The Central Control of Industrial Research, 1917–30

Abstract

The Imperial Academy of Sciences and the scientific establishments which before the revolution had been under the Ministry of Education became the responsibility of the Narkompros RSFSR, the People’s Commissariat of Education of the newly established RSFSR (which comprised most of what was in 1923 to become the USSR); a scientific department was established as one of its seventeen departments.¹ On the other hand the organisations with a military and industrial orientation, such as the Central Laboratory of the War Department, which had been set up just before or during the war under or closely linked to the War Department, came under the control of the commissariat set up to control industry, VSNKh, the Supreme Council of the National Economy. The latter, thus, presented a potential challenger to Narkompros’s inherited primacy in science. Indeed, by the beginning of 1918, there was talk of an independent body for coordinating science.² Lenin apparently wanted to organise a commissariat for science and technology.³ N. P. Gorbunov, a young protégé of Lenin and secretary of Sovnarkom RSFSR (the body which comprised all the commissars and was responsible for the overall control of the economy), was entrusted early in 1918 with drawing up the statute for this body.