Bureaucrats Stifle Research, Top Soviet Scientist Asserts

A bureaucracy led by “comically obtuse leaders” with little understanding of science has stifled research in the Soviet Union for decades and left science there weak and unproductive, a leading Soviet scientist says in an article published in a U.S. journal.

Roald Z. Sagdeev, director of the Soviet Space Research Institute and a member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, said that the Soviet style of government has handicapped science research but that there have been efforts to hide its inadequacies behind showcased examples of success.

“To a great extent, science is a product of the social conditions in which it develops,” he wrote in an article in the quarterly journal Issues in Science and Technology made public Sunday. “During the past half-century, Soviet science has suffered deep, and still bleeding, wounds from ill-conceived government policies.”

Sagdeev, a key science adviser to Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev, says the Soviet Union can be “justly proud” of contributions to the study of the laser, the launching of Sputnik--the first man-made object to orbit the Earth--and other achievements in space. But he said Soviet science has failed to strengthen industrial productivity because “we have not faced up to the real problem: Soviet fundamental science is too weak to contribute much to practical applications.”

He said that since World War II, Soviet attempts at major science projects have been increasingly dragged down by bureaucratic machinery that stifles rather than encourages original research.

Bureaucrats have attempted to apply central production planning techniques to research, he said, often with ludicrous results.

“In the 1960s, scientists even had to promise to achieve a specific amount of progress within a designated period,” he said. Some physicists, “recognizing the absurdity of the exercise, pledged to make one discovery of worldwide importance, two discoveries of all-(Soviet) Union importance and three . . . of Siberian importance to please political leaders at all levels.”

While scientists saw this as nonsense, Sagdeev said, “political leaders can be comically obtuse.”

“French, German and American science is vibrant with new ideas, while Soviet science is stultifying,” he said.