Ekaterina A. Averianova
The study analyzes the history of the optical industry in the USSR. The main plots of the history of the State Optical Institute (GOI) in the period from 1918 to 1925, when the foundation for future success was being laid, are considered. All the achievements of the 1930s, from the creation of the first Soviet cameras to equipping the Red Army with advanced optics, were laid in those years. This period. It allows us to understand the role of science in ensuring Soviet industrialization. The period under study serves as an intellectual and organizational prologue to the subsequent grandiose reconstruction of industry. It was then that a strategy was formulated that made it possible to further transform the institute into the "head center" of the optical and mechanical industry of the USSR, a unique structure combining theoretical research with the interests of defense and the national economy. Rozhdestvensky's idea of a synthesis of science and technology ceased to be a personal project of a group of scientists, it became the foundation of the industrial power of the state, providing the institute with the role of a permanent leader and the main scientific and technical center of the optical and mechanical industry for decades to come. The foundation laid by the Institute in 1918–1925 ensured the continuity of the scientific school and created the intellectual and industrial base on which all modern Russian optics was built in the following decades. By the time the Fourteenth Congress of the CPSU(b) was held in December 1925, which proclaimed a course towards socialist industrialization, D. S. Rozhdestvensky's "idea" of a synthesis of science and technology had acquired a complete form and had become an effective tool for organizing production. Implementing this principle, the Institute turned into a powerful research and production center, becoming the foundation of the entire Soviet instrument engineering system.