The Internationalism

Internationalism No. 84, February 2026 Page 15 From the series Atom and industrialisation of science The course of the war between Germany and the Soviet Union, from Operation Barbarossa — the German attack of June 22 nd , 1941 — up to the Battle of Stalingrad between the summer of 1942 and February 2 nd , 1943, set the timeframes of the Russian nuclear programme. The Battle of Stalingrad The Battle of Stalingrad was the turning point of the Second World War on the Eastern Front. We quote The New York Times of February 3 rd , 1943, to illustrate the climate of the period, within which we need to contextualise Soviet decisions about the nuclear bomb. The daily cited a Moscow bulletin, according to which the Red Army had completely destroyed the elite of Adolf Hitler’s army, trapping 330,000 soldiers. On the basis of Russian announcements, since mid-November 1942, a total of 503,650 soldiers of the Axis powers (Germany, Italy, and...

Internationalism No. 83, January 2026 Page 15 From the series Atom and industrialisation of science Nikolai Krementsov, of the St. Petersburg Institute for the History of Science and Technology, writes in Science in the Twentieth Century [1997] that at the end of the 1920s, the scientific community in the Soviet Union was completely co-opted into the system of power relations and occupied a prominent place in the social structure of the State. The global economic crisis in the 1930s changed the situation. World autarchy The crisis, which began with the collapse of the New York Stock Exchange in October 1929, led to a contraction in world trade and to the spread of autarchy among the leading nations. Russian State capitalism adapted to the new situation with forced industrialisation, which found its political expression in the Stalinist terror. The Bolshevik Party kept its name, but became something entirely different: adopting the theo...

Internationalism No. 80, October 2025 Page 15 From the series Atom and industrialisation of science In his book Quantum Generations [1999], Helge Kragh, professor of history of science at Aarhus University, Denmark, writes that at the beginning of the First World War most scientists regarded themselves as members of a supranational class, a republic of culture in which nationality was less important than scientific achievements. When confronted with the reality of war, the supranational ideology broke down almost immediately and was quickly replaced by nationalism: physicists were no longer simply physicists, but German, French, Austrian, and British physicists. The same can be said of Russian physicists. The nationalisation of Soviet science Nikolai Krementsov, from the Institute for the History of Science in St Petersburg, in Russian Science in the Twentieth Century [1997] argues that, despite appearances and the myth of a totalitarian Sta...