Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  Right up to his death in 1959 Chetverikov – the expert in insects who pioneered population genetics – claimed not to know why he was arrested. Mostly likely, he was the victim of a smear that accused him of writing a postcard to the Academy of Sciences, congratulating it on Kammerer’s suicide. That Chetverikov carried no flag for Kammerer’s work was well known, but the postcard, which was never produced and of course also served to embarrass an already beleaguered Academy, made no psychological sense.

  Chetverikov was exiled to Ekaterinburg and his celebrated seminar group, the ‘screeching society’, which at the time comprised about half the world’s population geneticists, were scattered to breeding stations in central Asia and God knows where.15

  VARNITSO existed to bring scientific expertise to the service of Soviet construction, and, specifically, to the First Five-Year Plan. With their state funding hanging in the balance, scientific societies went out of their way to show VARNITSO that they were not insular fortresses of pure research.

  But the leaders of VARNITSO weren’t interested in friendly gestures or even actual reform. They launched a press campaign against ‘bourgeois’ scientific societies, which was meant to climax in March 1931 at a meeting in Moscow, to which most of the nation’s scientific and voluntary societies were invited. Wisely, leaders of non-Party organisations simply declined this toxic invitation, leaving Boris Zavadovsky to rail impotently in print against those ‘citadels of bourgeois intellectuals’ and their ‘total inability and frequently wilful refusal to redesign their work and bring science closer to practice’.16

  By April 1931 attacks on Koltsov and his Institute of Experimental Biology had got to the point where a decision was made to disband his institute. Four divisions had already split from the parent body and become independent. Was it worth preserving the core?

  Obviously Koltsov thought so. His life’s work had been devoted to his institute: experimental biology was a new and fertile field of research, and a centre for pure theory was essential if progress was to be maintained. Luckily, Maxim Gorky felt the same, and delivered a letter from Koltsov – his client and his friend – into Stalin’s hands. The next day, Semashko’s replacement as health commissar, Mikhail Vladimirsky, ‘restored the undivided authority of the director and’, wrote Koltsov, ‘removed a number of annoying trifles which then were making my existence totally impossible’.

  Koltsov replaced the exiled Chetverikov with a man who could not possibly offend VARNITSO. Nikolai Petrovich Dubinin was an orphan whose working-class credentials had earned him an accelerated education. Intellectually, he was a force to be reckoned with. Serebrovsky could testify to that, having taken Dubinin along on expeditions to Central Asia to map the spread of genes in domesticated fowl. Dubinin didn’t just look good from the outside, he was good – a first-rate mind.

  Koltsov’s circumspection grew. When Stalin gave a speech entitled ‘The Cadres Must Decide Everything’, Koltsov delivered his own version to his institute. And when, at a 1936 conference the plantsman Trofim Lysenko went head-to-head with Nikolai Vavilov, director of the Bureau of Applied Botany, Koltsov firmly – though without malice – twitted Vavilov on his lack of ‘practical achievements’.

  *

  The first public attack on the Academy of Sciences came on 15 May 1927, in the form of a satirical article in the daily Leningradskaya Pravda. M. Gorin’s satire ‘The Academy’s Ark’ neatly skewered the anomalous class make-up of that institution.

  Certain myths clung to the Academy – that it was dominated by Germans, arch-conservative and elitist. But the truth was hardly more comfortable: that it had been dominated by foreign scholars until the second half of the nineteenth century, and had now become a magnet for nobles and so-called ‘former people’ who, unemployable elsewhere, found ‘protection and the possibility to exist’ in the Academy.17 Twenty-three academicians, all former high government officials, either had titles or belonged to the nobility. Several of them were related to each other. The Academy, Gorin warned, ‘cannot be used as an ark for has-beens.’18

  Three further articles – less ironical, much more aggressive – followed within a month. The writers of these pieces – two of whom may have had close connections with the secret police – cooked up the most dangerous calumnies, including talk of a ‘Cosmic Academy of Sciences’, a (so far as we know, fictitious) religious and philosophic circle of academicians opposed to the Soviet programme.

