Academia in Upheaval: Origins, Transfers, and Transformations of the Communist Academic Regime in Russia and East Central Europe

Shows that the communist system in science and higher education was created less by an intentionally-imposed Soviet model than by the pressures and agendas developed within communist societies to reshape science and learning in successive periods of upheaval and consolidation. The communist academic regime was considerably more complex and historically contingent than previously recognized, as the persistence of many of its features after the fall of communism demonstrates. The latest archival research by an international team of scholars is brought together to produce the first comparative treatment of the periods of upheaval that shaped the rise and fall of the communist academic regime in Russia and East Central Europe. This volume sheds new light on the question of a Soviet model by examining how a particular Soviet system of science and higher education emerged, how it was exported and imported across varying local, national and international settings, and how key aspects of it outlived the political system that fostered it. The contemporary crises in science and higher education surrounding the demise of communism appear as a distinctive break from the patterns set into motion in the 1920s and 30s, but also as one more upheaval following a long line of previous reorderings throughout the 20th century that were conditioned by broader cataclysms in politics, society, ideology, and culture.

Table of Contents:
Preface Introduction On the Origins and Demise of the Soviet Academic Regime by Michael David-Fox and György Péteri The Origins The Formation of the Soviet Academy of Sciences: Bolsheviks and Academicians in the 1920s and 1930s by Vera Tolz The Assault on the Universities and the Dynamics of Stalin's "Great Break," 1928-1932 by Michael David-Fox Stalinism and Science: Physics and Philosophical Disputes in the USSR, 1930-1955 by Paul Josephson The Transfers The Sovietization of Higher Education in the Czech Lands, East Germany, and Poland during the Stalinist Period, 1948-1954 by John Connelly Lysenkoism in Europe: Export-Import of the Soviet Model by Nikolai Krementsov Science Between Two Worlds: Foreign "Models" and Hungary's Academia, 1945-1949 by György Péteri The Transformations: Continuities and Discontinuities after 1989 The Academy vs. the Rest by Stephen Fortescue How Willing Are Scientists to Reform Their Own Institutions? by Loren R. Graham The Legacy of State-Socialism in Academia by György Péteri Conclusion Scholars Steer Their Ships through the Turbulent Seas of History by Linda Lucia Lubrano

About the Author :
MICHAEL DAVID-FOX is Associate Professor, Department of History, University of Maryland at College Park. GYÖRGY PÉTERI is Professor, Department of History, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim.

Review :
.,."these essays provide a sophisticated, engrossing, edifying, and expansive view of the social and institutional history of "Soviet-style science" and should find their way into science studies syllabi."-Isis ?...these essays provide a sophisticated, engrossing, edifying, and expansive view of the social and institutional history of "Soviet-style science" and should find their way into science studies syllabi.?-Isis ..."these essays provide a sophisticated, engrossing, edifying, and expansive view of the social and institutional history of "Soviet-style science" and should find their way into science studies syllabi."-Isis