Scientific information for stalin's laboratories 1945–1953

摘要

During the twentieth century the strategic value of science and scientific information forced world powers to support supply systems for foreign publications even when their governments' official ideologies militated against such openings. This was the case both under National Socialism in Germany (Richards, 1994) and in the Soviet Union at the height of Soviet xenophobia in the period 1945–1953. While on the one hand fulminating against “toadying to the West”, Soviet authorities were simultaneously laying the foundations of a complex importation system to supply their own researchers with scientific publications from the West. The Central Committee of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union played a role in building this supply system, as did librarians, documentalists and the state security police. This article will attempt to reconstruct the pathways along which Western scientific publications got to scientists in the Soviet Union between 1945 and 1953, wherever they were working—at Academy of Science institutes, universities, military laboratories, prison laboratories (sharashki) or forced labor camps. It will be an incomplete, preliminary account, based on interviews, published memoirs and histories, and accessible archival sources. Ultimately, the article will try to determine what effect the conflict between official xenophobia and the state's scientific needs had on information processing.