Simon Ings

There is actually not that much Stalin in this book all things considered, with most of the first third being devoted to what it meant to practice science in the early Soviet Union, Though since much of the story is being told through the prism of the Lysenko Affair, the “Boss” is a big part of this tale. As for what is really going on, Ings is examining how the pretensions of Marxists to being the practitioners of a science conflicted with the actual practice of theoretical science. The show more foundational issue is that the Marxist conception of science was a very mechanistic and reductionist affair and they had a hard time dealing with the efflorescence of nuclear physics; at the very least these developments profoundly disturbed Lenin enough to write a very wrong-headed essay criticizing the new physics.

Even more problematic though were what developments in the human and life sciences meant for the Bolshevik program. The implications there being that the Bolshevik ambition to be “engineers of human souls” was not achievable, and this was a total anathema. As it was, it took the demise of Stalin, and the craze for Cybernetics, to finally put Lysenko in his place, whereas my impression is that Russian psychology and psychiatry has only started to recover in the wake of the fall of the Soviet state.

The note that Ings chooses to conclude on is to make a nod to Nicolai Fedorov and Russian Cosmism, with its twin obsessions of perfecting humanity and transcending the natural world, if one only had enough will and enough knowledge; the implication there being that the natural world was expendable in the pursuit of perfection and immortality. Ings actually has some respect for this vision, not to mention the desperate Soviet efforts to transform society with the weak tools at hand. What Ings looks askance at in the end is our version of scientism in the West, which allows us to entertain delusions that our power will always allow us transcend our own burn rate in regards to natural resources that have a hard cap. show less

An exhaustive and sometimes exhausting history of science in Russia, with some time spent on the period just before the Communist revolution, and at then end on how things did and didn't change under Khrushchev. Most of the focus is on biology, particularly genetics, and agriculture. Less time is spent on physics and the space program, perhaps because this area was somewhat less dominated by political factors. Like War and Peace, there are seemingly hundreds of character arcs to follow, but show more the story of Lysenko dominates. Though Ing says several times "I'm not an academic", the bibliography is 30 pages long and there are 28 pages of footnotes.

For me, the book opens well, establishing the nature of Russia government under the tsars and its relationship with science, and the transition to Communism, the tensions between Lenin and Stalin, and how central the challenges of feeding Russia were to everything. The book also ends well as Russia emerges from Stalinism, sort of, and makes an interesting case for how cybernetics provided an umbrella for the return of serious science in a variety of domains. The big middle of the book is a slog though. Though chapters are basically ordered temporally, there's a lot of jumping around in time as different people are introduced and followed. Worse, there are frequent transitions from one person to another, as the history hops from one thread to another to another. It's like a Charles Ives piece with many snippets of music but rarely any sustained arc. There are many quotes from various scientific debates, that consistently failed to help me understand the personal, philosophical, and political battles they were meant to illustrate.

So an A for effort and depth, and B for story telling. show less

This is probably not a book I would have chosen for myself, but I was given a copy, and I found it compulsively readable, informative and surprisingly relevant to the world of Trump, Johnson and other truth-resistant populists.

Ings's starting point was the psychologist Luria, and his account is quite heavily skewed towards biological sciences (and a little physics), but the range is impressive. This is by no means a straight denunciation of Stalin, though his role in supporting bad science show more and the way this contributed directly to the great famines is ruthlessly exposed - there were a surprising number of achievements too, and as Ings points out in his concluding section, recent governments have not always been blameless in their dealings with science either. show less

This one sat long on my bookshelf until I had a heated argument with some friends regarding the proper color for fire-extinguishers. They insisted it should be only red, since this is the color majority of animals are primed to see best. However, in the absence of evidence I refused to take such claims at face value. Thus I reached out for the dusty tome… and found justification for my doubts. Besides this answer I found a boundless source of information about vision and eyes. The author show more possesses erudite knowledge of the topic, draws on numerous and very appropriate examples, and presents all these revelations in a very structured and digestible manner. A real eye-opener. show less