Citizen Seismology,Stalinist Science,and Vladimir Mannar’s Cold Wars

Russian Earthquake Observers from the Crimean War to the Cold War

On March 9, 1953, four days after the death of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet leading authority, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), received a telegram from the remote town of Bayram-Ali in Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic in Central Asia. The correspondent, Vladimir Mannar, reached out to report about his modest contribution in order to celebrate Stalin’s life and achievements: the establishment of a seismological station of his own. ⁶ In the correspondence that followed, Mannar described himself as an “amateur” in the literal sense of the word: doing what he was doing for the love of the subject rather than for a living. ⁷ As a teenager in revolutionary Petrograd, he was attracted to science by the public lectures by a Russian zoologist Pyotr Yulievich Schimdt, a brother of a geophysicist and the Arctic explorer Otto Yulievich Schmidt. Mannar proceeded to study physics: he enrolled in distant learning courses, started to read popular and technical scientific literature, and reproduced various physical experiments using homemade instruments of his own design. ⁸

Mannar turned to seismology in the wake of an earthquake that struck the city of Ashgabat, the capital of Soviet Turkmenia, on October 6, 1948. The 1948 Ashgabat earthquake was one of the most devastating earthquakes in Soviet history. ⁹ The main shock occurred at 2:17 in the morning, razing to the ground the city of Ashgabat and killing thousands. Yet outside the main city, only few deaths were attributed to the earthquake. As Mannar reported, people in the countryside left their homes in advance, alerted by their animals’ strange behavior and other signs. ¹⁰

Mannar, for whom the Ashgabat earthquake was a life-turning event, began to collect the anecdotal knowledge and the experiences of local villagers about the earthquake precursors—the pre-seismic cues (or “proseisms”). Simultaneously, Mannar began studying professional and popular literature on earthquakes—“I purchased all seismological and geophysical literature I could find in the bookstores in the cities of Tashkent and Chirchik”—and designed simple instruments “to detect and monitor other possible pre-seismic cues, such as the release of gases and charged particles, and the change of animal behavior.” ¹¹

In 1951, after three years spent in intense activities, which included collecting information from local villagers, recording various data using homemade instruments, and organizing local high school children into a club of volunteer observers, ¹² Mannar summarized his findings in the report entitled “On animal behavior before the earthquakes.” ¹³ On the advice of the head of Tashkent’s seismological station, Mannar sent his report to the Geophysical Institute in Moscow. The report, according to Mannar, was “warmly received.” A seismologist at the institute, G. P. Gorshkov, encouraged Mannar to continue data collection and gave advice on how to build a seismograph and record different ground motions. Mannar was disappointed that his report was not accepted for publication in the annual publication series of the Institute. Instead, however, he was invited Moscow to attend seminars held by the Geophysical Institute for the technical supervisors of the Institute’s seismic stations around the country. Mannar was also offered hands-on practical training and learned to operate standard instruments used at the seismic stations at the time: horizontal and vertical seismometers with galvanometers and recording drums. ¹⁴ After the crash course in seismology, Mannar was appointed as a technical supervisor of one of the Institute’s seismological stations, “Mary,” in his hometown Bayram-Ali, responsible for overseeing, timing, and troubleshooting the equipment of the seismograph vault and for transmitting the data from the station in Turkmenia to the institute in Moscow.

The case of Mannar, while extraordinary in several respects, typifies the involvement of amateurs and volunteers in earthquake observations and data prospecting. As the historian Deborah Coen pointed out, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, amateurs were “cultivated” to produce data and knowledge on environmental disasters. The very object of seismological study—earthquake, one of the most terrifying natural disasters—made the mobilization of the networks of amateur earthquake observers “a basic tactic of nation-building” in the political regimes as different as republican Switzerland, imperial Austria, progressive California, and Communist China (Coen 2012, 2013). Russia was no different in this respect.

In Russia, the systematic studies of earthquakes began in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the wake of Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War in 1856, Alexander II, determined to modernize his defeated state, had started a series of reforms aimed at spreading the education beyond the local political and religious elites. These political reforms coincided with Russian territorial expansion into the southern regions of the Far East, the Caucasus region, and Central Asia. By the 1870s, with Russian borders extended to the frontiers of China, Afghanistan, and the Pacific Ocean, the Russian empire had reached its greatest territorial extent and also became one of the most seismically active countries in the world.

