by Simon Ings
Vernadsky’s bolt-hole during his time in hiding was the biological research station at Staroselsky where he had previously witnessed ‘the flowering of the waters’. Each week Theodosius Dobzhansky, Vernadsky’s research assistant, set out on a seventeen-kilometre trek from Kiev, bringing his boss a knapsack full of mail and groceries. (A professor at a rabfak – a workers’ university – Dobzhansky had papers that could get him past the Bolshevik checkpoints.) Vernadsky used his time in hiding well, studying and tabulating the chemical composition of different animals. By 1922 he had established that, of the ninety-two elements then known, over fifty were bound up in the history of living organisms. These elements comprised 99.6 per cent by weight of the whole earth’s crust, leading Vernadsky to conclude that living organisms could reshape planets as surely as any purely physical force. It was the first step on an intellectual journey that would culminate in Vernadsky’s concept of the ‘nöosphere’ – the idea that intelligence itself was yet another planet-changing component of earth’s geological system, wreaking changes even greater and more significant than those achieved by life itself.
At the end of April 1919, Vernadsky, fearing for his Ukrainian Academy, travelled south to meet with the generals in charge of the region. Stricken with typhus, and caught between battle lines, he got stuck in the Crimea. At the same moment Mikhail Frunze, a professional revolutionary with no military training whatsoever, launched a devastating attack that routed White forces out of the south. The sheer scale of Russia’s enormous interior did the rest. The Whites, exhausted and under-supplied, withdrew. The Reds recaptured Ukraine’s major cities in late December and, in late March 1920, the remaining White forces were pushed into the Black Sea at Novorossiisk, leaving only the Crimean Peninsula as the Whites’ final refuge.
Nursed back to health, Vernadsky found himself surrounded by old friends. They were teaching at the new Taurida University in Simferopol – according to Vernadsky ‘one of the strongest academic schools in the country’ – and virtually all of them were looking to emigrate. So too were his son George and his wife Nina. They left with the British as the Red Army closed in, and Vladimir, too, sought British help in emigrating.
In the end, though, Vernadsky’s sense of duty, and his extraordinary work ethic, kept him in place. As the Red Army overwhelmed the Crimea Vernadsky, who was already working at Taurida University, found a fiendishly simple way to protect his White friends: he issued them with student cards. The Bolsheviks caught on and questioned him, but in the nick of time the message came through that Nikolai Alexandrovich Semashko, the health commissar, had organised a hospital train to bring Vernadsky and his family, along with the wife and daughter of Academician Sergei Oldenburg, back to Moscow. Semashko was proud to count himself one of Vernadsky’s students. (Vernadsky did not remember Semashko, but kept that to himself.) Between them, Oldenburg and Semashko saved Vernadsky’s life.
The train arrived in Moscow in March 1921. The police did not altogether let go – Vernadsky found himself briefly under arrest yet again – but Oldenburg extricated him and took him to Petrograd, where they found grass growing on Nevsky Prospect. Vernadsky, happy nevertheless to find that ‘thought is still alive’ in the city, visited his old lab and met one of his students, Evgeny Flint, deep in an experiment – or so he thought.
It turned out that Flint was making moonshine to exchange on the black market for food.
*
In early November 1920 the Red Army smashed through the narrow land bridge that connected the Crimea to the mainland, and eliminated all remaining resistance in hardly more than a week.
The last major White army was gone, but the damage was done: peasants driven to violence by the theft of food and forced conscriptions began an insurgency to end the Red Army’s policy of requisitioning grain, even when the peasants needed all of it to feed themselves. The Bolsheviks crushed this insurgency mercilessly. Responding to a massive rebellion in the Tambov region, they even used poison gas against peasants hiding out in the forests.
In the cities the food shortage was driving the urban population to its own acts of insurrection. The Kronstadt revolt erupted while the Tenth Party Congress was in session in nearby Petrograd. Kronstadt was an island fortress and naval base in the Gulf of Finland, about thirty kilometres west of the capital. After workers’ strikes and scattered disturbances in factories and garrisons in other parts of the country, in March 1921 the sailors of the fortress rose up against the regime with the slogan ‘Soviets Without Communists’. The rebels’ newspaper declared:
The power of the police and the gendarme monarchy passed into the hands of the Communist usurpers, who, instead of giving the people freedom, instilled in them the instant fear of falling into the torture chambers of the Cheka, which in their horrors far exceed the gendarme administration of the tsarist regime.25
On 16 March the merciless Mikhail Tukhachevsky led about 50,000 Red Army troops across open ice, taking the fortress and filling the jails of Petrograd with prisoners. ‘Months later,’ a contemporary wrote, ‘they were still being shot in small batches, a senseless and criminal agony.’
