Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

It is possible that Muller had no idea just how unlikely his greeting was, and how fragile his welcome. He seems to have had a talent for bad timing. Having arrived in Berlin in time for the ascension of the National Socialists, he now came as an honoured guest of the Soviet state even as the country was gearing for another world war with an isolationist zeal that bordered on xenophobia. Beginning in 1934, the exchange of reprints with foreign scholars became officially possible only through the All-Union Society of Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries (VOKS), in all but name a branch of the secret police. Papers submitted for publication abroad were censored by the Main Directorate on Literature and Presses (Glavlit). The Main Directorate also controlled the distribution of foreign literature, including scientific journals and books, and periodically removed ‘harmful’ literature from libraries. The Academy of Sciences stopped electing foreign members, and in 1936 a broad press campaign was organised against ‘servility to the West’. By 1939 Soviet science’s international contacts were almost completely severed.

  Muller seems to have taken no note at all of the worsening political situation. He had come to the Soviet Union hoping to create a socialist eugenic society, and saw no reason to divert from his grand purpose. In his book Out of the Night, published in Britain and the United States in 1935, he resurrected, without attribution, Alexander Serebrovsky’s discredited proposal from 1929 recommending a large-scale programme of human artificial insemination, using the sperm of eugenically selected male donors. ‘How many women,’ he enthused, ‘in an enlightened community devoid of superstitious taboos and of sex slavery, would be eager and proud to bear and rear a child of Lenin or of Darwin!’8 Neither the Great Purge nor the press attacks on fascists deterred him. In the spring of 1936 he sent a copy of Out of the Night to Stalin.

  Dear Comrade Stalin! As a scientist with confidence in the ultimate Bolshevik triumph throughout all possible spheres of human endeavour, I come to you with a matter of vital importance arising out of my own science – biology, and in particular, genetics … The matter is … the conscious control of human biological evolution. This is a development that bourgeois society has been quite unable to look squarely in the face.9

  Muller asserted in his letter that

  it will be possible within only a few generations to bestow the gift even of so-called ‘genius’ upon practically every individual in the population – in fact, to raise all the masses to the level at which now stand our most gifted individuals, those who are helping most to blaze new trails to life.

  Most people could have ‘the innate qualities of such men as Lenin, Newton, Leonardo, Pasteur, Beethoven, Omar Khayyam, Pushkin, Sun Yat Sen, Marx, or even to possess their varied faculties combined.’

  ‘After twenty years’, he wrote,

  there should already be very noteworthy results accruing to the benefit of the nation. And if at that time capitalism still exists beyond our borders, this vital wealth in our youthful cadres … could not fail to be of very considerable advantage for our side.

  This claim put in the shade even Lysenko’s bid to grow new varieties of maize in two-and-a-half years. Muller’s promise of quick results reflects the same kind of opportunism. But his flattery of Stalin and use of Marxist rhetoric all came to nought: Stalin hated the book10 for the very same reasons Bolshevik commentators and headline writers had hated Serebrovsky’s 1929 paper. Unless you had a firm grasp of the science, and a deep knowledge of the political background, Out of the Night appeared to be peddling the very racial theories spouted by the fascists. With the rise of the Nazis in Germany, Russian leaders and thinkers were frantically back-pedalling on their own Nietzschean excesses. Talk of creating new forms of human being – a commonplace of Bolshevik rhetoric just a decade before – was now considered fascist. Muller had no idea just how much damage he had done to himself, to his friends, and to the field of Soviet genetics.

  The first intimation that something had gone wrong came on 14 November 1936, when the Politburo decided ‘to cancel the convocation of the Seventh International Genetics Congress in the USSR in 1937’. Muller was involved in organising the congress, which was meant to be an important political coup for the Soviet Union. He was bitterly disappointed.

  The congress’s ambitious programme had included numerous excursions to universities, research institutes, laboratories and museums, not only in Moscow, but also in the provinces. A centrepiece of the show was supposed to be the brand new home for the Academy’s Institute of Genetics. But its construction, begun in Moscow in April 1936, was taking much longer than expected. Turning the cancellation into a mere postponement, an official Soviet announcement explained the confusion: the congress was simply not going to be ready in time. This explanation was probably true.11

  Nonetheless, in the autumn of 1936, Muller privately let his friends know that he ‘was not overenthusiastic about recent developments in the USSR’ and if he ‘could get a decent job somewhere else after the congress’, he would be ‘glad to accept’.

