Providing U S Scientists With Soviet Scientific Information

World-class science and technology developed in the Soviet Union during Stalin's dictatorial rule under conditions of political violence, lack of international contacts, and severe restrictions on the freedom of information. Stalin's Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists is an invaluable book that investigates this paradoxical success by following the lives and work of Soviet scientists ? including Nobel Prize-winning physicists Kapitza, Landau, and others ? throughout the turmoil of wars, revolutions, and repression that characterized the first half of Russia's twentieth century.The book examines how scientists operated within the Soviet political order, communicated with Stalinist politicians, built a new system of research institutions, and conducted groundbreaking research under extraordinary circumstances. Some of their novel scientific ideas and theories reflected the influence of Soviet ideology and worldview and have since become accepted universally as fundamental concepts of contemporary science. In the process of making sense of the achievements of Soviet science, the book dismantles standard assumptions about the interaction between science, politics, and ideology, as well as many dominant stereotypes ? mostly inherited from the Cold War ? about Soviet history in general. Science and technology were not only granted unprecedented importance in Soviet society, but they also exerted a crucial formative influence on the Soviet political system itself. Unlike most previous studies, Stalin's Great Science recognizes the status of science as an essential element of the Soviet polity and explores the nature of a special relationship between experts (scientists and engineers) and communist politicians that enabled the initial rise of the Soviet state and its mature accomplishments, until the pact eroded in later years, undermining the communist regime from within.

This report is intended to provide a brief historical perspective of the evolution of the interacademy program during the past half-century, recognizing that many legacies of the Soviet era continue to influence government approaches in Moscow and Washington and to shape the attitudes of researchers toward bilateral cooperation in both countries (of special interest is the changing character of the program during the age of perestroika (restructuring) in the late 1980s in the Soviet Union); to describe in some detail the significant interacademy activities from late 1991, when the Soviet Union fragmented, to mid-2003; and to set forth lessons learned about the benefits and limitations of interacademy cooperation and to highlight approaches that have been successful in overcoming difficulties of implementation.