This is a select bibliography of academic level English language books (including translations) and journal articles, published mainly post World War II, about the history of the physical sciences in Russia and the Soviet Union.
For other areas of science, please see:
Works listed here are cited in the notes or bibliographies of scholarly sources. Each is published by an academic or major press, written by a recognized expert, or substantially reviewed in scholarly journals; borderline cases are omitted. A selection of primary sources are included. Many of the books below carry their own bibliographies; see the Further reading section for other bibliographies, and the External links section for historical sites, academic sites, and museums.
Citations follow APA style. Book have citations to academic journal or mainstream published reviews when available. For books only partly about the subject, relevant chapter or section titles are provided when useful and available. Translators of the original-language edition are included when possible. In cases where a title or name has appeared with more than one English spelling, the most recent published form is used and a footnote documents any earlier title under which the work appeared.
Physics
For works on nuclear weapons, see the section on Nuclear weapons. For works on nuclear power, see the section on Nuclear Accidents and Chernobyl.
Akhundov, M. D. (2005). Social influence on physics and mathematics: Local or attributive?. Journal for General Philosophy of Science, 36(1), 135–149. Cross, A. (1991). The crisis in physics: Dialectical materialism and quantum theory. Social Studies of Science, 21(4), 735–759. Gorelik, G. E., & Frenkel, V. Ya. (1994). Matvei Petrovich Bronstein and Soviet Theoretical Physics in the Thirties (V. M. Levina, Trans.). Birkhäuser. (Original work published 1990) Guth, S., Lüscher, F., & Richers, J. (2018). Nuclear technopolitics in the Soviet Union and beyond—An introduction. Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 66(1), 3–19. Holloway, D. (1999). Physics, the state, and civil society in the Soviet Union. Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 30(1), 173–192. Josephson, P. R. (1991). Physics and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. University of California Press. Josephson, P. R. (2022). Nuclear Russia: The Atom in Russian Politics and Culture. Bloomsbury. Josephson, P., & Sorokin, A. (2017). Physics moves to the provinces: The Siberian physics community and Soviet power, 1917–1940. The British Journal for the History of Science, 50(2), 297–327. Kneen, P. (1998). Physics, genetics and the Zhdanovshchina. Europe-Asia Studies, 50(7), 1183–1202. Kojevnikov, A. (2004). Stalin's Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists. Imperial College Press. Lukishova, S. G., Masalov, A. V., & Zadkov, V. N. (2021). Icons of Russian physics: From the Lebedev Scientific School in Physics to the Lebedev Physical Institute. Contemporary Physics, 62(1), 1–13. Sakharov, A. (1990). Memoirs (R. Lourie, Trans.). Alfred A. Knopf. Suvorova, O. (2021). Rutherford and Russian physics: The critical influence of the human factor. Journal of the Royal Society of New Zealand, 51(3), 467–488. Tropp, E. A., Frenkel, V. Ya., & Chernin, A. D. (1993). Alexander A. Friedmann: The Man Who Made the Universe Expand (A. Dron & M. Burov, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. Turchetti, S. (2012). The Pontecorvo Affair: A Cold War Defection and Nuclear Physics. University of Chicago Press.
Nuclear Accidents and Chernobyl
A full bibliography of the Chernobyl disaster can be found at Bibliography of Ukrainian history#Chernobyl. Works on Chernobyl are not included here.
