Less Known Pages of the History of Scientific and Technical Progress in the USSR

The article is a response to the article by S.A. Tolkachev and I.D. Udalov “Politico-economic problems of scientific and technical progress: Soviet experience and present day”. The article shows that science in the USSR of the 1920s was at a very particular, distinct stage of its development, radically different from the science of the 1930s, war and post-war science, as well as the Soviet experience of scientific and technical progress has a number of features that were common and ordinary for a person who lived inthose times but are not so clear for a present-day reader. One of these features is the ideological struggle in science that led to sharp changes in the vector of scientific and technical progress in Soviet times. Another serious problem of scientific and technical progress in the USSR was “Diamat vs. Sopromat”: ideologists decided for technicians, for engineers, the timelines a new equipment should have been created. For this reason, there occurred a great number of technogenic accidents and catastrophes. The equipment did not go through the full testing, approbation and even elementary checks. Such a race with non-acceptable reduction of the full testing led to colossal discredit of both new technology and science, and scientists as a whole. The discussion of scientific and technical progress is related to the question of the division of labor. In the 1929-1930s, M.A. Okhitovich convincingly proved the necessity of a distributed arrangement of production under communism and socialism which ensures the dialectical removal of the very first division of labor (the separation of city from village) and showed that cities hold back scientific and technical progress. However, starting from 1930, the capitalist model of organizing industry, cities, etc. was copied instead of developing a socialist, wholly original model. The article also lists a number of other interesting phenomena blotted out of the history of science.