It was a pyrrhic victory, and the Bolsheviks knew it: they were now at loggerheads with the very class in whose name they had fought. Lenin’s ‘New Economic Policy’ (NEP) was being discussed by the Tenth Congress even as the drama of Kronstadt was unfolding, and the policy was adopted less than a week after the fortress fell. ‘War Communism’ – the wholesale state takeover of industry and commerce – ended forthwith, and private individuals were permitted to own small businesses. Felix Dzerzhinsky’s ‘Red Terror’ was brought to an effective end, too, replaced by a much more targeted persecution of opposition groups. Dzerzhinsky had realised that keeping tabs on those ‘who might take part in active struggle against us’ was much more effective than direct repression, and in September 1922 the state began compiling dossiers on the country’s entire intelligentsia.26
*
On 14 July 1921 Vladimir Vernadsky was arrested. Telegrams to Lenin, health commissar Nikolai Semashko and education commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky from Alexander Karpinsky, president of the Academy of Sciences, almost certainly saved his life. After a two-hour interrogation, he was released. The next day, sickened and afraid, he left with his daughter Nina for the Kola peninsula and in May 1922 got passports to travel – via Prague, where his son George had settled as an emigrant – to Paris. They arrived on 8 July 1922.
Vernadsky had received an invitation to teach geochemistry at the Sorbonne. Marie Curie and her institute were also ready to fund him. Indeed, everything had been arranged for the family’s permanent resettlement. Between August 1922 and September 1924 the Vernadskys lived in two small rooms on the rue Toullier, bang in the centre of the Latin Quarter, and for a while it seemed as though Vernadsky might be tempted to emigrate. He even searched for funds in the United States to establish a biogeochemical laboratory there. He wrote to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, the US National Research Council and the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC – all without success. Frank Golder, an old friend who had worked with the American Relief Administration, passed his proposal to Stanford University; again, he was turned down. In 1924 he tried to remain permanently in France, creating his new lab as part of the Natural History Museum in Paris – but sufficient funds could not be found.
And anyway, Vernadsky’s closest comrades in the new Soviet Union were not inclined to let him go. With no carrots to offer, they applied the stick: Oldenburg and Fersman refused to renew the authorisation for his trip to Paris beyond the first year, and cut off his salary when he overran, so that the family had to move out to the suburbs, to Bourg la Reine.
Vernadsky’s Paris acquaintances lobbied hard for him to remain in Paris. But Vernadsky turned sixty in 1923, and began to realise that the upheaval of emigration would be too much for him. ‘If I were much younger,’ he wrote to an old friend, living in exile in Prague, ‘I would emigrate. My universal
feelings are much stronger than my nationalist feelings. But now it is difficult and impossible, as one always needs to lose several years on securing a position.’27
By 1925, Oldenburg and the Academy were at last in a position to offer Vernadsky some positive reasons to return. A promise of freedom, and funding to pursue his own lines of research, combined with the introduction of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, suggested that Bolshevism was a spent force.
So Vernadsky returned to the USSR – or tried to. He had extraordinary problems getting a visa and making his way back home. Still lacking his Academy salary, he worked his way across Europe, taking whatever speaking engagements he could find. Friends and colleagues lent him money for warm clothes for the journey. In the spring of 1926 Vernadsky arrived back in Leningrad.
The state of the city astounded and appalled him. For one thing, many of his acquaintances were dead.
Notes
1. Johansson & Gastev, Aleksej Gastev, p. 65–6.
2. In Opticks (1704), his famous work on the colours that make white light, Isaac Newton categorically states that his mechanics will completely and conspicuously fail to describe the colours his prism has thrown upon his wall; all his ‘mechanics’ can do is measure the width of the rainbow.
3. Marx was not alone. Across the globe, the First World War inspired ideas of ‘rational government’. Governments in war had taken control of their economies – why not in peace? In the USA, Thorstein Veblen wrote The Engineers and the Price System (1921), which called for committees (called soviets) to run a ‘rational’ economy.
