Suppressed research in the Soviet Union

Suppressed research in the Soviet Union refers to scientific fields which were banned in the Soviet Union. All humanities and social sciences were additionally tested for strict accordance with historical materialism. These tests were alleged to serve as a cover for political suppression of scientists who engaged in research labeled as "idealistic" or "bourgeois".

In several cases the consequences of ideological influences were dramatic. The suppression of research began during the Stalin era and continued after his regime.

Certain scientific fields in the Soviet Union were suppressed primarily after being labeled as ideologically suspect.

In the mid-1930s, the agronomist Trofim Lysenko started a campaign against genetics and was supported by Stalin. If the field of genetics' connection to Nazis wasn't enough, Mendelian genetics particularly enraged Stalin due to its founder Gregor Mendel's being a Catholic Christian priest, a fact that flew in the face of the Soviet Union's official atheism and antitheism.

In 1950, the Soviet government organized the Joint Scientific Session of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, the "Pavlovian session". Several prominent Soviet physiologists (L.A. Orbeli, P.K. Anokhin, A.D. Speransky, I.S. Beritashvily) were attacked for deviating from Pavlov's teaching. As a consequence of the Pavlovian session, Soviet physiologists were forced to accept a dogmatic ideology; the quality of physiological research deteriorated and Soviet physiology excluded itself from the international scientific community.

Cybernetics was also outlawed as bourgeois pseudoscience. Norbert Wiener's 1948 book Cybernetics was condemned and translated only in 1958. A 1954 edition of the Brief Philosophical Dictionary condemned cybernetics for "mechanistically equating processes in live nature, society and in technical systems, and thus standing against materialistic dialectics and modern scientific physiology developed by Ivan Pavlov". (However this article was removed from the 1955 reprint of the dictionary.) This attitude hampered the development of computer science and engineering in the Soviet Union. Notice that the Russian term "кибернетика" ("cybernetics") has come to describe what is called "computer science" in the West.

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