Then there is ‘class’ science, or the ‘class approach’ to science–the tragic and grotesque inheritance of Lenin. There is no doubt that Lenin was a genius of political organization, of subversion, of manipulation. But perhaps the essential part of his bequest–unwitting, maybe–is the unacknowledged(at times–at other times fully acknowledged) Führerprinzip that permeates the entire structure of the Party and eventually of society. Power in such a structure emanates from the führer, the leader, el lider, duce, chairman, whatever his title may be. It willy-nilly begets lesser führers, not only in the political sphere but in all branches and walks of life. Participating in the power from above, most of them succumb to the illusion that the source of power is also the source of infallible wisdom–scientifically infallible wisdom–and that they participate in this wisdom as well. And so it happens that the führer likes a charlatan dabbler in genetics who dislikes the founder of genetics, ergo the founder could not have been a scientist, ergo the science based on his theories is a nonscience: a bourgeois science. Or the führer is not fond of syncopation, ergo the only good jazz is one without syncopes.

In essence, this is a vulgarized form of the scholastic method of referring to the auctoritates. In the Middle Ages it produced such curious situations as the mandatory belief in the horses’ heart being in its right side, contrary to the evidence of the battlefield, because Aristotle taught so. Its Soviet form, as Starr notes, leads often to devising elaborate arguments intended to prove that the führer’s dislike of an instrument’s timbre is a scientific assessment of that timbre’s decadent nature directly attributable to the disintegration of the outdated bourgeois Weltanschauung. The history of Soviet jazz is, therefore, also the story of incredible, of absurd meanderings of the ideologue’s ‘scientific’ false consciousness.

Josef Škvorecký, “Talkin’ Moscow Blues”, as reprinted in the collection of the same name.

Proof that such “science” occurs, indeed could only occur, in benighted Soviet Republics et al. is left as an exercise to the reader.