The rich tradition of Siberian science and higher education is little known outside Russian academic circles. Using institutional history, this article focuses on the founding and pre-war period of the Siberian Physical Technical Institute, the establishment of its research focus and its first difficult steps to become a leading centre of R & D in Siberia. Based on archival materials, the article describes how local and national physicists justified the institute's creation by demonstrating ties with industry and building on the (...) presence of a cohort of locally trained physicists, whose numbers were augmented by Leningrad specialists. The strength of local cadres enabled the institute to navigate civil war and cultural revolution successfully. Physicists were able to take advantage of ongoing industrialization campaigns to gain support to create the institute, although local disputes and economic problems slowed its further development. The article describes the circulation of scientific, political and philosophical knowledge between Moscow, Leningrad and the provinces, and the impact of Bolshevik rule and Stalinism on the Siberian physics enterprise. (shrink)

Over the first decades of the twentieth century, the fragmentary remains of a huge prehistoric ungulate were unearthed in scientific expeditions in India, Turkestan and Mongolia. Following channels of formal and informal empire, these were transported to collections in Britain, Russia and the United States. While striking and of immense size, the bones proved extremely difficult to interpret. Alternately naming the creature Paraceratherium, Baluchitherium and Indricotherium, paleontologists Clive Forster-Cooper, Alexei Borissiak and Henry Fairfield Osborn struggled over the reconstruction of this (...) gigantic fossil mammal. However, despite these problems, shared work on the creature served as a focus for collaboration and exchange rather than rivalry between these three scientific communities. Not only did the initial interpretation and analysis depend on pre-existing connections between British and American paleontological institutions, but the need for comparative material, recognition and contacts brought British and American scholars into communication and exchange with their counterparts in the Soviet Union. This article examines these processes. It first uses these excavations as a comparative case-study of different manifestations of colonial science in this period, examining how scholars in the Britain, the Russian Empire and the United States used formal and informal colonial links to Asia to pursue new research. It then moves to examine how the common problem of reconstructing this giant animal drew metropolitan scientific communities together, at least for a time. The construction of the Baluchitherium and Indricotherium illustrates the drives to expand research both imperially and internationally in the early-twentieth century, but also the continual problems in resources, institutionalization, transport and communication that could run up against scientific work. (shrink)

The aim of the present paper is to show that the fundamental transformation of Russian society that had been realized by the Soviet government since the early twenties included not only the reforms of scientific institutions or the creation of a new educational system but also a radical reevaluation of the social role of the expert knowledge. It proposes a transversal analysis of the institutional history of the Soviet science and its complex relations with the state apparatus in order to (...) show that the research policy of the twenties should be considered not only as an attempt to stimulate a “catch up growth,” but rather as an anticipation of some essential problems discussed in the contemporary social epistemology. The early Soviet government had a very particular vision of “social engineering” that was both utopian and extremely pragmatic. The Soviet Union was considered as the first truly “scientific state,” based on the idea that the historical development could be accelerated due to a party lead popular mobilization. The result of this conviction was the policy of “state-sponsored evolutionism” that created a high demand for the experts in all fields of knowledge. First, it focuses on the dualism of scientific institutions in the twenties when the “old” Academy of Sciences composed of the scientists formed under the Old Regime was disputing the role of the leading research institution with the newly created Communist Academy. This period could be described as the era of “New Scientific Policy” or some kind of “primitive accumulation” of the expert knowledge. Later it explores another dualism that existed since the creation of the Soviet Union: it consisted of the opposition between two rival projects of state building. The first one was promoted by State Planning Committee and made an emphasis on the administrative division based on economical basis, the second one was a project of People’s Commissariat of Nationalities, that proposed a creation of multiple soviet “national states” based on the principle of self-determination. Both projects required a large amount of data in various fields of knowledge and promoted a creation of new research institutions and favored the pioneering study in both central economy planning and social engineering. The aim of this article is to place the soviet experience in the comparative perspective, claiming that the communist modernization should be analyzed in the context of elaboration, in Foucault’s terms, of new “governmental technologies” which are supposed to be the products of new research institutions directly or indirectly influenced by a modern state. (shrink)