WEEKEND: AT THE CUTTING EDGE OF SOVIET CHANGE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90G00152R000500600001-8
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: C
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 23, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 16, 2011
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: November 20, 1987
• Content Type: MEMO

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WEEKEND
__
At the cutting edge of Soviet change
To achieve reform,
Mr Gorbachev must
tap the world's
largest store of
scientific talent, the
Academy of
Sciences. Rupert
Cornwell reports
from Moscow
J t is a flower in the desert. one of those
hidden jewels which give Moscow so
much of its fascination. You turn south
off the inner-ring motorway down
Leninsky Prospect, one of those canyon
boulevards in which the Soviet capital
specialises, with apparently no distinguish-
ing feature whatever. But, a few hundred
yards down on the right, you see a narrow,
elegant gateway, only too easy to miss. You
sa4r, and you are in another world.
Uw,*iveway leads toe villa immaculate
in oeiue stucco and white colonnades. It
would belong more naturally in the soft hills
of the Veneto in Italy. The building started
life early in the eighteenth-century, the
pprrooppeerty of a Moscow industrialist called
Demidoff. Later it belonged to Catherine
the Oreat, and later still Napoleon spent his
last night in Moscow under its roof, before
the great retreat of 1812.
Every now and then black Volga limou-
sines pull up, to collect or deposit venerable
gentlemen who vanish into the villa's cool,
vaulted interior. Inside, the atmosphere ex-
udes the ritual of a London club or the se-
nior common room at an Oxford college.
Nor is the comparison misleading. For
you have stumbled into the headquarters of
that most clubbish institution of the Soviet
Union, the Academy of Sciences. And those
elderly figures are academicians, arguably
the most cossetted, among the best paid,
and certainly the most prestigious of the
modern Russian establishment.
The Academy was founded in 1724 by Pe-
ter the Great amid his attack upon the back-
wardness of his country. Peter, admirer of
the West, imported 13 Germans, a French-
man and two Swiss to be its first members.
Not until 1745 was the first Russian acade-
mician elected, and only at the end of the
nineteenth century had the Academy be-
come a truly Russian institution.
In the intervening quarter of a milenium,
the world beyond she viila'4 games has been
turned upide dOmn; Russia has changed
political syateass; Peter's imperial academy
The Soviet Academy of Silences, which was founded by Pater the Great and has
has become the USSR Academy of Sci-
ences. Those foreign scientific seeds have
long since taken root.
In many fields Soviet Science commands
respect and admiration. Instead of just 16,
there are now 270 full members of the
Academy and a further 540 corresponding
members, eminent in anything from laser
physics to American politic. Like the Rus-
sian state, the Academy has grown to be-
come the ruler of a mighty empire. It has
acquired offshoots in the Urals, the Soviet
Far East and in Siberia. Each of the 14 non-
Russian constituent republics now has its
own academy as well. In all, this conglomer-
ate controls 250 affiliated institutes, em-
ploying 43,000 researchers.
History, though. is repeating itself. The
Soviet Union may be a military superpower.
but that mocking description of the countr.
as "Upper Volta (or rather Burkina Faso]
with missiles" still contains enough truth to
hurt. Mr Mikhail Gorbachev has inherited
from Peter the Great an acute awareness of
Russia's economic and social failings, as
well as a taste for root-and-branch reform.
And if he is to succeed, it must be by ex-
ploiting the resources of the Academy, the
largest single concentration of scientific tal-
ent on earth.
Many would rightly say that the institu-
tion is ripe for the Gorbachev treatment. Its
failings have been in part those of the times,
but in part of its own making. Almost two
decades of Mr Brezhnev imbued the Acad-
emy with caution and oompiaoency. But
then again. can a group of men most of
whom are over 70, and used to the luxuries
of chauffeurs, secretaries and salaries which
can eclipse these of a minister, ever be at
the cutting edge of change?
The Kremlin's economic order of the
hour is to shift from the extensive to the in-
tensive, towards quality rather than quan-
tity, to coax more and better goods from ex-
isting plant and workers, instead of building
new ones. Obviously science and technol-
ogy are central to this leap in productivity
But the Academy and its daughter insti-
tutes are still largely wedded to funda-
mental research, far from industry and the
real lives of people. Hierarchies have grown
rigid, bureaucracies have become en-
trenched. Most serious, young scientists are
demoralised: the structure of an average in-
stitute is, in the words of one frustrated
young researcher, like "ice on top of water"
These are the problems which that in-
stinctive technocrat and meritocrat Mr
Gorbachev intends to tackle. And after two
years in power, he can look back on some
useful achievements. Last October Anatol'.
