Moscow gave the orders, which took the whole world by surprise. Other governments had not anticipated a militarized invasion on such a scale. They reasoned that it would prove logistically difficult to occupy the territory and that local resistance would be long and costly for the invading troops. Many nations responded quickly with trade embargoes and sanctions. The United Nations General Assembly unanimously condemned the aggressor, and demanded that all troops be immediately withdrawn.
The Kremlin responded vehemently to domestic protests. While there had been some grumbling about the Moscow leadership over the past decade, it was not uncommon for the state to respond with vehemently to domestic opposition in recent years. Few protests were stopped by arrests. International condemnation grew when the regime’s most prominent critic was arrested and sentenced.
There were calls for boycotts of the sanctions to add to the pressure, even from the scientific community which felt particularly betrayed by their leader’s arrest. 65 countries boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow, condemning the invasion and internal exile of Andrei Sakharov, a dissident physicist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975 for his brave opposition to nuclear weapons race and human-rights violations.
It is not difficult to see the parallels between the Soviet Union’s aggression against Afghanistan in 1978 and the Soviet Union’s aggression against Ukraine in 2022. In terms of population, geography and ideology, the Soviet Union was not as powerful as the Russian Federation today. Russian court sentenced Alexey Navalny in March to nine year imprisonment for fraud and contempt. He is not an avatar from Sakharov. Russian President Vladimir Putin does not represent Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet leader.
However, the calls for sanctions by the international community and boycotts by scientists — among other things — are strong. Ukrainian scientists asked international journal editors not to publish research by Russian Federation-educated colleagues. Many Russian research institutions have stopped working with Russian state universities, professional associations, and the Russian Academy of Sciences. Grants were suspended. Talks were cancelled. These are sometimes simple expressions of moral revulsion towards the Kremlin’s brutality; other times they are attempts to protect Russian colleagues who could face punishment for transnational connections1. Researchers of Russian origin have also been subject to condemnation. This irony is especially striking considering how many of those who fled the economic chaos caused by the collapse of the Soviet Union were refugees from the previous regime that attacked Afghanistan.
How they are applied to economic reality will determine the practical effectiveness of sanctions. It will not make a difference if you forbid imports of Russian smartphones or pineapples. For a boycott that ties science ties, the same is true. Since the First World War, the international organization for science was restructured many times. But every attempt to sanction Moscow, 2022 and 1980 included, has failed. Why? They haven’t fully understood how the Soviet Union, and post-Soviet Russia fit in the global knowledge infrastructure.
While the practice of withholding succour or trade to punish perceived wrongdoing has been practiced since the beginning of time, it was only 1880 that the practice gained its permanent label. Lord Erne, the overbearing land agent in County Mayo, Ireland was so hated by the community, that workers from other counties had to be imported and carefully guarded to reap the harvest. Charles Boycott fled Ireland on that fateful day in 1880. The impunity of the powerful has not stopped those who were outraged at him from never forgetting him. There was a fin de siecle full of boycotts. Soon, the world of science joined the fray.
Before scientific boycotts were regularly targeted at Moscow, they tended to focus on Berlin. It is the 1919 Belgian, French and British scientists who imposed it on the vanquished power of the Great War. This was so significant that many later discussions about the practice still reflect its legacy. It was, in fact, imposed upon the successor states to the vanquished: The democratic republic of Weimar Germany, the new states Austria and Hungary.
To justify the punishment of all scientists from losing countries, many transgressions were cited. Most often cited incitement is the famous Manifesto of the Ninety-Three. This proclamation, officially entitled To the Cultural World and signed by a number of philosophical and literary luminaries, was released on October 4, 1914. It was intended to protect the German nation’s honour from allegations of atrocities by German troops during the invasion in Belgium. The list of prominent signatories was what stayed in the minds of later boycotting scientists. Among the names were Adolf von Baeyer, Paul Ehrlich, Fritz Haber, Felix Klein, Walther Nernst, Wilhelm Ostwald, Max Planck and Wilhelm Rontgen4.
They were paid in their own currency for being willing to politicize disinterested search for knowledge. All scientists from the countries that had been defeated were barred from scientific meetings and conferences, as well as from journals published by the boycotting powers. They were also denied access to the administrative structures of international science, which were being built on the remains of transnational organizations. The boycott was intended to last until 1931.
One exception was made. This did not apply to Albert Einstein. He was one of the four signatories of an anti-war countermanifesto To the Europeans. It was written by Georg Nicolai, Einstein’s Berlin colleague. The bans on German nationals aside, Einstein was celebrated in 1919 when the British expedition that tested the general theory relativity during a sunspot eclipse revealed the results. In 1921, he traveled to France and the USA in protest. Einstein made his own exceptions. He refused to accept invitations from the United States, and he also refused to attend any international meetings, such as the Solvay conference in physics in 1921 or 1924. This was because he was denied access to Germans. He believed that the boycott was terrible for science.
The same was true for countries that remained politically neutral throughout the conflict, like the Netherlands and Denmark. Their scientists claimed that blanket condemnation was ineffective and unwise. Ironically, these strictures gave sites like Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen institute for physicists a greater importance as places where both boycotters and those who are not part of the boycott could come together. These scientists argued that the problem was being punished. And what policy changes would result in the lifting of the boycott.
In other words, the boycott was ineffective and toothless. The Austrian and German scientific communities are vibrant enough to function fairly well without having to have intercourse with the shunned nations. Science and common sense were the only things that were hurt, claimed neutral scientists. They lobbied hard for League of Nations admission to the democratic Germany, which signaled an end to the scientific freeze. In 1926, the boycott was ended five years sooner than planned. Einstein was among others to attend the Solvay conference in the next year.
