Rather than follow conventional accounts by analysing Soviet science under
Stalin as a unique anomaly, Nikolai Krementsov’s Stalinist Science (Princeton
University Press, £37.50/$45, ISBN 0 691 02877 X) suggests that
scientists merely tuned their message to a new style of patron. Much of the
vested interests, careerism and institutional rivalry in the Soviet system is,
he suggests, remarkably similar to that which continues in Western science
today.
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