Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  11. Ivan P. Pavlov, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenni [Complete Works], vol. 3, part 1, p. 23.

  12. B. F. Lomov, V. A. Koltsova and E. I. Stepanova, ‘Ocherk Zhizni i nauchnoi deyatelnosti Vladimira Mikhailovicha Bekhtereva’ [‘Essay of Life and Works of V. M. Bekhterev’], Ob’ektivnaya Psykhologia [Objective Psychology], ed. V. A. Koltsova (Nauka, 1991), pp. 424–44. For more about the men’s rivalry, see Robert Boakes, From Darwin to Behaviourism: Psychology and the Minds of Animals; and Slava Gerovitch, ‘Love–Hate for Man–Machine Metaphors in Soviet Physiology: From Pavlov to “Physiological Cybernetics”’, Science in Context, 15 (2002), pp. 339–74.

  13. Todes, ‘Pavlov and the Bolsheviks’, pp. 386–7.

  14. I have slightly adapted this quotation from Abbott Gleason and Richard Stites, Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution, p. 102.

  15. Todes, ‘Pavlov and the Bolsheviks’, p. 392.

  16. After his dismissal, Chelpanov found work at the State Academy of Aesthetic Sciences, lecturing and publishing on aesthetic perception, ‘primitive’ creativity, children’s drawings and related themes. The academy was closed in 1930, leaving him out of a job once again. The misfortunes of his last years left Chelpanov embittered. One of his daughters died, another emigrated, and his son was arrested and shot in the Great Purge. Chelpanov died in poverty in 1936.

  17. Irina Sirotkina, ‘When Did “Scientific Psychology” Begin in Russia?’, Physis; Rivista Internazionale Di Storia Della Scienza (2006), 43, pp. 1–2.

  18. The Bolsheviks’ increasingly fraught relationship with psychoanalysis is the subject of Alexander M. Etkind’s Eros of the Impossible: The History of Psychoanalysis in Russia. See also Martin A. Miller, ‘Freudian Theory under Bolshevik Rule: The Theoretical Controversy during the 1920s’, Slavic Review, 44 (1985), pp. 625–46; and Alberto Angelini, ‘History of the Unconscious in Soviet Russia: From Its Origins to the Fall of the Soviet Union’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 89 (2008), pp. 369–88.

  19. A. R. Luria, The Autobiography of Alexander Luria: A Dialogue with The Making of Mind, p. 22.

  20. Ibid., p. 5.

  21. Ibid., pp. 38–9.

  22. Early collaborations between Lev Vygotsky and Alexander Luria are explored in T. V. Akhutina, ‘L. S. Vygotsky and A. R. Luria: Foundations of Neuropsychology’, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, 41 (2010), pp. 159–90.

  23. Vygotsky’s student thesis formed the basis of one of his better-known books, The Psychology of Art (1925). Published in English translation by MIT Press in 1971, it is available online from Marxists Internet Archive at http://bit.ly/1QzCg1f.

  24. Kozulin, Psychology in Utopia, p. 82.

  25. Ibid., p. 108

  26. Gita L. Vygodskaya, ‘[Lev Vygotsky] His Life’, School Psychology International, vol 16, no. 2 (1 May 1995), pp. 105–16.

  27. There has been a lot of recent work published about Sabina Spielrein, and even a movie, A Dangerous Method, directed by David Cronenberg. Few champions are as spirited as Jerry Aldridge: see ‘Another Woman Gets Robbed? What Jung, Freud, Piaget, and Vygotsky Took from Sabina Spielrein’, Childhood Education, 85 (2009), p. 318.

  28. Frank Brenner, ‘Intrepid Thought: Psychoanalysis in the Soviet Union’; available at http://bit.ly/20qQK6i.

  29. Vygotsky to Lev Sakharov, 15 February 1926, in L. S. Vygotsky, The Vygotsky Reader.

  30. Quoted in Joravsky, Russian Psychology, p. 229.

  31. Miller, ‘Freudian Theory under Bolshevik Rule: The Theoretical Controversy during the 1920s’, p. 644

  32. Quoted in Akhutina, ‘L. S. Vygotsky and A. R. Luria’, p. 169.

  33. A. R. Luria and L. S. Vygotsky, Ape, Primitive Man, and Child: Essays in the History of Behavior, p. 15.

  34. Ibid. pp. 77–8.

  35. Luria’s best account of his Uzbek expedition is in Cognitive Development, based on the Russian version published in 1974.

