Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  From 1934 on, all kinds of exotics were introduced to the Russian steppe. Sika deer. European bison. The racoon dog from Manchuria was introduced to Baikal, the central Urals and parts of the Volga Basin. Grey mullet and Black Sea invertebrates were dropped as food stock into the Caspian Sea. Meanwhile the nation’s nature reserves set about exterminating their wolves.

  The result was disaster, of course. With no wolves to pick off the weaklings, the health of deer, moose and other ungulates collapsed, even as their populations skyrocketed. Their diseases passed to domestic cattle, causing a huge death toll. And feral dogs quickly filled the niche the wolves had left behind.19

  Notes

  1. Karl Marx, ‘Private Property and Communism’, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, pp. 135–43.

  2. Kees Boterbloem, The Life and Times of Andrei Zhdanov, 1896–1948, p. 65.

  3. Quoted in Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front, p. 112.

  4. Bailes, Technology and Society under Lenin and Stalin, p. 363.

  5. Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair, p. 42.

  6. Ibid., p. 49.

  7. Ibid., p. 80.

  8. Ashby, Scientist in Russia, p. 33.

  9. At the meetings Stalin instigated at the Society of Materialist Biologists Boris Tokin, an embryologist and the society’s newly appointed chairman, asserted that ‘the extreme Morganists have become prisoners of modern bourgeois genetics’. He accused them of accepting the ‘precedence of the gene’ and of having a noncritical ‘view of Weismann’s teaching on the continuity of germplasm’. During the late 1800s and early 1900s, the German cytologist August Weismann had argued that while most of the body (‘the soma’) undergoes changes while alive, the hereditary material – which he labelled the ‘germ plasm’ – remains unchanged more or less indefinitely.

  10. Vadim J. Birstein, The Perversion of Knowledge: The True Story of Soviet Science, pp. 257–8.

  11. Douglas R. Weiner, ‘Community Ecology in Stalin’s Russia: “Socialist” and “Bourgeois” Science’, Isis 75, no. 4 (1984), p. 694.

  12. Nils Roll-Hansen, The Lysenko Effect: The Politics of Science, p. 87.

  13. Dialectical materialism recognises no absolute or fixed categories. The world is not a ready-made thing: it is a complex interplay of processes, all of which are ebbing and flowing, coming into being and passing away. (Its author, Friedrich Engels, had great fun with the duckbilled platypus, asking where that fitted into any rigid scheme of things.) There is no ‘essence’ hiding behind a cloud of steam, a puddle of water or a block of ice. There are only structures, succeeding each other in response to changes in the local conditions. In the same way, there is no ‘essence’ to thought. No soul. No recording angel. Just a dance of interactions among processes that spread out in a web through an individual’s whole nervous system, across society, and into the physical world. Changes stick, and time moves inexorably forward. To put it another way (and this is what makes dialectical materialism such strong medicine for the sciences) time is real and everything has a history. As a scientist at the turn of the twentieth century, and depending on your field, this claim would have struck you as (for biologists) self-evident, (for chemists) disturbing, or (for the physicists of those days) plain mad. Ernst Mayr’s short, sympathetic account, ‘Roots of Dialectical Materialism’, appears in Sovetskaia Biologiaa v 20–30kh Godakh, ed. Edouard I. Kolchinsky (1997), pp. 12–17; also available online at http://bit.ly/1mhUW8Y.

  14. Nikolai Krementsov, ‘Darwinism, Marxism, and Genetics in the Soviet Union’, in Alexander & Numbers, Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins.

  15. Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair, p. 238.

  16. Ted Benton, The Greening of Marxism, p. 124.

  17. Douglas R. Weiner, Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia, p. 182.

  18. Boris Konstantinovich Fortunatov, ‘O general’nom plane rekonstruktsii promyslovoi fauny evropeiskoi chasti SSSR i Ukrainy’, Priroda i sotsialisticheskoe khoziaistvo (1933), no. 6, pp. 90–109.

