How Global Science Was Set Back A Century

Modern science has yielded immense benefits to society, yet it has also suffered greatly at the hands of several major nations. Politics and ideology, not religion, have been the reason. The brutalities of Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and Maoist China effectively erased what should have been vital centers of research from the landscape of global science for many decades.

(Original Caption) Albert Einstein shown taking his oath of allegiance upon becoming a U.S. citizen. Einstein was one of many German scientists who fled the Nazi regime. The Nazis dismantled the greater part of German science, which at the time was one of the most advanced in the world.

Bettmann Archive

A disturbing conclusion follows from this. The loss that these examples represent marks a serious deficit for what global science could have been, thus a loss for humanity.

Death of Science in Stalin’s Russia

The fate of scientific research under the Soviets has been much written about by scholars like Loren Graham and Paul Josephson, with testimonials by those who fled adding many personal details.

Russia began the 20^th century with a world-class research enterprise. Scientists like Mendeleev in chemistry, Pavlov in physiology, and immunologist Mechnikov were internationally renowned for their discoveries, the latter two earning Nobel Prizes.

After the 1917 Revolution, Lenin spoke of the necessity for science as part of the Bolshevik cause yet placed it under state control. With Stalin’s ascent to power in 1928, scientific research had its autonomy eliminated and was subjected to demands for ideological conformity. Purges began by 1929 against scientists and engineers, continuing into the 1940s, with political surveillance, arrests, and executions especially targeted those who had been corrupted by “capitalist science,” meaning those who had been trained and worked in Europe.

With Stalin’s ascent to power in 1928, however, scientific research was brought fully under state control, its autonomy eliminated, demands for ideological conformity arriving soon after. Purges began against scientists and engineers, in some cases continuing into the 1940s. Political surveillance, arrests, and executions especially targeted those who had been trained before the 1917 revolution and who had worked in Europe.

Many fields were decimated. Subordination of research to party orthodoxy gave favor to pseudoscientific ideas, such as the well-known case of Trofim Lysenko. Modern theories like genetics, relativity, and Big Bang cosmology, as well as concepts in chemistry, geoscience, physiology, linguistics, and psychology were all suppressed. Many thousands of scientists were killed or sent to the gulag, where a significant percentage died.

An exception was nuclear physics, which Stalin spared for the atomic bomb project. This allowed partial independence to such brilliant researchers as Kapitsa, Landau, Khariton, and Sakharov, the last of which left Russia for human rights activism. The successes of this protected group were a striking contrast to the greater part of Soviet science.

Much of Russian research never fully recovered from the depredations of the Stalin era. Russian geoscience only embraced the theory of plate tectonics in the final years before the Soviet Union collapsed.

Mao’s Reversal And The Ruin of Chinese Research

In China, Maoism led to major setbacks for science during the Great Leap Forward and, especially, the Cultural Revolution. An early sign of what was to come arrived with Mao’s official adoption of Lysenko’s ideas and the launching of the Four Pests Campaign in 1958, aimed at eliminating rats, flies, mosquitoes, and sparrows.

Warned by ornithologists that killing an insectivorous bird that also ate grain seeds would lead to a surge in locusts and caterpillars, Mao dismissed such arguments and urged mass slaughter. The result was the Great Chinese Famine (1959-1961), the worst in history with as many as 30 million deaths.

The Cultural Revolution then saw universities closed or radically repurposed, graduate training halted, and many scientists exiled to the countryside for farmwork. Evidence indicates that by 1976 the number of faculty/researchers in colleges fell to under 10% of their pre–Cultural Revolution peak.

Scholarly communication virtually ended. Out of roughly 400 technical journals active in 1965, only about 20 remained by 1969, indicating a near-cessation of formal scientific discourse. The resulting human-capital and institutional scars persisted well into the reform era despite later rapid growth. Recovery took nearly 20 years, from the late 1970s to the 1990s; it was spectacular in scale and soon in achievement, but it needed to be.

Killing, Corrupting, and Exiling of Science Under Hitler

Widely regarded as the world’s research powerhouse in the 1920s and early 30s, German science was crippled by the Nazis starting in 1933, when Hitler gained power as Chancellor. Universities, research institutes, and many private companies were “Aryanized,” purged of Jewish and politically “unreliable” scholars.

Biology, anthropology, and, especially, medicine were all reoriented away from independent research toward confirming Nazi racial theory and related eugenic ideas. Medicine was deeply affected with institutes reoriented toward unethical human-subject and “euthanasia” research, with lethal experimentation on prisoners.

The purges drove an exodus of research talent, with figures like Einstein, Bethe, and Krebs emigrating to the UK and, mostly, the US. It also directly affected Jewish scientists in Austria and Hungary, including the “golden generation” of Hungarian physicists who had moved to Germany for research and included the likes of Szilard, Wigner, and von Neumann.

It took a full generation after the war for German science to recover. Such recovery was never total, nor could it be with the entire eastern portion of the country under Soviet rule. Moreover, denazification was partial, with many compromised academics retained or reappointed, complicating ethical and curricular renewal despite administrative recovery. In blunt terms, the wounds that German science suffered did not close quickly or easily.

Effects Of These Episodes Were Not Confined To Each Country

These episodes of suppression had serious international impacts. One of these involved the severing of contacts with scientists in other countries. Foreign research journals were no longer available. Forms of collaboration as well as informal sharing of ideas, data, and other inputs were halted. There was an end to conferences, symposia, and other scientific exchanges that had benefited European and American researchers as well as those in Germany.

In each case, an entire research culture was starved by censorship and suffocated by unrelenting suspicion, surveillance, and threat of arrest or worse. Basic research suffered most, as it could not be justified as directly serving state goals be they ideological, practical, or both. All three countries lost many of their best scientists, who were either killed, imprisoned, or driven to flee and establish careers elsewhere, mainly the U.S.

The achievements of these intellectual immigrants, considerable as they were in their new home countries, can’t be said to have compensated for the demise of so many other excellent minds and careers. Decades were needed for Germany and China to rebuild from the damage done, while Russia has yet to recreate the world-class capability it had a century ago.

What Conclusions Might Come From This View?

By my estimate, the three episodes cost the world more than a century of high potential scientific research, a staggering number. Russia alone had the capability to be a global research power in every major field, equal to Germany, by the 1930s. What China might be today had it pursued research modernization from the 1950s on is almost hard to imagine.

These points, I would argue, justify the asking of certain counterfactual questions. Where might the world be today in biomedicine, the treatment and cures for diseases, had these episodes never happened? Could problems like climate change, antibiotic resistance, plastic pollution, and the biodiversity crisis be closer to solution? What level of progress might now exist in AI and quantum computing, gene editing and space? Granted, there is also the matter of new risks that might have emerged. Yet, there seems an equal possibility that science’s ability to deal with these would have advanced as well.

One clear aspect all three periods is that they were the direct result of modern authoritarian regimes. This truth, in fact, can be extended to a significant number of other nations where science to varying degrees has been a victim of politicization, isolation, and retreat—Japan during the period of ultra-militarism, Spain under Franco, Iran in the hands of its theocratic regime.

No pattern in history is absolute. The examples of nuclear physics in Soviet Russia and Chinese research today suggest that science can succeed to a major degree in an autocratic regime, if given enough independence and allowed intellectual commerce with other nations. Yet China’s example, in particular, is by far the exception. What this may mean for the current century, with the worldwide increase in autocratic government, remains to be seen.