Vera Tolz, Russian Academicians and the Revolution: Combining Professionalism and Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997), 236 pp., £40.00, ISBN 0-333-71239-0.

Nikolai Krementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 371 pp., hb, £40, ISBN 0-691-02877-X.

Paul R. Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 351 pp., £27.50, ISBN 0-691-04454-6.

Kristie Macrakis and Dieter Hoffmann, eds., Science under Socialism: East Germany in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 380 pp., hb, £41.50, ISBN 0-674-79477-X.

Loren Graham, What Have We Learned About Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 177 pp., hb, $42.00, ISBN 0-804-73276-0.

Is the position of a citizen in the country to be determined only by his political weight? There was a time when alongside the emperor stood the patriarch: the church was then the bearer of culture. The church is becoming obsolete, the patriarchs have had their day, but the country cannot manage without leaders in the sphere of ideas …

Only science and scientists can move our technology, economy and state order forward …Sooner or later we will have to raise scientists to the rank of patriarch. That will be necessary because without that you will not make scientists always serve the country with enthusiasm … Without that patriarchal position for the scientists the country cannot grow culturally on its own, just as Bacon noted in his ‘New Atlantis’. It is time, therefore, for comrades of Comrade [Lavrenty] Beria's type to begin to learn respect for scientists.

Letter from Peter Leonidovich Kapitsa to Joseph Stalin, 3 October 1945