APPEAL OF THE ALL-UNION ACADEMY OF SCIENCES TO ALL SCIENTISTS OF THE WORLD, TO ALL WORKERS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Comrades!

The Academy of Sciences of the USSR, at its solemn session dedicated to the fifteenth anniversary of the October Revolution, addresses you with a fervent appeal: to march in step with the revolutionary workers of physical labor.

The experience of the entire great upheaval in our country has shown us that only along this path can a way out be found from the devastating crisis that all humanity is now undergoing.

No one can any longer deny that world history has entered the most catastrophic phase of its development, and that all the conquests of culture are under threat, beginning with its technical foundation and ending with those higher achievements of theoretical thought by which the earth is illumined.

The contradictions of capitalism have opened their bloody depths with staggering force. The capitalist leviathan-states, equipped with first-rate instruments of extermination and death-dealing apparatus, are ready once again to unleash all the demons of a new world war.

The economic crisis, inexorable as fate, is shaking the entire edifice of the capitalist system. This system is no longer able to make use of its mighty productive forces; it curtails production, turns tens of millions of people into unemployed paupers, drives technicians and engineers out of the factory, and scientists out of the laboratories. It gives rise among bourgeois ideologists and their followers to theoretical conceptions which themselves constitute the greatest danger to all culture.

This gloomy ideological reflex is an indicator of the whole bottomless depth of the general cultural crisis, like a shadow following the crisis of the capitalist economy. The struggle against machine technology and the preaching of technical primitivism go hand in hand with the venomous flourishing of mysticism; the flaming optimism of knowledge is replaced by mournful skep-

II APPEAL OF THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES TO ALL SCHOLARS OF THE WORLD

...with quietism and flight into the realm of the irrational, the search for synthesis degenerates into an appeal to religion, i.e. is illusorily “resolved” at the price of the capitulation of scientific thought. As a way out of the impasse it is proposed: in the field of technology—to replace electrical energy and the machine with “pick and shovel”; in the field of the economy—to retreat to handicraft; in the field of theory—to do away with rational knowledge; in the field of art—to seek sources of living water in models of infantile archaic cultures. This is a new cultural reaction, a call for barbarism, senseless and utopian at the same time.

We, the scientists and technicians of the Soviet Union, follow with the greatest alarm these symptoms of decline and degeneration. We believe that the way out lies not in the destruction of those mighty physical and intellectual forces which capitalism has accumulated, but in freeing them from the capitalist fetters and in developing them. We believe that this way out is to be found not in the understandable movement backward, not behind capitalism, but ahead of it, in socialism.

We are firmly convinced that history imperiously demands a transition to still more perfected technology, to super-large-scale planned production, to a powerful further growth of science, to a synthesis between theory and practice, to a mighty rise of all material and spiritual culture.

To this we call you, physicists and chemists, geologists and biologists, engineers and technicians, agronomists and physicians, historians and educators. To this we summon all workers of intellectual labor who, in the countries of capital, in gloomy despair are ready to seek spiritual consolation for themselves in musty bastilles of the spirit, in intellectual quackery, in idealistic and mystical illusions.

The course of world-historical events that had our country as their arena has shown clearly that the only force capable of stepping over the great historical threshold and leading after itself the entire basic mass of the people is the proletariat. Many of us, sharing the caste prejudices of the spiritual aristocracy, regarded the proletariat as the Huns of the future, destroyers of culture and civilization. History has proved precisely the opposite: the bourgeoisie destroys culture—while the proletariat saves and develops it, a heroic class, capable of enormous sacrifices, a creative, constructive, organizing class.

In bloody battles, in the fiery ring of sabotage, uprisings, intervention, blockade, in the torments of hunger and amid epidemics—

APPEAL OF THE ACADEMY OF SCIENCES TO ALL SCHOLARS OF THE WORLD

... he led the country out onto broad roads of construction, having smashed and routed all enemies under the leadership of his iron, unshakable party.

