| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

James T. Andrews. Science for the Masses: The Bolshevik State, Public Science, and the Popular Imagination in Soviet Russia, 1917–1934. (Eastern European Studies, number 22.) College Station: Texas A&M University Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 234. $45.00.

Laurence Schneider. Biology and Revolution in Twentieth-Century China. (Asia/Pacific/Perspectives.) Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. 2003. Pp. xi, 307. $75.00.

That the communist regimes in the USSR and the People's Republic of China (PRC) were committed to emancipating the common people from religion and "superstition" and to propagating a scientific, rational, and technologically developed culture is well known. Less well understood are the mechanisms through which they sought to achieve that ambitious goal. In his well-researched book, James T. Andrews examines the efforts of the Bolsheviks to promote progress and enlightenment through the popularization of science. One of the book's strengths is that it links these efforts to earlier initiatives that go back via the adult education movement of the late nineteenth century to the foundation of such societies as the Society of Investigators of Nature at Moscow University in 1804. Pre-revolutionary popularizers of science included professional scientists, journalists, and educators of all types. Their work in disseminating scientific knowledge struck a chord with the urban public, and by the late nineteenth century, commercial publishers were producing scientific and technical literature aimed at the newly literate masses. The public proved to be interested in a wide range of subjects, including astronomy, world geography, and air flight, but nothing whetted their appetite more than the theory of evolution, with its challenge to the biblical account of creation. Andrews shows how quick the Bolsheviks were to entrench the theory of evolution into the school curriculum. Otherwise, however, he suggests that during their first decade in power, they relied mainly on prerevolutionary societies, museums, and journals to popularize science, although these bodies could now rely on funding from the science department of the Commissariat of Enlightenment. During the 1920s, such relatively recherché topics as rocket science, interplanetary exploration, and the physics of immortality caught the public imagination, in tune with a zeitgeist that assumed that communism plus science would enable humanity to triumph over every constraint of nature.

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