by Simon Ings
In 1888, in his mid-thirties and determined to make something of himself, Ivan Michurin bought fourteen hectares with borrowed money, quit his job, and set up a nursery. Rather than grafting southern varieties onto northern stocks, he decided to breed hybrids from seed – a highly dodgy tactic given that good fruit varieties are complicated and unstable hybrids to begin with, and unlikely to breed true. It is hardly surprising, then, that Michurin came to the conclusion that there was no regularity in hereditary phenomena, and no coherent science to be had from studying them.
In November 1905, taking advantage of the promises of new civil liberties, Michurin submitted a petition to turn his unprofitable nursery into a state experiment station. After an unexplained delay of two and a half years, the Ministry of Agriculture turned him down. He later earned two medals and a job offer from the ministry, but none of this quelled his resentment towards the know-all academics who had failed to see the value of his work.
In 1911 and 1913, a plant collector from the US Department of Agriculture, Frank Meyer, visited Michurin’s nursery. Michurin priced himself out of an arrangement to sell regular fruit stocks from his nursery. He did not really need the trade. What he needed was the story: to hear him tell it, agents of the USDA had been visiting him since 1898, and had repeatedly begged him to come to the USA on an astronomical salary of $32,000 a year.
When the Soviets took control of the country, they agreed to turn Michurin’s nursery into a breeding station. True, Michurin was both eccentric and cantankerous, but Nikolai Vavilov himself visited Michurin in 1920 and was impressed by the old man’s notes. (Experimenters like Vavilov liked Michurin’s stocks because they were so bizarre. They were not, however, particularly commercial. Even in 1931, when Michurin was being recast as a working-class hero, only one new variety of apple could be found worth certifying.)
Michurin’s skills as a lobbyist were formidable. In September 1922 he got the President himself, Mikhail Kalinin, to visit his nursery in Kozlov. But the following autumn, in Michurin’s seventieth year, the First All-Russian Agricultural Exhibition was held, and here, and at the very end of his career, things threatened to come unstuck. Michurin’s view was that plantsmanship was an art, incommunicable in abstractions or formulas: ‘It is evident that nature, in its creation of new forms of living organisms, gives infinite diversity and never permits repetition.’5 He was right, of course: a fruit nursery is not a laboratory, and the hybridisation of fruit trees is a tangled business, better handled as a craft, learned over the course of years, than as an undergraduate research topic.
But as science had taken hold of the European imagination in general – and the Bolshevik imagination in particular – so public funding had become dependent on delivering neat, simple, scientific explanations of one’s work. And this, for Michurin’s institute, was bound to end in failure. A young horticulturalist, Igor Gorshkov, sent by Michurin to wow the exhibition, was worsted in arguments again and again over the validity of some of the Kozlov nursery’s hybrids. The one between a melon and a squash attracted especially negative attention. No, said the other experts, the stock onto which you grafted something would not alter the germ plasm of your fruiting plant, and all Michurin’s talk of ‘vegetative blending’ and ‘mentoring’ made no sense.
When Michurin learned of Gorshkov’s reception, he blew his top: if Gorshkov couldn’t win extra support for the nursery, he might as well throw in his cards and accept the USDA’s (fictional) job offer. Gorshkov pitched this threat to the editors of Izvestiia, who ran it under the headline ‘Kozlov or Washington?’ Where, the paper asked, would Michurin’s work find support – the Soviet Union or the USA?
Michurin was so delighted with this coup, he presented Gorshkov with a watch, hand-engraved by himself with the words ‘From I. Michurin to I. Gorshkov. For Victory over the Old Fogies of Horticulture. 14 October 1923.’6
Michurin remained an outsider. Few mentioned him in their papers. Trofim Lysenko took an interest, but the old man rebuffed him. He was far friendlier with Vavilov, and Vavilov was among those who elected him an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences a week before his death.