Bradley, D. J. (1997). Behind the nuclear curtain: Radioactive waste management in the former Soviet Union. Battelle Press. Brown, K. (2013). Plutopia: Nuclear families, atomic cities, and the great Soviet and American plutonium disasters. Oxford University Press. Egorov, N. N., Novikov, V. M., Parker, F. L., & Popov, V. K. (2000). The radiation legacy of the Soviet nuclear complex: An analytical overview. Earthscan. Fairlie, I. (2007). Dispersal, deposition and collective doses after the Chernobyl disaster. Medicine, Conflict and Survival, 23(1), 10–30. Huchthausen, P. A., Kurdin, I., & White, R. A. (1997). Hostile waters. St. Martin's Press. Josephson, P. R. (1999). Red atom: Russia's nuclear power program from Stalin to today. W. H. Freeman. Kapitza, S. P. (1993). Lessons of Chernobyl: The cultural causes of the meltdown. Foreign Affairs, 72(3), 7–11. Kasperski, T. (2019). From legacy to heritage: The changing political and symbolic status of military nuclear waste in Russia. Cahiers du Monde russe, 60(2/3), 517–538. Komarova, G. (2000). Ethnic behaviour under conditions of high radiation. Inner Asia, 2(1), 63–72. Medvedev, Z. A. (1979). Nuclear disaster in the Urals (G. Saunders, Trans.). W. W. Norton. Plokhy, S. (2022). Atoms and ashes: A global history of nuclear disasters. W. W. Norton. Schmid, S. D. (2015). Producing power: The pre-Chernobyl history of the Soviet nuclear industry. MIT Press. Sembritzki, L. (2018). Maiak 1957 and its aftermath: Radiation knowledge and ignorance in the Soviet Union. Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 66(1), 45–64. Stratton, W., Stillman, D., Barr, S., & Agnew, H. (1979). Are portions of the Urals really contaminated?. Science, 206(4417), 423–425. Trabalka, J. R., Eyman, L. D., & Auerbach, S. I. (1980). Analysis of the 1957–1958 Soviet nuclear accident. Science, 209(4454), 345–353. Trabalka, J. R., Eyman, L. D., Auerbach, S. I., & Medvedev, Z. A. (1982). Radioactivity in the Urals. Science, 217(4556), 198, 200. Woodwell, G. M. (1986). Chernobyl: A technology that failed. Issues in Science and Technology, 3(1), 30–31, 33–35.
Nuclear weapons See
Chemistry
Brooks, N. M. (1995). Russian chemistry in the 1850s: A failed attempt at institutionalization. Annals of Science, 52(6), 577–589. Brooks, N. M. (2005). Growing links between chemistry and industry in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1900–1953. Ambix, 52(1), 27–43. Chatt, J., & Rybinskaya, M. I. (1983). Aleksandr Nikolaevich Nesmeyanov. 9 September 1899–17 January 1980. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 29, 399–480. Druzhinin, P. A. (2020). The first publication of Mendeleev's periodic system of elements: A new chronology. Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 50(1/2), 129–182. Gordin, M. D. (2004). A Well-Ordered Thing: Dmitrii Mendeleev and the Shadow of the Periodic Table. Basic Books. Gordin, M. D. (2001). Loose and baggy spirits: Reading Dostoevskii and Mendeleev. Slavic Review, 60(4), 756–780. Gordin, M. D. (2018). Paper tools and periodic tables: Newlands and Mendeleev draw grids. Ambix, 65(1), 30–51. Graham, L. R. (1964). A Soviet Marxist view of structural chemistry: The theory of resonance controversy. Isis, 55(1), 20–31. Jensen, W. B. (Ed.). (2005). Mendeleev on the Periodic Law: Selected Writings, 1869–1905. Dover Publications. Kaji, M., Kragh, H., & Palló, G. (Eds.). (2015). Early Responses to the Periodic System. Oxford University Press. Lewis, D. E. (2012). Early Russian Organic Chemists and Their Legacy. Springer. Oldfield, J. D., & Shaw, D. J. B. (2013). V. I. Vernadskii and the development of biogeochemical understandings of the biosphere, c.1880s–1968. The British Journal for the History of Science, 46(2), 287–310. Rocke, A. J. (1981). Kekulé, Butlerov, and the historiography of the theory of chemical structure. The British Journal for the History of Science, 14(1), 27–57. Scerri, E. R. (2007). The Periodic Table: Its Story and Its Significance. Oxford University Press. Vinogradov, A., & Petriashin, S. (2018). Chemical industry, the environment, and Russian provincial society: The case of the Kokshan Chemical Works (1850–1925). Ambix, 65(2), 143–168. Zaitseva, E. A., & Homburg, E. (2005). Catalytic chemistry under Stalin: Science and scientists in times of repression. Ambix, 52(1), 45–65.
