Atomic-Powered Communism: Nuclear Culture in the Postwar USSR

Abstract

In 1953, just after Stalin's death, the Soviet state machine tool publishing house released A. A. Kanaev's From the Water Wheel to the Atomic Engine (Ot vodianoi mel'nitsy do atomnogo dvigateli). Like other books and articles published in the popular and scientific press in the USSR in this period, From the Water Wheel to the Atomic Engine explored the political, economic, and cultural significance of an incipient “atomic century” and touted the nearly limitless applications of the power of the atom in agriculture, medicine, and industry. Indeed, there was little doubt among scientists, engineers, economic planners, and party officials that the Soviet Union would soon enter the stage of “communist construction”: communism would be achieved within their lifetimes, owing to the omniscient leadership of the Communist Party and on the basis of the achievements of science and technology. By the end of the decade, the average Soviet citizen, too, came to believe that the glorious future had arrived. Many people wrote letters to prominent physicists with suggestions on how to tame the power of the atom to improve the quality of life. For citizens, scientists, and officials alike, successes in atomic energy provided undeniable confirmation that at long last society had embarked on the final leg of the long journey to communism.

Tsiolkovskii and the Invention of ‘Russian Cosmism’: Science, Mysticism, and the Conquest of Nature at the Birth of Soviet Space Exploration

“…18 Enthusiasm for space, much like the fascination with nuclear energy, was a signifi cant component of this intersection of postwar scientifi c and technological optimism with Cold War exigencies. 19 As with the mass interest in the 1920s, Tsiolkovskii was a central fi gure in this burst of writing on cosmic topics. Soon after the end of the war, a few infl uential space enthusiasts actively canvassed to elevate Tsiolkovskii's name as a nativeborn talent within the pantheon of Soviet science.…”

Science, Religion and Communism in Cold War Europe

“…18 For the next few years, a tussle went on behind the scenes between hardliners, led by M. A. Suslov, second 16 secretary of the CPSU, and an opponent of Khrushchev, and the Council for the Affairs of the Russian Orthodox Church, the body charged with overseeing the hierarchy, handling complaints and informing party leaders of developments on the ground. 19 The hardliners won out in 1958 when a new campaign against the Church was launched that would last until 1965. During the campaign, over 6000 churches and over 1000 non-Orthodox places of worship were closed down, monastic communities disbanded, restrictions placed on parents' right to teach their children religion and a ban enforced on the presence of children at church services (beginning in 1961 with Baptists, and then extending to the Orthodox in 1963).…”

“…In a book on popular Catholicism published in the early 1970s, for example, Ciupak devoted a chapter to discussion of religious life in small-city parishes. 19 He drew on statistics from ten parishes in ten different provinces and also included qualitative commentary by the local pastors on the religiosity of each community. But although those commentaries often made explicit references to the importance of divergent local traditions, especially in parishes in the Western Territories where the population was composed of a mix of natives and in-migrants, Ciupak showed little interest in the particularities of local historical experiences.…”

“…A connection with the science of the individual mind, Ćimić asserted, was important for understanding the origins and sources of faith, or as he put it, 'the emergence of religion from defi nite points of the psychological structure of the human being'. 19 Psychological dynamics were, in Ćimić's view, vital to a richer, more complex, yet still authentically Marxist sociological explanation of the unanticipated persistence of religiosity even after four decades of socialist conditions. The operative 'constitutive elements of the ontological structure of the human being' were so deeply seated, he concluded, that 'they resist, for quite a long time, radical social transformations'.…”

“…Historian Pavel Kolář observed that the events of 1956 shattered the idea of a quick and straightforward march towards the communist future. 19 History slowed down and became more indeterminate for Romanian atheists, much like to prominent Marxists and communist parties across Eastern Europe. In line with the broader post-Stalinist ideo- 17 logical shifts, Romanian atheists also 'discovered' that socialist societies generated their own contradictions and possibilities for alienation, reasons for which they increasingly came to argue that, contrary to previous pronouncements, religion was not a form of estrangement particular to past societies.…”