As in the West, the late 1950s and the 1960s in the Soviet Union were, for human scientists, the epoch of structuralism (cf. Marx-Scouras 1996; Pavel 1989). Structuralism was originally a theory of language that shifted the attention of linguists from the materiality of sounds and other elements of human language to the “deep structures” of relations, which appeared to determine the properties of these elements. Inaugurated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), the structuralist academic movement reached its highest point in the 1960s, when its linguistic models were modified and applied to a variety of other fields, such as the study of myth, ritual, literature, and communication. This process was taking place in France, Italy, Czechoslovakia, the United States, and in the Soviet Union.
Yet, despite being a transnational movement, structuralism developed along different trajectories in different national contexts. For instance, in 1940s France, structuralism was basically an external import without deep national intellectual roots (Pavel 1989, 125-132).
On the contrary, Eastern Europe and Russia gave the world such related trends as “Russian Formalism” and the Prague School structuralism already in the 1920s.1 Yet, in the 1930s and 1940s, the center of the world structuralist movement shifted to the United States. At the same time, in Soviet academia and the arts, everything that smacked of “formalism,” that is the emphasis on the autonomy of linguistic and artistic “form” from the ideological
“content,” was suppressed. Given this massive gap in the Russian intellectual history, all the more surprising is the impressive “neo-formalist revival,” which took place in the Soviet Union after Stalin’s death in 1953. In this chapter, I explore the institutional, discursive and political aspects of this revival by focusing on the Moscow-centered structuralist movement. I examine the ups and downs of this movement, and the strategies of action, which were adopted by its members in the Soviet “academic wars” for legitimacy and influence. I explain the reasons for its sudden emergence in mid-1950s and its sudden decline around 1963. This picture leads to the conclusion that the Tartu-Moscow School, inaugurated in 1964, was not simply a continuation of the structuralist movement but, in many respects, a new beginning, which was characterized by different social strategies and, eventually, by the new intellectual idiom.
1 The term “Russian Formalism” usually embraces the intellectual production of the Moscow Linguistic Circle (1915-24), headed by Roman Jakobson, and the Opoyaz (OPOIaZ), the Society of Poetic Language, which was established in 1916 and was active throughout the 1920s. The Prague School, active since 1928 to the 1940s, included both Czech scholars (Vilém Mathesius, Jan Mukařovský, René Wellek) and Russian émigrés (Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetskoi) (see Erlich 1981; Merquior 1986; Steiner 1984).
16 Stalinist Science and Its Legacy
Without necessarily falling into the trap of Russian exceptionalism, one can state that Soviet academic system, as it existed by the mid-1950s, was quite a unique phenomenon. Highly centralized and hierarchical, concentrated in a number of urban centers, fully funded by the state, and institutionally split into “fundamental” (basic, or theoretical) and applied research as well as research and teaching, Soviet science was a magnificent experiment in coalescing knowledge and power in the massive apparatus of the “empire of knowledge” (see Krementsov 1997; Vucinich 1984). Far from being just a product of the one-way imposition by the socialist state, this apparatus was, at different points in time, an outcome of the compromises between conflicting objectives within the politics of socialist modernization and the interests of the groups that were supposed to implement this politics, academic intellectuals in particular. In the early 1930s, when the Soviet scientific system acquired its distinctive shape, this settlement was a result of the tradeoff between various projects including Marxist materialism, socialist collectivism, technocratic rationalism, meritocratic ideology, anti-Western nationalism and anti-ideological academism. This tradeoff was achieved at the expense of more radical visions of proletarian science, which tried to abolish the distance between experts and “the masses” (Buck-Morss 2002; Vucinich 1984; Graham 2002; Kojevnikov 2004).
