Douglas R. Weiner

Community Ecology in Stalin's Russia: "Socialist" and "Bourgeois" Science

FEW SOVIETS AND FEWER WESTERNERS are aware that until the early 1930s the Soviet Union was in the forefront of developments in community ecology. losif Konradovich Pachoskii first proposed the term phytosociology for the study of plant communities. Vladimir Nikolaevich Beklemishev articulated provocative theories on the structure of ecological communities. Sergei Alekseevich Severtsov pioneered the study of population dynamics among wild mammals. And Vladimir Vladimirovich Stanchinskii developed the trophic-dynamics, or ecological-energetics, paradigm a full decade before G. Evelyn Hutchinson and Raymond Laurel Lindeman worked it out independently in the United States. By the mid-1930s, however, the study of community ecology hau been seriously curtailed in the U.S.S.R., and the scientific contributions of many leading Soviet ecologists fell into oblivion. The explanation for this turnabout lies in political developments of the 1920s and 1930s that dramatically altered Soviet views of natural science.

The Electrification of Russia, 1880-1926

Russia, 1880–1926 is the first full account of the widespread adoption of electricity in Russia, from the beginning in the 1880s to its early years as a state technology under Soviet rule. Jonathan Coopersmith has mined the archives for both the tsarist and the Soviet periods to examine a crucial element in the modernization of Russia. Coopersmith shows how the Communist Party forged an alliance with engineers to harness the socially transformative power of this science-based enterprise. A centralized plan of electrification triumphed, to the benefit of the Communist Party and the detriment of local governments and the electrical engineers. Coopersmiths narrative of how this came to be elucidates the deep-seated and chronic conflict between the utopianism of Soviet ideology and the reality of Soviet politics and economics.