In 1933, calls for boycotts were again made. Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany in January 1933. He also took power several months later. A Civil Service Law evicted most Jewish people, scientists included, from their university positions.
Einstein supported the boycotters this time. In March 1933, he resigned his position at Berlin’s Prussian Academy of Sciences. This was in spite of attempts by the state to publicly fire him. He also refused to publish in German journals. Cornelius Lanczos, his exiled friend from Princeton University in New Jersey, wrote him in 1935, “The German intellectuals as a whole have behaved disgracefully regarding all the abominable injustices, and have richly earned to be boycotted.”6 Percy Bridgman, Harvard University’s physicist, stated in 1939 that he would not share any information with his former colleagues in “totalitarian countries”, which was Germany7. Hitler’s regime for its part boycotted the journal after it continued to draw attention to Nazi crimes.
The Second World War quickly cut all ties between Germany and its adversaries, but on the basis of military secrecy than morality. Scientists from the Allies led the effort to bring former belligerents in after the war.
Despite the fact that it was not able to demonstrate any change in behavior in previous deployments, the boycott continued to be a popular tactic. There were certainly cold-war advocates among scientists who wanted the Soviet Union to be boycotted to protest the subjugation and oppression of Eastern Europe. How could they? There were very few scientific contacts between the Soviet Union, capitalist countries and the Soviet Union for the first ten years after the Second World War ended. This meant that there wasn’t really anything to be boycotted. Scientists were only able to express their dismay at the Berlin Blockade 1948-1949 and the suppression in 1956 of the Hungarian Revolution with private indignation.
Within a decade after the death of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, in 1953, it was possible to boycott again. Soviet and US scientists launched a concerted campaign for the integration of the former into emerging global scientific networks. As a way to ease tensions, the 1958 Lacy-Zarubin Agreement established exchanges between the United States of America and Soviet Union in many scientific and artistic fields. These exchanges were made possible by the escalating tensions in the 1970s. US President Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger, his secretary of state, cared more about geopolitical leverage and arms control than scientific communication. Their efforts in the former resulted in improvements in the latter. This included a series of exchanges with the Soviet Academy of Sciences8 and the US National Academy of Sciences8. This general trend of rapprochement was offset by the fact that there were only faint calls to boycott the 1968 Soviet-led invasion in Czechoslovakia.
Because those efforts at integration were valued, something that the Soviet leadership might not be willing to lose, the post-Afghanistan ban was initiated. However, it did not alter the Soviet deployment which lasted until 1989. The Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had initiated a more intense effort to integrate Soviet scientists into global science in the years preceding. After 1991, a similar push was made with post-Soviet scientists (including Russians who numerically dominated this group).
The resultant intellectual and financial investment was exactly the opposite of a boycott. The Philanthropic funding was provided by George Soros, a financier in Moscow and New York City, and the MacArthur Foundation, Chicago, Illinois. US state support was provided through the Civilian Research and Development Foundation, Arlington, Virginia. Multilateral collaboration was also possible under the auspices, among others, of the International Science and Technology Center (Moscow) and its Kyiv counterpart, the Science & Technology Center (Ukraine). These investments created new connections between scientists in various successor states to the Soviet Union and international science9.
But here’s the catch. The catch? The region saw a drop in scientific staff of at least 50%. This was partly due to emigration (the infamous ‘brain drain’), and mostly because there wasn’t enough funding for science or better opportunities for stability in the private sector. Even after the economic crisis in the 1990s, and after Dmitry Medvedev’s increased budgetary allotments to the Russian government, the level of investment and the uptake of scientists remained modest. While it was closer to global science, the remaining was only a shadow of Soviet scale.
This history is important for today’s scientific boycotts of Russia. It all depends on the purpose of a boycott.
A boycott may be intended to harm the scientific enterprise of a country or region. However, both the anti-German as well the anti-Soviet protests have shown that a country with a large and active scientific community (or sphere, of influence) is less likely to suffer from isolation from global science, at least not in the short-term. This quality has been a hallmark of China’s scientific community in recent years.
However, if a country has a smaller scientific community than it can survive on its own then sustained boycotts may prove to be detrimental. The academic boycott of South Africa in 1960s, with support from the African National Congress, is an exception to this record of failure. It was started to protest the country’s apartheid system and ended in 1990. Although it was not complete, the boycott had a devastating effect on South Africa’s scientific community. It cut off necessary connections to the transnational system for scientific exchange. South Africa’s scientific community wasn’t large enough or varied enough to allow it to exist independently. This has led to some calling for Israel’s scientific community to be boycotted.
Over the past 20 years, Russian science has been more connected to global networks that ever since the Bolshevik Revolution severed Tsarist connections to Europe. This is a far greater connection than what the Soviet sector was. Even with the few steps taken so far, the damage to Russian science could be serious.
Can a boycott of South Africa be used to influence the government’s mindset? This is possible only if the political leadership cares about science and scientists. Russia seems to not care. You can see the low investments in research over the past decade, the pursuit of status and rankings instead of improving fundamentals, the lacklustre reaction to COVID-19, as well as the “foreign agents” designation for various scientific collaborations and non profit organizations (such the MacArthur Foundation), and their expulsion from Russian soil12. These signs of government indifference to science were evident for many years before the invasion of Ukraine.
The end of the few scientific links that survived the last decade of neglect can be a statement about moral revulsion, which is how the academic boycott against South Africa began. Advocates for boycott should embrace this goal if it is the main goal. Despite the admirable intentions of its supporters, a scientific boycott will not change the course or outcome of the current war.
