Shaping a brave new world under the yoke of Stalinism

Stalin and the Scientists is a quirky book. It tells the story of what happens to science and scientists when the demands of revolution and the vagaries of intellectual investigation collide. The results, as the book’s subtitle suggests, are at times triumphant, but often tragic.

Ings is not a historian: he writes science fiction and science journalism. As culture editor with the New Scientist, he has an eye for the interactions between the ...