What happens to science when the state makes truth subordinate to power? Simon Ings tells the story of Soviet research under Stalin, 1905–1953, where careers turned on patronage and fear, not peer review.

Wartime expediency shields aviation, rocketry and the bomb. Ings tells of spars with the regime, scientists enduring the Gulag and treading a perilous line between brilliance and suspicion. He spans intellectual fashions from Marrist linguistics to the fraught arrival of cybernetics - all against a backdrop of surveillance and bravado.

The result is a brisk, unnerving history of knowledge under duress—and a reminder that when politics sets the terms of inquiry, discovery becomes both possible and dangerous.