The politics of knowledge: Party ideology and Soviet science, 1945--1953

The Soviet State, which had long staked its existence on the application of science to society, launched a new effort to shape scientific knowledge in the years between the conclusion of the Great Fatherland War and Stalin's death in 1953. This dissertation utilizes recently declassified material from Communist Party, Russian State, Russian Academy of Sciences, and other archives to analyze the interactions between Party leaders and scientists in the last years of Stalin's reign. Historians working in these archives have complicated our understanding of the Party, state and society in the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s. “The Politics of Knowledge” turns our attention to postwar Stalinism, when the Party undertook its most ambitious attempts to integrate scholarship with ideology. By doing so, this study sheds new light on late Stalinism and provides a fresh perspective for examining broader questions about politics and science in the modern world.;Science not only reflected doctrinal transformations in the Soviet Union; its rhetorical and practical importance to Stalin and the state meant that scientists played a central role in shaping the Soviet worldview. Party-sponsored dialectical materialism influenced scientific theory, but scientists were also active participants in the advancement and articulation of dialectical materialism. This, in part, explains why Georgy Malenkov, Lavrenty Beria, Andrei Zhdanov and Joseph Stalin—the most powerful political figures in the Soviet Union at the time—became involved in six well-known scholarly discussions in the postwar period. By focusing on these discussions (in philosophy, biology, physics, linguistics, physiology, and political economy) as sites of interaction between scientists and Party leaders, this dissertation reveals the changing emphasis and structure of Stalinist ideology and raises broader questions about the relationship between politics and science in the modern world.;The project is organized both by discipline and chronologically: the decisive meeting in each of the six disciplines took place about once a year between 1947 and 1952. Each chapter examines one discipline in depth; in the broader narrative the debates in each field are viewed as part of a concerted effort to clarify the place of science and scientists in relation to the state and Party.