p Only scientific communism, which links the solving of the problems confronting mankind with the elimination of obsolete social orders and the building of a new, communist society, is capable of organically connecting scientific and technological forecasting with socio-economic forecasting.

p The achievements of socialist construction in the Soviet Union and other countries have proved in practice the accuracy of Marxist socio-economic forecasting.

p All this together with the advances of modern science as a whole has created immense possibilities both for concrete technological forecasting and socio-economic forecasting. The latest mathematical theories and the most recent advances in cybernetics, computer technology and statistics processing—all these products of the scientific and technological revolution help us to look increasingly further into the future, to forecast with increasing accuracy to make the future an object of concrete sociological research in the same way as the past and present. At the same time, with the modern pace of scientific and technological advance, the efficient development of the national economy and culture is inconceivable without detailed forecasts of the future. Thus, scientific prediction acquires an enormous practical significance.

p The programme of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the programmatic documents of the fraternal Communist parties and international meetings summarise the prospects for the development of the world socialist system, the international working-class and the national liberation movements. This constitutes the basis for detailed forecasting of the development of individual branches of the national economy and culture—from industry and agriculture to public health and education systems.

p At the 23rd and 24th Congresses of the CPSU the need was stressed for putting long-term planning on an all-round scientific basis and it was pointed out that this referred not only to the planning of the economy, but to that of social relations and culture in the very broadest sense. Hence 310 the problem arises of working out the theoretical bases for long-term planning, the methodology of concrete technological and socio-economic forecasting.

p Leonid Brezhnev said at the 24th GPSU Congress: “This raises the question of planning national-economic development over a long term, on the basis of forecasts of the country’s population growth, the requirements of national economy, and scientific and technical progress. This approach, ensuring constant coordination of long-term plans with five-year and annual plans, helps in the more effective solution of the basic problems of our development."  [310•1 

p Research in this sphere demands close coordination between economists, sociologists, philosophers, demographers, mathematicians, physicists, chemists, biologists, geographers, and specialists in the technical, agricultural, pedagogical and other sciences.

p Forecasting in the Soviet Union rests on the progressive traditions of Russian and world science. The first steps in this field were linked with the names of great thinkers, for example, if one takes Russian scholars, the names of Mendeleyev, Tsiolkovsky, Sechenov, Pavlov, Mechnikov, Timiryazev, Zhukovsky, Vernadsky and many others.

p Dmitri Mendeleyev made a most important contribution to the development of scientific forecasting by discovering the periodic law, on the basis of which he predicted the properties of a number of chemical elements unknown at that time. To his pen also belong works on such scientific and technological problems, well in advance of his age, as the subterranean gasification of coal, the pipeline transport and location of oil refineries, the use of such constant natural sources of energy as the sun, wind and rivers. “In the future,” we read in one of his works, “one can foresee the time when the obtaining of mechanical force will take place without the expenditure of fuel, with the help of natural, or free, forces dispersed all round us."  [310•2  He paid particular attention to the prospects for utilising the sea’s food resources and to the production of synthetic food. “As a chemist,” he wrote, “I am convinced of the possibility of obtaining 311 nutritious substance from a combination of the elements of air, water and earth in addition to normal culture, i.e., at special workshops and factories, but the need for this is very remote as yet, because there is still a great deal of empty land everywhere...."  [311•1 

p Konstantin Tsiolkovsky examined concrete ways of exploring outer space and investigated the basic future problems of conquering the space (the principles of multi-stage rockets using liquid propellants, apparatus based on solar energy, artificial earth satellites, etc.) right up to building artificial planets—“ethereal towns”. All his predictions in this sphere have so far been substantiated with remarkable precision. One of his last forecasts concerning the conquest of space reads as follows: “I am firmly convinced that my other dream—interplanetary travel ... will also become reality. For forty years I worked on jet propulsion and thought that a trip to Mars would begin only many centuries from now. But time limits are changing. I believe that many of you will witness the first journey outside the earth’s atmosphere."  [311•2 

p Tsiolkovsky’s predictions on utilising the earth’s surface are less well known.  [311•3  Naturally, there is much in his detailed scientific and technological conceptions of the future which no longer fits in wi’th modern science and a number of his statements of a socio-economic and philosophical nature have not stood up to Marxist criticism. But many of his concrete scientific and technological forecasts—from the idea of trains on an air cushion to that of floating artificial islands—continue to be of extreme interest in our day.

p I. M. Sechenov and I. P. Pavlov anticipated the achievements of modern cybernetics in their works, pointing to the possibility of machine simulation of certain brain functions, i.e., to the fact that processes, from a certain point of view, 312 functionally equivalent, take place in the brain and in a machine. “All external manifestations of brain activity may be reduced to muscular movement,” wrote Sechenov. “For in the case of a musician and of a sculptor the hand which creates life is capable of performing only purely mechanical movements which, strictly speaking, may be subjected to mathematical analysis and expressed as a formula."  [312•1  “...All life from the simplest to the most complex organisms, including man, of course, is a long series of ever-increasing to the highest degree equilibrations of the external environment,” wrote Pavlov, developing the same idea. “There will come a time—albeit remote—when mathematical analysis, based on that of the natural sciences, will embrace all these equilibrations with the majestic formulae of equations...."  [312•2  Today these ideas are gradually becoming reality. The development of mathematical logic and cybernetics is making it possible to create logical electronic systems in biology and medicine.

