Science and Nation After Socialism in the Novosibirsk Scientific Center, Russia

Local Science, Global Knowledge: Science and Nation after Socialism in the Novosibirsk Scientific Center, Russia Amy Lynn Ninetto Mohnton, Pennsylvania B.A., Franklin and Marshall College, 1993 M.A., University of Virginia, 1997 A Dissertation presented to the Graduate Faculty of the University of Virginia in Candidacy for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Dcpartmcn1 of Anthropology University of Virginia May 2002 11 © Copyright by Amy Lynn Ninetta All Rights Reserved May 2002 lll Abstract This dissertation explores the changing relationships between science, the state, and global capital in the Novosibirsk Scientific Center (Akademgorodok). Since the collapse of the state-sponsored Soviet "big science" establishment, Russian scientists have been engaging transnational flows of capital, knowledge, and people. While some have permanently emigrated from Russia, others travel abroad on temporary contracts; still others work for foreign firms in their home laboratories. As they participate in these transnational movements, Akademgorodok scientists confront a number of apparent contradictions. On one hand, their transnational movement is, in many respects, seen as a return to the "natural" state of science-a reintegration of former Soviet scientists into a "world science" characterized by open exchange of information and transcendence of local cultural models of reality. On the other hand, scientists' border-crossing has made them-and the state that claims them as its national resources-increasingly conscious of the borders that divide world science into national and local scientific communities with differential access to resources, prestige, and knowledge. While scientists assert a specifically Russian way of doing science, grounded in the historical relationships between Russian science and the state, they are reaching sometimes uneasy accommodations with the globalization of scientific knowledge production. This ethnography argues that what counts as science-what makes science recognizable in a particular context-is more than what goes on in laboratories, but implicates how scientists imagine themselves to be part of national and even global communities. IV Table of Contents Acknowledgments V Note on Transliterations and Names Vll 1 Introduction 1 A Space for Science in a Backward Place: Soviet Modernity, Siberian Otherness, and World Science in Akademgorodok's First Years 26 Is Science Disappearing? Crisis, Capital, and Connections 74 Temporary Migration in the Permanent Crisis: Choosing Between Science and Nation 127 Cold Fusion: Negotiating Universal and Particular in Russian Science 169 Civilization and its Insecurities: Global Science, the State, and National Progress 207 Conclusion: From Physics to Folk A11 242 Notes 256 References 267 V Acknowledgments In Akademgorodok, I was fortunate to meet many people who encouraged my interest in the life of their town and their country. The Efimov family, Valerii, Liuba, Alena, and Ania, welcomed me into their home and treated me like a member of the family from the first day. I am grateful to them not only for their considerable assistance with my research, but for their warmth and good humor as well. I also thank Tat'iana Berezina, Munira Filonenko, Vitalii Tselishchev, Sergei Eremin, Iurii Pliusnin, Natal'ia Baranova, and Natal'ia Kupershtokh for assistance and support both practical and intellectual. Roza Rozhkova and Alena Efimova were of essential help in transcribing interviews. And of course, I thank all the Akademgorodok scientists who took the time to talk with me about their experiences; without their generosity, this dissertation would not be, though responsibility for the interpretations presented here-and any eITors-lies solely with the author. Many people at the University of Virginia helped shape this project. My dissertation committee, Richard Handler, Susan McKinnon, and Peter Metcalf, have been unflagging in their support for this project and my academic life in general. Karen Ryan joined the committee late in the process, but her comments and enthusiasm have been very helpful. This work benefited tremendously from ongoing conversations with Elizabeth Vann, Matthew Engelke, Jeffrey Feldman, Rebecca Nash, Eleanor Culley, Jeff Fleisher, Laura Bellows, and Katya Makarova. David Sapir helped me draw the map that appears in chapter two. VI Ira Bashkow, Jennifer Patico, and Adriana Petryna read and commented on versions of chapters that began as conference papers or articles. Last but not least, I thank my parents, Marguerite and Tony Ninetta, who have in so many ways traveled this long road right by my side. Field research in Novosibirsk in 1998-99 was supported by a grant from the InternationalResearch and Exchanges Board (IREX), with funds provided by the US Department of State, which administers the Program for Research and Training on Eastern Europe and the Independent States of the Former Soviet Union (Title VIII), and by a grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. I received support for the writing of the dissertation from the Eurasia Program of the Social Science Research Council and from the University of Virginia Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Preliminary research trips to Akademgorodok in 1995 and 1997 were funded by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Virginia, and I would like to acknowledge the support of Dean Robert Huskey in this regard. Vil Note on Transliterations and Names Transliterations of Russian words use a modified Library of Congress system, omitting diacritical marks, except for names that have generally recognized forms (for example, Yeltsin, Dostoevsky). The names of the scientists have been changed, except in cases where the details presented obviously identify them-for instance, if such details appear in other published materials, such as newspaper and magazine articles. Chapter One Introduction One cannot understand Russia with the mind. -Fyodor Tiutchev, 1866 I don't know how you'll understand all this in a year; I've lived here all my life and I don't know what's going on. -Aleksei, Akademgorodok physicist, November 1998 These are daunting words for an ethnographer. Certainly, I was not the first foreigner to be confronted with images of Russia's incomprehensibility-in fact, I was one in a centuries-long line of visitors to Russia to hear such words. But they were intriguing because I was interested in those aspects of contemporary Russian life that seemed the most distant from romantic images of Russian mysticism: modernity and scientific rationality. Russianness has long been understood as a spiritual quality, and in this way the Soviet emphasis on planning, science, and technological control could seem like something superficial, a foreign imposition whose hold on twentieth-century Russian society and Russian imaginations was accomplished only by force. This dissertation is about the ways in which science and the imagining of a nation come together in a place and a time where it often seems as though the nation is coming apart and being transformed by-even overwhelmed by-global flows of people, ideas, and capital. The crisis facing postsocialist Russia over the last decade has left much of the population poor and uncertain about the nature of the changes taking place in their everyday lives, in politics, and in the economy. Scientists, who once enjoyed the prestige of an important role in building modernity and adequate, stable state support for their research, find themselves with aging equipment, no chemical reagents, little access to 2 scientific literature, and months of unpaid salaries rendered nearly worthless by inflation. Their situation is not, perhaps, worse than that of other professions in Russia, but the dramatic change in their circumstances stands out. Many of the institutes and individual scientists in the Siberian science city of Akademgorodok have been looking abroad for opportunities to work or receive funding for their research, and the resulting movements of people, knowledge, and capital have engendered many apparent contradictions. On one hand, the transnational movement of scientists is in many respects seen as a return to the "natural" state of science-a reintegration of former Soviet scientists into a "world science" (mirovaia nauka) characterized by open exchange of information and the transcendence of local cultural models of reality. On the other hand, scientists' border crossing has made them-and the state that claims them as its national resources increasingly conscious of the borders that divide world science into national and local scientific communities with differential access to resources, prestige, and knowledge. While scientists assert a specifically Russian way of doing science, grounded in the historical relationships between Russian science and the state, they are reconfiguring the relationships between state, science, and society, reaching sometimes uneasy accommodations with the globalization of scientific knowledge production. The experiences of Akademgorodok scientists suggest that science is much more than what goes on in laboratories. Science is intricately interwoven with the imagining of nations, places, and worlds, so much so that an outmigration of scientists, such as that taking place in Russia today, is seen as threatening not only to national security, but to the very existence of the nation. If, however, a national science is to generate progress and modernity, it cannot remain

Load more