Abstract

The second half of the 1940s left its mark on the history of Soviet scholarship [nauka] as a special period in the interrelations between scholarship and society, as a time of direct encroachment on the development of scholarship by the totalitarian state. This direct ideological diktat over the activity of scholars [uchenye] took the form of scholarly [nauchnye] discussions, as they were called. They were an expression of the striving of Party-bureaucratic structures to unify the development of knowledge and to impose like-mindedness on the basic directions of scholarly activity. References to the philosophical discussion, the Lysenko session of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agriculture [VASKhNIL], the intrusion into the development of physics and chemistry, the discussions on issues of linguistics, physiology, etc., have become commonplace and have entered the textbooks, although the extent to which they have been studied varies