  36. V. Nell, ‘Luria in Uzbekistan: The Vicissitudes of Cross-Cultural Neuropsychology’, Neuropsychology Review 9, no. 1 (1999), p. 51.

  37. L. S. Vygotsky, ‘Letters to Students and Colleagues’, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 45, no. 2 (2007), pp. 11–60; quoted in Jennifer Fraser and Anton Yasnitsky, ‘Deconstructing Vygotsky’s Victimization Narrative: A Re-Examination of the “Stalinist Suppression” of Vygotskian Theory’, n. 43.

  6: Understanding evolution

  Professor Zange (Bernhard Goetzke) hugs his only friend in Salamandra (1928), a film based on the life and work of Austrian Lamarckist biologist Paul Kammerer.

  Whereas Westerners were inclined to go in through the traditional front door, our Soviet colleagues seemed at times to break in through the back door or even to come up through the floor.1

  Leslie Dunn

  The Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel was no stranger to big questions. In his scientific writings – and in particular in the introduction to Experiments on Plant Hybridisation (1865) – he asks how species manage to evolve into new forms, when their young look so much like their parents. Equally puzzling to him was the business of intraspecies variation. How can a black chicken give birth to a white chicken, which then gives birth to a black chicken (and where are all the grey chickens)?

  Mendel asked good questions. More impressive, from a professional standpoint, was his willingness to narrow his field of enquiry, to accept with good grace that some of his questions were beyond his ability to unpick.

  Rather than give in to handwaving, Mendel contrived some deceptively simple experiments in plant hybridisation – the crossing of related but distinct varieties of the same species – and through them attempted to reveal the smallest, simplest unit of heredity that could be passed from one generation to the next.

  Crossing green peas with yellow peas over several generations, Mendel discovered that particles of heredity combined and recombined in statistically coherent ways. You could see the mathematics playing itself out in the colour of peas of each successive generation: yellow peas were produced three times more often than green peas.

  Mendel’s explanation for this three-to-one ratio is simple and ingenious. Hereditary particles must come in two forms: dominant and recessive. During fertilisation, particles from each parent combine. If two dominants combine, the child will express a dominant characteristic (yellowness, in the case of Mendel’s peas). If a dominant and a recessive combine, once again the dominant trait will be expressed. A recessive trait only gets expressed if two recessive particles combine. This means that dominant characteristics will be expressed three times as often as recessive ones.

  dominant + dominant = dominant

  dominant + recessive = dominant

  recessive + dominant = dominant

  recessive + recessive = recessive

  Mendel’s findings brilliantly fulfilled his ambitions. Mendel had proved the existence of units of heredity. We call them ‘genes’.

  What Mendel had not done, of course, was reveal any link between heritability and evolution.

  Living things in the real world almost never behave like the peas in Mendel’s experiment. (Even Mendel’s peas didn’t behave that simply: the good friar wasn’t above massaging his statistics.) Most important characteristics aren’t like light switches: they don’t simply appear and disappear. They blend, from generation to generation. In fact, heredity is almost always a matter of blending, of slow and subtle change. We see it in the mirror, in the way we combine the qualities of our parents; and we see it in our children, and how they embody elements of ourselves and our mates in uncertain and unpredictable ways.

  Mendel had his enthusiasts – men who believed he had unlocked the secrets of evolution with one seed packet. But sceptics like Ernst Haeckel in Germany and Kliment Timiryazev in Russia were more reasonable, arguing that one random variation couldn’t possibly spread through a whole population in any simple way. That would be like squirting a drop of paint into the waves and expecting the whole ocean to chang
e colour. One variation, however advantageous, is going to get diluted, generation by generation, until it vanishes entirely. The mathematics of the day supported these criticisms. Developing new techniques in statistics to prove his point, Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s first cousin, calculated that successive generations descended from even the most gifted individual will naturally regress to the species’ norm.2

  This left genetics out on an intellectual limb for years. Theodosius Dobzhansky, Vernadsky’s young assistant, who would go on to be one of the most celebrated geneticists in the United States, was once told by one of his professors that genetics was a ‘passing fad’; why was he wasting his time on something so ‘intellectually perverse’?

