Although much has been written about the history of Soviet science, in the Western imagination the topic remains opaque, remote and (most importantly) hemmed in by a simplistic dichotomy of good versus evil. Beyond a few touchstones, such as the episode when Stalin's fondness for the theories of Trofim Lysenko almost destroyed the burgeoning field of genetics, and the Soviet "theft" of the atomic bomb, most Western laypeople have few points of reference to Soviet science. In his emotionally resonant book Buried Glory, Istvan Hargittai, a well-known Hungarian chemist and prolific writer of popular books on science, adds depth to this picture by bringing to light the biographies of more than a dozen Soviet scientists.
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