An epic story of courage, genius and terrible folly, this is the first history of how the Soviet Union´s scientists became both the glory and the laughing stock of the intellectual world.
Simon Ings weaves together what happened when a handful of impoverished and underemployed graduates, professors and entrepreneurs, collectors and charlatans, bound themselves to a failing government to create a world superpower. And he shows how Stalin´s obsessions derailed a great experiment in ´rational government´.