We are accustomed to accusing science of many sins, including non-existent ones, for example, that it serves the state for the most part in matters of armaments, but it was not science that started this dangerous game, but the state, and the laws that establish the rules of this game are established by not she.

At the beginning of World War II, Great Britain and the United States, fearing that Germany could get ahead of them in nuclear physics and the creation of an atomic bomb, established a ban on publications in this area. The USSR, which obtained the secret of the bomb in a spy, illegal way, immediately introduced the secrecy of scientific research, first in this area, and then in almost all others. Even maps at a scale of 1:500,000 (“half a million”) and larger turned out to be classified, and distortions began to be introduced into all other, smaller scales, making these maps unsuitable for practical use and navigation. Things sometimes came to the ridiculous: sea captains were forced to buy sailing directions for passage even to Soviet ports, but these maps, open "in the West", were immediately classified in Soviet shipping companies. Freedom of speech and communication which is so necessary for the development of science, at least in order not to “reinvent the wheel”, is still not provided in domestic science - and this gives rise to insurmountable difficulties in the cooperation of scientists. Separated by the First Departments, developers in related industries do not know what and how their neighbors are doing.

A Prime Example from Personal Experience

I was in the leading institute of the Ministry of the Marine Fleet "Sozmorniiproekt" and headed the division engaged in foreign trade transportation of goods and passengers, as well as foreign trade in maritime transport services; we, “ freight traffickers ”, were acutely aware that the necessary cooperation and information exchange with colleagues from other transport ministries, primarily with railway workers; I was the only one in my team who had access to secret work of form 2 (access to Soviet secret materials and documents), and therefore only once I was allowed to manually rewrite the developments of colleagues from GiprotransTEI (the head economic institute of the Ministry of Railways, now Russian Railways); I was disfigured in the First Department of this institute for a whole month, from dawn to dusk, the materials were transported by special . by mail and walked from the Baumanskaya metro station to the Aeroport metro station for a whole month, when I received these materials, it turned out that all the entries were completely crossed out with a bold black felt-tip pen; the same thing happened with the materials of SOPS under the State Planning Committee of the USSR, for which we and 500 other institutes of the country worked.

Another Example is from Siberia

The Institute of Economics and Organization of Industrial Production of the Siberian Branch of the USSR Academy of Sciences developed according to the state. The task of the so-called. The Siberian Report is a sociological analysis and forecast of the situation in Siberia. The report went to Moscow under the heading "for official use" ( dsp ), and returned to the developers with the heading "ss" and was not available to ALL performers ...It is characteristic that the State Planning Committee of the USSR did not accept developments using open statistical information of the USSR State Statistics Service as unreliable (which is true: unreliable), allowing only departmental statistics to be used, an order of magnitude more reliable, but completely inaccessible outside the department.

Right to Be Wrong

History teaches that the path of progress is not a series of achievements and victories, but a hard path of trial and error. step by step science was deprived of the right to make a mistake due to the fact that research has become expensive and costly (the main factor in the rise in price is the state tax policy: the developers themselves receive only about 10% of the cost of scientific developments (in the USSR it was generally 8%), from which personal income taxes (taxes on the activities of individuals) are deducted, including 13% income tax. Risk has disappeared in science, and with it the passion, and with it the true achievements and victories, even if they are rare. From such a science there is nothing to expect except what is expected. Science has become useless because of its predictability and indistinguishable from industrial production.

False Direction

Science often goes in the wrong direction: either it seeks caloric, or the philosopher's stone, or the elixir of youth, or it raises frost-resistant macaques to collect pine nuts in Siberia (the film "Garage"), or it fattens the gastro-satisfied cadaver ("Monday begins on Saturday" by the brothers Strugatsky), then builds the material and technical base of communism. These and many other delusions are inevitable (after all, no one illuminates the path ahead) and even necessary for those who follow to know where to go is not or is not worth it. But let us remember how many scientific directions were trampled upon by those who do not understand a damn thing about science: “genetics is the baguette girl of imperialism”, “cybernetics is the walking girl of the bourgeoisie”; these same people withdrew Darwin from school biology, expelled sociology, psychology and logic from schools. Science is able to determine for itself what is false and went wrong in it, and only science can determine this. And set limits. As the French Academy of Sciences forbade the development of a "perpetual motion machine" back in 1775, thereby preceding the Great French Revolution. And, by the way, no one cancelled the laws of political economy of socialism and all economic laws like the TPK or “the planned and harmonious development of the productive forces - they died on their own.

Negative Result

“A negative result in science is also a result,” officials and managers from science like to say, but in all instructions of the Higher Attestation Commission, in all standards for research, in all technical tasks and requirements, there is a clear setting only for positive results and negative ones are not allowed, which, by the way, in a normally developing science one encounters much more often positive ones. The taboo on negative results has led to the fact that no one undertakes a study in which a negative result is possible, sometimes advancing science much more than a positive one. Science needs to restore its freedoms and rights if it wants to remain a science and not a fiction. And this liberation is possible at the present time only by the institute of scientific production, only on the path of gaining sovereignty by science.