4. Quoted in David Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science 1917–1932, pp. 3–4.
5. Georgii D. Gloveli, ‘“Socialism of Science” versus “Socialism of Feelings”: Bogdanov and Lunacharsky’, Studies in Soviet Thought, 42, no. 1 (1 July 1991), p. 44.
6. Anthony Mansueto, ‘From Dialectic to Organization: Bogdanov’s Contribution to Social Theory’, Studies in East European Thought, 48 (1996), pp. 37–61; and George E. Gorelik, ‘Bogdanov’s Tektology: Its Nature, Development and Influence’, Studies in Soviet Thought, 26 (1983), pp. 39–57.
7. For more than this swift caricature, see Arran Gare, ‘Aleksandr Bogdanov’s History, Sociology and Philosophy of Science’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 31 (2000), pp. 231–48.
8. ‘Lenin’ was a Party alias, acquired around 1900.
9. Robert C. Williams, ‘Collective Immortality: The Syndicalist Origins of Proletarian Culture, 1905–1910’, Slavic Review 39, no. 3 (1980), p. 391.
10. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography, p. 347.
11. The Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Ivan Pavlov and his colleagues had a terrible time getting consistent results from their salivating dogs. One young assistant felt he had to resign because the very sight of him caused the dogs to salivate copiously whether they were hungry or not. He went off to Switzerland and became a psychiatrist.
12. Katherine Arens, ‘Mach’s “Psychology of Investigation”’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 21 (1985), pp. 151–68. Mach’s main biographer is John T. Blackmore: see his Ernst Mach; His Work, Life, and Influence.
13. V. I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism: Critical Comments on a Reactionary Philosophy, chapter 5, part 2.
14. Maxim W. Gorky, ‘V. I. Lenin’, trans. David Walters.
15. Ibid.
16. The physicist Yakov Frenkel (1894–1952) said that it ‘amounts to little more than the assertion of elementary truths that it’s not worth breaking a lance over’ and subsequent commentators have been no more kind. Writing in 1991, the historian Paul Josephson delivers a suitable capstone: ‘Materialism and Empiriocriticism is characterised by vulgar materialist generalisations, lengthy diatribes, and excessively long quotations of opponents followed by brief, haughty ridicule. Had the Bolsheviks not succeeded in 1917, it is doubtful that Lenin’s book would be read today.’ See Paul R. Josephson, Physics and Politics in Revolutionary Russia, p. 250.
17. Quoted in Diane Koenker, William Rosenberg and Ronald Suny, Party, State and Society in the Russian Civil War: Explorations in Social History, p. 286.
18. Quotation adapted from Bailes, Science and Russian Culture, p. 186.
19. Quoted in Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, p. 55.
20. Ibid., p. 56.
21. Bailes, Science and Russian Culture, p. 151.
22. Matthew Rendle, ‘Revolutionary Tribunals and the Origins of Terror in Early Soviet Russia’, Historical Research, 84, no. 226 (1 November 2011), pp. 693–721.
23. Haynes & Husan, A Century of State Murder?, p. 53.
24. Solomon Volkov, St Petersburg: A Cultural History, p. 211.
25. Lennard D. Gerson, The Secret Police in Lenin’s Russia, p. 183.
26. Douglas R. Weiner, more usually an environmental historian, neatly captures Dzerzhinsky’s almost-moral transformation in ‘Dzherzhinskii and the Gerd Case: The Politics of Intercession and the Evolution of “Iron Felix” in NEP Russia’, Kritika, 7, no. 4 (22 September 2006), p. 759.
27. Vaclav Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change, p. 5.
3: Entrepreneurs
Paul Dirac (left) and guests of the Sixth National Congress of the Russian Association of Physicists sail down the Volga – a grandiose gesture, never repeated.
Communism cannot be built without a fund of knowledge, technology, culture, but they are in the possession of bourgeois specialists. Among them the majority do not approve of the Soviet regime, but without them we cannot build communism.1
Vladimir Lenin to Anatoly Lunacharsky
The famine of 1921–2 began with the dry winter of 1920–1. The 1921 spring sowing was a predictable failure, and the autumn harvest not much better.
