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Abstract
The interdisciplinarity inherent to paleontology, synthesizing anatomy and stratigraphy, geology and physiology, afforded it exceptional political, economic, and scientific status in the Russian Empire and early Soviet Union. In this project, I situate the development of paleontology alongside that of extractive geology to trace how the discipline influenced, and was influenced by, Russian imperialism, nationalism, and the broader political and cultural context of the long nineteenth century leading into the early Soviet period. International networks informed the scientific directions of paleontology and precipitated diverse political reactions to Russia’s perceived reliance on, or membership in, the ‘West.’ The relationship between Russia and the West—an enigmatic, paradoxical category, variously idealized and castigated, aspirational and antithetical—is central to tracing the practice of paleontology. Paleontology as a systematic approach to understanding fossils emerged in the late Enlightenment, when Russian philosophes contributed to international debates on the historicity and character of the Earth. The crystallization of paleontology as a distinct discipline is marked, however, by the contributions of British and French geologists in the first half of the nineteenth century. This enduring conception of paleontology as a Western science guided debates between the Imperial political apparatus, scientists, and the intelligentsia about national identity and scientific authority; these competing claims on the deep past were used to shape diverse visions for Russia’s future. Foreign scientists made the earliest substantial contributions to Russian paleontology, while Baltic Germans, resident to the Russian Empire yet culturally oriented westward, held outsized influence in paleontology throughout the nineteenth century. At the same time, both Slavophiles and zapovedniki drew from Russia’s paleontological heritage to support contradictory political orientations: the geological past of the Empire reaffirmed its uniqueness and antiquity, or offered a vision of an economic future supported by Western scientific progress. Paleontology complicated and enabled diverse narratives of continuity and progress across multifaceted ideologies. While integrated into international scientific networks, Russian paleontologists of the mid-nineteenth century were more receptive than contributive. The Russian institutionalization of paleontology, and concomitant increased international influence, began to crystallize in the 1860s, just as paleontology was engaged in vociferous debates on the influence of Darwinism. Vladimir Onufreivich Kovalevskii was one of the strongest global advocates for Darwinian paleontology, though his influence was greater abroad than within Russia; the tension between scientific progress and institutional languor captures the contradictions of Russian paleontology. The economic, political and philosophical implications of paleontology continued to influence state and public perceptions of the discipline throughout the fin de siècle. By tracing these reactions and debates, I highlight the variously destabilizing and affirming place of paleontology in the late Russian Empire, as paleontology made manifest the impermanence of the environment and the scientific prowess of the Empire. The long-standing economic orientation of the discipline was again mobilized at the outbreak of the First World War. But as the Empire collapsed, both the Provisional Government and the early Soviet state remarkably preserved and reoriented Imperial scientific structures. This continuity evinces both the inertia and adaptability of paleontology in the confusion and disarray of the 1920s, while the Bolshevik support for its non-applied arms is even more striking. Beyond the economic influence of paleontological work, the political orientation of the discipline was further entrenched over the 1920s. Paleontology offered, for the Bolsheviks, a national history divorced from Russia’s Imperial legacy, justifying support for theoretical, non-applied, and fantastical paleontology.