Yet, this “symbiosis” of power and knowledge was inherently unstable. The communist authorities were torn between attempts to base their political legitimacy on knowledge claims and on the claims for egalitarian representation. On the one hand, the authorities needed intellectuals as “specialists in modernization,” or “transmission belts”
between them and “the masses” (Bauman 1987; Dubin 2001). Therefore, Stalin’s government granted academics, especially researchers of the Academy of Sciences and professors of a number of elite universities, with high official prestige and remuneration, as well as with multiple privileges approximating the ones of the nomenklatura (Fitzpatrick 1999; Vucinich 1984). The beneficiaries included many older generation academics that were previously vilified as the “bourgeois intelligentsia.” Yet the more privileged as a social category intellectuals were, the more personally secure they felt, especially during the purges of the late 1930s and late 1940s-early 1950s. Furthermore, the Party continued to promote lower class cadres to the academic positions, especially the positions in university education and human sciences. This politics threatened to undermine the considerable social distinction of academic professionals, which was inherited from the imperial period and reinforced in the late 1930s and 1940s. Also, these upwardly mobile promotees (vydvizhentsy), often more competent in the ideological “newspeak” than in their disciplines, frequently served as vehicles of the politicized and ideologized atmosphere characteristic for Stalinist science (Krementsov 1997). Indeed, the late 1930s and 1940s were full of outbreaks of highly politicized debates often accompanied by spasmodic interventions by the Party officials and Stalin himself (e.g. his personal support for Lysenko’s Michurinist biology as well as his overturn of Marrist linguistics (see Krementsov 1997; Slezkine 1996)).2 The result was uncertain and nervous atmosphere of what the classical philologist Olga Freidenberg (1890-1955) called a “squabble”:
2 See, for instance, his personal support for Lysenko’s Michurinist biology as well as his criticism of Marrist linguistics (see Krementsov 1997; Slezkine 1996). Academician Nikolai Ia. Marr (1864-1934) was the founder of the “new theory of language,” which was considered the basis for “Marxist linguistics” in the 1930s-40s and was officially supported as such by the authorities. Yet, in his 1950 article, “Marxism and the Questions of Linguistics,” Stalin rejected Marrism and thus put an end to its domination in Soviet linguistics.
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Everywhere, in all organizations and homes, a nasty squabble (skloka) is raging, a poisoned fruit of our order. Squabbling is a natural state for people who are rubbing against each other in a dungeon, helpless to resist the dehumanization they have been subjected to (Freidenberg and Pasternak [1956]1981).
In effect, academics were torn between, for one thing, their appreciation of—or rather increasingly taking for granted—the social distinction and prestige in Soviet society and, for another, their irritation—and often deeply seated fear—caused by the state’s and the Party’s infringements on the personal and corporate autonomy of academics and academia. Indeed, on the one hand, Stalinist science provided academics with the security of tenure, shielded from the instability of student and public “demand,” and promised enormous opportunities for conducting long-term expensive research. The regime also allowed academics to widen their institutional base and resources. By the late 1950s, the Soviet Academy of Sciences was a corporation as close to a state within a state as one can be, with its own share of “socialist property,” its own labs, plants, planes, ships, spas, dachas, and expensive equipment (Vucinich 1984). At the same time, intellectuals felt highly vulnerable in the atmosphere of unpredictability nourished by the Stalinist policies of the “permanent revolution.” Their institutional position, professional competence and personal security were in constant danger.
This was particularly true to the situation of educators and specialists in human sciences, where knowledge seemed to be more transparent to the authorities and thus more vulnerable to their interventions.
In response to these challenges, academics tried to translate their particular agendas into the Party lingo, as well as to enter the patronage relationships with the members of the Central Committee. They often succeeded in emasculating the attempts at the Party control by ritualizing political campaigns and thus reestablishing their own authority over their endeavors (Krementsov 1997, 192). Yet, in the years of terror, personal links to leaders proved to be increasingly dangerous (a patron could appear to be an hidden enemy!). The problem with the acquisition of the Party ideology was that its content was deeply ambiguous or, one might say, flexible, to the extent that only the Party itself could, at any particular moment, pin down its “correct reading” (Gerovitch 2002; Epstein 1995; Walker 1989). In this situation, even the most vehement proclamations of one’s “Marxism” could have been used against academics: Stalin’s denunciation of the previously officially endorsed “new linguistic theory” of Nikolai Marr is the case in point particularly relevant here. This significance of language and the question “who controls language?” explains the focus of the 1950s reform movement in Soviet science on reforming the language of science. In this context, the centrality of linguistics and semiotics, the science of signification and communication, in this movement is also not a big surprise.
Cybernetics, Structuralism and the Reform Movement in Soviet Human Sciences
It is good to be a structural linguist:
everything immediately falls into place - The Strugatsky Brothers, Escape Attempt After Stalin’s death, Soviet science immediately found itself in the state of flux. The Stalinist pact between intellectuals and authorities immediately came under attack. Frequent jerky alternations of official policies and preferences under Stalin satisfied neither the government nor the academic establishment. Under the conditions of the Cold War, scientists, especially physicists and mathematicians, accumulated sufficient political capital and social status to push for a major reform in organization and management of science (K.Ivanov 2002, 318).
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Their demands included the domination of “fundamental,” or “pure,” science over applied science, and the guarantees of the expert’s authority over their expertise, as well as over the terms of its translation into practice (2002, 334).
