Koren: How did the scientists and engineers fit into that?

Ings: He tried to get the young educated as fast as possible in batches, in brigades. On the other hand, he tried to wipe out generations that were operating under the old patronage system [that funded scientific research.] Stalin’s attempt was to do away with the patronage system by becoming the only patron. By making the state the only possible patron, you have this absurd situation in which even as engineers are being paid more than they’ve ever been paid before, you’re also getting show trials in which engineers are shown the door or exiled or shot.

Koren: It did seem like someone could be running a medical institution one day and sentenced to hard labor the next. What happened to scientists when the state liked them, and when it didn’t?

Ings: Each specialism lost people during the Great Purge [ordered by Stalin to scare and eliminate opposition between 1936 and 1938]. When that happens, people want an explanation for what happened. They think, if genetics got it in the neck, it must have been because of the genetics. But most of the purges were to do with bureaucracy, not with learning. We tend to look at the research and think, how did the research rub people up the wrong way? Where we should be looking is, what patrons they had, what clients they had, what institutions did they run, whose ear did they have. The astronomers at Pulkovo were important because of whose ear they had, because of where they were getting their funding. It wasn’t because they were spotting things in the stars that were rubbing the Stalinist regime up the wrong way.

Koren: Many scientists seemed to move in and out of exile, and it didn’t always seem like a bad career move.

Ings: The classic example of that is Alexander Luria, who led what on the surface looks to be a normal life. He never betrayed anyone, he had foreign visits, he had good correspondence with colleagues all over the world. But he did this by ducking and diving, and he moved from institution to institution. He was never exiled, but he simply jumped before he was pushed. It was possible to land on your feet, to make exile work you. To be pushed out of the center, from Moscow to Odessa, could actually play to your hand. It could be out of your advantage to be out of the limelight.

Koren: There was a lot of deception and back-stabbing among scientists themselves. I’m thinking of Trofim Lysenko’s decision in 1939 to send his rival Nikolai Vavilov on a expedition to the Caucasus so he could replace Vavilov’s department’s staff. Can you tell me more about those dynamics?

Ings: You have these big organizations that are stuffed full of people who were alive before the Revolution, who hold more to a liberal democracy scheme than to a socialist scheme, and so you have these internecine rivalries between generations. It’s made worse by the fact that at the time in Russia, you didn’t have a retirement age, and that’s a really big problem. People were staying in posts until they dropped dead, and these guys lived quite a long time. So unless you stabbed people in the back, there was no way move forward in your career.