By Simon Ings
ISBN-10: 0571290078
ISBN-13: 9780571290079
An epic tale of braveness, genius and bad folly, this is often the 1st background of ways the Soviet Union's scientists turned either the respect and the guffawing inventory of the highbrow world.
Simon Ings weaves jointly what occurred whilst a handful of impoverished and underemployed graduates, professors and marketers, creditors and charlatans, certain themselves to a failing govt to create a global superpower. And he indicates how Stalin's obsessions derailed a very good scan in 'rational government'.
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Additional info for Stalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy 1905-1953
Sample text
But peasants in Russia had never produced those kinds of surpluses. Their communal style of agriculture was not geared to feed cities. It was geared so that people in the countryside wouldn’t starve. We have good agricultural and climate data for Russia going back over a thousand years, from the year 873. In that span of time, Russia weathered a hundred hungry years and more than 120 famines. Russia is as cold and as barren as it is big, and it gets colder, by tens of degrees, the further east you travel.
Vernadsky’s estate manager wrote to tell his employer that they were selling their animals to the local gentry for a pittance, and about a quarter of them were already making ‘famine bread’, mixing their dwindling supplies of rye flour with hay, and even brick dust. They were knocking on the doors of Vernadovka for help. Vernadsky did not immediately rush home. He realised that he could do more good by remaining in Moscow. A gifted bureaucrat, he assembled a relief effort among his friends. A retired neighbour, V.
Moscow in particular, with its wild mix of contemporary buildings and ramshackle little homes, palaces and factories, crooked lanes and wide streets, squares and boulevards, drew young men from across the region. The communes emptied out: only women and the elderly remained, and agriculture declined. ‘Peasants living in Moscow send scarcely half of the taxes,’ ran one report from Klin District, north-west of Moscow, ‘and the family struggles with need year-round, living half-starved. ’6 In 1861, in an attempt to stem the haemorrhaging of the countryside (and the food shortages that were becoming a constant of city life), the system of internal passports was strengthened.
Stalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy 1905-1953 by Simon Ings
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