By this author

Institute for the History of Science and Technology in 1932-1936.

Issue 1 from 01.03.2002

The article documents the early period in the existence of the first Russian institution dedicated to the history of science and technology, from its establishment in Leningrad in February of 1932 on the basis of the Commission on the History of Knowledge (founded primarily on the initiative of Vladimir Vernadsky in the early 1920s) up to the radical reorganization and eventual relocation to Moscow in 1936. Various published and archival sources are used to reconstruct the structure and establish the personnel of the institute during that period, as well as to elucidate the range of its work and its significance. A special attention is given to the institute’s first director, Nikolai Bukharin, and scientific secretary, M. A. Gukovskii, both of whom were instrumental in building a well-coordinated team of experienced researchers from the very start of the institute’s existence.

In the early 1930s, when most research and educational institutions of the Soviet Union in the field of humanities were subjected to a series of purges and reorganizations, a number of outstanding historians (such as S. la. Lur’ie, O. A. Dobiash-Rozhdestvenskaia, E. Ch. Skrzhinskaia, and others) sought refuge in the history of science and technology and considered the relatively liberal atmosphere of the new institute as a safe haven. The nine volumes of the “Archive of the History ofScience and Technology,” published by the institute during that period, along with numerous monographs and translations of Western literature, made it a world’s leading player in the field. This period of enthusiastic and fruitful work was brought to a sharp halt in May of 1936, when a group of Moscow-based historians of technology, affiliated with the Commurust Academy and the Committee on the Higher Technical Education, succeeded in initiating the governmental decision to move the institute to Moscow, followed by dramatic changes in its personnel and the very character of work. The documents en closed in the appendixes to the article attest to both the promising start of the institute and its decline by the mid-1936.

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