  What alternative model was there for evolution? Haeckel and Timiryazev hypothesised that changes in species were driven by changes in the environment. Whole populations, being exposed to these changes, would adapt to them as a group. This seemed much more likely than to imagine that one lucky sport of nature spread its inheritance through an entire population. This theory is called Lamarckism, after the extremely talented Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), the man who coined the very word ‘biology’.

  Lamarck’s argument, first made in 1809, is compelling. Imagine an animal that relies on speed. The faster it is in pursuing its prey, the more it gets to eat. The more it eats, the healthier it is, and the more offspring it will have. The need for speed in capturing prey won’t just apply to one individual. It will apply to all its fellows, too. An entire generation, forced to scamper about for a living, will all acquire a honed physique. According to Lamarck, this athletic generation will then pass their muscular strength to their children. What they worked for, their children are born with. It is a hard-hearted biologist who denies the elegance of Lamarck’s idea about the heritability of acquired characteristics. Charles Darwin himself thought there was something to it.

  *

  The Bolshevik state invested a great deal of time and money in making science a subject of popular interest. Their effort was sincere: they truly meant the Soviet Union to be the world’s first scientifically run state, so public education about science was essential. And in weaning the populace off the old gods of the Orthodox religion, monarchy and property, they had quickly found that popular education, in the form of lectures, magazine articles and books, was much more effective than any number of antireligious festivals. (Indeed, those godless carnivals, timed to coincide with major church festivals, had frightened and angered many working people.)

  The cult of science lay at the foundation of Soviet rule, and Soviet rulers considered it their duty to keep science constantly before the people.3 The irony – that ‘Soviet Rule has bestowed on science all the authority of which it deprived religion’4 – was not lost on Western commentators.

  Soviet institutions devoted to science – and over a hundred ‘people’s universities’ were already operating by 1919! – took their public duties seriously. Moscow’s Timiryazev Biological Institute, founded and led by the biologist Boris Mikhailovich Zavadovsky, churned out impressive quantities of Marxist popular science. Zavadovsky, a key propagandist in the Militant League of the Godless, was particularly keen to spread evolutionary theory and other Darwinian ideas, and – this is significant – he and almost all his peers adhered to Lamarck’s theories.

  They cleaved to the idea that acquired characteristics could be inherited and did so, for the most part, out of ordinary scientific conservatism. They had grown up with Lamarck; his ideas seemed to fit the facts, and they saw no pressing reason to rethink them. New experimental data appeared constantly, but they never indicated a clear defeat of Lamarck. Set against it, meanwhile, were all those experiments that seemed to substantiate Lamarck’s views on heredity. You can darken the wings of moths by feeding them metallic salts characteristic of smoke deposits in industrial areas. You can alter the breeding frequency of silkworms by changing the temperature of their surroundings and by transplanting ovaries. You can induce mutations in Drosophila by turning up the heat. (Naturally, Lamarck’s opponents claimed these experiments for themselves and gave their results quite different interpretations.)

  Sincere as it was, though, the commitment of Marxist scientists to Lamarck also had a political component. Marx had claimed that socialism could reform and improve people’s physical and mental well-being within a single generation (at least, that was how Lenin and Bogdanov had read him), and the inheritance of acquired characteristics seemed the only possible mechanism by which this miracle might be achieved. How else – except by improving social conditions and hoping for the best – could doctors ever hope to treat and cure humanity’s numerous systemic and inherited illnesses: their cancers and weak hearts, their diabetes and arthritis? S. P. Fyodorov’s brochure Surgery at the Crossroads neatly encapsulates the problem faced by physicians at this time:

  We can best treat diseases whose causes we understand. These, however, are diseases that are triggered by infections, parasites, traumas, and relatively crude pathological changes. Our constitutional and functional diseases are the burden of modern surgery. Their challenge is far more difficult than anything we have faced before, because not only are their causes unknown; their basic natures and processes are equally mysterious.5

  Being impatient, Bolshevik physicians in particular looked to Lamarck’s inheritance of acquired characteristics to cure these diseases in a single generation.