Chemical weapons See
Astronomy and Cosmology
Dvoichenko-Markov, E. (1952). The Pulkovo Observatory and some American astronomers of the mid-19th century. Isis, 43(3), 243–246. McCutcheon, R. A. (1991). The 1936–1937 purge of Soviet astronomers. Slavic Review, 50(1), 100–117. Naan, G. I. (1963). On the infinity of the universe. Science & Society, 27(2), 176–202. Rudnitskij, G. M. (2006). I.S. Shklovsky and modern radio astronomy. Astronomical and Astrophysical Transactions, 25(5), 363–368. Tropp, E. A., Frenkel, V. Ya., & Chernin, A. D. (1993). Alexander A. Friedmann: The Man Who Made the Universe Expand (A. Dron & M. Burov, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. Vucinich, A. (2001). Einstein and Soviet Ideology. Stanford University Press.
Anthropology Alymov, S., & Sokolovskiy, S. (2018). Russia, anthropology in. In H. Callan (Ed.), The international encyclopedia of anthropology (pp. 5306–5322). Wiley-Blackwell. Bunak, V. V., Debets, G. F., & Levin, M. G. (1960). Contributions to the physical anthropology of the Soviet Union (Russian Translation Series of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Vol. 1, No. 2). Peabody Museum. Field, H. (1946). Anthropology in the Soviet Union, 1945. American Anthropologist, 48(3), 375–396. Field, H. (1948). Contributions to the anthropology of the Soviet Union (Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol. 110, No. 13). Smithsonian Institution. Krivosheina, G. (2014). Long way to the anthropological exhibition: The institutionalization of physical anthropology in Russia. Centaurus, 56(4), 275–304. Mogilner, M. (2013). Homo imperii: A history of physical anthropology in Russia. University of Nebraska Press. Mogilner, M. (2020). The science of empire: Darwinism, human diversity, and Russian physical anthropology. Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 43(1), 96–118. Moiseyev, V., Buzhilova, A., & Murphy, E. M. (2018). From the time of Tsar Peter the Great to modern Russia: The development of physical anthropology and bioarchaeology. In B. O'Donnabhain & M. C. Lozada (Eds.), Archaeological human remains: Legacies of imperialism, communism and colonialism (pp. 127–140). Springer.
Race science, eugenics, and political anthropology Adams, M. B. (Ed.). (1990). The wellborn science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia. Oxford University Press. Black, L. T. (1977). The concept of race in Soviet anthropology. Studies in Soviet Thought, 17(1), 1–27. Graham, L. R. (1977). Science and values: The eugenics movement in Germany and Russia in the 1920s. The American Historical Review, 82(5), 1133–1164. Krementsov, N. (2010). Eugenics in Russia and the Soviet Union. In A. Bashford & P. Levine (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of the history of eugenics (pp. 413–429). Oxford University Press. Krementsov, N. (2011). From "beastly philosophy" to medical genetics: Eugenics in Russia and the Soviet Union. Annals of Science, 68(1), 61–92. Krementsov, N. (2018). With and without Galton: Vasilii Florinskii and the fate of eugenics in Russia. Open Book Publishers. Mogilner, M. (2016). Racial psychiatry and the Russian imperial dilemma of the "savage within." East Central Europe, 43(1–2), 99–133. Mogilner, M. (2022). A race for the future: Scientific visions of modern Russian Jewishness. Harvard University Press. Nesturkh, M. F. (1964). The races of mankind (G. H. Hanna, Trans.). Foreign Languages Publishing House. Rainbow, D. (Ed.). (2019). Ideologies of race: Imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in global context. McGill-Queen's University Press.
Skeletal biology, paleoanthropology, and bioarchaeology Alekseev, V. P. (1973). Paleodemography of the USSR. Soviet Anthropology and Archeology, 12(3), 50–82. Alekseev, V. P. (1986). The origin of the human race (H. C. Creighton, Trans.). Progress Publishers.