GOELRO, Dielectrics, and the Soviet Scientist

From 1921 Florensky worked as a research engineer in the Soviet electrification programme — at Glavelektro, the central administration for electrification, and in the electrotechnical research institutes that grew out of the GOELRO plan. His field was insulating materials; his 1924 monograph Dielectrics and Their Technical Applications was published by the electrification administration itself; he became a deputy director of the electrotechnical institute, sat on the central directorate for research into electro-insulating materials, edited a technical encyclopaedia, and filed some fifty patent applications, most of which were reportedly refused because of his clerical status.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (Moscow Theological Academy; the Russian religious renaissance)

GOELRO and Glavelektro

GOELRO — the Gosudarstvennaia komissiia po elektrifikatsii Rossii, the State Commission for the Electrification of Russia — was established in 1920 and produced the plan that Lenin famously equated with communism itself. It was the largest technical undertaking of the early Soviet state and it needed engineers of a calibre the Bolsheviks did not possess in sufficient numbers. Glavelektro was the central administration under which the electrification work was organized.

From 1921 Florensky worked in this world as a research engineer on electrical and insulating materials, and he served on the GOELRO commission (Papadopoulos, “Pavel Florensky and his world,” arXiv:2310.12159, 2023, §3; Pyman, Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius, Continuum, 2010, ch. 9). [Disputed: sources vary on whether Florensky was a formal member of the GOELRO commission or a specialist consultant attached to its work through Glavelektro; the substance — that he worked within the electrification programme from 1921 and attended its meetings — is not in dispute.]

The recommendation that brought him in is generally attributed to the intervention of highly placed patrons who valued technical competence over ideology; Trotsky’s name is associated with it in the literature, and Papadopoulos reports the connection (Papadopoulos, arXiv:2310.12159, §3). [Disputed: the exact route by which a priest was admitted to the Soviet electrification programme is not securely documented; the reported role of Trotsky is repeated in the biographical literature but should be treated as a report rather than an established fact.]

Dielectrics

Florensky’s research specialism was dielectrics — insulating materials, the substances that do not conduct, and whose behaviour in an electric field determines whether a cable, a capacitor, or a transformer works or fails. It is unglamorous, essential, and, in a country attempting to electrify itself from a standing start, urgent.

His monograph Dielektriki i ikh tekhnicheskoe primenenie — Dielectrics and Their Technical Applications — was published in 1924 by Glavelektro (Papadopoulos, arXiv:2310.12159, §3). It is a genuine technical treatise, not a philosophical essay in a scientific costume, and it established him as an authority in the field.

He went on to a series of institutional positions: by 1930 he was a deputy director of the State Experimental Electrotechnical Institute, working under the electrical engineer K. A. Krug, and from 1931 he sat on the central directorate coordinating research into electro-insulating materials (Papadopoulos, arXiv:2310.12159, §3). He edited the Tekhnicheskaia entsiklopediia material on electrical insulating substances, and published in the Soviet scientific press, including in the journal Sorena (Sotsialisticheskaia rekonstruktsiia i nauka, “Socialist Reconstruction and Science”) in 1932 (Papadopoulos, arXiv:2310.12159, §3).

Between 1927 and 1933 he filed on the order of fifty patent applications. Most were reportedly refused — and the reason reported is his clerical status (Papadopoulos, arXiv:2310.12159, §3). [Disputed: the figure of roughly fifty applications and the attribution of the refusals to his clerical status derive from the documentary reconstruction in Papadopoulos and the Russian archival literature; the count varies between accounts.] The detail is worth pausing on: a state that needed his inventions and used his textbook would not grant him patents because he was a priest.

Why Dielectrics Suited Him

It is tempting to treat the choice of field as an accident of what the state happened to need, and Florensky himself never claimed otherwise. But the fit is closer than accident.

Dielectric physics in the 1920s was a study of boundaries and breakdown: what happens at the interface between conductor and insulator, how a material behaves under increasing field strength, and at what point — sharply, discontinuously — it fails and the charge passes through. The subject is about thresholds, and Florensky’s whole philosophical formation, from Bugaev’s arithmology of the discontinuous function through his dissertation on the singularities of plane curves to the theology of the boundary in Iconostasis, had trained him to find thresholds the most interesting feature of any system (see Concrete Metaphysics and the Unity of Knowledge).

