For the scientists, laboratory equipment and space was a crucial issue, and unfortunately most government offices did not see it as a priority. Pre-revolutionary Russian scientific laboratories and research stations were mostly small divisions within ministries or government offices like the Division of Agriculture within the Ministry of Finance or the small research laboratories of the Ministry of War, devoted to such problems as the production of optical sights for artillery. Most science took place in university departments, and there were scarcely any privately financed laboratories. Science was already dependent on government support throughout the world, but Russia was still too poor and backward to provide facilities similar to those of Germany or France. There were exceptions, like the physiologist Ivan Pavlov’s laboratory at the Imperial Institute of Experimental Physiology in St. Petersburg which had state funding and aristocratic donors and patrons, primarily Prince A. P. Oldenburgskii, a relative of the tsar and a general. It produced medicines while Pavlov conducted experiments on conditioned reflexes. Most scientists lacked such facilities, and all these problems came to a head during the First World War, in which Russia’s technological backwardness played a crucial role in its defeats. The scientific community was patriotic if not monarchist and in 1915 the Academy of Sciences founded a Commission for the Study of Natural Productive Forces, that was designed to survey the Russian Empire for natural resources that would be useful in war and industry. The result was a massive accumulation of data that came to be used by an entirely new regime after 1917.
The new Bolshevik government inaugurated a revolution in Russian science. For the Bolsheviks, the natural sciences were central to their utopian project. Their own ideology, Marxism, was in their minds a science, not just a political viewpoint. To them it was an objectively true account of the character and laws of development of human society. They believed that knowledge of the natural sciences would help convince people of the truth of Marxism, as it would impart knowledge of scientific methodology. There were other more practical benefits. The spread of scientific knowledge would combat religion, a high Bolshevik priority in the early years. Most important, however, they believed that science held the key to technology, and that the new Soviet Union needed technology to become a modern state and society.
Right from the beginning, the Bolshevik regime treated science and scientists very differently from other sectors of the old intelligentsia. The Soviets preferred large-scale, state-financed institutions mostly detached from university teaching, and the scientists were mostly in favor of the same structure, frustrated by the conservatism and limited resources of the pre-1917 Ministry of Education. Thus as early as 1918, as the Civil War was beginning, the Soviet government set up what became the Leningrad Physico-Technical Institute under Abram Ioffe. As the Civil War ended, Ioffe’s institute was given a series of buildings and money to build new laboratories at a time when the state had almost no resources and famine swept the interior of Russia. Similarly, the Section of Applied Botany and Selection, a small laboratory of the old Agriculture Department, became the All-Union Institute of Plant-Breeding under the botanist and geneticist Nikolai Vavilov.
These were highly sophisticated institutions, and the Soviet government did not spare expense. Vavilov’s institute moved into the former mansion of the tsarist Minister of State Properties off St. Isaak’s Square in the center of Leningrad, with greenhouses and research facilities in Tsarskoe Selo (renamed Detskoe Selo in the 1920s and later Pushkin) in confiscated properties from the old regime. Even more important, Vavilov was sent abroad to Europe and to the United States to acquire scientific literature, equipment, and seeds for research. In the United States he traveled widely, met Luther Burbank, and spoke at American universities – all of this at Soviet government expense. Ioffe and the physicists fared as well or better. Ioffe made a similar journey to Europe in 1920–21, and the students at the physics institute were not only allowed but even officially encouraged to spend years abroad working at Cambridge, England, with Ernest Rutherford or in Germany with the leading physicists of the time. In the rapidly changing world of physics in the early twentieth century, these contacts were crucial and established international reputations for many Soviet physicists. They published their works in the German Annalen der Physik, until 1933 the leading outlet for physics research in the world. Vladimir Vernadskii, in spite of his participation in the Kadet party before the Revolution, spent several years working in Paris in the 1920s with the full approval of the Soviet authorities. The Soviet government created a system that supplied scientists with better housing and favored access to consumer goods even in the 1920s, when the NEP market could have supplied many of their needs and wants. Pavlov, who was openly anti-Soviet, was appointed the head of the new Institute of Physiology of the Academy of Sciences in 1925.
Standing over and financing the scientific institutes in the 1920s were a variety of government offices. Some institutes were supported by the Russian republic Commissariat of Education, but the physical sciences increasingly came under the industrial commissariats or the Supreme Economic Council. Biology was mainly the purview of the Commissariats of Health or the Russian Commissariat of Agriculture. The idea was to unite theory and practice, an idea central to Marxism but also popular with many scientists on the eve of the Revolution who thought that Russia needed their expertise to overcome its backwardness. Thus the Leningrad Physical-Technical Institute had contracts with many industrial agencies, including a long-lasting and ultimately unsuccessful study of insulation for long-distance power cables. Successful or not, these contracts provided supplementary financing and demonstrated to the party leadership the usefulness of scientific research. The party authorities were perfectly aware that the scientists were not Bolsheviks. Many of them did believe that they should help the new state to modernize the country, whatever its leadership, but they were not Marxists. For the time being, this divergence of aims was not a problem.
The end of NEP meant, however, a radical upheaval in society launched by Stalin and the party leadership and a radical upheaval in art, literature, the humanistic disciplines, and the natural sciences. No area was spared this “cultural revolution,” as it was called at the time, an upheaval in culture that matched that in the villages and the factories of the Soviet Union. This cultural revolution itself was short-lived but it was the beginning of a fundamental transformation of Soviet culture.