Volume 45, Number 7 · April 23, 1998
Russia's Dream City
By Robert Cottrell
New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science
by Paul R. Josephson
Princeton University Press, 351 pp., $39.50
The Soviet Union's standing order to its scientists echoed that of Karl Marx to philosophers. Their job was not so much to understand the world as to change it. Those who sank too deep in theory were liable to face charges of 'idealism' or 'formalism' brought by jealous colleagues. When Khrushchev approved the building of a new Soviet 'science city' in 1957, the project was itself conceived as a way of stamping Soviet reality on the face of nature. It would form part of the regime's efforts to tame and exploit the sprawling wastes of Russia east of the Urals. A city of 200,000 people would be built in unspoiled Siberian forest near Novosibirsk, fifteen hundred miles east of Moscow. A score of research institutes would be created, each of them a leader in world science. And all this would be done within five years, promised Mikhail Lavrentev, the mathematician in charge of the project.
Review, 3999 words
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