Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  Civilisation, he argued, was vanishingly far from controlling people sufficiently to make practical eugenics possible. ‘To do so we should either be carried by our imagination to long ago to times when mighty lords ruled their subjects as slaves, or unleash our fantasy and imagine for a moment that the idea of the famous British writer H. G. Wells came to pass, and dwellers of the planet Mars, who possess the greatest knowledge and technology, which vastly surpasses ours, landed on Earth …’5

  Koltsov imagined the invasion of a group of super-intelligent Martians who treat us the way we treat our livestock and pets. People would be domesticated, just as dogs have been made from wolves. Rebellious types would be eradicated; docile breeders would give rise to an obedient workforce; those with fine motor control would be bred to create craftsmen, the most beautiful bred for show, and so on.

  ‘In as little time as a century’, he wrote, there would be ‘endless individual races of domesticated people as sharply distinct from one another as a pug or a lapdog is from a Great Dane or St Bernard.’

  At the time of publication, Koltsov’s jeu d’esprit was received in the humorous spirit in which it was intended. But his brand of eugenics was still controversial. Underlying his studies of the bloodlines of remarkable families was an unspoken political assumption, that the most precious element of the population was its intelligentsia. Koltsov’s argument against contraception reflects his view – common at the time but no less offensive to the Bolsheviks – that low-quality genes reside in the lower classes. Koltsov feared that it was the intelligentsia and the aspirational working classes who would respond best to a contraception campaign, while sluggish peasants and workers would carry on over-breeding.

  This undiscussed and unexamined assumption exasperated Boris Zavadovsky, who fulminated against

  the attempts of bourgeois biologists to draw conclusions from the laws of genetics and Mendelism, which are clearly aimed with a sharp point against the power of the proletariat … forcing even Marxist biologists to distance themselves from genetics … what’s good for us is death to a Koltsov.6

  Even setting aside Zavadovsky’s gift for hysterical overstatement, this is rough stuff, but it stemmed less from any domestic argument, so much as from a reading of eugenics in other countries. In the USA and Europe, negative eugenics was gaining ground. Russian scientists had never had any time for this style of thinking, and now it was tainting the entire field.

  The proponents of Soviet eugenics were perfectly aware of their growing image problem. Very early on, the word ‘eugenics’ was either qualified or simply dropped from discussions about human genetic health. In late 1925 Yuri Filipchenko – Koltsov’s opposite number in Leningrad – added the word ‘genetics’ to the name of his Bureau of Eugenics. Three years later he removed the word ‘eugenics’. By then the eminent geneticist’s unease with the whole business had stopped him publishing any work on human heredity, and in May 1929, just a few months after the genetics congress was held in his city, he failed to renew his bureau’s membership of the International Federation of Eugenic Organisations. Only his untimely death from meningitis the following spring prevented him from publicly announcing his decision to resign from the board of Koltsov’s Russian Eugenics Journal.

  Given the Russians’ intellectual hostility to eugenic ideas – indeed, their long-nursed and war-hardened suspicion of any argument that involved checks on population growth – it is possible that Russian eugenics might have bumbled along as a mere footnote to the main work of genetics, or avoided public opprobrium by sheltering beneath some innocuous banner like social hygiene or health education. This is precisely what happened in Britain, another nation made queasy by the eugenic idea.

  What brought eugenics to the forefront of public discussion in Russia, and made discretion impossible, was a discovery made half a world away in Texas, by a committed socialist and eugenicist who already, by his gift of laboratory Drosophila, had proved himself a friend of Soviet science.

