Simon Ings

Stalin and the Scientists

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An epic story of courage, genius and terrible folly, this is the first history of how the Soviet Union's scientists became both the glory and the laughing stock of the intellectual world.
Simon Ings weaves together what happened when a handful of impoverished and underemployed graduates, professors and entrepreneurs, collectors and charlatans, bound themselves to a failing government to create a world superpower. And he shows how Stalin's obsessions derailed a great experiment in 'rational government'.
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Quotes

  • Toğrul Qurbanovhas quoted3 years ago
    The Germans, fighting from house to house and from staircase to staircase, joked bitterly that they had seized the kitchen but were still fighting for the living room. And at last, in January 1944 – a moment of huge psychological importance – Leningrad was freed
  • Toğrul Qurbanovhas quoted3 years ago
    Under the aegis of such men, it was impossible to push the debate into specialist territory, or even ask hard factual questions. All the geneticists could do was argue for the ‘practicality’ of their own research, while their opponents the Lysenkoites barracked them for studying a useless fly, Drosophila, while they, the Lysenkoites, busied themselves with tomatoes, potatoes and other useful plants and animals.
  • Дмитрий Безугловhas quoted6 years ago
    1957 another nuclear accident – a massive explosion at the nuclear waste dump in Kyshtym, close to Sungul – contaminated the area with radioactive waste. The plume rose about a kilometre into the air, exposed about 100,000 people to measurably harmful levels of radiation, and created a dead zone of several hundred square kilometres. The ‘East Ural Radioactive Trace’ became a unique testing area for radio-ecological studies but cleaning up the mess was a real headache,

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