IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - Winter 2014 - 13

BOOK REVIEW

JAMES R. RUSSELL

Lonely Ideas:
Can Russia Compete?
By Loren Graham. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 2013, 240 pages.

ussian scientists and inventors have excelled
in every field of technology for nearly two
centuries. Yet in almost every technology
field, except perhaps space science and
armaments, Russian research, development, and manufacturing lag far behind the rest of the industrialized
world. This mixture of visionary creative brilliance
and utter impracticality is a long-recognized Russian
national trait. In the 19th century Ivan Goncharov in
his novel Oblomov depicts a gentle, intelligent nobleman full of ideas, but the very notion of getting up and
working to put them into practice is so exhausting that
he spends most of his life on his comfy sofa, served by
his grumbling, lazy, faithful servant Zakhar. His gogetter German friend from childhood leads a vigorous
and successful life.
In a Soviet era film adaptation of the novel, when
Oblomov dies, Stolz and his wife pause, fall silent,
and the camera pans over the vast, soft Russian countryside. An Orthodox dirge swells, and for the nth
time the viewer is blinded by tears. "Russia cannot
be understood by the mind,/ No common yardstick
measures her./ Her stature is of a special sort:/ Russia
demands, quite simply, faith," runs the 19th-century
poet Fyodor Tyutchev's famous quatrain. Subsequent
folk bards have added in scabrous tones that it is high
time Russia became comprehensible, but these sentimental and mystical self-justifications that elevate

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2014.2366920
Date of publication: 1 December 2014

incompetence to the status of the sacred are deeply
ingrained in the collective neurosis.
Loren Graham, a Professor Emeritus in Science,
Technology, and Society at M.I.T., is the foremost
living historian of Russian science, and a lucid writer
whose work is mercifully shorn of "academese." Graham has demystified this conundrum in his book, a
concise masterpiece of meticulous scholarship. Unlike
the little Oblomovs who populate Ivy League Slavic
departments, Graham has experience in the real world
of business and industry as a working engineer. But he
is also a humanist, and brings to his research the special virtue of a deep understanding of Russian culture
and its interaction with science and economics. Thus,
in Naming Infinity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009) co-authored with the mathematician
Jean-Michel Cantor, Graham explored the interaction between mathematicians working on set theory
at Moscow University, and practitioners of a banned
Orthodox mystical practice called Imyaslavie, "Glorification of the (Divine) Name." The practitioners
of Imyaslavie recited the Jesus Prayer and held that
any form of the name of God in any language is the
very Name itself. Graham brings this interdisciplinary
insight to the problem of science and technology in
Russia. It is a critical issue, and the book under review
is the focus of attentive study in Russia now.
Soviet propaganda claimed Russian priority in the
invention of the radio, the light bulb, and baseball.
Graham shows that they were right, at least about the
first two. Russians in the 19th and 20th centuries were

James R. Russell is the Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and
Civilizations, a faculty member of Folklore and Mythology program at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, U.S.A. He
is a member of the executive committee of Harvard's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

WINTER 2014

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