  These public attacks were a (presumably deliberate) extra pressure brought to bear on the Academy at a crucial moment. The Academy was fighting to retain its independence: in particular, the right to say who was worthy to carry the title of academician. There was a conflict of ideologies here, as well as a conflict of interests. Party scholars argued that, when it came to considering candidates, their textbooks and popularisations deserved consideration as scholarly works. For them, the act of binding the sciences together, and making them legible to each other, was the highest scientific calling. The Academicians, proud specialists to a man (the first female academician, Lina Shtern, was elected in 1939), insisted that only quality of research mattered.

  Sincere cases could be made on both sides, and principled disagreement eventually dissolved into horse-trading. Oldenburg’s fellow academician Ivan Pavlov was outraged: ‘This is lackeyism that you are proposing!’ he exclaimed.

  Pavlov was almost screaming that we need to show ourselves to the Bolsheviks, that there is nothing to fear from them, that no preliminary deals are needed, that everyone should and must act individually and so forth. Sergei [Oldenburg] told him vehemently that he, Iv. Pav., can, and is permitted to, say what he likes, they will not touch him, since he is in a privileged position, since he is, as all know and as the Bolsheviks themselves say, the ideological leader of their party. Pavlov boiled over again. It was terrible.19

  This ‘terrible’, messy, ad hoc dealing was reasonably successful until it came time to consider the Party’s three most controversial candidates for election to the Academy: the dialectical philosopher Abram Deborin; Nikolai Lukin, a lacklustre historian of the French Revolution; and the Marxist literary critic Vladimir Friche. On 12 January 1929, an election by secret ballot rejected them. Straight away Oldenburg and a delegation of academicians were ferried in a curtained limousine to an emergency summit meeting in the Kremlin. Faced with the threat of the Academy’s wholesale dismemberment, the delegation capitulated, and the three Party scholars were voted in at a special election. In return, the Academy’s budget rose over 40 per cent on the previous year.

  One more largely cooked-up conspiracy did for the old dispensation worked out by Oldenburg and Lenin; indeed, it ended Oldenburg’s career. On 19 November a government commission was informed that the Academy was secretly storing documents ‘of great political value’: tsarist police reviews of revolutionary movements, personnel files of tsarist secret agents, secret military documents from the world war, Kadet and Menshevik party archives and even some Bolshevik material.

  Never mind that the Academy had been tasked, in the chaos of the Civil War, with storing this material: wild accusations followed. Alexei Rykov – yet to be toppled as head of state over the Shakhty affair – wired the Academy demanding that Oldenburg be dismissed as permanent secretary. Oldenburg, on the brink of retirement, resigned in disgrace, while newly elected academicians Deborin and Nikolai Bukharin, a leading politician and revolutionary theorist, wrote the Academy a new constitution, bringing it under the absolute control of the Party.

  Few openly opposed these reforms, and few had the opportunity, as Pavlov did, to tear strips off the government for its vandalism. In December 1929, Pavlov turned a centenary celebration of Ivan Sechenov’s birth into a startling political spectacle, striding up to a large portrait of the ‘father of Russian physiology’ and declaiming: ‘Oh noble and stern apparition! How you would have suffered if in living human form you still remained among us! We live under the rule of the cruel principle that the state and authorit
y is everything, that the person, the citizen is nothing.’20

  The audience was stunned. Pavlov told them to stand and salute Sechenov. What to do? Everybody rose, looking around nervously. Many communists walked out.

  Not every elderly academician agreed with Pavlov. Unlocking the doors to the Party faithful had at least saved the Academy’s bricks and mortar, not to mention its budget, which rose and rose in following years. Besides, these newly elected academicians were not monsters. Indeed, they now mounted a spirited defence of their new home. Leading the effort to rebrand and champion the Academy was, of all people, David Riazanov, founder of both the Communist Academy and the Marx–Engels Institute. It turned out that during his tenure at the Communist Academy, Riazanov had been growing sick to death of the combative and doctrinaire behaviour of his own researchers. His disgust with these people – mostly graduates from the Institute of Red Professors – and their constant ‘hunt for deviations’ had finally caused him to abandon any role in the Communist Academy’s governance; now, from the purlieus of the Academy of Sciences, he was calling the Communist Academy a ‘pale copy’ of that august body to which he now belonged.

