Similarly, in many other areas of the Soviet economy, Marxism fostered reluctance to motivate workers with material rewards for success. In the atomic project, however, Stalin dumped Marxist dogma in favor of bourgeois horse sense: Stalin said also that he was anxious to improve the scientists’ living conditions, and to provide prizes for major achievements—“for example, for the solution of our problem,” Kurchatov wrote. Stalin “said that our scientists were very modest and they sometimes did not notice that they live poorly . . . our state has suffered very much, yet it is surely possible to
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