  *

  Hermann Joseph Muller was born in 1890 in New York City and grew up in Harlem. At Columbia University he had joined Thomas Hunt Morgan’s fabled ‘fly room’, studying the genetics of Drosophila. Though it made his name, and set him on the road to winning a Nobel Prize in 1946, work in the fly room involved more grind than glamour. The fly room was an actual room, and a modest one at that: just five by seven metres. Calvin Bridges and Alfred Sturtevant were already in there, and Muller was often shunted out for reasons of space. Their boss, Thomas Hunt Morgan, believed in teamwork, but his juniors were less convinced. Muller’s sensitivity over who got to what idea first made the men’s work difficult, and soured their later relations. Muller’s sense that he was the poor cousin of the team was exacerbated by the fact that he was actually poor: while he was studying he had to teach English to immigrants and work as a runner on Wall Street to earn money for himself and his mother. (His father, who worked with fine metals, had died when he was ten.)

  Eventually Muller settled at the University of Texas at Austin, where he met his first wife, Jessie Jacobs, a talented mathematician. Times being what they were, Jessie lost her position when she got pregnant. While her husband was conducting pioneering work on the effects of radium radiation on the genetics of fruit flies, Jessie juggled work as his lab assistant with care of their son and their house.

  Sturtevant had once accused Muller of having a ‘priority complex’, and Muller’s relations with his new colleagues at Austin lend credence to the claim. In the end, in an effort to avoid prickly encounters with his colleagues, Muller took to working at night.

  Muller’s politics did not ingratiate him with his fellows. He was sympathetic to the Communist Party, although he never joined. He advised the National Student League, a communist student organisation according to the FBI, and on the quiet he edited The Spark, a newspaper that campaigned for civil rights for African-Americans, equal opportunities for women, social security and other ‘socialist’ goals.

  What sustained him, even as his marriage fell apart and his colleagues shunned him (and he them), was a major discovery. In a few months, using X-rays, Muller found a way to generate mutant genes. The practical benefits of the technique were legion. His induced Drosophila mutations were 150 times more plentiful than mutations arising spontaneously in the lab. But this was only the beginning. Muller noticed that his mutant genes were stable. Exposure to radiation didn’t merely muddle them up. A particular exposure generated a particular effect. The ‘transmuting action of the X-rays is thus spatially narrowly circumscribed, being confined to one gene even when there are two identical genes close together’. Muller’s conclusion is triumphant: ‘the genes really do lie in the chromosome in linear arrangement, in the physical order in which we have theoretically mapped them …’7

  Muller had proved that genes were physical things. They were made of something. Muller rushed to print, writing in the journal Science in 1927 to establish his priority. Now his reputation depended entirely on how, and how soon, he presented his evidence. Typically, he was still writing his paper and preparing slides on the train while heading to the Fifth International Congress of Genetics in Berlin.

  His presentation that summer was, predictably, a mess. But it didn’t matter. His results spoke for themselves. As he wrote later: ‘Perhaps the most hopeful feature of the present data is that they show that mutation is indeed capable of being influenced “artificially” – that it does not stand as an unreachable god playing its pranks upon us from some impregnable citadel in the germ plasm.’8

  Marxist sceptics of genetics – men like Agol and Levit at the Communist Academy – had thought of genes as playing cards, and genetic inheritance as a game played with a limited deck. They had thought genes were unchangeable, and for that reason timeless, and for that reason God-given – so, naturally, they didn’t believe in them.

  Muller’s findings blew that prejudice wide open. Genes did change. Living things did adapt to their environment, and they
did pass these changes to their offspring, and they did so through the mechanisms of their genes.

  As soon as a copy of Science arrived in Moscow, Serebrovsky rushed to print – in Pravda, no less – with news of Muller’s discovery. Under the title ‘Four Pages That Shook the Scientific World’ (a deliberate echo of the American Marxist classic Seven Days That Shook the World by John Reed), Serebrovsky blew Lamarckian ideas out of the water. Genetics wasn’t ‘idealist’. It was a solid, down-to-earth material science. And in the manipulation of genes lay the promise of improving the health and well-being of the people.