  Now that its gates were open, the Academy of Sciences grew. The number of communist staff members went from virtually none in 1928 to almost 350 by 1933, and the following year, when it moved from Leningrad to Moscow, the Academy was given splendid new buildings originally planned for the Communist Academy. Two years later the Academy of Sciences swallowed the Communist Academy – a cruel blow for old Marxist scholars. Elderly academicians, meanwhile, were haunted by a painful awareness that you are what you eat.

  Notes

  1. Josif Stalin, ‘Rech’ Na VIII S’ezde VLKSM’ [‘Speech at the Eighth Congress of the Communist Youth], Sobranie Sochinenii [Collected Works], vol. 11, p. 77; quoted in Krementsov, Stalinist Science, pp. 29–30.

  2. Finkel, ‘Purging the Public Intellectual’, p. 604.

  3. Kendall E. Bailes, ‘The Politics of Technology: Stalin and Technocratic Thinking among Soviet Engineers’, American Historical Review 79, no. 2 (1 April 1974), p. 462.

  4. Hiroaki Kuromiya, ‘The Crisis of Proletarian Identity in the Soviet Factory, 1928–1929’, Slavic Review 44, no. 2 (1985), pp. 286–7.

  5. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, p. 170.

  6. Weiner, ‘Dzherzhinskii and the Gerd Case’, n. 125.

  7. Quoted in Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, p. 81.

  8. Kendall E. Bailes puts the many grotesque absurdities of that trial in political context in ‘The Politics of Technology: Stalin and Technocratic Thinking among Soviet Engineers’.

  9. Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia, p. 127.

  10. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931, p. 10.

  11. Quoted in Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, p. 88.

  12. Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia, p. 54.

  13. A. V. Lunacharsky, ‘Intelligentsiia i ee mesto v sotsialisticheskom stroitel’stve’ [‘The Intelligentsia and its Role in Soviet Construction’], Revoliutsiia i kultura, no. 1 (15 November 1927), p. 32–3.

  14. James T. Andrews, Science for the Masses: The Bolshevik State, Public Science, and the Popular Imagination in Soviet Russia, 1917–1934, p. 138.

  15. Following his exile, in 1935 Chetverikov reestablished a biological career in the city of Gorki, and devoted himself to research on silkworms. In the winter of 1937 he was approached by the scientific secretary of the Ministry of Agriculture with the proposal that he breed silkworms for Russian conditions: silk was needed for parachutes, and Japan was no longer regarded as a reliable supplier. In 1944 a monograph summarising six years of research was sent to the Lenin Academy for publication. The Supreme Soviet awarded him a medal of excellence. It did not save him: in 1948 he was fired from his job at Gorki University and at the time of this death in 1959, he was penniless, blind and virtually forgotten.

  16. Andrews, Science for the Masses, p. 139.

  17. Michael David-Fox, ‘Symbiosis to Synthesis: The Communist Academy and the Bolshevization of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1918–1929’, Symbiosis, 219 (1998), p. 43.

  18. Aleksey E. Levin, ‘Expedient Catastrophe: a Reconsideration of the 1929 Crisis at the Soviet Academy of Science’, Slavic Review 47, no. 2 (1988), p. 265.

  19. Todes, ‘Pavlov and the Bolsheviks’, pp. 399–400.

  20. Daniel P. Todes, Ivan Pavlov: A Russian Life in Science, p. 577.

  9: Eccentrics

  ‘Victory over the old fogies of horticulture’: plant breeder Ivan Michurin and an assistant (Igor Gorshkov?) study one of his many varieties of hybrid fruit.

  Natural science will … incorporate into itself the science of man, just as the science of man will incorporate into itself natural science: there will be one science.1

  Karl Marx, 1844

  You can take the peasant out of the countryside, and Stalin did, literally, and on an industrial scale. It is harder – much harder – to take the countryside out of the peasant. Slave societies rarely breed fine feeling, and lives spent on the edge of starvation breed reciprocity faster than friendliness. (There is a word for debt in Russian – dolg, but no word for favour. The nearest equivalent, odolzhenie, still expects a return.)