This reform movement proved to be quite successful, at least in the short term and especially within natural sciences. Scientists indeed managed to impose their agenda on the Communist leaders. They achieved particularly striking successes in rehabilitating and even institutionalizing some of the scientific fields and traditions, which were suppressed under Stalin. From genetics and cybernetics to structuralism and Vygotsky’s psychology—these are some of the success stories. The remarkable career of the new science of cybernetics from the “bourgeois pseudo-science” to “the science in the service of communism” is particularly important for understanding the history of Soviet structuralism (Gerovitch 2002).
Cybernetics (from a Greek work for “steering” and “government”) is a the interdisciplinary study of complex systems, especially communication processes, and the mechanisms of control and feedback. Proposed in the late 1940s by Norbert Wiener (1894-1964), the idea of the science of cybernetics immediately attracted the attention of Russian scholars, of whom Andrei N. Kolmogorov (1903-87) was one of the most important. Among other things, cybernetics appealed to Kolmogorov as a method of “diminishing the entropy in the scientific community” by reformulating scientific knowledge in “exact” terms of control, communication and information. As such, cybernetics provided the academic reform movement with its grammar and vocabulary, something that Slava Gerovitch recently called
“cyberspeak,” as opposed the “newspeak” of the official politicized discourse (Gerovitch 2002; V.Uspensky 1997).
Obviously, linguists could not stay aside from the work of working out of this
“ideologically neutral” language. Soviet structural linguistics emerged in the mid-1950s under the auspice of recently rehabilitated and very popular cybernetics. Structuralists and cyberneticians shared the common belief in the possibility of the universal method of problem solving, provided that problems are formulated in the right language. Following the logical positivist Rudolf Carnap (1891-1970) and the linguist Louis Hjelmslev (1899-1965), they declared that, before deciding whether a certain problem can or cannot be solved scientifically, “it is necessary first of all to formulate this problem clearly in some strict terms, for example, to pose it as a mathematical problem” (Revzin and Rozentsveig 1963, 34). Whatever does not survive the reformulation into this kind of “cyberspeak” would have to be expunged from the body of science. This “hygienic” concern constituted a key frame for the reception of the newly available Western achievements in what was known as
“structural linguistics,” that is American descriptive linguistics, transformational-generative grammar and Roman Jakobson’s phonology and poetics.
Although there were different views on the nature of the universal method and ways of achieving it, there was a widely shared consensus on the fact that language, including the language of science, is as it were independent of the political and economic conditions of its usage. This view had been vilified in Soviet literature as “formalist” since the campaigns against “the formal method” in linguistics and literary studies in the 1920s. Ironically, Stalin himself played a pivotal role in dispelling the exclusively accusatory usage of this label. In his explosive series of articles on linguistics and Marxism, he employed his crown move of distancing from the “excesses” of previously endorsed policies and accused the supporters of Nikolai Marr of inventing “formalism” “to facilitate their struggle against their opponents in linguistics” (Stalin 1950, 87). Stalin proclaimed that language is not a part of the superstructure, that it is not determined by the economic basis and that it manifests stability over time. That is, he not only dismantled the Marrist hegemony; he also de facto legitimized
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the “formalist” idea of the autonomy of language and, whatever inadvertently, opened up the field of linguistics for academic debate.3
Clandestine structuralists immediately jumped into the opening created by Stalin.
Already in 1952, the young linguist Sebastian Shaumian published a paper, in which he advocated the interest in Western linguistic structuralism (see Seyffert 1983, 86-87).4 He argued that this interest is not a sign of “kowtowing to the imperialist West” but a way to assimilate the best in the Russian national academic tradition. Already 3-4 years later, these kinds of obvious references to Soviet ideological and nationalistic “newspeak” disappeared from the papers on structuralism. The academic reform movement, the 1956 Khrushchev’s speech and the rehabilitation of cybernetics made it possible to not only advocate but also practice the “ideological neutrality” of language. For instance, structuralists could argue for the autonomy of their methods and perspectives by invoking such ideas as Sebastian Shaumian’s “principle of homogeneity”: “scientific explanation within a certain theory cannot be built on facts lying outside the subject-matter of this theory” (1957, 44).5 According to Viacheslav Ivanov’s (1995: 3, 167) reminiscences of this period, “we were tired of the phraseology of the official philosophy. We wanted to deal with precisely defined concepts and with terms that were defined through rigorously described operations.”
The alliance with cybernetics seemed to offer a prospect of implementing this program. Ivanov and his colleagues were intrigued by Roman Jakobson’s (1971c) translation of thermodynamic and information-theoretical parlance of “information,” “redundancy,”
“codes” and “messages” into linguistics. The alliance with hard sciences, especially cybernetics and information theory, was perceived as a panacea against “ideology” and a recipe for the transformation of linguistics and other human sciences into “true sciences.”
