Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  He was apologising for his lack of ability as a speaker, saying he was only a ‘vernaliser’, not an orator or a writer, when there was an interruption. ‘Bravo, Comrade Lysenko, bravo!’

  The heckler was Stalin.

  The audience broke into spontaneous applause, and the incident was publicised in all national newspapers.30

  In October 1935, the Lenin Academy concluded that vernalisation had passed the experimental stage and that responsibility for the programme should now pass to the agricultural administration. In December 1935 the front page of Pravda showed Lysenko in the Kremlin, sharing the rostrum with Stalin at a public meeting.

  Notes

  1. Quoted in Valery N. Soyfer, ‘New Light on the Lysenko Era’, Nature 339, no. 6224 (1989), p. 417.

  2. V. Safonov, Land in Bloom.

  3. Audra J. Wolfe, ‘What Does It Mean to Go Public? The American Response to Lysenkoism, Reconsidered’, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 40, no. 1 (2010), p. 53.

  4. William deJong-Lambert, ‘Hermann J. Muller, Theodosius Dobzhansky, Leslie Clarence Dunn, and the Reaction to Lysenkoism in the United States’, Journal of Cold War Studies 15, no. 1 (2013), p. 87.

  5. Barry Mendel Cohen, ‘Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov: The Explorer and Plant Collector’, Economic Botany 45 (1969), pp. 38–46.

  6. Proceedings of the International Congress of Genetics (1932), p. 150.

  7. Gary Paul Nabhan, Where Our Food Comes from: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov’s Quest to End Famine, p. 129.

  8. Roll-Hansen, The Lysenko Effect, p. 134.

  9. Quoted in Loskutov, Vavilov and His Institute, p. 97.

  10. N. L. Krementsov, International Science between the World Wars: The Case of Genetics, p. 41.

  11. Nabhan, Where Our Food Comes From, p. 164.

  12. James F. Crow, ‘Sixty Years Ago: The 1932 International Congress of Genetics’, Genetics 131, no. 4 (1992), pp. 761–8.

  13. Leslie C. Dunn, The Reminiscences of Leslie Clarence Dunn.

  14. William deJong-Lambert, The Cold War Politics of Genetic Research: An Introduction to The Lysenko Affair, p. 32.

  15. Burds, Peasant Dreams and Market Politics, p. 91.

  16. Maurice G. Hindus, Red Bread: Collectivization in a Russian Village, p. 53.

  17. Fitzpatrick, Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931, p. 2.

  18. As this book went to press, Loren Graham’s Lysenko’s Ghost (2016) appeared, offering a fascinating re-evaluation of Soviet “Lamarckism’.

  19. Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, p. 245.

  20. Pringle, The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, p. 177.

  21. Soyfer, ‘New Light on the Lysenko Era’, p. 417.

  22. Roll-Hansen, The Lysenko Effect, p. 162.

  23. Quoted in Loskutov, Vavilov and His Institute, p. 97.

  24. Roll-Hansen, The Lysenko Effect, p. 167.

  25. O. M. Targulian, Controversial questions on genetics and selection: transactions of the 4th session of the Academy, 19–27 December 1936; quoted in Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, p. 29.

  26. Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair, p. 90.

  27. Roll-Hansen, The Lysenko Effect, p. 175.

  28. Ibid. p. 181.

  29. Quoted in Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, pp. 16–17.

  30. Valery N. Soyfer, ‘Tragic History of the VII International Congress of Genetics’, Genetics 165, no. 1 (September 2003), p. 4.

  12: The great patron

  Coal miner and national hero Alexei Stakhanov (centre) explains his methods to fellow workers, 7 June 1935.

  One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beatings she suffered for falling behind, for her backwardness … All beat her, because of her military backwardness, cultural backwardness, political backwardness, industrial backwardness, agricultural backwardness… Do you remember the words of the pre-revolutionary poet: ‘You are poor and abundant, mighty and impotent, Mother Russia’? … We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us. 1

  Joseph Stalin, ‘On the Tasks of Industrial

  Administrators’, 1931

  In 1931 Maxim Gorky returned to Russia. Stalin had spent years wooing back this revolutionary celebrity, though in the end it was only the fading of his reputation in the West that persuaded him to come home. The fashion for Nietzschean tramps was passing, and Gorky belonged to the turn of the century. Returning to Russia offered him the prospect of a fresh start.