A series of devastating earthquakes that caused massive destructions and numerous deaths among the population (Ararat in 1840, Shemakha in 1859, Erzrum in 1859, and Abich in 1862) triggered the systematic studies of the earthquakes. Devices for the measurement of the different components of the seismic waves through the earth—seismographs—had long existed in Europe and China and started to be widely used in Russia. Yet Russian seismologists were among the first to focus on surveying and mapping the geographical distribution of earthquakes as the main method that held the promise of earthquake prediction—determining when and where major quakes would occur next. The key to earthquake prediction, it was reasoned, was to determine where they had occurred in the past and then deduce their cycles of repetition and periodicity. Given the vast territory of the Russian empire, surveying and mapping earthquakes seemed to constitute a particular need but also held a methodological strength: certain regularities could be found in spatial and temporal distribution of such apparently random natural phenomena as earthquakes. As the authors of the first comprehensive catalog of earthquakes in Russian empire stated, “Protection from earthquakes is impossible without knowledge of their geographical distribution” (Mushketov and Orlov 1893, 582).

The emphasis on surveying and mapping put a premium on the collection and comparison of a variety of earthquake data, both observational and instrumental, across different regions. The 1893 catalog exemplified a particular approach to data, reconciling instrumental measurements with various kinds of observational data, ranging from geological to zoological, botanical, astronomical, and even psychological observations, by naturalists and witnesses of the earthquakes alike. The authors of the catalog also mined the data from the archives and newspapers, correlating them with observational and instrumental data (Mushketov and Orlov 1893; Tatevossian 2004). ¹⁵

The 1893 catalog of Russian earthquakes, still cited by seismologists as a useful source of information (see, for instance, Ambraseys 2008), played a consolidating role for earthquake studies in Russia. During the last decade of the nineteenth century, the nascent field was growing. By 1902, the newly formed Seismological Commission set up within Russian Imperial Geographical Society began publishing the annual bulletin of the earthquakes of the Russian empire. Disrupted by the First World War, the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, and the civil war, the earthquake studies reemerged in Soviet Russia in the mid-1920s, triggered by destructive earthquakes in Leninakan (1926) and Crimea (1927; Tatevossian 2004). During the 1920s, many specialists who did not leave Russia after the 1917 revolution quickly found new patrons under Bolshevik rule. Seismology, similarly to other fields underdeveloped in imperial Russia, became firmly institutionalized under the Soviet regime (Krementsov 1997). The Seismological Institute, which replaced the Seismological Commission, was established in 1928 to become a center of research and coordination of earthquake studies in the Soviet Union. By the mid-1930s, a steady supply of newly trained specialists and Soviet-made seismographs was feeding the Soviet oil and gas industry, the geological survey organizations, and the research institutes (Zaichenko 2010).

The professionalization of seismology did not shut the volunteer observers out of the discipline, although their contribution was increasingly anonymized and their role redefined as the suppliers of data for professional scientists in the distant “centers of calculation,” in Bruno Latour’s sense of the term (Latour 1987, 233). One prime example of the changes is the Seismological Institute, which engaged, since its inception in the 1920s and until the late 1950s, hundreds of volunteers into a network of the “regional correspondents” feeding the data into the institute. ¹⁶ The Institute supplied the “correspondents” with the questionnaires asking about the time of the earthquake, the experienced tremor, the sounds heard during the quake, and so forth, and leaving the empty space encouraging the correspondents to fill in any observations not covered by the questionnaires (Shebalin 1991). Data received from the correspondents were transferred into the card catalog by the institute’s scientists, who “cooked” them, aggregating data into the tables and stripping them of the references to their sources. ¹⁷

In the interwar and early postwar years, while becoming less “historical” in their presentation of the data, Soviet seismologists continued to use historical sources, mining them for data and information about past earthquakes. The Seismological Institute’s card catalog of the earthquakes included various data on “historical earthquakes,” based on the information found in old newspapers, magazines, and Russian archives (Shebalin 1991; Godzikovskaya and Shebalin 2012). In the first half of the twentieth century, “historical seismology”—the reconstruction of past seismic events using historical written records among other sources—was a prominent area of research in seismically active regions, producing a number of “regional seismic histories” published in the 1930s and 1940s. ¹⁸