[By 1922] there were abandoned homes in the communes by the score, the roofs and wooden parts taken off for fuel, and the walls of mud and straw falling into decay. Everywhere we found emaciated starving children, with stomachs distended from eating melon rinds, cabbage leaves and anything that could be found, things which filled the stomach but did not nourish …2
Aid came from private organisations like the Quakers and the Save the Children Fund, and indirectly from the US government through the American Relief Administration under Herbert Hoover. The Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen won a Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in helping famine victims. Despite all this, around 5 million people died.
It was an era of heroic achievements, of groundbreaking novels by Babel, Bely and Bulgakov, Platonov and Zamyatin, iconoclastic music by Prokofiev and Shostakovich, paintings by Malevich, poetry by Blok and Mayakovsky, films by Vertov and Eisenstein. In theatres, Meyerhold and Stanislavsky held sway. But life was cheap. The novelist Maxim Gorky recalled a peasant confessing to a city gent that he had killed a native Bashkir and stolen his cow: ‘Will he be prosecuted for the cow?’ Frank Golder, an observer for the American Relief Administration, recalled how one professor called on a Crimean government representative. He informed her that professors in the Crimea were dying of hunger. ‘What of it?’ she replied. ‘Let them die!’
They did: in Petrograd, seven of the Academy of Sciences’ forty-four members died of starvation. From his spacious quarters at the Academy’s residence on Vasilevsky Island, the physiologist Ivan Pavlov, then Russia’s only living Nobel laureate, witnessed the catastrophe for himself. Two academicians living in his building died of cold and hunger; others stood by helplessly as the authorities billetted complete strangers in their apartments. Pavlov’s Nobel Prize money was confiscated. So were the gold medals awarded to him by St Petersburg University and the Academy of Sciences. He scavenged for firewood and fed his family from a garden he tended himself at the Institute of Experimental Medicine.
By 1918 Pavlov’s groundbreaking research work was grinding to a halt for lack of assistants, experimental dogs and the food to feed them. He couldn’t even get decent lecture demonstrations out
of his lab results, let alone publishable work. As winter approached he had ‘no candles, no kerosene, and electricity is provided for only a limited number of hours. Bad, very bad. When will there be a turn for the better?’3
Arriving in Petrograd in the spring of 1922, Frank Golder visited the permanent secretary of Russia’s Academy of Sciences, Sergei Oldenburg. ‘It is so pitiful and so heart breaking that it completely upsets me,’ Golder wrote to his friend Ephraim Adams. Oldenburg, now in his late fifties, was bedridden. He was barely able to reach the scraps of toast on his table, let alone chew them. He had spent the past four years trying to support his own family, the orphan children of his brother, his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren. The children had bread every day: for the rest of the family it was a weekly treat.
In Moscow, too, conditions were desperate, and ingenuity was essential if any of that city’s scientific life was to survive. The Moscow Practical Institute, a former trade school, announced the opening of three departments, in biology, agriculture and economics, to harness the fast-developing biological sciences to serve the needs of the people. All that large building lacked was equipment – so they stole it. One of the teachers, Nikolai Vladimirovich Timofeev-Ressovsky, used to dress up in his military uniform, get into a two-horse buggy, and ride off to whatever establishment had what they needed. People handed over to this curt ‘Red Cross official’ quite extraordinary treasures: new microscopes, binocular loupes, microtomes,4 thermostats, crates stuffed with chemical glassware. By 1923 the Practical Institute was better equipped than the biological laboratories of the university.
Most intellectuals had welcomed the revolutions of 1917. Some enthusiastically embraced Lenin’s October coup. Others endured. The physics community paid hardly any mind to the revolution until winter brought their work near to ruin. (Meeting after dark proved so dangerous, the discipline’s various committees and boards only ever gathered on Sundays or other holidays.) In February 1919 the education commissariat provided emergency funding so that over 100 physicists could meet to celebrate Russia’s most famous scientific son, Dmitry Mendeleev, and his periodic table of elements. They met in a ‘melancholy Petrograd of iced-over buildings without food or heat or the promise of reimbursement of expenses’. The Third Petrograd Pedagogical Institute offered accommodation in its dormitories and meals in its dining hall, but ‘it is necessary to bring with you some foodstuffs, e.g., sweet crusts, sugar, tea, jam, sausage, meat, and so on’.5