  Gorky cannot have been very surprised by conditions in his homeland, since he had been a regular visitor since 1929. Still, the continuing decline in the social fabric was hardly encouraging. The early 1930s were dominated by shortages of food, clothing and housing. Rationing was in force from 1929 to 1935. At every point in the distribution chain, employees funnelled off goods for themselves or for sale on the black market. Suits, woollens and gramophones disappeared from regular stores and turned up in second-hand shops at exorbitant prices. When galoshes appeared in Kazan’s main department store, speculators crowded out regular shoppers. When forty bicycles came in, the store manager funnelled them one at a time to friends. Shoes were impossible to get hold of through legitimate stores, not least because the livestock that supplied the leather had been slaughtered en masse by desperate peasants during the first years of collectivisation.

  Despite all this, Gorky contrived to appear positive about his return and worked enthusiastically to celebrate the heroic practical achievements of the era. In a letter to Stalin he argued the need for propaganda about ‘our achievements’ and proposed introducing such a section in all the newspapers.2

  He was particularly taken with the construction projects known as stroiki. These ‘hero projects’ included Belomorstroi, the White Sea Canal connecting the Baltic and White seas, which opened on 2 August 1933; Dneprostroi, the building of what was at the time the world’s largest hydroelectric power plant; Magnitostroi, the construction of what was and still is the world’s largest steel plant; and Kuznetstroi, the development of the coal fields and railroads needed to supply Magnitostroi.

  Gorky’s ecstatic glorification of big engineering stemmed from his hatred of the countryside. ‘My sympathies’, he wrote in a letter of 1926, ‘have always been with the “insignificant handful” of the urban proletariat and intelligentsia’: a sentiment that hardly begins to express the loathing he nursed for the land of his forefathers. As far as Gorky was concerned Russia’s countryside was a harsh, miserable place where people starved half to death; a charnel-house where only brutes and their lackeys stood any chance of survival.

  Maxim Gorky was rabid in his enthusiasm for the transformation of this ghastly Russian nature. In 1934, as he considered the utopian significance of the construction of the Baltic–White Sea Canal, he wrote:

  Stalin holds a pencil. Before him lies a map of the region. Deserted shores. Remote villages. Virgin soil, covered with boulders. Primeval forests. Too much forest as a matter of fact; it covers the best soil. And swamps. The swamps are always crawling about, making life dull and slovenly. Tillage must be increased. The swamps must be drained … The Karelian Republic wants to enter the stage of classless society as a republic of factories and mills. And the Karelian Republic will enter classless society by changing its own nature.3

  This was much more than mere propagandising. This was a long-awaited answer to Chernyshevsky’s question What Is to Be Done? Gorky saw the stroiki as ushering in a heroic age that would fulfil centuries of utopian yearning. The Russian people had woken at last from their hypnotic slumber and were fast evolving toward total mastery of the planet. ‘Our brave and mighty activities directing the physical energies of the people to the struggle with nature allow the people to feel their true purpose: to gain possession of the forces of nature and to tame its fury.’4

  Significantly, this mastery would involve not only the subjugation of external nature, but also the absolute c
onquest of human nature, which in Gorky’s estimation was ‘nothing but an instinctive anarchism of a personality brought up through the ages of pressure placed on it by the class state’. You didn’t have to get very far into Belomor, Gorky’s celebratory account of the canal, to find this lesson spelled out for you. The motto on the flyleaf reads: ‘Man, in changing nature, changes himself.’

  *

  How far human nature might be changed – by urban living, by regulated work patterns, and by machines themselves – was of course a question considered seriously from the very beginning of the revolution by men like Alexei Gastev and Nikolai Bernstein. But just as in agriculture – where ‘the mass experience of leading state farms, machine and tractor stations, and collective farms’ outweighed the scientific papers of Vavilov and Maksimov and Meister – so in industry, isolated achievements on the factory floor came to wield far more influence over government policy than Gastev and Bernstein’s studies of ergonomic motion.