Now whole new regions are opening up to us with enormous deposits of ferrous and non-ferrous metals, coal, oil, and potassium salts. Innumerable new cultural centers are arising for the first time, and in the Far North the largest industrial centers are rapidly being created. A number of expeditions in the Arctic regions are known throughout the world.

Giants of metallurgy and machine-building have grown up in truly monstrous time spans.

Super-powerful electric stations are breaking world records of technology. New routes have been laid. The entire economic landscape in recent years has changed beyond recognition.

Enormous psychological shifts have occurred among the masses: on an exceptional scale the remolding of people has proceeded; whole armies of builders of the new society have been created; culture has made decisive conquests.

The grandiose scale of construction has required a sharp growth of scientific-research institutions. During the revolution an entire network of them has arisen, and their significance has grown extraordinarily. The practical orientation of all scientific work has proved, on the whole, to be the guarantee of its great theoretical scope.

The structure of the planned economy increasingly demands a synthesis of all fragmented disciplines. Unity of will and action presupposes an unprecedented wholeness of worldview, one that generalizes all the achievements of the new culture rushing forward and of the entire cultural heritage.

We are far from despondency, pessimism, withdrawal from earthly problems, or disappointment in the powers of human reason. On the contrary: casting aside the religious and mystical idols and fetishes of the old world, historically continuing all the most progressive tendencies of development, our proletarian country, under the leadership of the party organized by the genius of Lenin, is moving, as the principal motif of the new world, toward the highest form of human existence. We conceal neither the enormous difficulties of the great reconstruction, nor the breakthroughs, nor the flaws of which we still have many.

The working people of our country have to make no small sacrifices, but only the blind, or those pretending to be blind, think that an upheaval equal to which not a single preceding phase of historical development has known can proceed as a painless and in all its parts harmonious process.

We are working to raise the material and cultural level of the masses. We do not at all wish to build a soulless civilization, like the machine civilization of America, where the working person is a pitiful appendage to an object-machine system. On the contrary, we are building the most perfect technical foundation of society, in which the human being is the master of that system, and not its slave; where that system is a means for satisfying developing needs, where it is an instrument of liberation from excessive labor and the basis of a truly cultured development of fraternal human community.

The Academy of Sciences, the highest learned institution of the USSR, proudly believes that our country is the ridge of a new, socialist world. It considers it an honor to devote its forces to the cause of socialist construction. We are surrounded by a belt of hatred and hostility on the part of the capitalist states. We are not working under easy conditions. But we know firmly that the basic laws of social development are on our side—laws which, with inexorable and invincible logic, are leading to the destruction of the domination of capital and to the victory of socialism.

We call upon all of you to a friendly and strong alliance with the revolutionary proletariat!

We call upon you to the active defense of the USSR!

We call upon you to the struggle against cultural reaction imposed by the countries of capital!

We call upon you into the ranks of fighters for socialism!

For our part, we pledge to do everything that the proletariat requires of us for the accomplishment of the constructive tasks of the second Five-Year Plan.

We assure the Central Committee of the Party, its leader Comrade Stalin, and the Soviet government that we shall not retreat a single step from the fulfillment of the tasks connected with the entire heroic epoch of the great works of socialism.

President of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, A. Karpinsky.

Vice-presidents: N. Marr, G. Krzhizhanovsky, V. Komarov.

Permanent Secretary of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Academician V. Volgin.

Academicians: A. Borisyak, S. Vavilov, V. Alekseev, S. Zernov, S. Oldenburg, D. Rozhdestvensky, A. Orlov, S. Solntsev, I. Krachkovsky, A. Favorsky, N. Derzhavin, B. Keller, N. Bukharin, A. Deborin, A. Richter, N. Gubkin, N. Lukin, S. Strumilin, A. Bakh, N. Kurnakov, A. Ioffe, A. Samoilovich, N. Tulaikov, S. Lebedev, S. Zhebelev.