{"id":3018,"date":"2019-12-11T17:02:29","date_gmt":"2019-12-11T17:02:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3018"},"modified":"2019-12-11T17:02:29","modified_gmt":"2019-12-11T17:02:29","slug":"russian-enlightenment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3018","title":{"rendered":"Russian enlightenment"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Attending Russia’s top non-fiction awards for the TLS, 11 December 2019<\/a><\/p>\n

Founded in 2008, the Enlightener awards are modest by Western standards. The Russian prize is awarded to writers of non-fiction, and each winner receives seven million rubles \u2013 just over \u00a38,500. This year\u2019s ceremony took place last month at Moscow\u2019s School Of Modern Drama, and its winners included Pyotr Talantov for his book exploring the distinction between modern medicine and its magical antecedents, and Elena Osokina for a work about the state stores that sold food and goods at inflated prices in exchange for foreign currency, gold, silver and diamonds. But the organizer\u2019s efforts also extend to domestic and foreign lecture programmes, festivals and competitions. And at this year\u2019s ceremony a crew from TV Rain (or Dozhd, an independent channel) was present, as journalists and critics mingled with researchers in medicine and physics, who had come to show support for the Zimin Foundation which is behind the prizes.<\/p>\n

The Zimin Foundation is one of those young\u2013old organizations whose complex origin story reflects the Russian state\u2019s relationship with its intelligentsia. It sprang up to replace the celebrated and influential Dynasty Foundation, whose work was stymied by legal controversy in 2015. Dynasty had been paying stipends to young biologists, physicists and mathematicians: sums just enough that jobbing scientists could afford Moscow rents. The scale of the effort grabbed headlines. Its plan for 2015 \u2013 the year it fell foul of the Russian government \u2013 was going to cost it 435 million rubles: around \u00a35.5 million.<\/p>\n

The Foundation\u2019s money came from Dimitry Zimin\u2019s sale, in 2001, of his controlling stake in VimpelCom, Russia\u2019s second-largest telecoms company.\u00a0 Raised on non-fiction and popular science, Zimin (pictured) decided to use the money to support young researchers. (\u201cIt would be misleading to claim that I\u2019m driven by some noble desire to educate humankind\u201d, he remarked in a 2013 interview. \u201cIt\u2019s just that I find it exciting.\u201d)<\/p>\n

As a child, Zimin had sought escape in the Utopian promises of science. And no wonder: when he was two, his father was killed in a prison camp near Novosibirsk. A paternal uncle was shot three years later, in 1938. He remembers his mother arguing for days with neighbours in their communal apartment about who was going to wash the floors, or where to store luggage. It was so crowded that when his mother remarried, Dmitry barely noticed. In 1947, Eric Ashby, the Australian Scientific Attach\u00e9 to the USSR, claimed \u201cit can be said without fear of contradiction that nowhere else in the world, not even in America, is there such a widespread interest in science among the common people\u201d. \u201cScience is kept before the people through newspapers, books, lectures, films, exhibitions in parks and museums, and through frequent public festivals in honour of scientists and their discoveries. There is even an annual \u2018olympiad\u2019 of physics for Moscow schoolchildren.\u201d Dimitry Zimin was firmly of this generation.<\/p>\n

Then there were books, the \u201cScientific Imaginative Literature\u201d whose authors had a section all of their own at the Praesidium of the Union of Soviet Writers. Romances about radio. Thrillers about industrial espionage. Stirring adventure stories about hydrographic survey missions to the arctic.\u00a0The best of these science writers won lasting reputations in the West. In 1921 Alexander Oparin had the bold new idea that life resulted from non-living processes;\u00a0The Origin of Life<\/em>\u00a0came out in English translation in New York in 1938. Alexander Luria\u2019s classic neuropsychological case study\u00a0The Mind of a Mnemonist\u00a0<\/em>described the strange world of a client of his, Solomon Shereshevsky, a man with a memory so prodigious it ruined his life. An English translation first appeared in 1960 and is still in print.<\/p>\n

By 2013 Zimin, at the age of eighty, was established as one of the world\u2019s foremost philanthropists, a Carnegie Trust medalist like Rockefeller and the Gateses, George Soros and Michael Bloomberg. But that is a problem in a country where the leaders fear successful businesspeople.\u00a0In May 2015, just two months after Russia\u2019s minister of education and science, Dmitry Livanov, presented Zimin with\u00a0a state award for services to science, the Dynasty Foundation was declared a \u201cforeign agent\u201d.\u00a0\u201cSo-called foreign funds work in schools, networks move about schools in Russia for many years under the cover of supporting talented youth\u201d, complained Vladimir Putin, in a speech in June 2015. \u201cActually they are just sucking them up like a vacuum cleaner.\u201d Never mind that Dynasty\u2019s whole point was to encourage\u00a0homegrown talent to return. (According to the Association of Russian-Speaking Scientists, around 100,000 Russian-speaking researchers work outside the country.)<\/p>\n

Dynasty was required to put a label on their publications and other materials to the effect that they received foreign funding. To lie, in other words. \u201cCertainly, I will not spend my own money acting under the trademark of some unknown foreign state\u201d, Zimin told the news agency Interfax on May 26. \u201cI will stop funding Dynasty.\u201d But instead of stopping his funding altogether, Zimin founded a new foundation, which\u00a0took over Dynasty\u2019s programmes, including the Enlighteners. Constituted to operate internationally, it is a different sort of beast. It does not limit itself to Russia. And on the Monday following this year\u2019s Enlightener awards it announced a plan to establish new university laboratories around the world. The foundation already has scientific projects up and running in New York, Tel Aviv and Cyprus, and cultural projects at Tartu University in Estonia and in London, where it supports Polity Press\u2019s Russian translation programme.<\/p>\n

In Russia, meanwhile, history continues to repeat itself.\u00a0 In July 2019 the Science and Education Ministry sent a list of what it later called \u201crecommendations\u201d to the institutions it controls. The ministry should be notified in detail of any planned meetings with foreigners and provide the names. At least two Russian researchers must be present at any meeting with foreigners. Contact with foreigners outside work hours is only allowed with a supervisor\u2019s permission. Details of any after-hours contact must be summarized, along with copies of the participants\u2019 passports. This doesn\u2019t just echo the Soviet limits on international communication. It copies them, point by point.<\/p>\n

In Soviet times, of course,\u00a0many scientists and engineers lived in golden cages, enjoying unprecedented social status. But with the Soviet collapse in 1991 came a readjustment in political values that handed the industrial sector to speculators, while leaving experts and technicians without tenure, without prospects; above all, without salaries.<\/p>\n

The wheel will keep turning, of course. In 2018 Putin promised that science and innovation were now his top priorities. And things are improving: research and development now receives 1 per cent of the country\u2019s GDP.\u00a0But Russia has a long way to go to recover its scientific standing, and science does poorly in a politically isolated country. The Enlighteners \u2013 Russia\u2019s only major award for non-fiction \u2013 are as much an attempt to create a civic space for science as they are a celebration of a genre that has powered Russian dreaming for over a hundred years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Attending Russia’s top non-fiction awards for the TLS, 11 December 2019 Founded in 2008, the Enlightener awards are modest by Western standards. The Russian prize is awarded to writers of non-fiction, and each winner receives seven million rubles \u2013 just … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78],"tags":[769,351,81,92,695],"class_list":["post-3018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-awards","tag-books","tag-russia","tag-soviet-science","tag-tls"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3018"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3018\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3020,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3018\/revisions\/3020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}