  In 1926, a Society of Materialist Biologists was formed within the Communist Academy, a Marxist research institute created in 1918 with the idea that it would ultimately surpass and replace the Academy of Sciences. Later events would set the society’s president – the doctrinaire Marxist philosopher Isaak Izrailevich Prezent – and its most active members – Izrail Agol and Solomon Levit – at each other’s throats. To begin with, though, these men imagined themselves allies, pursuing the inheritance of acquired characteristics through experimental studies.

  Agol and Levit were of that younger generation of Soviet scientists who desperately needed the support of Bolshevik institutions, since all the important posts within the academic science system were already filled by older colleagues. Solomon Grigorievich Levit in particular owed everything he had to the revolution. He was born in 1894 to the poorest family in the small town of Vilkomir, in what is now Lithuania. His grandmother went out of the way to buy stale bread so they would eat less. His invalid father worked as a night watchman. The only member of his family to receive an education, Levit worked his way through public school and high school by coaching and tutoring. As a teenager, he had joined the Bund, the most left-leaning of the Jewish parties in the Jewish Pale, and later he joined the Bolsheviks.

  Levit was his generation’s most articulate defender of Lamarck’s theories, and he had a frank dread of what it might mean for medicine if genes turned out to be real, physical structures.

  ‘Chromosomal’ genetics depressed and worried him. The term had come into use in 1902 when a German, Theodore Boveri, and an American, Walter Sutton, had suggested that Mendel’s ‘factors of inheritance’ (what we would call genes) were located in large thread-like protein structures in the cell, called ‘chromosomes’ because they absorbed dyes so easily. This meant that specific stretches of the chromosome could be identified visually and tracked across generations.

  The trouble with imagining genes as solid, physical entities, strung along a protein thread, is that there can only be so many of them. It follows that the number of variations they generate must, in turn, be finite. Levit feared that if chromosomal genetics was real, then all evolution could ever do was shuffle an ageless, pre-existing deck of genetic cards.

  Levit objected to this idea. As a Marxist, and therefore an atheist, he wanted an explanation of where these supposedly ageless and changeless genes came from. Since 1925, when the Scopes Monkey Trial had made an international laughing stock of the state of Tennessee,6 Christian fundamentalists had been hitting the headlines, and it was not hard to im
agine them claiming these timeless and adamantine particles as God’s handiwork.

  Besides, the idea – that genes were a finite set of cards, shuffled endlessly – was simply not borne out by the facts. The fossil record hardly suggested that Nature had run out of ideas. Quite the contrary, in fact.

  For Levit, a sincere Bolshevik and therefore a man focused on brass tacks, on work and the welfare of the people, his severest objection was practical. The idea that an unborn child had a fixed genetic endowment, which nothing could alter, suggested a mechanistic sort of predestination – a sort of scientific Calvinism.7 It would render many new and exciting medical ideas completely useless. If people’s genes were fixed, then heritable diseases and weaknesses were locked in, and nothing doctors or hygienists or other health workers might do would be of any benefit. Genetics, Levit declared, ‘smacks of desperate pessimism and impotence. If, indeed, pathology is determined by one’s genes, and these develop solely under the influence of “internal forces,” independent of the environment, what will become of human efforts to change these pathological forms?’8

  If your family carries the gene for cancer, and nothing in the environment can change what that gene does, what’s the point in looking for a cancer cure?

  Levit refused to give in to such fatalism. Better, surely, to embrace Lamarck.

  At the University of Vienna, meanwhile, Paul Kammerer, a well-established scientist working under Hans Prizbram, head of the city’s Institute for Experimental Biology, was conducting fascinating experiments to demonstrate the inheritance of acquired characteristics in amphibians. In a series of trials stretching back more than a decade, Kammerer had been raising the yellow-spotted newt Salamandra maculosa on differently coloured soils. Newts raised on black soil gradually lost their yellow spots. Those raised on yellow soil gained larger and larger yellow spots. In another experiment, Kammerer experimented with the cave-dwelling newt Proteus anguinus. Proteus is totally blind; its rudimentary eyes are buried deep beneath the skin. Exposing blind newts to ordinary light produced a black pigment over the eye and sight never developed. Raising Proteus under red light, however, produced newts with large, perfectly developed eyes. Experiments like these convinced Kammerer that what parents learned was somehow being passed on to their children.