Most ‘independent scholars’ were like Michurin: opportunists seizing their last chance at glory. But some were closely allied to the Bolsheviks from the start. Olga Borisovna Lepeshinskaya had been a personal friend of Lenin and his wife. Between 1897 and 1900 they had all been banished to the same region of Siberia. As a consequence, she was terrifyingly well-connected and not remotely intimidated by power. On a personal level, she was charming. She fiercely opposed anti-semitism, and had dedicated her personal life to the orphan problem, bringing up at least half a dozen children as her own. As a scientist, however, she was a disaster. She once announced to the Academic Council of the Institute of Morphology that soda baths could rejuvenate the old and preserve the youth of the young. A physician, Yakov Rapoport, asked her sarcastically whether mineral water would work instead. Lepeshinskaya, oblivious to his tone, told him no. A couple of weeks later Moscow completely sold out of baking soda.
The same unstoppable cart that whisked Michurin and Lepeshinskaya to glory also carried along several articulate youths whose ambition far outweighed their talent. The simpler and more outrageous their schemes, the more they appealed to fond wishes, the more they were believed. (Science – real science, Marx’s ‘one science’ – was supposed to be straightforward and practical.) Planning groups and building trusts approved plans for socialist cities of the future. A government commission thought about reforming the calendar (with 1917 as Year One). The Soviet patent office, the Committee on Inventions, reported one case of a ‘scientist’ entirely lacking in formal education who was given 200,000 roubles and an ‘electrical biology’ laboratory to show how bombarding seeds with ultra-high frequency radio waves would trigger bumper harvests. (The police eventually tracked him down to the cabaret clubs of Leningrad.) Considering the work of a physicist in Ashkabad who made rain with electrified smoke, the Marxist philosopher Isaak Prezent declared:
We are carrying out the grandest task, planned alteration of the climate … A special grand institute for making and stopping rain is being organised … The grandest, unheard of projects are now being worked out, in actual working plans with concrete economic calculation, for the irrigation of dry regions and an all-out assault on the desert. We are solving the problem of heating Siberia.7
Eccentric schemes tend to blow up in their backers’ faces, and the state was aware of the risk. In 1947 Eric Ashby, a botanist attached to the Australian Legation, observed that,
there has been recently an increase in the efficiency with which the State separates genuine from bogus advances in agricultural research, and protects itself from being ‘sold a pup’ by enthusiastic and not too critical experts. There is, for example, an interesting and elaborate organisation for testing new crop varieties, known as the Government Commission for Seed Testing, under the chairmanship of Academician Tsitsin.8
But problems of this sort sprang from more than a handful of hucksters and ‘independent scholars’. Old Bolshevik hands, Party leaders and key bureaucrats were themselves dedicated amateur philosophers of science. They ruled in the name of scientific government, and were honour-bound to pronounce on scientific issues. Their mistaken and wild schemes came stamped with the imprimatur of the state, and were much harder to challenge.
Stalin was himself a totally dedicated and self-declared ‘Lamarckian’, obsessed by the idea that it might be possible to alter the nature of plants. As the years went by this obsession grew, and became indeed his only hobby. At his dachas near Moscow and in the south, large greenhouses were erected so that he could enter them directly from the house, day or night. Pruning shrubs and plants was his only physical exercise. In 1946 he grew especially keen on lemons, not only encouraging their growth in coastal Georgia, where they fared quite well, but also in the Crimea, where winter frosts obliterated them. Stalin was not discouraged. He asserted that oak
s and other deciduous trees, if planted as seeds, would adapt to the most hostile conditions, flourishing in the dry steppe, and in the salty, semi-arid wildernesses near the Caspian Sea.
Leaders, politicians and bureaucrats have their hobby horses, of course. The problems start only when these people assume for themselves an expertise they do not possess, when they impose their hobby horses on the state by fiat. The Bolshevik tragedy was that, in donning the mantle of scientific government, the Party’s leaders felt entitled to do this. More: they felt obliged to do this. Stalin’s Lamarckian beliefs and utopian fond wishes regarding the plasticity of living forms were rather ordinary for his day. Realising these ideas in policy would have extraordinary and often catastrophic effects on the lives of millions.
*
At the very end of 1929, at a conference of agricultural economists, Joseph Stalin clarified the Party’s line on what science was, and how it should progress. Science was a human activity, not a mystical communion with nature, and the measure of theory ought to be how usefully it could be applied. In the field of economics, especially, theory lagged behind practice. Party workers in the countryside were pushing collectivisation far faster than the economists had thought possible.
