“Scientific Crude” for Currency: Prospecting for Specimens in Stalin’s Siberia

Responding to the Soviet state’s call to expand export for currency during the First Five-Year Plan (1928–32), Siberian scientific personnel—pointing to Siberia’s importance in the history of global science and exploration—created and promoted a new category of commodity, calling it “scientific” or “museum crude.” These uniform sets of objects of the natural and human sciences of Siberia represented a departure from existing international specimen trade in that the expeditions to extract scientific/museum crude relied on institutions and techniques of state socialism. In this vision, scientific goods became a nationalized resource subject to state planning and capitalization. However, once collected, these commodities came up against characteristically Soviet/Stalinist barriers: after being trumpeted as a contribution to Soviet trade, most of these collections were stopped at the border because of a shift in Soviet political culture. Instead of contributing profits to Soviet international trade, therefore, scientific crude’s accumulation in Moscow and Leningrad functioned as a way of requisitioning value from the periphery to the center, not unlike state treatment of other resources. Suggesting that scientific/museum crude represents the ultimate logic of capitalism as applied to the scientific spheres, this essay argues that state socialism itself created the institutional spaces that fostered and then shut down this extreme iteration of capitalism-science entanglement.