p The writings of Ivan Mechnikov collected in his books The Nature of Man and Studies in Optimism played an important role in developing modern ideas of the physical make-up of the man of the future. K. A. Timiryazev’s discovery of the energy law of the photosynthesis of plants paved the way for forecasting concrete prospects for utilising mankind’s food resources. The works of N. A. Umov stimulated the study of a number of future problems in information theory. The father of Russian aviation, N, Y. Zhukovsky, who produced some most interesting ideas on the possibility of developing jet-propelled vessels and flying machines heavier than air as early as the end of the last century, was one of the founders of scientific forecasting in the field of air transport. The founder of geo-chemistry and radio-geology, V. I. Vernadsky, stressed the paramount importance of consciousness, science and humane intellect in directing the process of the interaction of nature and society. “Sources of energy have come to light,” he wrote as far back as 1910, “against which the power of steam, the power of electricity and the power of explosive chemical substances 313 pale in strength and importance. We, children of the twentieth century, have grown used to the power of steam and electricity all around us. We know how profoundly they have changed and are changing the whole social structure of human society and, moreover, how deeply they are changing the more trivial everyday environment of the human personality.... But now, in the phenomena of radioactivity, sources of atomic energy are opening up which exceed millions of times over all the sources of energy which have ever suggested themselves to the human imagination."  [313•1 

p In the twenties and early thirties, under the direct influence of Lenin and in close conjunction with long-term socialist planning, research in the sphere of social forecasting assumed considerable proportions in the Soviet Union. Many Soviet scientists took an active part in discussion of the principle of economic planning, and the country’s scientific community directed its efforts towards solving the problems of the first Soviet five-year plans. Interesting longterm forecasts were made by G. M. Krzhizhanovsky and A. V. Vinter (fuel and energy), A. F. loffe (the possibility of utilising thermo-elements), A. L. Chizhevsky (the effect of solar activity on the human organism; the fundamentals of space biology and space physiology), L. M. Sabsovich and N. L. Meshcheryakov (town planning), and others.

p The first Soviet collective work on social forecasting, The Life and Technology of the Future appeared in 1928.

p One need only compare this work with similar works of the same period in the West, which were discussed in the previous section, to see how favourably it differs from most of them in many respects. The first All-Union Scientific Planning Conference attended by A. F. loffe, A. N. Frumkin, S. I. Vavilov and a number of other eminent Soviet scientists/washeld in 1930. This conference also demonstrated the high scientific level of Soviet forecasting.

p In 1935, under G. M. Krzhizhanovsky the first research on the problem of “Electric Power Development in the USSR" was carried out at the Electric Power Institute. This work provided the basis for a number of important 314 technico-economic and socio-economic forecasts. At the end of that year Maxim Gorky proposed a multi-volume publication devoted to the results of the first two five-year plans. One of its volumes entitled A Glimpse Into the Future was to contain a detailed technological and socio-economic forecast of the country’s development for the next twenty or thirty years. Soviet specialists in science, literature and the arts, including Academician A. N. Bakh, the writer Leonid Leonov and the film director Alexander Dovzhenko, took part in preparing this volume.

p In the last few years research in the sphere of social forecasting has become particularly extensive, concurrently and in close connection with the scientific and technological revolution which provides scientists with the essential material and methods for efficient forecasting. Things that were inconceivable fifty or twenty-five years ago (for example, detailed research on prospects for developing the world’s energy and raw material base, industry, agriculture, transport, communications, demographic processes, town planning, labour and living conditions) are now becoming possible for large research units equipped with the latest advances in science and computer technology and a carefully worked out methodology.

p There is a large number of articles by many Soviet scientists on problems of forecasting. Special works on this subject have been written by A. I. Berg, V. M. Glushkov, M. V. Keldysh, B. M. Kedrov, V. A. Kirillin, B. G. Kuznetsov, M. D. Millionshchikov, A. N. Nesmeyanov, A. M. Bumyantsev, N. N. Semyonov, V. I. Siforov, S. G. Strumilin, V. A. Trapeznikov, E. K. Fyodorov, P. N. Fedoseyev, T. S. Khachaturov, I. S. Shklovsky, D. I. Shcherbakov and many other Soviet specialists.  [314•1 

p There are still many unsolved problems and insufficiently studied questions in social forecasting. Consequently, it is only natural that among Soviet scientists views occasionally differ on a number of problems, that mistaken or debatable hypotheses are criticised.

p Soviet social forecasting, however, is fundamentally different from Western forecasting, because, firstly, it is based on the theory of scientific communism, developing its theses in various concrete aspects and, thus, standing in antithesis to the diverse and contradictory bourgeois theories of the future as an integrated logically complete system of views. Secondly, Marxist-Leninist theory makes it possible to link organically the socio-economic and technological aspects of forecasting, avoiding the contradictions between the two frequently found in the West. Thirdly, because of the nature of socialist economy the forecasts of Soviet scientists are closely connected with state long-term planning of the national economy and culture.

Let us now examine a number of important problems of scientific and technological forecasting in the USSR.