This book narrates the unstable and virtually bankrupt revolutionary Russia when it tried to make its way to the future with the help of science. It succeeded through terror, folly and crime, but also through courage, imagination and even genius. Stalin believed that science should serve the state and with many disciplines having virtually unlimited funds, by the time of his death in 1953, the Soviet Union boasted the largest and best-funded scientific establishment in history - at once the glory and the laughing stock of the intellectual world.