  Solomon Levit, who dreamt of a revolution in medicine, read Muller’s results, talked to Serebrovsky, and realised he had been wrong to champion Lamarck’s outdated ideas. More than that, he realised that, in the name of Lamarck, a doctrinaire element was seeping into his field, derailing new research and stifling new ideas. At the Communist Academy’s conference in April 1929 he back-pedalled furiously:

  History has played a trick on the Communist Academy. It happened that we in the Communist Academy set up a Lamarckian laboratory and that this laboratory represented our biological line to the outside world. And many got the false impression that in fact the Communist Academy was preaching Lamarckism, that Lamarckism was their slogan, that in the name of Lamarckism they would fight genetics. This is a myth. We have to do away with this myth, and the sooner the better, both for the academy and for science …9

  Serebrovsky’s second major convert at the Communist Academy was the political firebrand Izrail Iosifovich Agol. The son of a carpenter, Agol had followed his sister into revolutionary activities and fought with the Reds during the Civil War, before joining Boris Zavadovsky at his laboratory at Sverdlov Communist University. He had spent the whole of his young career researching the inheritance of acquired characteristics in axolotls and hens. Freshly elected to the Communist Academy, Agol added the zeal of a convert to his bullishly Bolshevik approach to scientific work. His strident call at the April conference for Lamarckism’s official condemnation and its expulsion from the academy was politely ignored.

  Nonetheless, the time had clearly come to rejig the research agendas of the Timiryazev Biological Institute to reflect the changing times. Agol was told to lay off some Lamarckian researchers and in their place to organise a genetics lab, to be headed by Serebrovsky.

  Agol worked with Serebrovsky to replicate Muller’s results and Levit did the same, assisting Serebrovsky at the Moscow Medical–Biological Institute (a research institution founded in 1924 under the Commissariat of Health).

  Meanwhile the science section of the Commissariat of Education nominated Agol for a Rockefeller fellowship to study in the United States. As Solomon Levit was already in receipt of a fellowship, this meant the two men would spend 1931 together in Austin, Texas, where Hermann Muller, the beleaguered American communist sympathiser, was waiting for them.

  *

  Between late 1928 and his departure for Texas in 1931, Levit threw himself into the creation of a radical, truly Soviet eugenics. With Serebrovsky, he established an ‘office of human heredity and constitution’ at the Moscow Medical–Biological Institute. In its first volume of research papers, published in late 1929, Levit listed the office’s interests. They would study human population genetics, and heritable diseases and conditions, using case histories, genealogies and twin studies. They would compile data on human chromosomes. They would lay the foundations for the mapping of the human genome. Levit’s brief note is dizzying: written in 1929, it is nothing short of a roadmap of the next eighty years in global genetics research.

  In his own paper, ‘Genetics and Pathology (in Relation to the Current Crisis in Medicine)’,10 Levit explained just what genetics could achieve for human health and well-being. It wasn’t just a matter of studying ‘constitutional diseases’ like cancer and Huntington’s that had a well-established genetic component. If you looked at the statistics through Mendelian glasses, you saw that susceptibility to common infections like TB also ran in families. Genetic weaknesses and predispositions were everywhere. Short of mowing you down with a bus, there was little the environment could do to you that didn’t involve a genetic component. ‘We put an end’, Levit announced, ‘to simplified ideas about the almighty role of the environment, for which an organism is a kind of amorphous mass that is able to change in any direction.’

  *

  With Lenin’s death, and the steady (if fiercely contested) rise of Stalin as his successor, a new approach to politics was emerging. The state would take charge of the country’s development, accelerating its modernisation in massive coordinated campaigns, built around a series of five-year plans. In 1928, the Party called for proposals for the first plan. Levit’s first volume of research papers was assembled with that official invitation in mind. Its lead article, by Alexander Serebrovsky, contained a remarkable practical proposal. ‘Human Genetics and Eugenics in a Socialist Society’11 advocated the mass voluntary artificial insemination of Russian women, using techniques already employed in the breeding of cattle and horses.

