Policy
Certain scientific fields in the Soviet Union were suppressed primarily after being labeled as ideologically incorrect.
At different moments in Soviet history a number of research areas were declared "bourgeois pseudosciences", on ideological grounds, the most notable and harmful cases being those of genetics and cybernetics. Their prohibition caused serious harm to Soviet science and economics. Soviet scientists never won a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine or a Turing Award. (In comparison, they received seven Nobel Prizes in Physics.) This is one of the factors that resulted in the USSR historically lagging in the fields of computers, microelectronics and biotechnology.
Research which was not banned was often subject to political pressure to conform to certain schools of science seen as "progressive."
Further, research was subject to censorship. Hence, scientists and researchers were denied access to some publications and research of the Western scientists, or any others deemed politically incorrect; access to many others was restricted. Their own research was similarly censored, some scientists were forbidden from publishing at all, many others experienced significant delays or had to agree to have their works published only in closed journals, to which access was significantly restricted.
Read more about this topic: Suppressed Research In The Soviet Union
Famous quotes containing the word policy:
“Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine, but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist.”
—George Marshall (1880–1959)
“U.S. international and security policy ... has as its primary goal the preservation of what we might call “the Fifth Freedom,” understood crudely but with a fair degree of accuracy as the freedom to rob, to exploit and to dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced.”
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“We are apt to say that a foreign policy is successful only when the country, or at any rate the governing class, is united behind it. In reality, every line of policy is repudiated by a section, often by an influential section, of the country concerned. A foreign minister who waited until everyone agreed with him would have no foreign policy at all.”
—A.J.P. (Alan John Percivale)