BOOK REVIEW : The Sciences Step Out of the Soviet Darkness : SCIENCE AND THE SOVIET SOCIAL ORDER <i> edited by Loren R. Graham</i> ; Harvard University Press, $35, 425 pages

Revolution, by definition, is discontinuity. Science is based on continuity. How then have the sciences survived in a self-consciously revolutionary society like the Soviet Union?

Loren R. Graham, an MIT historian of Russian science, presents this paradox in his introduction to “Science and the Soviet Order,” the first book to examine the intricate histories and special role of physics, engineering, space science, biology, medicine and communications in the years after the October Revolution.

We learn straight away that the year 1917, while crucial to Russian political history, was not especially important to the sciences. Under the last czars, Russia had begun to produce sophisticated scientists and engineers who continued their work well into the 1920s.

The watershed for science was the death of Lenin and Stalin’s subsequent first Five-Year Plan. Beginning in 1929, as Stalin began collectivizing agriculture and annihilating the Kulaks, the Academy of Sciences was also forced to conform ideologically to the Soviet mold.

The sciences did not suffer equally. Engineers were hounded but physicists, especially after World War II, were given relative freedom of research and great prestige. But practitioners of those sciences whose turf spilled over into the social sciences suffered most, and the worst victims were biologists.

In a chapter on the Soviet nature/nurture debate, we learn about both the appeal of Lysenkoism, and the devastating effect it had on the development of Soviet genetics.

In 1930 Trofim Lysenko, an ill-educated agronomist, argued that his Lamarckian views of biology--that organisms can transmit learned knowledge biologically to their offspring--was superior scientifically and ideologically to Western Mendelian genetics.

Moreover, he argued that medical genetics and eugenics were ideological adjuncts of fascism. Stalin liked what he heard and conducted a pogrom, killing many of the Soviet Union’s best biologists and sending others, like Theodosius Dobzhansky, into exile.

Stalin’s war against genetics created curious alliances, lining up eugenicists and geneticists as so-called “naturists” against Lysenkoists who supported the role of the environment on development as “nurturists.” Whereas eugenics had been dismissed as poor science and politically tainted in the West, it retained its credibility in the Soviet Union because it, too, had been tarnished by Lysenkoism.

Hounded for 30 years, surprisingly few geneticists switched camps. We learn here that many found sanctuary in institutes for physicists and mathematicians. Enough survived so that when it was safe to come out publicly again, they were there to pick up the threads of molecular biology.

On the other hand, medicine and bioethics seem to have been permanently altered by Bolshevism. After October 1917 the Hippocratic oath was tossed out as bourgeois and individualistic. The new values, in medicine as elsewhere, set the good of society above the needs of the individual.

Certain issues that trouble us do not exist for the Soviets. We learn that it is routine in the Soviet Union to withhold from patients a diagnosis of cancer, or the fact that they are dying; there is no consideration of the individual’s right to know.

They are not troubled about abortion, because “according to Marxist-Leninist theory, personality is a function of integration into society. And since rights are grounded in society, the fetus has no rights.” Likewise, there is no problem with fetal cell research.

In fact, for rules on this kind of research, the Soviets are ethical consumers. They have imported our National Institutes of Health guidelines.

The Soviets have their Luddites, too, as described in a chapter on ecology and the environment. Best exemplified by “village” writers who glorify rustic life and dismiss technology as corrupt, they condemn those who produced Chernobyl as well as those who plan to explore Mars.

“Science and the Soviet Social Order” is an excellent guide to the 20-Century Soviet Union because of the special role that science has played in the society. We are reminded of what our cultures share and where mutual understanding may be difficult to achieve.

The question remains, of course, how much of the Soviet social order will survive, and what role science will play in refashioning whatever is to follow.

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “Drumming at the Edge of Magic: A Journey Into the Spirit of Percussion” by Mickey Hart with Jay Stevens (Harper Collins).