  19. Weiner, ‘Community Ecology in Stalin’s Russia’, pp. 684–96.

  10: The primacy of practice

  A collection of wheat from the Bureau of Applied Botany’s collection – still the world’s biggest and richest seed bank when this photograph was taken in 1973.

  People jump about, play at dialectical materialism (a substitute for philosophical thought) but they do not work. It is a great shame that Russian scholars have not learned how to behave properly … Scientific work right now is close to a catastrophe.1

  Vladimir Vernadsky to Alexander Fersman, March 1933

  It was just before the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, and they were passing their leader around between them like a bomb with a lit fuse. On a couple of occasions Vladimir Lenin took shelter in the apartment belonging to Margarita Fofanova, a dedicated Bolshevik who lived in Leningrad, on the north side of the Neva River delta. From her bedroom, behind chintz curtains and surrounded by flowered wallpaper, Lenin scribbled urgent notes to shape a coup that was now barely a fortnight away.

  Reading was his only relaxation, and luckily for him, Fofanova had a decent library.

  One day, after dinner, Lenin went up to the bookshelves and said: ‘I’ve dug up a remarkable book in your collection. Simply amazing. And a very convenient size, too, you can slip it in your pocket. When we take power we shall definitely reprint it … Look what the author says in the first chapter: “In the midst of this sad predicament science came to his help, that sensible science of our advancing day, which has for its ultimate end not merely discovery, but application; which is not so delighted with the formulating of a new law as it is overjoyed at the lifting of a burden.”’2

  The book, translated into Russian in 1909, was The New Earth by the American biographer William S. Harwood. It was subtitled A Recital of the Triumphs of Modern Agriculture in America. And triumphs there certainly had been. Millions of hectares under maize had seen yield increases of up to a third, thanks to a new method of hybridisation.

  Some cereals tend to self-fertilise. Wheat is an obvious example. It has sex with itself and the next generation of plants are clones of their parents. Maize, on the contrary, tends to outcross. At around the turn of the century, agricultural scientists in the United States noticed something odd: if maize plants were forced to in-breed, it appeared to do them no harm whatsoever. This was unexpected, not least because of the all-too-well-recorded damage that inbreeding does to, say, people.

  Further researches – of an educated trial-and-error variety – threw up a way of breeding maize that radically increases yields. In-breed two lines of maize, then cross them. Then cross the result with another hybrid of inbred lines. The plant that results is quite spectacularly fruitful. The effect falls off in the subsequent generation, so farmers who go down this route will have to buy fresh seed each year. This is difficult for small farms, but easy for bigger, more industrial concerns, because they have better lines of credit. They can borrow money against the next harvest to obtain the seed they need.

  So it was that Harwood’s book sowed in the minds of Lenin and his fellows the notion that agriculture would be more efficient if it was collectivised. And they weren’t wrong: along with massive yield increases, American agriculture saw 17 million people leave agriculture altogether between 1910 and 1920. Collectivisation wasn’t a Soviet invention. It was an American one.3

  Harwood’s book was influential in another way, too, and one that was absolutely disastrous. In his desire to cast modern science in a democratic and practical light – science for everyone, that everyone might understand – Ronald Harwood picked, for particular praise, the efforts of his friend, the plantsman Luther Burbank.

  Burbank was famous almost as much for his lack of formal education as for his varieties of vegetables, nuts and berries. A talented self-publicist, he made many outrageous claims for his products. One of the plates in his lavish twelve-volume Methods and Discoveries (1914–15) illust
rates a plum that, he claimed, dried itself while still on the tree, becoming an instant prune.

  Burbank was the original barefoot scientist, a man whose practical plantsmanship outperformed by miles the slow, plodding work of academics in universities. He was the new type of citizen–scientist Marx had predicted, and that Stalin was determined should lead his industrial revolution – and he was American.

