and one-quarter of its physicists-it continued to perform poorly.
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
Mikhail Gorbachev championed “acceleration” (uskorenie) of the achievements of research into the production process. Like leaders before him, he believed in the power of science to help solve the social, economic, and other problems facing the country. As part of glasnost and perestroika, Gorbachev’s policies encouraged rapid decentralization of science policy and increasingly open discussion of the poor performance of the sector. Scientists reorganized professional societies for the first time since the 1930s. They gained the opportunity to travel abroad to conferences. Only the collapse of the USSR facilitated significant reevaluation of science policy in Russia. At the same time, because of rapid inflation and decline in government revenues, the scientific establishment lost much of its funding and stability for the first time since the 1920s. Salaries were not paid for months at a time, and research monies disappeared. International organizations offered aid programs to discourage emigration. In general, however, the Russian scientific community has been slow to recover from the political and economic shocks of the 1990s. See also: ACADEMY OF SCIENCES; LYSENKO, TROFIM DENISOVICH; SPACE PROGRAM
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Balzer, Harley. (1989). Soviet Science on the Edge of Reform. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Graham, Loren. (1967). The Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Communist Party, 1927-1932. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Graham, Loren. (1987). Science, Philosophy, and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union. New York: Columbia University Press. Joravsky, David. (1970). The Lysenko Affair. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lubrano, Linda, and Solomon, Susan. (1980). The Social Context of Soviet Science. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Parrott, Bruce. (1983). Politics and Technology in the Soviet Union. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Science fiction is a literary genre that extrapolates from existing knowledge about the real world to speculate about alternative worlds. It always includes an element of the fantastic, since it aims to go beyond what is, to give a literary model of
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“what if?” Unlike pure fantasy or utopian literature, however, science fiction posits a rational exploration of as-yet inexplicable phenomena and unknown corners of the human psyche. In Russia the most important works of science fiction have usually been viewed as subversive to the regime in power because of their ability to model alternative realities, to evade censorship by displacing political allegories to the juvenile realm of cosmic adventure, and to tap into the Russian readership’s persistent longings for a more just society.
The first, mid-nineteenth century works of Russian science fiction blend the rational utopianism of European models with the age-old Russian folk vision of communal justice and abundance for all. The idea that Western- oriented scientific and technological progress might be combined in Russia with egalitarian values, avoiding the evils of both autocracy and capitalism, is one of the strongest and most consistent strains in Russian science fiction. Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s 1862 novel What Is to Be Done? created a fictional model of this idea that inspired generations of Russian revolutionaries, including Lenin. Alexander Bogdanov’s The Red Star (1908) depicts a socially and scientifically progressive society on Mars that is superior to existing earthly alternatives. In the decade following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, many stories extolled a cosmic revolution, anticipating the victorious spread of classless societies to other planets with the help of futuristic technology and radically evolved human consciousness. As late as the 1970s, the writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky countered official literary depictions of Soviet society with science fiction imaginings of alternative societies where rationality, science, and human freedom are not at odds.
A second, and opposing strain, is the dystopian vision of society dehumanized by the relentless rationalization of work, health, social, and spiritual life. Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We (1924, unpublished; 1989) is a brilliant philosophical satire depicting “mathematically happy” workers in the One State, where free will has been all but eliminated. Extrapolating tendencies from both bourgeois and socialist systems of conformity, We insists on the paramount value of individual free will. Zamyatin’s novel, and later Western novels based on similar ideas (e.g., George Orwell’s 1984 ) were banned in the Soviet Union. After 1957, the launch of Sputnik and the gradual relaxation of ideological restrictions inaugurated a new era of Soviet science fiction. In the immensely popular works of Ivan Yefremov and the brothers Stru1354 gatsky, Russian readers found a forum in which their authentic political and cultural aspirations were given a voice-along with an exciting plot. They offered richly imagined histories of the future to remind the reader of the outcome of ethical choices made in the present. Russian literature has often served as the conscience of the nation, and twenty-first century Russian science fiction continues the tradition of ideological engagement, by addressing such themes as contemporary social malaise and the search for a new, post-Soviet Russian cultural identity. See also: CHERNYSHEVSKY, NIKOLAI GAVRILOVICH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fetzer, Leland, ed. (1982). Pre-Revolutionary Russian Science Fiction: An Anthology. Ann Arbor: Ardis. Gomel, Elana. (1999). “Science Fiction in Russia: From Utopia to New Age.” Science Fiction Studies 26(3): 435-441. Howell, Yvonne. (1994). Apocalyptic Realism: The Science Fiction of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. New York: Peter Lang. Suvin, Darko. (1979). “Russian SF and Its Utopian Tradition.” In Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
The term scientific socialism was used by Friedrich Engels to characterize the doctrines that he and Karl Marx developed and distinguish them from other socialist doctrines, which he dismissed as utopian socialism. Engels regarded the Marx-Engels doctrines as scientific in that they laid bare the secret of capitalism through the discovery of surplus value, and explained (with a theory known in the USSR as historical materialism) how capitalism would inevitably be overthrown and replaced by socialism. The concept “scientific socialism” made Marxist doctrines more attractive to many than rival socialist doctrines by suggesting that equality and the end of exploitation were not only desirable but also inevitable.
Scientific socialism was introduced to Russia in the late ninenteenth century. After the Bolshevik victory in the civil war, scientific socialism became
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
part of the official ideology of the USSR. The term itself was frequently used loosely to designate a doctrine concerning the development of a Soviet type of society. Much of the actual content of the doctrine varied over time in accordance with the concrete policies of the Soviet state.
Socialism as a comprehensive social system failed to spread to the advanced capitalist countries (although “pension fund socialism,” the growth of government welfare and regulatory programs, the expansion of employee rights, state-owned industries, public education, and universal suffrage, were widespread and important). This failure, along with other developments such as the collapse of the USSR, indicated that scientific socialism was an imperfect guide to the future. By the end of the twentieth century, the term was mainly of historical interest. See also: IDEALISM; MARXISM; SOCIALISM
Engels, Frederick. (1880). Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. «http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Archive/ 1880-SUS». Lichtheim, George. (1962). Marxism. New York: Praeger.
MICHAEL ELLMAN
The Scissors Crisis occurred in the Soviet Union during the New Economic Policy (NEP) era of the 1920s and refers to the movements, over time, of the relative prices of industrial and agricultural products. When the movements of relative prices are presented graphically, the observed patterns resemble the open blades of a pair of