From his narrow chivvying of a bunch of economic specialists, Stalin then extended his argument to cover all science and philosophy. Philosophy and all other branches of theory must be refashioned to be of immediate service to the revolution. The central principle of philosophy was now to be partiinost: partyness.
Under this dismal scheme, scientists at least got to be glorified engineers. Philosophers had no obvious second string to their bow: they were now, in all essentials, simply a branch of the media, there to explain and celebrate practical improvements wrought by the Party. They were yes-men at best; at worst, a species of thought police.
Stalin himself, in an effort to defend Lamarckism against its critics, instigated meetings of the Society of Materialist Biologists on 14 and 24 April 1931 to ‘organise the study and unmasking’ of the ‘mechanistic school’ of Nikolai Koltsov. Official hostility mounted against the Institute of Experimental Biology because it was run by a bourgeois intellectual was one thing. An official attack on its science, based on Stalin’s strong scientific opinions, was quite another.9
There was a semblance of balance: the Society of Materialist Biologists included powerful proponents of genetics, men like Levit and Agol, and the president himself, the philosopher Isaak Prezent, had declared himself a ‘Morganist’. As later events would reveal, however, Prezent coupled a belief in the functional role of philosophy with a quite gobsmacking lack of personal integrity.
Prezent was from Toropets, a town 400 kilometres west of Moscow. He was one of those enthusiastic working-class students given an accelerated education under the Bolsheviks. His progress within the Party was impressive – from Communist Youth League secretary in 1920 to political commissar in the Red Army in 1929. He began his higher education in 1925 in Leningrad, teaching at Party schools while attending lectures in social science at the university.
By the time of his graduation, Prezent’s notorious personal style was well established. He compensated for his lack of physical stature by wearing shoes with built-up heels and a tall green hat. He was mind-bogglingly petty. A self-appointed classroom vigilante, he once tried to get a young student expelled because she couldn’t properly articulate Lenin’s important thoughts about cognition in Materialism and Empiriocriticism. He denounced a Leningrad teacher for writing a happy poem about the May Day holiday because it demeaned that ‘holiday of struggle’.10
This political activity left Prezent little time for difficult work, for which, in any case, he had no aptitude. Mathematically illiterate and given to gestures over applied effort, Prezent gravitated, naturally enough, towards biology. Mathematics had yet to make serious inroads into university-level biological science, and Prezent expended much effort over the years in keeping his field free of sums. ‘It is impermissible’, he asserted, ‘to allow mathematics to usurp the content of biology … We are interested in concrete knowledge, not in algebraic symbols.’11
Biology was a natural field of endeavour for Prezent because it impinged so directly upon the political world, sometimes in the guise of agricultural policy, sometimes under the banner of eugenics, sometimes as the discipline that promised to unlock the nation’s vast untapped natural riches. The questions biology was asking were urgent, politically charged, and not yet weighed down too much by hard data and complex model-making. In biology, then, Isaak Prezent found his ideal base of operations.12
At first, Prezent’s tendency to champion whatever argument seemed the most quintessentially Marxist played to the advantage of Mendelian genetics. In the hands of Levit and Agol ‘Mendelism’ (chromosomal genetics) was a radical new idea, a truly materialist explanation of how life develops and evolves. At Leningrad University, in his widely attended seminar on the dialectics of nature, new graduate Prezent attacked Lamarckian ideas, insisting that genetics provided as good a demonstration as you could want of dialectical materialism in action.13
Prezent’s partisan declarations helped genetics get a toe-hold in Russian scientific circles. But his arguments won him no personal advantage. Established biologists didn’t quite know what to do with him. He sought their patronage, but when they set him to work he proved useless. Even Nikolai Vavilov gave him a job, but they fell out very quickly.
Prezent had better luck creating his own fortune. As president of the Leningrad branch of the Society of Materialist Biologists, he acquired notoriety for ‘unmasking’ Boris Raikov, a leading educator in biology, as an ‘agent of the world bourgeoisie’ and a wrecker. (This was in 1930, around the time the first arrests at Shakhty were announced: Raikov and his colleagues were speedily arrested.) In 1931 Prezent turned his seminar into a bona fide Department of Dialectics of Nature and Science – and it was around then that his own position towards genetics began to change.
