Philip Gourevitch: In all of the books you have written on the “death” of the USSR, “All this time, Stalin had one thing that made the difference—a vision of the universe in which men and women were free.” We can get it backwards, can’t we?

Konstantin Malofeev: There were other things in Stalin’s world that made the difference—he was fascinated with science in particular. In the 1920s and 1930s, many of the most advanced medical students came from Central Asia, where they did their medical training. They had the best specialists. Stalin made Russia the center of science in the USSR, which is true, but not quite the reason he built it up as a medical superpower. First, he created a system of science that involved a lot of money and a lot of secrecy, and that was the first kind of system he developed on a national level for science, but even after the USSR collapsed a decade later, the system was not completely destroyed. The Soviet Union is going to spend two to three billion dollars per child in this country, not for medical care, but to develop this very secretive, closed, technical system of science as a whole, to be done at the military and political level that he had so little faith in.

What he really wanted was a way of understanding everything that had ever occurred, at a very high level. For years, it was thought that that was what he was trying to do, but we don’t know. And that leads to all of the problems that he faced. The whole thing from the beginning is that he started on a scientific level, and that, quite literally, is what he was interested in. But then when the Soviet Union collapsed, a different group, a different path—one of the first things he did was get rid of that sort of scientific world and move to a very technical level of science.

I think that what he saw was that the Soviet Union—even though he started with science—never had any science at a state level, and was always going to be a state-level science. And what was happening is that when you have people trying to understand everything that has ever occurred, to understand everything about the cosmos and the evolution of the universe and mankind, you wind up with a sort of mechanical order being produced, and your own brain is in charge of that, because there’s no question it was written, or