To those who began the revolution in Russia seventy-five years ago science was a grand liberating force. They believed Karl Marx had discovered the scientific laws of society which they would now use to unlock the gates to a new world where everyone would be equal and free. But within twenty years the revolution was taken over by technocrats who looked down on the crowd below as though they were atoms. They were inspired not by Marx but by the laws of engineering. They believed they could transform the Soviet Union into a giant rational machine which they would run for their political masters. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box I: The Engineer’s Plot: A Fable From the Age of Science, BBC 1992
This is a story of science and political power. How the Bolshevik’s vision of using science to change the world was itself transformed. What resulted was as strange experiment far removed from the original aims of the revolution. From the beginning of the revolution, modern technology was central to the Bolshevik’s plans. Above all, the new power of electricity. ibid.
The aim of the Bolsheviks was to transform the people they ruled into what they called ‘scientific beings’, people able to understand and control the machines of the modern world rather than become enslaved to them. ibid.
The people to shape the future Soviet Union was passing to those who could build the new industrial society the Bolsheviks wanted so much. They were known as the bourgeois specialists, engineers from before the revolution who had the skills needed to master the modern technology. ibid.
At the end of 1930 the engineers’ dream suddenly became a nightmare: Stalin ordered two thousand of them to be arrested, and eight of the most senior were put on a public show-trial. ibid.
‘Bolsheviks must master technology. It is time for the Bolsheviks themselves to become specialists. In the reconstruction period, technology decides everything.’ ibid. Stalin
He [Stalin] ordered engineering schools to be set up across the country to thousands of the young party faithful. ibid.
The model for this new simplified world was American … Gary, Indiana, is almost derelict. But seventy years ago it was a new kind of model city planned in an ordered way around a giant steel mill. To its builders it was a chance to break with the complexities of the past. ibid.
Those who lived in the American City were the new elite: a mixture of old Bolshevik commissars, foreign technicians and an ever increasing number of young red engineers. By the mid-30s the engineers had become the heroes in Soviet society. Praised by Stalin, they flaunted their new status. ibid.
In 1937 Stalin began another series of purges. This time his targets were the tens of thousands of old Bolsheviks. ibid.
It was a vision of a planned Utopia. Everything in the new Russia was to be designed and controlled from the centre of Moscow. ibid.
By the early ’50s vast reconstruction projects had changed the face of Soviet cities. ibid.
The age that we have just left – the 45 years since the end of the Second World War, was overshadowed by a strange partnership between Science and Fear. It began with a weapon created by scientists that threatened to destroy the world. But then a group of men who were convinced they could control the new danger began to gain influence in America. They would manipulate terror; to do so they would use the methods of science. Out of this would come a new age free from the chaos and uncertainties that had led to terrible wars in the past. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box II: To the Brink of Eternity, BBC 1992
Research and Development: RAND was funded by the air force, but staffed by young academics who believed the scientific method could help bring the Cold War back under America’s control. ibid.
They were no longer advisers to the military, they had become the masters. ibid.
In a controlled nuclear war populations of cities would become like pawns in a game of bargaining with nuclear weapons. So the strategists persuaded America’s leaders to take civil defense seriously. ibid.
In the end President Kennedy ignored any idea of controlled war. Instead, he told the Russians that if they launched one missile from Cuba, he would retaliate with America’s entire arsenal. To the strategists, this threat was irrational and humiliating. ibid.
The systems and numbers approach dominated the Pentagon. McNamara’s wizz-kids were convinced that the battle against the Viet-Cong could be managed in a rational, scientific way. ibid.
What they [the Strategists] left behind was MAD – mutual assured destruction – a giant system of nuclear defence with the two sides locked together, watching each other for the slightest move. But by the mid-’70s it seemed to have become an end in itself. ibid.
The system of deterrents had begun as rational. It now seemed a dangerous trap. ibid.
35 years ago one man set out to turn this country into a modern industrial utopia – he was Kwame Nkrumah, the first leader of a newly independent black African state. His aim was to transform Ghana into a society shaped and driven by the power of science. At the heart of Kwame Nkrumah’s plan was a giant dam that would produce vast quantities of cheap electricity. Enough power to build a modern industrial state in the heart of Africa within a generation. But what Nkrumah did not foresee was that with the dam would come other more dangerous forms of power which he could not control – political and economic forces that would tear apart his vision of using science and technology to create a model for the new Africa. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box V: Black Power, BBC 1992
Power meant electricity and the source was to be the Giant Volta River that flowed through the eastern heart of the country. Ever since the 1920s the British had planned to build a dam there ... In the early ’50s Britain was desperate for a cheap source of aluminium. And Nkrumah joined with the British to resuscitate the scheme. The British authorities saw the power from the dam simply as a means to boost the empire’s supply of aluminium. But for Nkrumah it was much more. He saw it as the key to fulfilling his country’s destiny. ibid.
The Dam was now a hostage in the vicious confrontations of the Cold War. A year before, the Congo had been torn apart by a brutal civil war. America and the Soviet Union backed opposite sides. The policy of the new Kennedy administration was to fight the spread of communism in Africa. In 1960 Brezhnev, the President of the Soviet Union, had visited Ghana. It frightened America’s leaders. They were determined that Nkrumah, despite his brand of African socialism, would be their man. Nkrumah though wanted to keep Ghana and Africa out of the Cold War. ibid.
In the early sixties Ghana became a Mecca for European industrialists eager to win large contracts from Nkrumah’s government. They began to discover that the easiest way was to offer officials from Nkrumah’s party a bribe. This soon became the accepted way of doing business in Accra. What resulted was a rush to sell Ghana anything, no matter now inappropriate for an emerging African nation. Vast sums of Ghana’s precious foreign currency were spent on these projects. Then in 1964 Nkrumah’s industrial experiment received another body-blow: the world price of cocoa which had been falling for four years finally crashed. It was Ghana’s main source of foreign exchange. The millions of pounds needed to pay for the new factories began to dry up. Ghana, once one of the richest countries in Africa, began to slide into debt. Nkrumah turned to help to the European industrialists … Nkruma was an increasingly isolated figure on the world stage. What had once been seen as visionary ideas were now perceived as dangerous megalomania, and his country was sinking ever deeper into debt. ibid.
The military coup won enormous popular support. Nkrumah had failed to deliver the modern Ghana he had promised. ibid.
Rawlings became a popular figure on a par with Nkrumah; his main aim was to lift the burden of debt. ibid.
In 1945 in the aftermath of War scientists were heroes, particularly the physicists who had built the atomic bomb. ‘They are men,’ said Life magazine, ‘who wear the tunics of supermen and stand in the spotlight of a thousand suns’. Adam Curtis, Pandora’s Box VI: A is for Atom, BBC 1992
In the late ’40s there was a growing belief that scientific methods could be used to solve social problems. ibid.
They had found that the closer they peered into the structure of the world the more complex and unpredictable it became. ibid.
Politicians began to look to Atomic power as more than just cheap electricity. It became the way to a better world. ibid.
Then in October 1957 there was a major accident in Britain. The core of the [Calder Hall] reactor caught fire and spewed high levels of radioactivity across north-west England. The radioactivity released was far worse than the public was told. ibid.