While data produced by nonprofessionals were increasingly marginalized in seismological centers of calculation, the demand for volunteers increased as seismology entered the new world of post–World War II (WWII) and cold war largesse. One of the consequences of the transformation of seismology into a “big science” in the aftermath of the WWII was the proliferation of seismological stations spread over the territory of the Soviet Union. The postwar heir to the Seismological Institute—the Geophysical Institute in Moscow, which was the result of a merging of the Seismological Institute and the Institute of Theoretical Physics in 1946—orchestrated a network of stations in seismically active regions of the Soviet Union. In these regions, which were also the most remote and least populated areas, the volunteers were vital for manning the stations that fed the data into the Geophysical Institute in Moscow. Mannar’s story is a case in point.

Mannar’s trajectory from an enthusiastic volunteer to a supervisor of a seismological station was not exceptional. Ambitious amateurs such as Mannar were recruited to work at the remote seismological stations as operators—officially titled the stations’ “supervisors” (nachal’nik stantcii). Some background in physics and math was welcomed but otherwise regional seismic stations were staffed by nonprofessionals, usually a couple, who were trained on the job. ¹⁹

Mannar, however, found the experience disappointing. He was frustrated to see that professional seismologists generally seemed to be uninterested in earthquake prediction. In his letter to the CPSU, he lamented:

On the suggestion of Prof. Bonchkovsky we took charge of the seismological station “Mary” that later had been transferred to Bayram-Ali city. After three and a half years of working on the station we came to realize that seismology ignores the study of pre-seismic cues showing no interest in such studies whatsoever. We decided therefore to pursue such a study independently from the Geophysical Institute of the Academy of Sciences, which showed a lack of interest in the question [of earthquake prediction]…or even a hostility towards…amateurs-innovators. ²⁰

Lysenko’s “Science for the People” and Mannar’s “People’s Seismology”

The vision of bringing “science to the people” was embraced by Russian educated intelligentsia. In late imperial Russia, the naturalist societies and scientific associations sponsored a broad range of activities that engaged ordinary citizens. ²¹ After the revolution, the Soviet regime promoted the vision of bringing science to the masses as the core value of the new people’s state, the basis of rational, scientific socialist society, and the means for cultivating new scientific elites for the socialist society (Andrews 2003).

In the late 1940s, a series of public campaigns that marked the beginning of the cold war brought to the limelight Trofim Denisovich Lysenko—a self-fashioned “peasant scientist,” an agronomist who rose to power in the 1930s backed by Stalin himself. The campaign against genetics disrupted the established alliance between professional experts and nonprofessionals. ²² The history of Lysenkoism and its tragic consequences for Soviet biology is one of the most researched episodes in the history of Soviet science. ²³ Yet the existing histories of Lysenko’s “affair” have focused either on the political history of Lysenkoism or on the history of Lysenko’s personal rise to fame. Little attention has been paid to a larger movement to which Lysenko’s individual trajectory was intimately linked: the massive mobilization of kolkhozniki—the workers of the collective farms, kolkhozy—into scientific activities organized in the kolkhoz agro-laboratories, or the “hut labs.” ²⁴ Lysenko’s campaign against genetics, as much as anything else, brought “scientists of the people” to the fore, presenting them as equal participants in Soviet socialist science.

The hut labs movement originated in Ukraine in the early 1920s as an agricultural extension service amid severe food shortage and famine brought about by the chaos of revolution followed by the civil war, the “war communism,” and the beginning of collectivization. The movement started as a newspaper campaign. In 1921, the newspaper Bednota called the peasants in the collective farms, which lacked trained people and funds to hire an agronomist, to send their questions to the newspaper. The newspaper published the replies to the questions, serving as a mediator between the experts and the farmers, while at the same time urging the correspondents to learn the answers for themselves, by organizing their own hut labs and pursuing experiments in plant breeding on their own (Joravsky 1970, 54-62).