  And at the beginning the Bolsheviks, in awe of the pace of American industrial growth – the cars, the planes, the factories – were only too happy to follow American examples. Margarita Fofanova later recalled how:

  In 1918, as soon as the Soviet Government moved to Moscow, Lenin rang me up and asked whether I had with me Harwood’s The New Earth and whether I could send it to him at the Kremlin. Lenin sent the book to Professor K. A. Timiryazev, requesting him to look it through and to write a preface for it. The book was to be prepared for printing urgently. Timiryazev changed the title of the book to Regenerated Land, wrote a preface, and the book was published early in 1919.

  The industrialisation and collectivisation of agriculture began long before Stalin made it over into an aggressive (indeed, death-dealing) means of internal control. Ford tractors imported in their thousands from America were so popular that, according to the Russian-American correspondent Maurice Hindus, writing in 1927, ‘more people in Russia have heard of Henry Ford than of Stalin … I visited villages far from railroads, where I talked to illiterate peasants who did not know who Stalin was or Rykov or Bukharin, but who had heard of the man who makes the “iron horses”.’4

  At first some peasants crossed themselves devoutly when they saw one and ‘spat out three times as they would on the appearance of the devil’, but before long the Fordson tractor had become so popular that peasants were naming their children after it.

  The modernisation of agriculture in drought- and famine-prone Russia could not come fast enough. Nikolai Koltsov once told the American geneticist Leslie Dunn

  how he traveled to Leningrad during the famine of 1920 with Lenin and some other members of the Central Executive. Lenin was to urge upon the responsible committee the diversion of some of the funds set aside for famine relief to the construction of a research institute for seed selection and plant breeding. ‘The famine to prevent,’ said Lenin, ‘is the next one and the time to begin is now.’ He carried his point and there was built with emergency funds the great Institute of Applied Botany which under the direction of Nikolai Vavilov became the center of the greatest plant breeding and seed selection service in the world.5

  Nikolai Vavilov was the natural choice to lead the Bureau of Applied Botany. His utopianism was hardly less strident than Lenin’s own. Even as Lenin was preparing to seize power in Petrograd, Vavilov was lecturing to his class at the Saratov Agricultural Institute, outlining the task before them: ‘the planned and rational utilisation of the plant resources of the terrestrial globe’.

  He was loud, but he was not alone. Geneticists at the beginning of the twentieth century liked to think their intellectual breakthroughs would translate relatively quickly into practical applications, rather in the way stem cell researchers in the early 2000s were hinting at overnight cures that remain elusive today. Vavilov, who had studied Darwin’s papers in Cambridge during his years overseas, was impressed by Darwin’s tracing of ‘the evolution of the gooseberry from a wild one weighing half a gramme to one weighing 53 grammes, or the amazing range of variation in the pumpkin where a cultivated variety was a thousand times larger than the wild one’.6 Genetics, he declared, would go yet further, giving the next generation the ability ‘to sculpt organic forms at will … Biological synthesis is becoming as much a reality as chemical.’7

  Vavilov was a man of action as well as words. In 1921 he was invited to attend a conference by the US Department of Agriculture. Famine had consumed all the seed stocks of the Volga region, and the rouble was worthless, so Vavilov arrived in the United States carrying solid gold roubles and ingots of platinum, bought over 6,000 packets of seeds from twenty-six different seed companies in less than a month, and persuaded Hoover’s American Relief Administration to ship them – all two tonnes of them – to the Baltic port of Riga along with its food aid.

  He also set up a branch of his bureau in New York City, and for five years Dmitry Borodin, a Russian agronomist and long-time US resident, kept Vavilov supplied with seeds and scientific literature.

  Vavilov even found time to visit the laboratory of Thomas Morgan at Columbia University; it was his invitation to visit and lecture that brought Hermann Muller and his valuable Drosophila stocks to Russia the following year.

  Vavilov returned to Russia in February 1922 and, at only thirty-five, was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. As director of the Bureau of Applied Botany, Vavilov held his research council meetings in the Kremlin. Newspapers followed his travels.

