary theory of 'socialism in one country'. This theory was inevitably extended into the fields of science and technology. The first
30
show trials of the Stalinist era, in 1928, were of German engineers brought in to develop the coal mines in the Donets region, who were accused of sabotage. The trial was used by Stalin to foster a mood of isolationism and a need for self-sufficiency in developing technology.
Despite the ideology of the bureaucracy, the technology used in the industrialisation demanded by the first five year plan was very largely imported from capitalist countries. The development of the basic industries in the 1930s, such as coal, steel and electric power generation, showed the potential of using a plan of production to harness scientific knowledge to develop society. Growth rates of 20 per cent or 30 per cent per annum were common, unprecedented in the capitalist world even in boom periods. But these colossal advances were achieved at a price. Trotsky estimated that up to three-quarters of production was lost because of bungling and mismanagement.
Scientific elite develops
The basic industries such as steel and electric power generation were capital intensive, using established technology and where the quality of the finished product was not the over-riding factor. This meant that big advances were made, even though there was no democratic control of production. In mass production however, democratic accountability is vital to ensure quality control and the correct allocation of resources. Because this didn't exist in Stalinist Russia, up to 80 per cent of consumer goods produced were unusable because of poor quality.
The imposition of ridiculously high production quotas, regardless of the quality of the finished product, resulted in one plant producing tractors without engines for several years. The production engineer was put in an impossible
[page 30]
position. On the one hand, facing the hostility of the workers who were suffering great hardship, and on the other hand, having the pressure from the party officials and the secret police to fufill the quotas. The result was that the most conscientious engineers looked for jobs outside production, in teaching or research, while those remaining were absorbed into the 'Communist' Party machine. Between 1939 and 1941 approximately 70 per cent of new Party members were from this group. The quandry many engineers faced was summed up by one specialist who said: "You were afraid to introduce innovations and rationalisation. We often thought that certain methods must be introduced. But usually we did not do it. If an experiment should fail we could be charged with sabotage. This had a bad effect on the creative ability of many engineers.
There were two main effects. First, the best engineers were lost to one of the most important areas in industry. Second, a gulf opened up between pure research and production. One of the aims of the early Bolsheviks was to have a unity of theory and practice, so that a scientific elite wouldn't develop who were divorced from day to day reality. This is exactly what began to happen in the 1930s and the tendency has continued and deepened since.
Scientific controversy and debate was often settled by Stalin's personal intervention, sometimes with disastrous consequences. During the late '30s and '40s, new theories were formulated in Britain and America on plant genetics. These discoveries were eventually used to increase the yield of crops many times over. At the 1948 session of the Agricultural Academy, the President, Lysenko, declared that in future biology was to be divided into two camps, the 'Proletarian' and the 'Bourgeois'
• The genetic theory of plant heredity was put in the bourgeois camp and those scientists who supported it were killed or imprisoned. At Stalin's personal instigation, the so-called 'grassland' theory of crop rotation was adopted as a 'Proletarian' way of increasing crop yields. This was a disaster which setback agriculture for a generation.
Stalin also intervened in the field of aircraft design. He insisted that top priority be given to the construction of heavy bombers. At the same time the leading designers, such as Tupolev, were pursued as saboteurs etc. Only very reluctantly did Stalin agree to the production of lighter planes for tactical defence. This was too late to be useful against the Nazi attack in the Summer of 1941. In the first few days over 2,000 of the heavy bombers were destroyed due to lack of fighter support and obsolete design, a blow which nearly led to total defeat at the hands of the invading fascist armies.
Gulf between research and production Despite the fetter of the bureaucracy restricting the development of science and technology, the Soviet Union has emerged since the Second World War as an industrial super power rivalling the USA. Technological developments in basic industries such as iron and steel, machine tools and electric power transmission have led all the capitalist countries. The 5,000 cubic metre blast furnace for iron smelting, completed in 1974, is the largest in the world. Here size is a good indicator of technical level, since it can reduce costs and improve the quality of the product. Since 1970 the rate of introduction of numerically controlled machine tools has outstripped other industrial countries, and the design of circuit breakers for the 750 kilovolt power transmission line was a major technical achievement.
However a critical factor in the successful development of new technology is how long it takes to 31 HAC ХОЧУТЬ РОЗЛУЧИТИ!