Starting in Ukraine, the movement spread to other regions. In 1949, the journal Kolkhoznoe Proizvodsvo, almost entirely devoted to the reports from the “lab correspondents,” surveyed the kolkhoz agro-labs in the Soviet Union. ²⁵ According to the journal, the hut labs pursued a broad range of environmental observations. Many collective farms established meteorological stations and kept routine weather observations; for the most part, the hut labs were engaged in experimenting with crop rotation, fertilization, weed control, and stimulation of seeds and plant growth (Anon 1950; Chmora 1949).

The production of scientific results was not the aim of the movement. Rather, the hut labs were endorsed as a cheap and easy way to increase yields and exalted as a new way of doing science: the peasant scientists were praised as daring inventors who would drive the old technical intelligentsia to the margins. Lysenko, who emphatically identified with peasant scientists, invited a number of the hut labs’ workers to the fateful meeting of the Agricultural Academy in August 1948, which proclaimed Lysenko’s victory while banning genetics from educational curricula and research in the Soviet Union. Widely publicized proceedings of the meeting generously quoted one such “peasant scientist”, who called geneticists “the arm chair philosophers” criticizing these “private gentlemen” for being preoccupied with “abstract and theoretical questions” and “exalted science” while suppressing “modest practical workers” in the fields (cited in Pollock 2006, 62). Lysenko, in his turn, praised the hut lab movement not only for providing crucial evidence for his theories but, more importantly, for cultivating a new kind of scientist—a quasi-professional working in the hut labs who was on an equal footing with professionally trained specialists in their modern labs. As Lysenko stated,

The hut-laboratories have already produced a body of active workers capable of working shoulder to shoulder with scientific specialists, taking up and solving complex scientific problems…The comrades amongst the hut-laboratory workers who have outgrown the hut-laboratory work should be boldly transferred to research institutes and [agricultural] stations as specialists. ²⁶

As a first step toward people’s seismology, Mannar suggested a book project. Entitled “How to Build a Seismic Station by Yourself and How to Work on It,” the book was to include step-by-step instructions on how to build simple instruments such as electrometer, radiometer, and a simple seismograph. ³⁰ Mannar meticulously calculated the costs of a self-made seismic vault equipped with homemade instruments made from scratch, which he estimated as around 3,000 rubles or “half the price of a motorcycle”—a diminutive budget in comparison with the costs of a professionally equipped seismic station. ³¹

Mannar’s advocacy of people’s seismology could have led to the larger consequences beyond a mere correspondence between a dedicated amateur and the party functionaries. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the beginning of the cold war was marked by the staged public debates in different disciplines: in philosophy in 1947, in biology in 1948, in linguistics and physiology in 1950, and in political economy in 1951 (Krementsov 1997; Kojevnikov 1998; Pollock 2006). ³² The meetings differed in their agendas and the outcomes, but they all addressed a common theme: how to reconcile Soviet ideology and science in the name of socialist science. Similar debates were planned in other academic disciplines, but they did not materialize for different reasons (see, for instance, Graham 1964). One of the campaigns inspired by 1948 purges in biology was planned in physics, centering on the critique of the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics as “West-born” theories. Despite months of preparation, the major meeting was canceled. As Gennady Gorelik and Alexei Kojevnikov have argued, it was the intervention of the physicists involved in the construction of Soviet atomic bomb that “saved” physics from the affair in the mold of Lysenko (Gorelik and Kozhevnikov 1999).

The atomic bomb placed physicists in a unique position that shielded them from the interventions from outsiders of all kind. The bomb’s protective shadow extended beyond physics to the neighboring fields, if only indirectly related to the nuclear weapons industry. Seismology was one of these fields in the shadow of the bomb. The link to nuclear weapons research and technologies not only protected seismology from a Lysenko-like scenario but also thoroughly transformed seismology, redefining the disciplinary conventions about research questions, methods, and data in seismology. Mannar’s project was motivated by these transformations as much as by the ideological drivers.