  [Given] the tremendous sperm-making capacity of men [and] the current state of artificial insemination technology … one talented and valuable producer could have up to 1,000 children … In these conditions, human selection would make gigantic leaps forward. And various women and whole communes would then be proud of … the production of new forms of human beings.

  This, Serebrovsky asserted, would make it ‘possible to fulfil the Five-Year Plan in two-and-a-half years.’

  Was Serebrovsky writing science fiction? Of course. Thought experiments and speculative articles have always had their place in learned journals. And government purseholders for years had been encouraging just this kind of hyper-optimistic, future-facing writing. Between 1917 and 1922 – a time of martial law, famine and the devastation of industry – fabulous social projects were suggested: the total collectivisation of property, personal belongings and even spouses. In 1922 Ivan Stepanov’s book The Electrification of the RSFSR planned ‘for the transformation of nature and society’, mixing popular science, Communist politics and optimistic science fiction.

  Some of these works were purely fantastical. (Vladimir Obruchev’s serialised novels of the 1920s began with Plutonia, describing the voyage through a hole in the Arctic ice to an underground world of rivers, lakes, volcanoes and strange vegetation, inhabited by monstrous animals and primitive people.) But they all at least tipped their hat to the real day-to-day business of doing science. There were novels about the Arctic whose heroes measured magnetic fields in impossible cold and made chloride titrations of water from under ice floes. There were novels about bridges and canals, chemists and doctors.12

  A massive volume published in 1928, Life and Technology in the Future, edited by the philosopher Ernst Kolman, offered projections about the future by an assortment of distinguished scientists featuring commune-cities, personal flight, skyscrapers linked by bridges and air stations, and (in a piece by the psychologist Aron Zalkind) new organs, new minds and new senses.

  If Kolman could publish Life and Technology in the Future, why was Serebrovsky’s vision met with such opprobrium? He was officially reprimanded for his ‘insult to Soviet womanhood’, and the satirist Demyan Bedny published a poem in Izvestiia taking Serebrovsky’s proposal to absurd lengths, envisioning Moscow clogged by 10,000 copies of the same bureaucrat.13

  Serebrovsky did not take Bedny’s satire quite seriously and even attempted to publish a versified response. It fell flat. Official disfavour and the public outcry eventually forced Serebrovsky to dissociate himself from Levit’s office.

  Serebrovsky’s main idea had been to liberate sex from procreation. His eugenic future was a throwback to the heady days of the 1920s, when the family was just one more part of the capitalist past to be overthrown. In his view the ‘bourgeois’ family, in which the husband accepted only those children who were biologically his, was an entirely artificial and unnecessary state of affai
rs, stemming from the notion that a wife was a man’s property. This view, if not commonly held, was certainly a familiar trope in speculative fiction and opinion pieces of the 1920s.14

  But times had changed. The country had new problems to wrestle with: a falling birthrate, escalating abortions, paternal delinquency and a generation of homeless orphans – literally millions of them – now sustaining themselves by begging, theft and prostitution. Serebrovsky’s idea was technically thrilling; politically, it was badly out of step.

  Even this might not have mattered had ‘Human Genetics and Eugenics in a Socialist Society’ been pure fantasy. (No one was taking Koltsov to task for his Martian parable.) But this was the other problem with Serebrovsky’s proposal: it seemed doable.

  *

  Since 1923, Serebrovsky had been running the department of poultry breeding at the Moscow Zootechnical Institute, so he was well acquainted with the latest work on artificial insemination, and particularly the achievements of his world-renowned colleague Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov.

  Before the revolution Ivanov, who had learned his surgical techniques from the meticulous Ivan Pavlov, had won international acclaim for his research on artificial insemination, which up until then had been chiefly an experimental curiosity. He had developed a system of sponges, rubber catheters and syringes, inseminating ten times more mares than a stallion could when left to its own devices. This was no minor achievement at a time when horses were agriculture’s main power source.