A cartoon from a 1930 engineering journal. From tsarist times engineers had worn uniforms as a symbol of professional rank. With the rise of Stalinism, without democratic workers' control of the specialists, the ruling caste had to use bureaucratic control to force them to achieve production plans. The bureaucracy periodically org anised 'specialist-baiting', including a campaign against uniforms and insigna. The engineer in the cartoon is explaining, "they want to separate us". move from the intitial prototype stage to the final stage where the technique is widely used in industry. It has proved to be easier to get to the final stage for a hydroelectric power scheme, where only a few plants will ever be made, than it has for the mass production of clothing using synthetic fibres, for example. The first synthetic fibres polyester and nylon were made in a prototype plant in 1948. Yet it took until 1973 for production to reach onethird of total fibre output. Fundamentally, this lag is not due to technical reasons but to political ones. To develop modern 'science' based industries needs close collaboration between research, development and production. There must also be a method control the allocation to of resources between different areas and to establish accountability for what is produced. In the capitalist system, this is done by the whip of market forces, at least to an extent. In the Stalinist states there is no mechanism of accountability or controi, only arbitrary dictator a decrees. Democratic control by the working class of all stages of the production process is the only
[page 31]
MIR Spring 1986: Science and
solution.
The separation of research from production, and the flight of the best engineers from industry, was an inevitable consequence of the repression and the purges in the 1930s. The result was to hold back the development of the full potential of the planned economy. As the importance of industry based on advanced science and technology has increased, so the problems caused by the gulf between research and production have become a bigger and bigger obstacle to developing industry
Computer technology
Advances in electronics and computer technology have raised the possibility, for the first time, of eliminating dangerous and souldestroying work and freeing people to do creative work. The bureaucracy realise the potential of computers and have started massive programme to install 100,000 by 1987. They see the main benefits in making more advanced weapons. The computers are being imported from the Western countries or copies are being made from American designs. This, in itself, is an indictment of the Stalinist system which has been unable to organise an efficient, modern, electronics industry, despite it having more engineers and technicians at its disposal than the USA.
Nevertheless, the American government is afraid of the potential of a planned economy, however distorted. They have started a boycott of nearly all electronic and computer equipment bound for the East. This will prove to be a very difficult task, since the latest, very powerful, 32 bit microcomputers can fit in a briefcase, and can be bought over the counter in dozens of countries. There is also a campaign to stop scientists and engineers from coming to study electronics and microprocessor technology at colleges and research institutions in the West.
Even if the drive in the Soviet Union to install the new computers is successful, this will not solve the
Gregory Ordzhonikidze, Commissar of Heavy Industry during the five year plan, at the Gorky Automotive works, 1935. Although a faithful Stalinist since the early 1920's, he died in mysterious circumstances in 1937, possibly poisoned by the GPU for his rumoured opposition to the purges which had set back scientific advances in Russian industry.
economy has been shown by the
development of techniques in iron
and steel production, and in power
generation, which are the most ad-
vanced in the world. This was
achieved at a cost however, due to
several factors: the arbitrary in-
tervention of the bureaucracy in
technical fields, repression, stifling
creative work and general bungling
and mismanagement. As society
has become more complex, and in-
dustry more science-based, the
bureaucrats have become a dead-
weight. The gulf between research
work and production, caused by
Stalinism, has meant that a huge
lag has occurred after a new idea
has emerged, before it has been
eventually deployed in industry
Bureaucracy stifles
scientific advances
contradictions in the economy. Computer control can never be a substitute for workers' control. Applied to production, the computer can more efficiently co-ordinate and control processes which in themselves are already functioning properly. If an attempt is made to use them it will expose, to an even greater extent, the true reason for the failure in the economy, the corruption and bungling of the 'Managers' and 'Communist' Party officials. The most likely outcome, therefore, is that the computers will be left to rust away in corners of factories.
Recent articles in the technical press in the West tend to confirm this analysis. A report from Prague in Electronics Weekly says that the new robotic equipment is proving to be extremely unpopular in the USSR. The Cultivator Works at Rostov on Don has three programmeable manipulators (robots) hanging around because no one knows what to do with them, the need for an instruction manual was overlooked! Many robots have been produced to do pressing and stamping of metal operations which can be more efficiently done by conventional means. At engineering factories in Voroshilovsrad, Baku, Ulyanovsk and Dzhankov managers have simply disconnected the robots.
The potential of a
32
n the scientific field, as in production, the ruling caste has now become a complete fetter on society. The only way to ensure that scientific and technical knowledge is fully harnessed to the needs of the people in the Stalinist countries, is to overthrow the bureaucracies and establish a system of democratic workers' control of industry. This will lay the way open, on a world scale, for the full harmonisation of scientific work and production which will be vital in building socialism.
[page 32]