In the absence of Agol and Levit (who were in Texas) genetics ceased to be considered a radical Marxist idea; indeed, people were beginning to look askance at its foreign provenance and cosmopolitan, globe-trotting community. To begin with, Prezent simply dropped the chromosomal argument altogether in favour of some very dull political correctness, compiling a 500-plus page Reader on Evolutionary Theory, nearly half of which was taken up with excerpts from works by Marx, Engels and Lenin.14
Had Isaak Prezent simply been self-serving, there would be little enough to say about him. What made Prezent so energetic, and therefore powerful – and therefore dangerous – was his sincere conviction that, by dovetailing his own interests to the interests of the Party, he was actually furthering philosophy and science. In an interview with the historian David Joravsky he was able to pinpoint the exact moment these happy sentiments were drawn to a point: in October 1931, at an All-Union Conference on Drought Control, the commissar of agriculture, Yakov Yakovlev, was discussing Lysenko and his work on ‘vernalisation’. Vernalisation was a technique for increasing crop yields by manipulating the temperature of germinating seeds. Lysenko’s technique, Yakovlev announced, had a revolutionary significance that far exceeded mere agriculture: it was the very model of a new, Soviet way of doing science.
In a pamphlet titled Class Struggle on the Front of Natural Science, Prezent dashed down the substance of the revelation granted him that day:
Only productive practice is the criterion of truth and the essence of concrete cognition. And this same practice, which produces an object in accordance with a postulated law, makes possible the production of this object on the mass scale necessary for society. And only such socioeconomic practical mastery is the true meaning of cognition.
(Joravsky, who is nobody’s fool, nailed this well as ‘the boss knows best’.)15
Prezent, committed to the wholesale acclimatisation of exotic species and creating a world in which ‘all living nature will live, thrive, and die at none other than the will of
man and according to his designs’,16 rallied Soviet biologists to become ‘engineers’ and ‘inventors’ in a thoroughgoing transformation of nature.
Objects of nature have ceased to be objects of contemplative study … Soviet faunists must become inventors. They must develop concrete projects for the planned transformation of animal communities and for their geographical redistribution. We must master fauna and not only make it work for us, but we must reconstruct it as well so as to enhance its productivity.17
Underlying this grand purpose was the belief that the ‘gigantic fodder base’ of the Soviet Union was going to waste because there were not enough game animals to create a rich ecology. One ‘faunist’ who heeded Prezent’s call, Boris Fortunatov, claimed that nature was riddled with empty niches begging to be filled with exotics or even with newly created life forms; another, Peter Manteifel, insisted that the country’s network of nature reserves – a rare and enlightened hangover from late tsarist days and strongly supported by Lenin – ought to become ‘staging areas’ for the rearrangement of nature: ‘We must regard zapovedniki [reserves] and hunting grounds as production units, and not as institutions cut off from life,’ he wrote. Fortunatov’s ‘General Plan for the Reconstruction of Economically Important Fauna of European Russia and the Ukraine’ arranged for exotic species to be acclimatised across the European part of the USSR.18
The repurposing and eventual dismantling of the Soviet Union’s system of nature reserves ought to have raised much more protest than it did. ‘Morganist’ geneticists and the entrepreneurs who ran their institutions would have run very little risk in criticising a man like Isaak Prezent. Even his political allies had him down for a blow-hard. Alas, their silence was complicit; they sensed extraordinary opportunities in Prezent’s acclimatisation plans. Acclimatising species was a difficult, slow, but eminently possible task – and one that would show genetics to advantage. The task of creating successful hybrids could only increase the standing of genetics – or so the geneticists thought. At the end of 1931 Vavilov was among the inspectors sent by the Commissariat of Agriculture to the world-famous breeding station and reserve at Askania Nova. ‘Askania’, he declared, at the end of his visit, ‘must be an Institute for acclimatisation and hybridisation as its basic profile.’ By mid-1932, pathbreaking research at Askania Nova had been shut down, and its reserve converted into the All-Union Institute for Agricultural Hybridisation and Acclimatisation of Animals. Heading the institute, its 150 scientific workers, its staff of 2,000, and a budget of just under 5.5 million roubles, were Isaak Prezent and the man who had by now become his brother-in-arms: Trofim Denisovich Lysenko.