This alliance with natural sciences was enshrined institutionally and discursively in the multitude of “labs” (e.g. “the Machine Translation Lab”), which mushroomed in the late 1950s, and in the establishment of the Linguistic Section of the Academy’s Council on Cybernetics, established in 1959.6 The “scientization” of human sciences was achieved through the introduction of “mathematical methods” (statistical probability analysis, formal modeling, topology, game theory and more) and information theory in linguistic and later cultural studies. By associating themselves with prestigious and powerful natural scientists, Soviet structuralists established a distance between their conceptual language and their field of research, on the one hand, and the competence of other human scientists and philosophers, on the other. In response to this strategy, structuralists were accused of indulging in
“terminological redundancies” and being plain arrogant. To this they had a ready made
3 This was not the only result of Stalin’s intervention. Vladimir Toporov recalls that, before 1950, there were very few opportunities for academic advancement for Moscow University students who specialized in comparative and theoretical linguistics. Yet, “after the discussion [initiated by Stalin], everything changed. Before, the ratio of the places for linguists and literary critics available in the graduate school (aspirantura) [of the Philology Faculty] was 5 to 35. After the discussion, they let in everyone who wished to study linguistics on the graduate level, 11 persons altogether,” Toporov included (Toporov, Vladimir. Interview by author. Moscow, July 2002).
4 Sebastian K. Shaumian (1916-2007) was a relative of a famous Bolshevik hero, Stepan Shaumian (1878-1918), and a leader of Soviet structural linguistics. Ivanov (1995 (3), 166) writes that Shaumian used his connections in the Central Committee [of the Soviet Communist Party] to rehabilitate structural linguistics.” In 1975, Shaumian immigrated to the US, where he joined the faculty of Yale University.
5 Targeted against the expansionism of official Marxist philosophy, this “principle” omitted the fact that structural linguistics’ own methodology was based on translating the methodology of hard sciences, i.e. sciences built on non-linguistic facts.
6 ARAN, f. 1807, op.1, d.110, l.29.
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answer: “those who do not understand [what we say] cannot accuse [us] of arrogance; it is as if they would attend the symposium on astrophysics.”7
The alliance with cybernetics not only provided means for protecting the disciplinary autonomy of structuralism-dominated linguistics with respect to “ideology” but also justified the expansion of structuralism into other domains of human sciences. As Geoff Bowker (1993) demonstrated, cyberneticians were fashioning themselves as “specialists in generalities,” or practitioners of the “universal discipline.” In contrast to a traditional disciplinary strategy of “obligatory passage point,” they forged their discipline as a
“distributed passage point” (1993, 122-123; cf. Latour 1988). That is, instead of advocating the distinct status of their field, they posited “cybernetics … everywhere you went,” i.e. as a universal mediator between different academic and social domains. If ordinary disciplines underlined their novelty with respect to the scientific tradition, the universal discipline, to quote Andrei Kolmogorov, faced a “grandiose task of including in its worldview the whole heritage of human culture which has developed, so far, in forms alien to it [cybernetics], including religious forms” (see V.Uspensky 1997, 242).
Structural linguists fashioned themselves in a similar manner. They turned around Jakobson’s dictum that “every language is a code” into “any code is a language” (Ivanov and Shaumian 1961, 220). Thus a specific cyberspeak of structural linguistics was conceived as a universal language of science and a recapitulation of the “secondary modeling systems” of art, myth and religion.8 Such expansionist aspirations took the shape of the project of
“semiotics,” or a science aimed at the study of “any sign system in human society” (Ivanov 1962, 3). Being defined this way, semiotics claimed the “foundational significance” of its methods for “adjacent disciplines in the humanities,” the significance similar to the one “of mathematics for natural sciences” (1962, 8). Hence, as semioticians, linguists and other humanists could claim not only to control their specialized vocabulary but also to be a
“universal translator” and an arbiter of the meaningful academic discourse.
The rhetoric of exactness and universality implied a particular vision of interdisciplinarity opposed to the one institutionalized in Soviet academia. Soviet Marxist-Leninist philosophy was supposed to be the ultimate theory of nature, society and science and thus the super-disciplinary analyzer, coordinator and initiator of disciplinary research. In these respects, Soviet academia was an heir to the German Humboldtian model of the university in which philosophy played “meta-territorial” role (e.g. Collins 1998, 618-688).
Yet, under the Soviet conditions, this role of philosophy did not guarantee the autonomy of science. On the contrary, philosophers were often perceived as agents of the Party state within academia. Indeed, the periodic interventions of Soviet Marxist philosophers into
Yet, under the Soviet conditions, this role of philosophy did not guarantee the autonomy of science. On the contrary, philosophers were often perceived as agents of the Party state within academia. Indeed, the periodic interventions of Soviet Marxist philosophers into