Word: research
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...surprising degree of independence is allowed the academy in scientific matters. With notably few exceptions-mostly in nonscientific fields -the academy elects its members on the basis of merit. It not only directs the policies of the twelve "sister academies" of the various republics, it runs at least 126 research institutes, and to a large extent governs the work of more than 200,000 scientists and technicians. Its institutes probe into everything from weather control and ionospheric explorations above the Antarctic icecap to elaborate schemes for landing electronic-guided tanks on the moon. It sponsors as many as 100 field...
...such men as Copernicus as "the craft of the Devil.'' The first academicians were mostly from the West, but whether Russian or not, they soon acquired the special place in society that they hold today. Though a practical man, Czar Peter fully realized the value of research that might not bring immediate benefits. As a result, from the days of the early academy's great all-round genius Mikhail Lomonsov -poet, pioneer physical chemist, physicist, reformer of the language, and "father of the new Russian literature"-Russian science has flourished even under the most stifling of dictatorships...
...people realize that the Russian scientific tradition goes back so far," says Mathematician Richard Bellman of the Rand Corp. "In some fields, we've always been behind." It was the 19th century Russian Botanist Dmitry Ivanovsky who discovered the first plant virus. Dmitry Pryanishnikov originated soil research, and world-famed Dmitry Mendeleev charted the elements and drew up the periodic scale still found in every high school laboratory. Had Aleksandr Popov worked a bit faster, he might well have wrested from Marconi credit for inventing the radio. In 1904 Ivan Pavlov won a Nobel Prize for his work...
...party waged war on "academic individualism," and in the great purge of 1936-38, nearly half of the academy's party members were either shot or shipped to forced-labor camps. Cosmopolitanism (the idea that science could be foreign or Jewish), objectivism (the refusal to interpret new research in the light of Marxism), and idealism (a catch-all indictment) became the cardinal sins. The era of "fatherland science" had begun. By official decree, Russia claimed so many retroactive scientific "firsts" that its impressive past was discredited by exaggeration: Polzunov was declared the builder of the first steam engine...
...work of Einstein and Bohr to develop Russia's atomic bomb, and the Soviet began turning out calculators as fast as it could. Physicist Peter Kapitsa, who was placed under arrest for refusing to work on the atom bomb, is now back in favor and heads a research institute...