Prelude to War 2

SOVIET UNION PRE WAR

While America and the United Kingdom struggled to organize centralized institutions for scientific research, after the 1917 revolution in Russia, Soviet authorities gave more money to the sciences than any country in the world in the 1920s and 30s and established thousands of research centers. However, many scientists employed prior to the 1917 takeover were considered to be politically questionable, and subsequently were forbidden from working in universities or Soviet science institutions. Further purges of intellectuals under Stalin’s rule led to more shortages in the USSR’s scientific community. This resulted in a tremendous loss of scientific expertise in the years between the wars, no doubt hindering their technological progress during the war. According to scholar Loren Graham, Soviet authorities thought of science in terms of advancing industrial output to meet production demands from the government. Advanced weapons were not at the top of the Soviet science community’s agenda as the USSR struggled to become a modern industrialized nation in the 1920s and 30s.

Similar to the USSR, the Nazi government nationalized science programs shortly after their takeover in 1933, also purging political and social, and in the Germans’ case, religious, ‘undesirables.’ Germany was well advanced in the sciences before the Nazi ascension to power. Created shortly before the First World War, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Sciences was established as a national, centralized institution for scientific research. At the onset of hostilities in 1914, the institute shifted its focus to military research. Since the 19^th century, Germany was well-known internationally for its leading research in physics. Many landmark discoveries, like Albert Einstein’s theories on quantum physics, that were unveiled before the Nazi takeover, were dismissed by the new regime as “Jewish Science.”

These actions are similar to the Soviets’denouncement of scientists and institutions that existed before the communist revolution as vestages of the Tsar’s bourgeois society. This led to official ignorance of scientific progress in both countries because of their totalitarian nature of leadership – dependant on absolute political control of all facets of society. Noted scientists like Albert Einstein left the country after facing the realities of losing their positions and being subject to arrest or worse. Though there were certainly many brilliant scientists that remained in Germany – either by choice or force – the state of German sciences leading up to the war was certainly not aided by the loss of leading scientists and official dismissal of scientific discoveries made by ‘undesirables.’ Although the Nazi government put significant resources towards scientific research, the politicized nature of their actions did not benefit scientific progress.