AJexandrov finally stepped down from the
presidency, which he had held for 11 years,
at the age of 83. His replacement was Guri
Marchuk- 22 years his junior, and very much
in the Gorbachev mould.
By training Marchuk is a mathematician
Much more important, he knows how gov-
ernment works, and what it wants. Wrjshin
the Aoadmayie headed its Siberian depart-
ment at fJvotsk within ootosttt+l4>;ijppcf.-'
polit pied oardand it, a care Soviet sample
of hnw crientifir work run he harnr4tcP'4 -
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the requirements of industry. Then he spent
five years in charge of the State Committee
for Science and Technology a powerful co-
ordinating body unloved by other minis-
tries. Its chairmanship. however, carries the
rank of deputy prime minister.
And now, a few months into his new job,
Marchuk is urging that the Academy, which
he is once said to have described as a "geri-
atric institute", be pointed "decisively to-
wards the needs of public production".
Already a new generation of 50-year-olds
has emerged immediately beneath him.
Yevgeny Velikhov, one of the academy's
four vice-presidents and in charge of its
physics and mathematics section. is one of
Mr Gorbachev's most influential advisers.
He accompanied the Soviet leader to the
Reykjavik Summit, and is reputed to see
him weekly.
Another Gorbachev man in the limelight
is Roald Sagdeyev, director of the USSR's
space research institute, an academician
and a leading Soviet spokesman on "peace"
and disarmament. Abel Aganbegyan, a
deader of the reformist "Siberian" econom-
ics school. new-ieads the Academy's eco-
nomic section.
Andrei Sakharov (left) as a member is the focus for Gorbachev's process of reform
In the quest for new faces and new ideas,
Marchuk is demanding a 5 per cent annual
staff turnover in Academy institutes. In the
rigid and stratified Soviet system, this would
be a remarkable achievement. More strik-
ing still, institute employees will now face
mandatory retirement at the age of 65,
while academicians will in future have to
step down at '0 - although special new
"advisory" posts will be created. to ensure
re not rudely separated from those
they are'
perks like car and driver. dacha, and exclu-
sive shopping and medical facilities.
In a subtler sense, Marchuk is encourag-
ing the devolution of authority from prae-
sidium to individual departments and insti-
tutes. These, for example, will now be
allowed to make their own foreign contacts,
instead of the previous insistence that all be
channelled through the central foreign rela-
tions department. This should help tackle a
glaring weakness of Soviet science: its pau-
city of links with comparable work abroad.
At the centre too, the impact of the
technological revolution is visible.
Alongside the 17 departments in
existence, two more have just
been set up dealing with those late twenti-
eth-century applications of science, com-
puters and engineering control processes.
As Georgy Skrvabin. the academy's secre-
tary general. summed it up recently:
"Perestroika (reconstruction) has arrived
here with a vengeance. we've got more
responsibility and much more work."
But will the sought-after overhaul of the
Academy - indeed of society here as a
whole - reaih move beyond the superfi-
cial" In the peculiar case of the Academy
moreover, \Ir Gorbachev faces the risk of
throwing out the babN with the bath water.
Certainly much !s wrong Kith it. but much
too is worth keening.
The Soviet leader wants independent-
mindedness writ large in his new model
Russia. But no area of official or semi-offi-
cial life here offers a greater, however im-
perfect. tradition of autonomy from poli-
tics. True. the proportion of Communist
Party members among academicians rose
from around a third in the 1950s to an esti-
mated-0 per cent after the elections of De-
cember 198.1
Only the most naive would suppose that
as vital a body as the Academy would not
ultimately be at the regime's behest. Under
Mr Brezhnev, moreover, the balance of
power within the organisation tilted away
from the natural sciences to the social sci-
ences. Politics and plasma physics have lit-
tle in common, but politics, especially
Marxist politics, and economics and history
plainly do. On top of this has come a per-
ceptible discrimination against Jews.
Even so, cases of naked political interfer-
ence have been rare - and certainly noth-
ing since to match the career of the acade-
mician and charlatan geneticist Lysenko in
the 1960s, thanks to the patronage of Khru-
shchev. That episode still rankles: "It was
the fault of us scientists for putting up with
it, not of the politicians," says Skryabin.
Elections are by secret ballot, anticipat-
ing by centuries an innovation that Mr
Gorbachev says he now wants to introduce
into Soviet life. Candidates are proposed by
colleagues, and although expert commis-
sions state their preferences, there is no
guarantee that crusty old academicians will
toe the line, for all the intense arm-twisting
in private. Skryabin himself only got in at
the second try.