  His workaholism was legendary. A constant stream of visitors and public duties awaited him at the bureau’s offices, often long after closing time. If there were still people to see after 10 p.m., he would invite them to his house, a ten-minute walk away. In the drawing-room, at a long table, he laid on tea, pastries and cakes, and wine (though he himself was teetotal). Past midnight, having seen his visitors to the door, Vavilov sat down to work some more, rarely getting to bed before two or three o’clock in the morning. If you asked him about his impossible schedule, he invariably replied ‘Life is short, my dear, one has to make haste!’8

  *

  ‘Spread the Achievements of Science Among the Masses!’ So read the banner draped along the front of the hall.

  The All-Union Congress of Genetics, Plant Breeding, Seed Production and the Raising of Pedigreed Livestock took place in Leningrad in January 1929: a gala event which launched the agricultural goals of Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan. About 300 papers were given at the event; overseas visitors included Richard Goldschmidt and Erwin Bauer from Germany, Harry Federley from Finland, and many other illustrious names.

  Nikolai Vavilov, the event’s chairman and chief architect, greeted his government patrons warmly. Nikolai Gorbunov, then commissar of agriculture, was his boss. Sergei Kirov was one of Stalin’s right-hand men. All three confidently predicted that science could achieve the goal set by the First Five-Year Plan: an increase in grain yields per hectare of 35 per cent.

  The United States had achieved as much; why not the Soviet Union? Even Nikolai Koltsov, head of the Institute of Experimental Biology and never the Bolsheviks’ easiest customer, wrote enthusiastic articles about the good times the collectivisation of agriculture would usher in. In terms shockingly similar to those used by Isaak Prezent, he described collectivisation as a bold national experiment in practical science, enriching both academe and agriculture. Koltsov’s Party-minded colleague Alexander Serebrovsky, meanwhile, actually helped plan the collectivisation campaign.

  And at the Sixteenth Party Conference in 1930, when the Party cast out its right-wing critics, Vavilov was there to help, endorsing the agrarian offensive: ‘Enormous energy is needed to get our enormous country moving, the whole peasant mass of it, to rouse to wilful action all the creative forces of our country.’9

  It is daunting, with hindsight, to find so many great figures of Soviet biology queuing up to endorse collectivisation – a movement that starved millions to death and was used quite deliberately as a weapon to obliterate an entire class of moderately well-off peasant, decimate the Ukraine, Russia’s troublesome satellite, and subjugate the Soviet countryside.

  Though the campaign’s monstrous nature could not have been predicted, you would think its sheer impracticality would have set alarm bells ringing. But enthusiasm is catching. Vavilov and his colleagues, far from blowing the whistle on the idea, demanded more funding and easier foreign travel to speed the project along. (The money, at least, proved forthcoming.) Vavilov also oversaw the loose amalgamation of numerous institutes whose administration he had been juggling alongside work at his own
bureau. The Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL) was to be, in Vavilov’s own words, ‘the academy of the general staff of the agricultural revolution’ – nothing less, then, than the scientific and intellectual arm of the Commissariat of Agriculture.10 Made a full member of this academy, and given administrative control of its 111 research institutes and 300 experimental stations, Vavilov was far too busy to ask awkward questions of a campaign that gave Russian agriculture all that reformers had dreamt of and campaigned for since the end of the eighteenth century.

  Vavilov was first and foremost a bureaucrat. Yes, he was a talented scientist, of that there is no doubt, but his was a culture where dominance over a field comes with the obligation to administer it. Vavilov’s was a bureau of applied botany, and quite different in its workings from other scientific institutes. Scholars never enjoyed much autonomy there, the way they did under, say, Koltsov, at the Institute of Experimental Biology. The Commissariat of Agriculture kept Vavilov’s bureau under tight control. Its presidium was made up of administrators, not scholars, and its minutes are a catalogue of administrative matters, not scientific ones. It was perfectly usual for official meetings to involve ministry officials alone, with not a scientist in sight.