Science and technology in the Soviet Union

Science and technology in the Soviet Union served as an important part of national politics, practices, and identity.

From the time of Lenin until the dissolution of the USSR in the early 1990s, both science and technology were intimately linked to the ideology and practical functioning of the Soviet state and were pursued along paths both similar and distinct from models in other countries.

Soviet scientists won acclaim in several fields, marked by a highly developed pure science and innovation at the theoretical level, though interpretation and application fell short.

Soviet technology was most highly developed in the fields of nuclear physics, where the arms race with the West convinced policy makers to set aside sufficient resources for research.

Due to a crash program directed by Igor Kurchatov (based on spies of the Cambridge Five), the Soviet Union was the second nation to develop an atomic bomb, in 1949, four years after the United States.

The Soviet Union detonated a hydrogen bomb in 1953, a mere ten months after the United States.

The Soviet Union also had more scientists and engineers, relative to the world population, than any other major country due to the strong levels of state support for scientific developments by the 1980s.

Claiming his theories corresponded to Marxism, he managed to talk Joseph Stalin in 1948 into banning the practice and teaching of population genetics and several other related fields of biological research; however, this decision was reversed in the 1960s.

Soviet scientists were forced to redact prior work, and even after this ideology, known as Lysenkoism, was demonstrated to be false, it took many years for criticism of it to become acceptable.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, rapid inflation and decline in governmental revenues caused the scientific establishment to lose much of its funding and stability for the first time since the 1920s.