CHNN 22, Spring 2008 - School of Social Sciences

Thesis Report
Something Wicked This Way Comes: the Russian
delegation at the 1931 congress
‘Something Wicked This Way Comes: the Russian delegation at the 1931 congress’, D.
Phil. Thesis submitted September 2006, accepted October 2007, Linacre College,
University of Oxford. Deposited Bodleian Library, Oxford.
The 1931 Second International Congress of the History of Science has acquired an iconic status in
the modern history of science. Viewed as the genesis of the history of science as an academic
discipline, the conference was organized and chaired by Charles Singer, who published widely on
the history of science and sought to establish the discipline at University of Oxford and UCL. The
congress has become iconic for more subterranean reasons as well.
However, the congress and the status it has acquired have never been studied or analysed
historically. Its context has never been illustrated, thus leaving the meaning of the event contingent
upon one’s own preconceptions and the dubious wonder of historical hindsight. The presence of a
significant Russian delegation (the first to attend such a conference) with important and
interesting commentaries on the relationship between science, history and society makes this
omission more unfortunate and has left the delegation’s legacy open to misinterpretation in a ‘Cold
War discipline’. This work is an attempt to understand the meaning of the congress, its multiple
contexts and the Russian delegation’s significance. It also hopes to view the meaning of the history
of science as a discourse through this historical prism.
On the first day, a Russian delegation led by Nikolai Bukharin entered the arena, having touched
down at Croydon airport a few days earlier. The delegation consisted of eight scientists and
politicians from Stalin’s Russia and had been significantly upgraded in the weeks before the
congress after the intervention of the scientific journalist and communist, J G Crowther. Crowther
recognized the importance of the congress to Stalin’s shifting priorities in the industrialization
effort of the Five Year Plan. As an adviser on the training of Russian engineers, Crowther noted the
new emphasis on seeking support and cooperation from ‘bourgeois specialists’ and viewed the
congress as an opportunity to address the international scientific community.
The delegation reflected the domestic complexity of the transitional character of Russian society at
this time. Hitherto, historians and commentators have tended to identify the delegation as marxist
in politics and stalinist in tactics with no appreciation of the complicated and multifaceted social
background of the group or the complexities of the messages articulated. The individual motives of
the Russian delegation have been consistently underestimated in the subsequent decades so much
that one commentator could claim that it was nothing more than ‘Stalinist dogmatism.’ However,
its composition reflected the fluid and fractured political situation facing Russian science, politics
and philosophy during this period.
The icons of political left and right have yielded a plethora of misinterpretation and myth that
served to obscure the genuine significance and meaning of the event. While many historians viewed
the congress from the perspective of the present, assuming a ‘quiet meeting of historians of science’
of standard academic character, its context and construction were nothing of the kind.
The philosophical motivations of Singer and the congress organizing committee were not politically
radical. The congress was designed as a huge public relations exercise to launch a public
intellectual movement for the history of science. Singer sought and received significant press
exposure for his campaign and asked for public participation and the support of various pillars of
the British establishment. This was a scientific congress devoted to enunciating the tenets of
George Sarton’s ‘new humanism’, where the history of science would rebuild a rational worldview
that would support science and technology in shaping society along rational lines. The delegates
were overwhelmingly eminent scientists from across the globe with members of the public also
attending. Four European governments sponsored the event with the British Labour government
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