The Politics of Seismology and Vladimir Mannar’s Cold War

With the beginning of nuclear explosions, seismology became tightly linked to nuclear weapons research and technologies in both the United States and USSR. ³³ In the Soviet Union, seismologists were involved in Soviet atomic bomb project from its inception. At the beginning of the Soviet atomic bomb project, the main challenge for Soviet nuclear weapon developers was the lack of access to uranium. ³⁴ Developing new methods to find uranium at home was crucial for the success of the entire project. Seismology offered such a method. The seismic method of mineral prospecting was initially developed for the oil industry. Shooting a seismic wave into the ground and then recording the reflected signal with seismographs had been used as a method to discriminate between different types of soils and rocks by oil companies worldwide since the early 1920s (Ewing and Press 1956). When the nuclear experts around the world started to look for uranium, the seismological method of geological prospecting was adopted for the purpose of uranium exploration. Not surprisingly, already in 1946, the head of the Soviet atomic bomb project, Igor Kurchatov, invited Grigoriy Gamburtsev, the country’s leading seismologist who received 1941 Stalin’s prize for the development of the seismic methods of oil and gas prospecting, to join the top-secret atomic team and organize the prospecting of uranium in the country (Vasiliev 2003). ³⁵

In the early 1950s, seismological expertise found another application. Since 1951, Gamburtsev lobbied the organization of a special seismological service that would work on the development of coherent nuclear test detection methods. The beginning of the underground nuclear testing in the United States gave the proposal momentum. In 1954, a classified seismological branch of the Geophysical Institute headed by Gamburtsev and his former student Ivan Pasechnik was inaugurated to work on the detection of nuclear tests at a distance. Soon thereafter, Gamburtsev noted in an unfinished manuscript kept in his family archive: “At present, the seismological method of detection and localization of the nuclear tests is adopted by Soviet Army services.” ³⁶ After Gamburtsev’s untimely death in 1955, the scientific director of the Semipalatinsk nuclear test ground, Mikhail Sadovsky, became the head of the Geophysical Institute, institutionalizing the crucial link between the military and academic seismology. ³⁷

The dual, scientific qua military agenda gave a major boost to both civilian and military branches of Soviet seismology. ³⁸ The field was thoroughly transformed through its link to nuclear weapons. On a theoretical level, the so-called discrimination problem—distinguishing between the ground waves generated by the earthquakes and the ones by clandestine nuclear explosions—became a serious scientific problem, marking the beginning of large-scale investment in the development of technologies and methods to triangulate seismic data and differentiate the records of nuclear explosions from the earthquakes. ³⁹ In the 1950s, seismology swelled. New seismological stations were established on the territory of the Soviet Union. As Gamburtsev emphasized, “the control of and the knowledge about clandestine nuclear tests is possible through the seismological methods on the condition of the development of a decentralized network of seismic stations equipped with highly sensitive new seismographs.” ⁴⁰ Mannar worked on one of these stations, collecting instrumental microseismological data while criticizing professional seismology for neglecting macro-observations. ⁴¹

One consequence of these developments, besides the increased gap between low-tech macroseismology and high-tech microseismology, was the introduction of a stringent “nuclear secrecy” regime established in Soviet seismology with the beginning of nuclear weapons. ⁴² Simultaneously with Mannar’s complaining about the disregard of the people’s needs by professional seismologists, Gamburtsev was complaining about the strange situation that strangled seismologists’ work. Addressing the academician Aleksandr Nesmeianov within a few days after Stalin’s death, Gamburtsev pressed upon the powerful president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences that the secrecy regime jeopardized the work of the Geophysical Institute, which he directed. Referring to the main regulatory document that defined the classified information in the Soviet Union (the Main Directorate on Literature and Presses [Glavnoe upravlenie po delam literatury i izdatel’stv or Glavlit]) he wrote:

According to…Glavlit list no. 2, “all materials, acts and information on earthquakes” are considered a state secret and banned from publication in open press…As a president of the Academy’s Council of Seismology I would like to inform you that as a result all works of the Geophysical Institute that mentioned “earthquake” were banned from publication. The publication of the seismological bulletin was stopped, too. ⁴³

The transformation of seismology into a cold war big science marginalized nonprofessional volunteers like Mannar in many different ways beyond the secrecy regime with its deliberate restriction of access to the authorized professionals only. ⁴⁵ Another change, which Mannar experienced firsthand, was the redefinition of the disciplinary conventions around earthquake prediction. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, seismology was shifting toward increasingly global approaches that required data from around the world—the developments that came together in the 1960s with the gradual acceptance of the plate tectonics theory in geosciences (Oreskes 2001). ⁴⁶ With these developments, earthquake prediction as a scientific problem was replaced with statistical assessment of the likelihood of a future quake, while earthquakes as object of study were replaced with measurable “microseisms.” As Deborah Coen (2013, 267) has put it, in the second half of the twentieth century “the earthquake as scientific object became something unrecognizable to its victims.”