  The whole eugenics issue was becoming especially sensitive, open to misinterpretation and false assertion. The Spanish Civil War was bringing the Soviet Union and Germany to the brink of open conflict. The USSR was the only state openly supporting the Republicans, while Germany backed Franco. Spying for Germany was a typical charge during the show trials of that time, and the Soviet press had launched an extensive campaign of antifascist propaganda.

  On 13 November 1936 the Science Section of the Moscow Party called a meeting of biologists and physicians at the House of Scientists to unmask ‘the fraud of Fascist and para-Fascist scientists’ and the ‘racist falsification of biology’. Medical genetics was denounced as ‘fascist’ – invective that found its way into print in Under the Banner of Marxism through its editor Ernst Kolman. An article under the uncompromising headline ‘The blackguard nonsense of Fascism and our Medical–Biological science’ attacked Levit and his co-workers for holding ‘Fascist views’ on human genetics. On 4 December Levit was expelled from the Party ‘for smuggling hostile theories into the publications of the Institute, and for Menshevist idealism’, and found himself being followed about the streets – none too subtly – by agents of the NKVD.

  On 14 December, the New York Times published a dispatch from its Moscow correspondent covering the cancellation of the Seventh International Congress of Genetics.

  An interesting story of a schism among Soviet geneticists, some of the most prominent among whom are accused by Communist party authorities of holding German Fascist views on genetics and even being shielders of ‘Trotskyists,’ lies behind the cancellation. The fact that so many of the Soviet Union’s most distinguished geneticists are under fire is believed to be motive for the government action.

  The dispatch also announced that Nikolai Vavilov, the president of the forthcoming congress, and Izrail Agol, the former Rockefeller fellow, had been arrested. On 17 December, the New York Times added fuel to the fire, publishing a sarcastic editorial on the cancellation of the genetics congress under the title ‘Science and Dictators’.

  TASS, the Soviet news agency, routinely prepared internal government summaries of important Western news, and on 19 December, its ‘Bulletin of Foreign Information’ landed on Stalin’s desk. Two days later Izvestiia published an unsigned editorial article, heavy edited by Stalin, under the title ‘A Response to the Slanderers from “Science Service” and “New York Times”’.

  ‘The New York Times simply lied about Vavilov’s arrest,’ the editorial declared. True, Izrail Agol had been arrested, but his arrest had nothing to do with genetics or the congress; he had been arrested for ‘his direct connection to Trotskyist murderers’. The next day a lengthy ‘Telegram to the New York Times’ appeared, in which Vavilov angrily denied the story of his own detention.

  These controversies came to a head just a few days later at the fourth annual session of the Lenin Academy, that vast conglomerate of all things agricultural. The organisers of the session, which ran from 19 to 2
6 December, had never planned it to be some kind of extra-judicial venue to try genetics. The session’s main purpose was simply to sum up the results from the Lenin Academy’s ‘socialist competition’ in plant breeding. But the relatively small number of people involved in genetics meant that a political controversy in one corner very quickly coloured people’s responses to the entire field.

  The unmasking of apparently ‘fascist’ scientists with strong professional and personal links to the Lenin Academy, even as the Soviet people were recovering from the worst famine in living memory, was a press story worth pursuing. Daily reports in Pravda built up tremendous public interest in the session, which had to be relocated half way through when the audience of 700 expanded to more than 3,000.

  Alexander Ivanovich Muralov, the new head of the Lenin Academy, tried to maintain an even-handed debate. Both Lysenko and his allies and the geneticists had reason to trust him. Muralov had replaced Vavilov as president of the Lenin Academy eighteen months before, delivering a speech entitled ‘Do Not Lag Behind Life’, which praised Lysenko’s Odessa Institute as a model of close contact between science and farms. On the other hand, relations between Vavilov and Muralov were good. Losing the presidency to Muralov had been a demotion, obviously, but not an unwelcome one for Vavilov, given the bureaucratic pressures on him. (He was now one of three vice-presidents, which gave him time for science; the presidency had been a full-time bureaucratic post.) Indeed Vavilov, as president of the forthcoming genetics congress, had put Muralov at the head of the organising committee because Muralov’s political connections made him the better spokesman.

