From the Formation of the Soviet Scientific System to the Involvement of Russian Academic Organizations in the War Against Ukraine

Abstract

This paper introduces “super-normal science” to explain how Soviet and post-Soviet academic communities preserve institutional continuity while sincerely adopting different state ideologies and representations of reality. Extending Thomas Kuhn’s normal science, the concept describes communities whose cognitive framework is defined by the state. Institutions retain degrees, journals, conferences, expert councils, and terminology, but their function shifts from investigating objects to translating state-sanctioned worldviews into scientific language.

This academic type emerged through Soviet science’s restructuring from the late 1920s. Its reproduction combined adaptation with negative selection: researchers separating state doctrine from scientific conclusions or insisting on autonomous problem formulation were marginalized, reducing institutional capacity to identify inconvenient facts and investigate state policy’s long-term consequences.

Russian and Ukrainian academic communities are treated as inheritors of the same system, not different types. Their wartime conduct reflects different state demands. Russia required academic legitimation and normalization of aggression; Ukraine imposed a weaker ideological “score.”

Using documents concerning geographer Nikolai Bagrov, Tavrida National University after Crimea’s 2014 occupation, and Russian academic participation in anti-Ukrainian policies, the paper interprets Bagrov not as exceptional, but as a manifestation of an institutional system oriented toward serving sta