The Perpetual Province: 'Ever Climbing Up the Climbing Wave'

Autor: David Joravsky
Rok vydání: 1998
Předmět:
Zdroj: The Russian Review. 57:1-9
ISSN: 1467-9434
0036-0341
Popis: A t first sight these articles seem to tell about two different countries rather than two periods in the development of the same one. That first sight may reinforce the vision of the Soviet period as a catastrophic interlude in Russian history, quite at odds with what went before, demanding of those who come after a return to where the ancestors stood at the beginning of the terrible century now ending. I put the vision in the extreme, phantasmic form that has dominated talk about Russia since 1991. Can history of science serve as a test, as a way of turning that phantasm into serious questions for historical inquiry? I think it can, if approached as both Nathan Brooks and Alexei Kojevnikov do, seeking the adaptation to the Russian context of an organized inquiry that we call cosmopolitan, yet also call Western. In science as in Christ there is supposed to be no East or West, but everyone knows that "the West" has been the privileged center for scientific as well as economic and political development, while Russia and most other countries have been backward provinces, endlessly frustrated in their efforts to "overtake and surpass." I am deliberately evoking the continuity from Peter the Great through Stalin in the use of state power-violent, top-down, ultimately self-defeating-to achieve such catch-up. I am also suggesting the broader kinship of Russia and other "third-world" countries, a kinship highlighted now by the virtual collapse of state support for science along with the collapse of communism. Good history is always comparative, if only implicitly, and I compliment both Brooks and Kojevnikov for doing implicitly comparative history of science in Russia
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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