  Muralov’s reputation was one of warmth and fairness – but he was in serious trouble, and very distracted. Trotsky had been his friend and champion: ‘Muralov is a magnificent giant, as fearless as he is kind,’ Trotsky had written. ‘In the most difficult situations he radiated calm, warmth, and confidence.’12 That sort of affiliation was by now quite enough to get a person killed. Muralov’s older brother Nikolai was already in prison as a Trotskyite and an ‘enemy of the people’ and was about to appear at the second Moscow show-trial in January 1937. (He was shot; Alexander Muralov was arrested that autumn, and executed in March 1938.)

  There was another problem with Muralov – one which came to shape the Lenin Academy’s session in a way that sent a chill through Vavilov and the field of genetics: Muralov knew nothing whatsoever about genetics. Indeed, he made Lysenko look knowledgeable. And he believed (or at any rate fervently hoped) that the ‘criterion of practice’ would solve all controversies.

  This belief in the ‘criterion of practice’ was knocked sideways from the first when Lenin Academy members Peter Konstantinov and Peter Lisitsyn, together with the Bulgarian geneticist and plant breeder Doncho Kostov, repeated charges they had already made in print about Lysenko’s scientific work in Odessa. This account was so negative as to suggest that Lysenko’s vernalisation, to which the state had already devoted huge resources, was nothing more than a fraud. They cited cases where vernalised grain had been given preferential treatment in trials; and others where negative results had been discarded. They considered Lysenko incapable of holding a ‘rational discussion’.

  This should have been a knock-out blow, and the focus of the whole session, but Lysenko blindsided Muralov by simply brushing these accusations aside. Such quibbling belonged to old and outdated bourgeois science, he said. Why were they even talking about this? The successes of vernalisation could ‘be read in the press every day, centrally, regionally and locally’. As far as Lysenko was concerned, the test of practice was to be measured in point sizes and column inches. Anything else was obfuscation.

  Muralov, president of a vast government organisation that had staked its reputation on vernalisation, let the matter go.

  The second half of the Lenin Academy’s session was devoted to genetics. Lysenko’s recent pronouncements – embracing Ivan Michurin as the founder of a ‘correct’ homespun biology, denying the reality of the gene, and so forth – were hugely embarrassing for Vavilov, who still wished to be considered Lysenko’s supporter and patron. In his opening speech, Vavilov attempted to smother the controversy, but his equivocations convinced no one. His insincerity actually drove one of his students to Lysenko’s camp, and in declaring his defection, the student lampooned his old teacher for failing to declare himself. Vavilov was ‘a vegetative chimera, whose individual parts are incompatible. He is both … a Michurinist and an anti-Michurinist; he is both a Lysenkoite and an anti-Lysenkoite.’13

  That speech – and that desertion – wrought a change in Vavilov. Clearly, the centre would not hold. Agrobiology was splitting, irrevocably, into two camps. He was going to have to take sides.

  In one corner stood Lysenko, Prezent and a group of Lysenko’s associates from the Odessa Institute; on the other, a group comprising Koltsov, Muller and a small but very high-functioning caucus of biologists who had dedicated themselves to establishing a Marxist position in their field long before the effort had become both compulsory and vacuous. Serebrovsky, Mikhail Zavadovsky, Dubinin and Anton Zhebrak – like Lysenko, a peasant’s son – were all sincere Marxists, and their opposition to Lysenko, who seemed determined to pit Marxism against good scientific practice, was loud and fierce.

  The urgency these men brought to the debate over genetics was new to Vavilov. Regardless of what they believed, Vavilov and Muralov and the plant breeders of the Lenin Academy had a vast bureaucracy and a huge range of activities not related to genetics to fall back on, should genetics become politically dangerous. Serebrovksy and his fellows had no such easy escape route. They were animal geneticists. They were committed wholeheartedly to the reality of the gene. Their jobs, careers and reputations depended on it. They had everything to lose.

