East-West scientific collaboration face-to-face with dissidence: The logic of the International Committee of Mathematicians in defence of Plyushch and Shikhanovich
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The case of mathematicians Leonid Pliushch and Iurii Shikhanovich, who were arrested in 1972 and locked up in psychiatric hospitals for their “anti-Soviet acts,” pushed the mathematical research community into a long-lasting and public international political debate. This article aims to analyze the beginnings of the protest this generated among Western mathematicians in support of their Soviet colleagues. How did these international mechanisms of politicized mobilization emerge in relation to ongoing claims about the value of open and neutral scientific discussions? Based on new archival research and interviews, the paper explains the context of mathematical international cooperation that emerged after Stalin and the asymmetric organization of the connections between Soviet and Western mathematicians. The author argues that the early 1970s marked a turning point with the degradation of the USSR’s international image tarnished scientific collaboration. The analysis then sheds light on the precise chronology of the international debate and the specificities of the first years of the International Committee of Mathematicians in Defence of Plyushch and Shikhanovich (1972-1974), which questioned the community’s unity and caused politics to erupt into science at the the International Mathematical Union’s (IMU) congress held in Vancouver in August 1974. The Détente international collaboration between Soviet and Western mathematicians and its disillusions created the conditions for a specific transnational mobilization, deeply rooted in a sense of “professional fraternity” and shared values, which did not erase the mathematicians behind the dissidents.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.039 | 0.065 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.014 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".