  In 1927, a miner called Alexei Grigorevich Stakhanov went to work in the Tsentralnaya-Irmino mine in the Donbass region of the Ukraine. In 1933, he became a jackhammer operator. He was no superman, but he was energetic and intelligent. He saw a way of organising his work crew so as to increase the amount of coal they were able to dig in a single shift. On 31 August 1935, it was reported that Stakhanov had mined a record 102 tonnes of coal in 4 hours and 45 minutes – fourteen times his quota. Barely three weeks later, on 19 September, Stakhanov and his crew (who were rarely if ever mentioned in the press) more than doubled this record.

  Stakhanov’s achievement was made an example for others to follow. His story was so remarkable that on 16 December 1935 he appeared in the United States – on the cover of Time magazine.

  Others rushed to follow Stakhanov’s example, and newspapers and newsreels across the Soviet Union celebrated their efforts. In Gorki, a worker in a car factory forged nearly a thousand crankshafts in a single shift. A shoemaker in Leningrad turned out 1,400 pair of shoes in a day. On a collective farm three female ‘Stakhanovites’ proved they could cut sugar beet faster than was thought humanly possible. Such workers were awarded higher pay, better food, access to luxury goods and improved accommodation, and soon Stakhanovism was a mass movement. ‘In factories and even in scientific institutes’, wrote the American psychologist Richard Schultz in 1935, ‘the workers’ names may be posted on a bulletin board opposite a bird, deer, rabbit, tortoise, or snail relative to the speed with which they turn out their work. A great deal of prestige is attached to the “shock brigade” worker.’5

  On the collective farms, Stakhanovism was greeted in the main with apathy. ‘We have done enough fulfilling; our horses will all be dead by spring,’ one exhausted farmhand complained.6 In the factories, meanwhile, the push for extra production could as easily disrupt the running of a factory as improve it, with sections of the same shop unable to work together. Improved productivity itself served to accelerate the breakdown of aged, shoddily made and badly maintained equipment, so that along with the production problems came a shocking spike in the number of industrial accidents. Then there were the Stakhanovites themselves – young, quarrelsome egotists who, in their desire to get ahead, made life miserable for everyone else. Resentment towards Stakhanovite ‘shockworkers’ often boiled over into punch-ups and machine wrecking.

  These problems might have spelled the end of the Stakhanovite movement, were it not for Stalin’s extraordinarily adept way of orchestrating violence. If the Stakhanovites were causing trouble in the factories, were they not the perfect mechanism for getting rid of bourgeois factory managers? When trouble broke out between plant managers and would-be Stakhanovites in 1936, local press and party organisations were encouraged to take the side of the Stakhanovites. Several important plant and mine directors were fired; some were arrested for sabotage. And the optimism and get-go of Stakhanovism gave way, as the 1930s progressed, to a very different kind of campaign: one that highlighted the activities in industry of ‘wreckers’ and ‘saboteurs’.7

  *

  Stakhanov was one of the more exceptional products of the revolution. But attempts to mass-produce him failed. In the end, Stalin’s bureaucrats settled on a very different idea of how human nature might be industrialised. They learned how to use the labour camp.

  Stalin’s labour camps were more than simple borrowings from tsarist history. They evolved as a direct consequence of the hero projects of the Five-Year Plans, and they attained their grotesque scale and ubiquity thanks to that other great heroic project of the early Soviet era – the attempt to settle Siberia.

  From the beginning, Soviet attempts to exploit the vast natural resources of that harsh and gigantic region had required more than volunteers.8 Prison labour was considered essential from the very first. This conclusion was less harsh than it sounds. For generations the tsars had sent their criminals and political opponents to terms of exile in Siberia. The Soviet use of this system to establish new settlements and new industries in a hitherto neglected region was considered a rather far-sighted piece of penal reform. It was the sheer scale of the work required to settle Siberia which led the labour camp (or ‘gulag’) system to far outgrow anything conceived of by the tsars. At the time of the original 1929 order launching the Soviet labour-camp system, the USSR had a prison population of around 23,000. Less than five years later, half a million Soviet citizens were inmates.

