The Universe, the Cold War, and Dialectical Materialism

TL;DR

This paper examines how political ideology, especially Marxism-Leninism, heavily influenced Soviet cosmology from 1947 to 1963, leading to suppression of certain models and a shift in scientific development.

Contribution

It provides a detailed analysis of the impact of ideological pressures on Soviet cosmology and compares it with the Chinese case, highlighting political influence on scientific progress.

Findings

Cosmological models were labeled pseudo-scientific due to ideological reasons.

Soviet cosmology was suppressed until the 1960s, delaying scientific progress.

Political ideology significantly shaped scientific research directions in the USSR.

Abstract

Ideological considerations have always influenced science, but rarely as directly and massively as in the Soviet Union during the early Cold War period. Cosmology was among the sciences that became heavily politicized and forced to conform to the doctrines of Marxism-Leninism. This field of science developed entirely differently in the Communist countries than in the West, in large measure because of political pressure. Certain cosmological models, in particular of the big bang type, were declared pseudo-scientific and idealistic because they implied a cosmic creation, a concept which was taken to be religious. The result of the ideological pressure was not an independent Soviet cosmology, but that astronomers and physicists abandoned cosmological research in the Western sense. Only in the 1960s did this situation change, and cosmology in the Soviet Union began to flourish. The paper examines the relationship between science and political ideology in the case of the Soviet Union from about 1947 to 1963, and it also relates this case to the later one in the People's Republic of China.