Aspects of the Soviet IGY

Results

[60] On 10 March 1958 eighteen men, representing powerful organizations, sat around a table in Moscow discussing the ins and outs of IGY data exchange. It was the fourth meeting of the IGY committee's working group on oceanography. Would all data really have to be made available to foreign scientists via World Data Center B, or only that from IGY projects? The group was conscious of the value of collecting all Soviet oceanographic data at WDC-B. But they were concerned that only data officially designated for the IGY should be sent abroad, not the "internal observations'' that were also being collected under the current Five-Year Plan. The solution –strict differentiation and separate handling of IGY and non-IGY data, but all at WDC-B.⁸²

[61] Within those limits, the Soviet IGY committee took their responsibility for the creation and management of WDC-B seriously, starting with an intervention by Belousov at the 1955 CSAGI Assembly which had ensured that IGY data would be made available to all scientists.⁸³ The Data Center was originally formed in two sections, with eight IGY disciplines handled at the Academy's Institute for Aeroclimatology (WDC B1) and five at NIZMIRAN (formerly NIZMIR –WDC B2). They became operational in 1958. In May 1959 a survey compiled for the US IGY committee found the flow of Soviet data "considerable'', "very good'', and above the world average for several disciplines. But the provision of data for auroras and for glaciology was felt to be "weak'', and the position over rockets and satellites was still unsatisfactory.⁸⁴ The last point seems to be confirmed by an astonishing report issued by WDC-B in 1960, which presented a tally of everything it had sent out and received to date. Data from rockets and satellites were specifically included in its responsibilities, but nothing whatsoever was listed for them –on either side of the balance-sheet.⁸⁵

[62] During the IGY there was Soviet disappointment at the limited number of committees, outside the Eastern bloc, which took the optional decision to send their data to Moscow as well as to Western WDCs. There was no obligation on scientists, either, to send copies of their subsequent IGY-related publications to any WDCs at all. The amount of such material reaching WDC-B also fell below expectations. A later report bears out those early concerns. In many categories the data for 1957–1959 had come from fewer than half the committees in the IGY.⁸⁶

[63] Strictly speaking, the IGY was limited to the collection and exchange of a vast pre-arranged set of measurements of worldwide physical processes, in short geophysical data. The extraction of new knowledge from that data, or science, was never part of the IGY but was left to individual scientists working as usual in their local or national organizations. But the distinction was widely ignored at the time and will be so again, briefly, here.

Figure 8

[64] In July 1958 the Soviet committee welcomed about 220 foreign and 185 Soviet delegates, plus 800 guests and over 200 journalists, to the 5th and last CSAGI Assembly.⁸⁷ Despite a bitter row behind the scenes about who was to blame for the absence of a delegation from Taiwan, the scale and splendor of plenary sessions in the Great Hall of Moscow University (Figure 8), and the number and quality of scientific papers presented, were a fitting conclusion to the largest international research programme ever undertaken.⁸⁸ (So many scientific and organizational documents needed to be circulated that bureaucratic obstacles had to be bypassed by shipping in extra supplies of duplicating paper from Brussels.⁸⁹ ) On 4 August a Soviet proposal that the IGY should be continued for a further year was accepted in a modified form, establishing the International Geophysical Cooperation of 1959.

[65] Like their colleagues elsewhere, Soviet scientists held many subject-specific conferences based on IGY materials in later years. In January 1963 they held another general conference on the IGY in Moscow, which was also the occasion for one of the first IGY philatelic exhibitions.

[66] Turning to publications, Soviet scientists edited only one of the 35 volumes of scientific reports in the Annals of the IGY, which perhaps reflects their weak position at the center of the programme. But they were also responsible for one of the Year's key data sets, the Catalogue of Sunspot Magnetic Fields, which was compiled at the Crimean Astrophysical Laboratory.⁹⁰ And out of some 6,400 entries in the bibliography of the IGY, over 1,000, or 16%, were written by Soviet authors.⁹¹

Figure 9

[67] Within the Soviet Union every IGY discipline except Nuclear Radiation, in which the Soviet committee did not take part, received its own series of reports. There were additional series for the Antarctic Expeditions and for the Arctic `North Pole' drift-stations. Work at other Arctic stations was covered in the regular series of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute. The results of expeditions to the Pamirs were presented in separate volumes, and the Academies of Science of some of the national republics also published IGY reports (for example, [Belinskii and Khromov, 1960; Dubinskii and Kovalyev, 1964]). Another impressive publication was the Antarctic Atlas, which presented several hundred maps, plans and tables on 75 loose, double-sided elephant sheets (Figure 9) [Bagaev et al., 1966; Tolstikov et al., 1969]. The value of some of this work can be inferred from its early translation into English.

[68] Soviet IGY scientists also wrote for the general public, mainly about their polar expeditions. Books of this sort by Tryoshnikov and Vvedenskii, for example, were well-written and entertaining. In 1962 Troitskaya and two of her colleagues published a drily factual, but also strikingly even-handed and internationalist account of the IGY as a whole [Tryoshnikov, 1959; Vvedenskii, 1970; Silkin et al., 1962]. Books about the first sputniks were naturally popular, but were usually written by science writers rather than by scientists or engineers. An exception was the rocket engineer Yurii Pobedonostsev, whose book was finished three weeks after the launch of Sputnik 1 [Pobedonostsev, 1957; Shternfel'd, 1957; Petrov, 1958].

[69] After the event, one of the best-informed Soviet commentators on the IGY reflected that its great achievements for both international and Soviet science had only been possible because the interests of the two coincided. At the time it had seemed like the natural thing to do in order to transform Soviet geophysics, and not in the least like a one-off event [Povzner, 1966, pp. 214-215]. Taking part in the IGY did indeed change Soviet geophysics for ever, not only in itself, but also in its relationships with the rest of Soviet science and with the international scientific community. That is why so much institutional reverence is still directed towards it today at the Geophysical Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a sentiment which was voiced repeatedly at the Suzdal conference in 2007. But this article is already too long, and the broader significance of the IGY for Soviet science will be discussed elsewhere [Bulkeley, 2007].