  There was an eerie idealism to the whole venture – one not that far removed from the ideas that powered the transportation of British convicts to Australia, as though moral correction would naturally follow from the rigours and rough satisfactions of the pioneering life. Henrikh Yagoda, deputy head of the OGPU, felt it ‘necessary to convert the camps into colonising settlements’. Selected convicts would be sent to various regions to construct huts – 200–300 per settlement. Then they could send for their families (why anyone in their right mind would invite their family to the largely uninhabited wastes of Siberia was a point Yagoda did not address) and ‘in their free time, when the forestry work is over … they will breed pigs, mow grass, and catch fish. At first they will live on rations, and later at their own expense.’9

  Needless to say, the future for these select convicts was not quite so bucolic in practice. Faced with the harsh production demands of the First Five-Year Plan, mine and factory directors clamoured for access to this new labour pool. In 1931 the Urals Metallurgical Trust sent a telegram to the local labour department complaining that out of the 2,700 recruits arriving that year, a thousand had already left. Far better, they said, to use prison labour for those jobs where the conditions were particularly harsh. Peasants were less likely to run away while they were being watched by armed guards. By the late 1930s forced labour was used in all major industries in the Urals, and a million people were prisoners in the gulag. It was their labour that created most of Siberia’s vast industrial plants: the Norilsk copper–nickel factory, the works in Komsomolsk-on-the-Amur, Novosibirsk, and many other Siberian cities and towns.

  Created in November 1931 and operating under the secret police, Dalstroi – the Main Administration for Construction in the Far North – prospected and mined for gold in north-eastern Siberia, particularly in the Kolyma basin. Up to the summer of 1937 Eduard Berzin, its first director, made the agency profitable while still keeping conditions, even for convict labourers, relatively humane. Then in June he was denounced by Stalin himself for ‘the coddling of prisoners’. Berzin was shot, and Dalstroi’s new leadership turned its mines and camps into the USSR’s most brutal, making Kolyma and Magadan names to rival Auschwitz and Majdanek. The gulag and its pool of slave labour were by now essential tools in Soviet industrialisation. Prison camps were self-sufficient, even profitable. They were in no sense correctional facilities. They were state businesses.

  *

  Did Maxim Gorky know how his beloved Baltic–White Sea Canal was constructed? Did he know that from a total of around 126,000 workers, at least 12,000 died in
its construction?

  Did he know the cost Stalin’s stroiki exacted in lives? That to build Dneprostroi, 10,000 villagers were forced out of their homes? That workers endured temperatures below –13 °C in the winter, and that tornado-strength winds whipped their tents away in the summer? That flour had to be delivered to the construction town at night under armed guard to prevent theft?

  It is possible that Gorky’s propaganda work was a sophisticated smokescreen, and he was dabbling with conspiracies to oust Stalin from power. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that Gorky viewed Stalin as a less than ideal choice of leader. When the satirist and novelist Yevgeny Zamyatin was finally allowed to emigrate in 1931, he went round to say goodbye to Gorky, his old friend and patron, and Gorky told him: ‘Leave, leave. We have yet to say who among us here will triumph, this’ – and he made a gesture depicting Stalin’s moustache – ‘or our “Ivanoviches”’, by whom he meant the leaders of the right opposition, Alexei Ivanovich Rykov and Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin.10

  *

  By 1934 the leaders of that opposition were ready to act and were looking for a likely candidate to take over from Stalin as leader. They elected to approach the hard-drinking, foul-mouthed Sergei Mironovich Kirov, head of the Leningrad Party machine and one of Stalin’s closest and most trusted lieutenants. Kirov, well read and garrulous, was hugely popular in government circles and had proved himself capable of arguing with Stalin – and besting him – in Politburo sessions.

  Senior Politburo members asked Kirov to move from Leningrad to Moscow to focus full-time on his work as one of three Central Committee secretaries. Given Kirov’s popularity, his move to Moscow would have greatly simplified Stalin’s removal. But Kirov, a dedicated and loyal Stalinist, declined the offer and – fatally – reported the entire conversation to Stalin.