The case of Mannar illuminates how the transformation of earthquake prediction in professional seismology was seen by an amateur seismologist and an earthquake witness. In his letters, Mannar commented on a recent book by his adviser from the Geophysical Institute, G. P. Gorshkov:

In his book, “Zemletriaseniia v SSSR” (Earthquakes in USSR [1949]), Gorshkov gives a very valuable historical survey of the earthquakes in Russia, from the times immemorial till 1949. This book appears to be the last word in Soviet seismography. The data, it appears, have contributed to the current work on seismic mapping of the USSR—highly valuable and important in itself, but, unfortunately, not responding adequately to the problem of earthquake prediction. Gorshkov himself perfectly articulated this stance towards earthquake prediction when he wrote: “No scientist was ever able to predict an earthquake scientifically, or even suggest a method to approach the task.” The hopeless sentiment of this statement…confirms the impression that what seismology produces is what in electomechanics is called “wattless” power: you have the electric current and voltage, but no power and no work! ⁴⁷

As Mannar navigated the complex terrain of cold war seismology, he had grown increasingly critical of professional seismologists’ style of work. Weaving together his advocacy of people’s seismology with his bewilderment at what he saw as seismologists’ lack of interest in earthquake prediction, Mannar concluded that Soviet big-science seismology was misled, functioning de facto as a “capitalist science.” Most consequentially, Mannar argued, this was reflected in the scientific instruments: the seismological stations were equipped with “commercial” instruments—the ready-made instruments manufactured at a factory floor. ⁴⁸ “Commercial instruments” embedded the “capitalist principles of scientific instrument-making,” which Mannar summarized as follows:

– The attractive presentation of the devices (to sell well) – The short lifetime (to ensure continuous demand) – The large size of the instruments (to justify the higher prices) – A very limited or no operational information (to ensure the indispensability of the manufacturer) – The impossibility to assemble the instruments outside the factories, either by amateurs or by scientists themselves (“if anyone can build it at home who would buy it?”) ⁴⁹

The commercial principles of instrument-making, Mannar argued, not only made scientific instruments costly and thus limited the number of stations that were possible to equip with overpriced devices; they also determined the kind of research these stations enabled: these instruments were narrowly designed for specific scientific priorities, which did not include macroseismic observations or earthquake prediction.

In contrast to the “capitalist” model, Mannar advocated a “socialist method of scientific instrument-making,” characterized by modest finishing, small size, detailed instrument documentation, and, above all, the possibility to assemble the devices locally, adjusting them, by scientists and amateurs alike, for their particular purposes. ⁵⁰ Referring to the success of the “grassroots” Soviet radio amateur movement, ⁵¹ Mannar emphasized:

Every Soviet citizen can make instruments for the purpose of scientific explorations of his/her choice.…[We] should not forget the experience of Soviet radio amateurs who, with the help of an awl, a screwdriver, and a pair of pliers make fine radio transmitters and radio receivers—modern and sophisticated instruments, which they used for serious scientific work. Practice has demonstrated that amateur-made instruments can be better than “commercial” ones. ⁵²

Conclusion

The episode of Vladimir Mannar and his aborted campaign for socialist seismology opens a window into a world of Soviet “citizen scientists” who saw in Lysenko an exemplar of a “scientist for the people,” and an inspiring model to emulate. There are some strong parallels between the trajectories of the two men. Lysenko was able to gain professional status in biology due to comparatively low barriers for “entrance” in Stalinist science in the 1920s and 1930s, and to the interpretative flexibility of the evolutionary framework in these years, which made it possible for Lysenko to intervene in major academic debates in the theoretical biology of the time. ⁵⁶ Mannar, on the other hand, gained professional status in seismology at the moment of the expansion of the field, which created job opportunities for people just like him—educated but not professionally trained citizens who manned seismic stations in the remote and seismically active regions of the Soviet Union. Leading Soviet seismologists encouraged observational activities on the part of lay citizens, establishing channels of communication and seeking to include them in a dialogue with professional experts. The similarity does not go further, however. Lysenko, assisted by several canny advisers and endorsed by Stalin, plunged into ideological battles that led to an official ban of genetics with catastrophic consequences for Soviet biology. Yet this most pathological version of Stalinist citizen science was also quite unique. During Stalin’s time, the would-be Lysenko surfaced periodically within disciplines ranging from linguistics to physics but always failed. Mannar, writing in the wake of Stalin’s death, had even lesser a chance to have Soviet authorities on his side.

