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The Private World of Soviet Scientists from Stalin to Gorbachev. By Maria A. Rogacheva. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. xi, 211 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. $99.99, hard bound.
Maria Rogacheva begins a chapter of her study of the scientific center of Chernogolovka with Andrei Sakharov's recollection of being a “soldier … of the scientific-technical war” (49). The great physicist's awakening of conscience and his role in the human rights movement has colored popular views of the late Soviet scientific intelligentsia, according to which scientists were natural dissenters against the Soviet order. In this well-crafted and persuasive monograph, Rogacheva argues that most Soviet scientists refused to follow Sakharov in rejecting the USSR's “scientific-technical war,” instead remaining its soldiers until the regime's collapse.
The Private World of Soviet Scientists pursues this agenda through a microhistory of the scientific town of Chernogolovka in Moscow province, a research testing ground for the military-scientific complex in the 1950s that then developed into a “full-fledged scientific center dedicated to fundamental research” (2). Unlike the better-known Akademgorodok in Siberia, Chernogolovka's status as a hub of science came from...