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Lenin's Laureate: Zhores Alferov's Life in Communist Science. By Paul R. Josephson. Cambridge,Mass.: MIT Press, 2010. Pp. v+307. $29.95.
Lenin's Laureate is one of two books on "communist science" by the prolific Paul Josephson published in 2010. Here, he uses the biography of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist to examine the long and often painful trajectory of scientific practice in the Soviet Union. Earlier scholars have adopted similar stylistic conceits; in fact, many of Josephson's insights about Soviet science are not dissimilar to the ones found in Loren Graham's biography of mining engineer Peter Palchinsky, The Ghost of an Executed Engineer (1993). Josephson focuses here on Zhores Ivanovich Alferov, the Soviet physicist who was instrumental in creating the heterojunction (or heterotransistor), for which he shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 2000. In Josephson's words, the book aims to explore "the rise of big science and technology in the twentieth century through the experiences of a leading scientist and against the backdrop of Soviet history from the Revolution to the USSR's collapse in 1991" (p. 4).
In the context ofWestern literature on Soviet science, Josephson's book is both atypical and typical. Its anomalous nature derives in part from the choice of Alferov. Commonly, historians of Soviet science-especially those doing biography-have gravitated to one of three types of scientists: dissidents, victims, or ideologues; hence the many treatments...