Sos! Save Our Science!

The brains of science are rarely spared in political revolutions. Even if no scientist is beheaded by guillotine, as Antoine Lavoisier was during the French Revolution, the upheaval throws many other obstacles in the way of the scientific community’s surviving without substantial losses. In 1917–20, at the peak of economic chaos and civil war in Russia, the scientific intelligentsia was indeed an endangered species, not only because of the blood being spilled everywhere but also because of the revolution’s simple economic impact: The country was in ruins. At that historical moment the author Maksim Gorky, who played a positive role in the early years of the Bolshevik regime, persuaded Lenin to adopt extraordinary measures to rescue the very small group of intellectuals—scientists as well as writers and artists. As a result of this pressure, Lenin agreed to establish special food rations for the intelligentsia, in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg) in particular.