Inside Soviet Science: Birth of a New Age?

Until recent years, the inner workings of Soviet scientific institutions have been glimpsed by only a few privileged visitors from the West. Now as part of the partial thaw in U.S.-Soviet relations, several American science writers, including TIME'S Fred Golden, have been taken on a conducted tour of leading Soviet research centers, from Moscow to Leningrad to Novosibirsk in western Siberia, and allowed to speak with scores of top scientists. Golden's report:

American scientists have good reason to be envious. Even though the Soviet Union is in theory a classless society, Soviet scientists are a powerful and privileged elite. Better paid than most of their countrymen, they enjoy superior housing, ownership of private cars, long-term job security, and perhaps most important of all, the freedom to read many Western journals and literature. Science, too, occupies a special place in the minds of government officials, who are frankly puzzled by those Westerners who are now vilifying modern science and its goals. "How could there be any antiscientific feeling in the Soviet Union?" one official asked us. "In our country, science always serves the state."

The close ties between science and state have at times been painful for Soviet researchers. Not many years ago, party ideologues were denouncing cybernetics, modern genetics and even certain aspects of Einsteinian relativity as bourgeois theories that were contrary to Communist orthodoxy. In fact, one reason for the U.S.S.R.'s continuing lag in computer technology is that party pundits once argued that computer-controlled devices and other automated machinery would interfere with the dignity of labor and rob workers of their jobs. Despite such ideological hurdles, however, Soviet scientists have in recent years made remarkable progress.

In atomic physics, for example, Moscow's competing Lebedev and Kurchatov Institutes may well be ahead of Western research centers in the race to control thermonuclear fusion, the same energy process that powers the sun. Under Nobel Laureate Nikolai Basov, Lebedev scientists are using high-energy laser beams in an effort to produce a plasma, or ionized gas, of sufficiently high temperature and density to sustain a fusion reaction. Kurchatov researchers are using powerful doughnut-shaped machines, acronymically named Tokamaks, to obtain the same results with intense magnetic fields. Academician Lev Artsimovich, head of the Kurchatov work, doubts that anyone will be able to produce power from fusion in less than 20 or 30 years. "When you hear scientists boasting that they will achieve it in two or three years," he says, in an obvious jab at his crosstown rivals, "don't believe it." But he has no doubt that controlled fusion will eventually be achieved: "Probably just before man needs it."

Pollution. At every scientific center, we heard a recurring theme: "Let's have more cooperation between American and Soviet scientists." Indeed, ever since the agreement last spring between Presidents Nixon and Podgorny to increase scientific cooperation, there has been a sharply increased flow of official and unofficial scientific visitors from the U.S.--Environmental Chief Russel Train, former AEC Chairman Glenn Seaborg and Oceanographer William Nierenberg of the Scripps Institution, to name only a few. One reason for this hospitality is the Kremlin's hope for access to advanced U.S. scientific gear, especially computers. The Russians are also after something else. As one longtime British scientific observer in Moscow put it: "The Soviets want the West to acknowledge that they are a superpower, scientifically as well as economically and militarily, and that they might have something to offer too. It's no more devious than that."

Everywhere scientists spoke of their great concern about the despoliation of the countryside, rivers, lakes and the atmosphere, and their determination to do something about it. They also insisted, with a touch of arrogance perhaps, that "we will never let our problems get as bad as yours." Still, they are clearly very eager to learn from the American experience. During our tour, for instance, an agreement was reached that will enable Soviet scientists to study air pollution in St. Louis and water pollution in Lake Tahoe; American scientists will have similar access to Leningrad and to Lake Baikal, the world's deepest fresh-water lake.

Officials of the Soviet Committee for the Utilization of Atomic Energy --comparable to the AEC in the U.S. --seemed surprised that America had largely backed off from Plowshare, the program to use atomic explosions for peaceful purposes. The Soviets, by contrast, are ambitiously experimenting with nuclear explosives to quarry mineral, oil and natural gas deposits, to dig out giant water basins and even to carve new river channels to divert excess water into the Caspian Sea, which is slowly drying up.

The Russians also found it difficult to understand the resistance in the U.S. to the construction of nuclear power plants, especially the breeder type, which produces more atomic fuel than it consumes. The Soviets now have one small experimental breeder at Obninsk and another, much larger, 600,000-kw. plant at Beloyarskoye; none of their six nuclear power plants now in full operation has had a serious accident. Proud of their own safety procedures, they dismissed as useless the American practice of enclosing nuclear reactors in large protective shells; "Purely psychological," said Igor Morokhov, No. 2 man of the Soviet atomic energy committee.

In contrast to their earlier, almost paranoiac secrecy, the Soviets now talk more freely about their space program. At one interview, the chief scientists of Russia's recent Mars and Venus probes,

Vasily Moroz and Mikhail Marov and the ranking exobiologist, Lev Mukhin, described in considerable detail the life-detection devices that will be sent to Mars aboard an unmanned lander in 1975, about the same time as the U.S.'s own Viking Mars probe. The scientists also disclosed that they will choose the landing site, probably near the edge of a polar cap (because of the likelihood of finding life-supporting water there), with the help of the detailed photographs taken by America's Mariner 9. Marov, incidentally, proudly wore a Mariner 9 tie clip, a gift from friends at Caltech's Jet Propulsion Lab, which conducted the Mariner mission.

Soyuz and Apollo. The Russians are less open about their manned space program, which has been sidetracked since the deaths of three cosmonauts last year. Chief Soviet Cosmonaut Vladimir Shatalov parried all questions about his country's next shot: "We will start as soon as we are ready." He also insisted, rather unconvincingly, that the Soviets had never been in a race with the U.S. to reach the moon. Yet both Shatalov and Boris Petrov, the Academy of Sciences' ranking space official, eagerly watched a NASA film we had brought along of last spring's Apollo 16 mission. "I felt as if I were on board the rocket with the American astronauts," said Shatalov.

That observation may well be prophetic; he is a veteran of three space missions and a leading candidate for the Soviet team that will take part in the linkup of a Russian Soyuz and an American Apollo spacecraft in 1975. Shatalov also spoke enthusiastically about a joint U.S.-Soviet mission to Mars before the end of the century.

For all its accomplishments, Soviet science still suffers under the Kremlin's heavy hand. Scientists have been sent to psychiatric institutions for protesting too vigorously against government policy; Health Minister Boris Petrovsky's chilling explanation was that dissent is often the first sign of mental disorder. Moreover, Jewish scientists have lost their jobs after applying for visas to leave the country. Still, scientists represent the more liberal and forward-looking elements of Soviet society. Like their counterparts in the U.S., many are openly disenchanted with military research: "I am too busy to discuss problems with generals," said Artsimovich.

Beyond all else, they are profoundly optimistic. Again and again, we heard objections to Cassandra-like predictions like those made by the Club of Rome, which has calculated that mankind is depleting its resources at a disastrous rate. A Soviet computer expert insisted that such assessments were unfounded and dangerous and assured us, perhaps overconfidently, that science in the years ahead will solve the problems that now seem to trouble so many people in the West. "After all," he added, "the golden age of science is only beginning." In the Soviet Union, that may be true.

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