  Traditionally, peasant relations in the countryside had been policed through reputation, and the ease, speed and savagery with which it could be destroyed. The threat of denunciation held together communities who could quite literally starve to death if too many of their members abandoned them. In tsarist times, people who left for side-earnings in the city and tried to break with their village were regularly accused of heresy. When the Soviets took over, religious denunciations turned seamlessly into political ones. Being an ‘enemy of the people’ was not at all a Stalinist innovation. Stalin’s genius was to harness and direct to his own ends the fierce belligerence of the peasant class.

  In this he was supported by a new generation of Bolshevik official: earnest believers whose whole adult life had been spent under Soviet rule. These men knew their state was unfinished and unstable, but they had no experience of alternatives. For them, the bourgeois old guard represented, not a rejected alternative, but an obstacle to be removed. (The Party was by now, as it never had been under Lenin, a working-class party.) At a provincial conference on 27 May 1928 (and still some way off from real power), the Party chief of Nizhny Novgorod, Andrei Zhdanov, cast the gathering cultural revolution in apocalyptic terms, as the war of sons against fathers: ‘The struggle for the cleanliness of our ideas, the struggle for the youth has to take an important place at the moment; it is necessary to develop within the Komsomol [the Party youth wing] a critical relationship toward the older generation [and] its shortcomings in its way of life and being.’2

  Youth activists duly harried their elders and betters, and in particular attacked them for their religious beliefs. In a letter to the national teachers’ newspaper, one reader complained:

  My teacher in junior class, meeting me sixteen years after I left school, wept and told me that she is even afraid to live and work at the present time. She has no regrets for the Tsar – he drove her fiancé into the grave and so she is still unmarried at forty. But the icons that they threw out of the school – this was more than she could bear.3

  This ‘cultural revolution’ silenced an entire educated class at the very moment the government, committed to breakneck industrialisation, thirsted after new practical ideas. So it was perhaps inevitable that it ended up backing ideas that turned out to be eccentric, to say the least. Every madcap professor shown the tsarist door rose clamouring for his day in the Bolshevik sun. John Littlepage, an American engineer working in the Soviet gold-mining industry, wrote of ‘the perpetual nuisance of so-called inventors, crack-brained persons who are convinced they have made some amazing mechanical discovery, a type that seems more numerous in Russia than elsewhere’.4 />
  Linguistics discovered Professor Nikolai Marr’s idiosyncratic ‘Japhetic’ theory of language. Music students embraced Professor Boleslav Yavorsky’s theory of ‘modal rhythm’, which had been a standing joke for years within the Moscow Conservatory. These men weren’t wrong or mad any more: they were radicals.

  *

  By the time the celebrated plant breeder Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin died of cancer in June 1935, he was not just considered an untutored genius, he was being hailed by the agriculture commissar, Yakov Yakovlev, as a heroic opponent of ‘bourgeois science’.

  Michurin rose to fame as a sort of Soviet Luther Burbank – a homespun genius who greened drought-browned valleys and filled the people’s bellies by mixing together scientific thinking and folk remedies. Like the Massachusetts-born plantsman Burbank, Michurin grew up in genteel poverty. The produce of his home town – Kozlov in the province of Ryazan, 300 kilometres south of Moscow – included rather scraggy fruit, which ceased to sell once the new railroads brought in produce from Crimea in the far south. Rather than sell their orchard, however, Ivan Michurin’s parents more or less destroyed themselves trying to hang on to it. A succession of misfortunes sent Ivan’s father Vladimir steadily more crazy. Tuberculosis killed his wife; his half-mad mother terrorised the family, and of his seven children, only Ivan survived. At his wife’s funeral Vladimir came out with a dance song instead of a dirge and was taken away for the first of several stays at the local asylum.

  Ivan Michurin, though he aspired to an aristocratic lycée in St Petersburg, in the end enjoyed only one year of local elementary school education. He went to work in nearby Tambov as a railway clerk, then as a signal repairman. He married a mechanic’s daughter, and there – but for his determination to realise his father’s agricultural fantasies – Michurin’s story ought really to have ended.