An assessment of the development of science in the Soviet Union, written by the President of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1948. "Heir to everything worthwhile left us by pre-revolutionary Russia in the field of culture, Soviet science has grown up together with the country. It has come through the early Soviet years, the period of intervention and civil war; it has come through the stern school of the Stalin five-year plans, and been tempered by the heroic days of the Great Patriotic War."