He also worked on the systematic classification and testing of insulating materials — the unglamorous cataloguing on which the encyclopaedia entries and the central directorate’s coordination depended — and this too was congenial: he had spent his adult life assembling material across registers and looking for the structure in the accumulation. A man who could plan a Symbolarium, a dictionary of the world’s symbols, was not going to be bored by a compendium of the world’s insulators.

None of this makes the science a disguised theology. The 1924 monograph is a technical book about technical problems and stands or falls as such. The observation is only that the double life was not the strain it looks like from outside, and that the same habits of mind were at work in both halves of it.

Teaching and the Other Institutes

He also taught. After the closure of the Academy he lectured at VKhUTEMAS, the Higher Art and Technical Studios in Moscow, on the theory of spatiality in art — the lectures out of which the perspective essays grew — and he worked at the Moscow institute for historical and artistic research (Papadopoulos, arXiv:2310.12159, §3; Florensky, Beyond Vision, ed. Misler, trans. Salmond, Reaktion, 2002, on the VKhUTEMAS lectures). For roughly a decade, then, a single man was simultaneously lecturing art students on the geometry of pictorial space, running dielectric experiments for the electrification of Russia, and writing an unpublishable theology of the icon.

Was This Collaboration?

The question is asked, and it deserves a direct answer rather than an evasion.

Florensky worked for the institutions of a state that was persecuting his Church, and he did so competently and productively. He did not, so far as the record shows, join the Party, endorse its ideology, renounce his priesthood, or lend his name to its campaigns; he did technical work in a technical field, in clerical dress, while his Church was being destroyed around him. The Soviet state, for its part, used his expertise for a decade and then arrested him twice and shot him.

Three observations, offered without adjudication:

The position was common and was not treated as apostasy. Thousands of “bourgeois specialists” worked in Soviet institutions in the 1920s; the Church did not regard technical employment as a denial of the faith, and Florensky’s own priesthood was never questioned on this ground by any ecclesiastical authority.
It was not a shelter. Whatever protection his usefulness afforded ran out. Being indispensable to the electrification of Russia did not prevent his arrest in 1928, his arrest in 1933, or his execution in 1937 (see Section 07).
It was, on his own account, coherent. The “concrete metaphysics” holds that there is one reality and that every discipline approaches it; on that view, work on insulating materials is not a compromise with an alien sphere but an act in the same world in which the liturgy is served. Whether that is a satisfying theology or a rationalization is a judgment readers may make for themselves; it is at least what he thought (see Concrete Metaphysics and the Unity of Knowledge).

The Scientific Work Did Not Stop in the Camps

The pattern continued after his arrest. In the Far East he was assigned to research on permafrost construction, and on Solovki he set up a laboratory extracting iodine and agar-agar from the White Sea seaweed, registering patents from the camp (see Solovki and the Death of 1937; Papadopoulos, arXiv:2310.12159, §4). There is no period of his adult life in which he was not doing science, and no period in which he was not a priest.

References

Papadopoulos, Athanase. “Pavel Florensky and his world.” arXiv:2310.12159, 2023, §3–4. (Glavelektro and GOELRO from 1921; Dielectrics and Their Technical Applications, 1924; the deputy directorship of the electrotechnical institute under K. A. Krug, 1930; the central directorate for electro-insulating materials, 1931; the technical encyclopaedia; the Sorena publication of 1932; the patent applications of 1927–33 and their refusal; the VKhUTEMAS lectures; the camp laboratories.)
Florensky, Pavel. Dielektriki i ikh tekhnicheskoe primenenie [Dielectrics and Their Technical Applications]. Moscow: Glavelektro, 1924.
Pyman, Avril. Pavel Florensky: A Quiet Genius. New York: Continuum, 2010, ch. 9. (The Soviet scientific decade.)
Florensky, Pavel. Beyond Vision: Essays on the Perception of Art. Ed. Nicoletta Misler, trans. Wendy Salmond. London: Reaktion Books, 2002. (The VKhUTEMAS lectures on spatiality in art.)