Membership too, means in practice mem-
bership for life. Much befell Andrei Sakha-
roy after he gained election to the Academy
at the unheard-of age of 32 back in 1953. as
recognition of his role in helping develop
the Soviet hydrogen bomb. But even in his
darkest years of disgrace and exile in Gorky.
he was never expelled from the Academy
Today. Sakharov is again attending and
speaking at praesidium sessions.
Paradoxicall, these very virtues make it
likeh that M.r Gorbachev will have to Ca-
jole. not coerce. to get his way. Soviet soci-
ety, the product after all of scientific social-
ism, has always held its scientists in great
esteem. A full academician is literally one
in a million of the country.'s population of
:82 million.
If the Soviet Union is to change. that pro-
cess cannot bypass the Academy of Sci-
ences, and the villa off Leninsky Prospect.
In neither case though will it be simple to
break habits moulded through the ages "I
wouldn't bet on it at all," commented a
close western student of the Acaderi}'s af-
fairs. "But the Academy is something which
could get this place moving again. And it
does have the talent and resources to make
it one of the most advanced in the world."
Marchuk. Academy bead r
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Brilliance that overcomes the bugoears
GFORGY SKRIABIV becomes
almost apoplectic at the very sug-
gestion: -In the I sited States
they criticise our science as bad,
"ad. had. But then it turns out
that everyone would like to come
and work here. 1es, of course we
have shortcomings in science -
but who doesn Is-
The secretars general of the So-
stet Academy of Sciences is talk.
ing in his cluttered office. its win-
dows looking out over lawns and
woods. A classic example of the
Soviet inferiority complex before
a richer. more advanced West? If
you consult the bald statistics of
%obel prizes. You would tend to
think in. L p to I9g5, in the most
prestigious disciplines of physics
and chemiatrr, L S researchers
received 4" and :8 prizes. For the
Gsviet L nion the comparable fig-
ures are seven and one.
The truth. though. is less clear.
cut. Certainly Moscow is after
high technolo/v and expertise
from the West by hook or by
crook. Certain, the Soviet scien.
tist faces problems which would
drive his American counterpart
to distraction. But in some fields.
the Russians are anything hut
slouches.
krtuably the most balanced re-
cent assessment was drawn up 18
months ago in a special White
House report, based on inter.
stews with 100 American scien-
tists with close experience of the
Soviet academic world. Their
broad conclusion -as that the
Russians are strong on theory,
but weak on the experimental
side.
The Soviet scit!otist has to con.
tend with chronic shortages of
equipment parts and mainte-
nance personnel. The level of in-
strumentatloa is often far below
western standards. His country
lacks compeller power, and unlike
the I. S. has no private industrial
sector generating progress in ap-
plied technology. 1rue, the mili-
tan sector makes up for this in
part, but only by "aunt new
drawbacks.
Militars work restricts a
scientist's freedom of communi-
cation and travel - essential if
he is to keep abreast of what is go-
ing on elsewhere. As a result.
ideas spread slowly, while in-
grained secrecy makes for dupli.
cation of effort - sometimes
within the same institute. That
poor `obel showing may indeed
be a by-product of this mentality
Incre>lsingiv. international
collaboration is the kes to me-
discoveries But this asenue is
largely barred to 'sister scien.
tists.
Then there are the familiar so-
siet bugbears of bureaucrats and
obsessive concern with hierarchs,
even a lack of basic supplies One
LS scientist recounted that as
chairman of an international
conference in the Soviet I. ninn.
he had to distribute copies of the
proceedings afterwards: only to
he told that the sponsoring Soviet
institute did not have enough pa-
per allocated to it under the cur-
rent plan.
In general. the Soviet Craton
lags behind in the biological sci-
ences. and to a lesser degree in
chemistry But mathematical ex-
cellence has contributed to an ex-
troordinan strength in expert-
mental physics, then retical
physics. frequently called the
queen ?r sosiet sciences" and in
5strnomy.
The 'a, k of computer power is
less of a iandicap than it might
appear ss the White House re- computers. And. continues the
port noted "The quality of scien- White House: sh-,uld state-af.
itfic results is sees high. thanks to the-art computer 'yes"me a?s t-
theoretical excellence." That an- able to the Ru?s,ans, :h?re me,
ahsical -mathematical ability be a surge ?n scientific
shows up in "deeper scientific un- capability
derstanding of problems than in For those who ,miss car r3st
the West" - and in an ability to West struggit s hie. .he
squeeze more out of low-powered implications are i ra s,irng
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