ABSTRACT
Science and technology always played a significant role in the validating ideology of the Soviet Union; Marxism-Leninism claimed to be a scientific doctrine and asserted that it would advance all that was progressive and advantageous in the European scientific tradition, stripping it of bourgeois ideological distortions and self-interest, laying the material and technological basis for the achievement of communism and transforming mankind in the process. This utopian vision of scientific advancement had been very pronounced in the public culture of the 1920s but receded during the 1930s as pragmatic, technological achievements, subordinated to the immediate economic goals of a rapidly industrializing country, received more prominence.1 Theoretical science once again became a focus of attention in the post-war years, as Lysenkoism and its imitators were aggressively propagandized across the USSR and the past triumphs of Russian science were cynically exaggerated by ideologues. Despite dramatic changes in the rhetorical presentation of science during the process of de-Stalinization, the natural sciences remained a prominent topic in propaganda, the arts and such limited forums for public discussion as existed during the 1950s and 1960s. This renewed interest in fundamental sciences, and their broader impact on the ‘worldview’ of Soviet citizens, reached its peak in the early 1960s, when Soviet achievements in physics and the space race coincided with the peak of Khrushchev’s own personal authority.