What then can Mannar’s case teach us about science in a citizen science mode? Mannar’s trajectory encapsulates the implicit tension between citizen science’s two meanings, one that encourages amateur contributions to science within a framework defined by experts and the other that implies a critical stance toward experts’ interests and goals. Unlike the Lysenko affair’s “pathology,” Mannar’s story represented reasonably “normal” developments stemming from attempts to reconcile the two loyalties, to science and to citizenship, doing both at once—playing by the scientists’ rules and at the same time maintaining a critical distance. As citizen science becomes more and more common today, Mannar’s story may serve as a useful reminder of citizens’ larger agendas and aspirations than merely providing scientists with data and observations or serving as “sensors” for scientific projects. ⁵⁷

Beyond the Soviet context, the case of Mannar and his vision of people’s seismology appears to be more similar to the nineteenth century’s way of thinking of who is professional—and a similar reversal of professional–nonprofessional relationship in the twenty-first century—than to the case of seemingly similar “citizen seismology” in Maoist China. As the historian Fa-ti Fan argued, Mao’s mass science was profoundly different from science in Stalin’s Soviet Union in the extent to which Chinese mass science broke from the established scientific traditions drawing “from unconventional sources of scientific knowledge” and championing folk, vernacular and “native” knowledge (Fan 2012a, 150). As Fan writes,

the Chinese enterprise of earthquake prediction depended in part on scientific observation informed by everyday experience and folk knowledge. Scientific observation was as political as it was epistemological. The generous inclusion of everyday and folk knowledge in Maoist mass science reminds us not so much of ‘amateur science’ as of ‘vernacular science’—e.g., the lay science…or even the non-elite versions of anti-evolutionary theories. (Fan 2012a)

Mannar’s case also presents a contrast to the developments in most Western countries, where the divide between the amateur and the professional in science has dramatically increased in the twentieth century in most scientific domains. Seismology is a case in point. As Coen (2013, 9) has argued, with the onset of the cold war, the entire “field of knowledge that depended on the self-reported observations of ordinary people in extraordinary situations”—the earthquake observers—was being swept away, replaced by high-technology science of microseisms and risk assessments. At the same time, there are some material convergences between the nineteenth and the twenty-first century, for instance, the explosion of new communication technologies in both periods that shrink the divide between amateur and professional scientists. ⁵⁸ Mannar’s story of an amateur seismologist in mid-twentieth century Russia thus suggests a corrective to the image of twentieth-century science as widening or even creating the gap between the experts and ordinary citizens.

The case of seismology is especially revealing in this regard. While nonprofessionals’ contribution as data collectors and nature’s observers is acknowledged in such disciplines as ornithology, zoology, botany, entomology, and other field sciences, such instrumental and highly technical big science enterprise as cold war seismology is commonly regarded as a field with higher barriers for the nonprofessionals to enter. As Mannar’s story illustrates, however, rather than elbowing nonprofessionals out, the transformation of seismology into a high-tech big science marginalized their data that fell outside the redefined disciplinary conventions.

Mannar’s predigital socialist seismology in late-Stalinist Soviet Union is an unlikely comparison to global and Internet-driven citizen seismology of today. ⁵⁹ Yet this case can offer insight into the inherent tensions, ambiguities, and paradoxical nature of citizen science with its dual loyalties and uneasy mediations. Mannar’s expressive written record of his mediations with professional seismologists brings to the fore the usually silent and invisible participant in scientific practice—a technician, an amateur, a member of public, an “ordinary citizen.” ⁶⁰ Mannar’s story highlights the dialogical and “two-way street” character of communication between scientists and citizens engaged in producing science while striving to create personal empowerment as well.