  Serebrovsky spoke for them all: ‘Under the supposedly revolutionary slogans “For a truly Soviet genetics”, “Against bourgeois genetics”, “For an undistorted Darwin”, and so forth,’ he declared, ‘we have a fierce attack on the greatest achievements of the twentieth century, we have an attempt to throw us backward a half-century.’14

  If the passions of the animal geneticists startled Vavilov, their effect on Lysenko and Prezent can only be imagined. The pair resorted to ever more extreme theoretical positions, the more the men from the Communist Academy laid into them.

  This, however, in a debate chaired by Muralov, who refused to consider these matters in detail (and who was, in fact, wholly incompetent to do so), merely gave Lysenko and Prezent the opportunity to grandstand. The fact was, Lysenko and Prezent needed opposition. They defined themselves by it. By the time he delivered his speech ‘Two Trends in Genetics’, Lysenko’s method was clear: reject any tenet held by the geneticists and embrace its opposite.15 Lysenko indignantly rejected accusations of denying the existence of genes and in the same breath he stretched the scope of the terms ‘genes’ and ‘genotype’ to the point where they became meaningless. One by one he appropriated genetic terms and rendered them absurd. One fed-up geneticist remarked it was like trying to talk to a builder of perpetual motion machines.

  In several speeches, people offered Lysenko the opportunity to back down from his increasingly crazy position. Clearly, Isaak Prezent was responsible for this mess! Lysenko would have none of it. Praising Prezent, he went so far, finally, as to deny the existence of genes:

  We deny little pieces, corpuscles of heredity. But if a man denies little pieces of temperature, denies the existence of a specific substance of temperature, does that mean that he is denying the existence of temperature as one of the properties of the condition of matter? We deny corpuscles, molecules of some special ‘substance of heredity’, and at the same time we not only recognise but, in our view, incomparably better than you geneticists, we understand hereditary nature, the hereditary basis of plant forms.16

  The Lysenkoists were on firmer ground when it came to politics. It did not matter to them whether you were a bourgeois like Koltsov or a Marxist like Serebrovs
ky. Exploiting ties between the early development of Soviet genetics and eugenics, and tying that to Nazi concepts of a ‘higher race’, the Lysenkoists accused their opponents of nurturing ‘fascist links’.

  The session had from the outset and on purpose omitted human genetics from its agenda. But there was no avoiding it now, and it was in fact the geneticists who brought up the subject, when Nikolai Koltsov read aloud a Russian translation of Hermann Muller’s speech.

  That Muller characterised Lysenko’s ideas as ‘quackery’, ‘astrology’ and ‘alchemy’ surprised no one. As he had himself written to Stalin, when delivering to him that ill-starred book Out of the Night,

  There is one means and only one whereby a worthwhile beginning may be made in the direction of providing more favourable genes. This is not by directly changing the genes, but by bringing about a relatively high rate of multiplication of the most valuable genes that can be found anywhere. For it is not possible to artificially change the genes themselves in any particular, specified directions. The idea that this can be done is an idle fantasy, probably not realisable for thousands of years at least.

  When Muller accused the Lysenkoists of unacceptable views on human genetics, however, the temperature in the hall rose sharply. In a letter to Julian Huxley a little later, Muller explained how he had ‘called attention to the fascist race and class implications of Lamarckism, since if true it would imply the genetic inferiority, at present, of peoples and classes that had lived under conditions giving less opportunity for mental and physical development’. The audience ‘applauded wildly, but there was a terrific storm higher up and I was forced to make a public apology, while the statement was omitted from the published address’.17

  So much for the main body of the speech: Koltsov then gave the floor to Muller for his concluding remarks. Muller dealt with Lysenko’s accusations of ‘fascist links’ with aplomb. If genetics was fascist, how were they to explain the message he had just received from the English geneticist John Haldane, who was dropping his laboratory work in order to go to Madrid to defend it against Franco’s forces? Indeed Muller too had made plans, already advanced, to offer his scientific and medical support to the International Brigades prosecuting the Spanish Civil War!