by Simon Ings
13. Kojevnikov, Stalin’s Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists, p. 135.
14. Klaus Fuchs returned to Britain in June 1946 and became head of the theoretical physics division of the Atomic Energy Establishment at Harwell where he helped the British to build their own bomb. Fuchs’s reputation as a spy has overshadowed a much more striking fact about him: that he contributed significantly to three bomb projects – the American, the British, and the Russian. See Matin Zuberi, ‘Stalin and the Bomb’, Strategic Analysis 23, no. 7 (1999), pp. 1133–53.
15. On paper, Zavenyagin was a high-placed gulag bureaucrat, answering to the Chief Directorate of Camps for Mining and Metallurgy Enterprises. As head of the Ninth Chief Directorate of the NKVD, however, he had special responsibilities. Among them was the supervision of Laboratory No. 2. For more on Zavenyagin’s activities in Berlin, see Pavel V. Oleynikov, ‘German Scientists in the Soviet Atomic Project’, Nonproliferation Review 7, no. 2 (2000), pp. 1–30.
16. Riehl, Stalin’s Captive, p. 164.
17. Quoted in Oleynikov, ‘German Scientists in the Soviet Atomic Project’, p. 10.
18. Interview of Nikolaus Riehl by Mark Walker. Transcript, 17 October 1985. American Institute of Physics. https://www.aip.org/history-programs/niels-bohr-library/oral-histories/4844–2.
19. Once when the foreign intelligence expert Leonid Kvasnikov was reporting to Beria on the latest data from overseas, Beria threatened him: ‘If this is disinformation, I’ll put you all in the cellar.’ See Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, p. 211.
20. Kurchatov’s laboratory equipment churns out 24 kilowatts of electricity to this day, making it the world’s oldest operating reactor.
21. Montefiore, Stalin, p. 513.
22. Alexei B. Kojevnikov, ‘Piotr Kapitza and Stalin’s Government: A Study in Moral Choice’, Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences, 22 (1991), pp. 131–64. See also David Holloway, ‘The Scientist and the Tyrant’, New York Review of Books (1 March 1990).
23. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, p. 139.
18: ‘How did anyone dare insult Comrade Lysenko?’
The August 1948 Session of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences, held in the club of the Ministry of Agriculture in Moscow.
I received a report that a human head and the soles of the feet had been found under a little bridge near Vasilkov, a town outside Kiev. Apparently the corpse had been eaten.1
Nikita Khrushchev, recollecting the 1946–7 famine
In mid-June 1945 the Soviet government flew a large party of foreign scientists to Moscow. Some 122 delegates from eighteen countries, including the United States, Britain, France and Canada, found themselves being chauffeured round the war-torn and devastated capital in comfortable cars. Their rooms were luxurious, their meals decadent. Until the end of the month, in Moscow and in Leningrad, a virtually bankrupt Soviet government treated representatives of world science to every luxury.
On the last day the Kremlin held a special banquet for its guests. Eric Ashby, a botanist sent to Moscow as Counsellor of the Australian Legation, recalls:
When all were assembled the music stopped and the curtains of the great Bolshoi stage parted to reveal, brilliantly lit by floodlights, an impressive and unusual spectacle.
At the front, behind a long table covered with a red cloth, sat the Council of the Academy of Sciences. They were backed by ranks of other distinguished scholars. The impressive depth of the Bolshoi stage was occupied by a huge bank of hydrangeas. Among the heaped flowers stood a bust of Lenin three times life size; behind Lenin, in a setting of red curtains, hung a picture about twelve feet high by eight feet wide of Stalin in the uniform of a Marshal.2
The occasion – the 220th anniversary of the Academy of Sciences – produced a lot of promises. Peter Kapitsa declared in his speech that there was really no such thing as Soviet science or British science; there was only one science, dedicated to the betterment of humankind. Molotov – to many a guest’s bemusement – concurred, promising the ‘most favourable conditions’ for the development of science and technology and for ‘closer ties of Soviet science with world science’.
There was a motive for this extraordinary thaw in relations. The Soviet government badly needed international support if it was going to recover from the war. International contacts were now considered a national asset. What better way to arrange a wide pro-Soviet propaganda campaign in the West than have science’s chattering classes take an interest in the Soviet project?
Eric Ashby, a critical but not unfriendly observer, got a book out of the experience, Scientist in Russia. In it he noticed that a visiting scientist had to cultivate some ‘sales resistance’ when he visited an agricultural research institute, ‘for he will hear stories of perennial wheat with prodigious harvests, bacterial treatment of seeds which doubles the yield, new potatoes for the Arctic, and new sheep for deserts, which do not stand up to international standards of criticism’.
Ashby was particularly curious to find out where, on the spectrum between iconoclast and plain fraud, the notorious agronomist Trofim Lysenko sat. With his friend Julian Huxley, he arranged for Lysenko to give a special talk at the Academy’s jubilee, translated for the benefit of English-speakers. From this lecture they learned, to their mounting embarrassment, Lysenko’s views on sexual reproduction: how the best oocyte chooses the best spermatozoon, and everything occurs as a ‘love-based marriage’ during which one cell ‘eats’ another. Both visitors shuddered at Lysenko’s description of sex cells ‘eating’ each other. Huxley hid his discomfort by fussing with his glasses. Afterwards they spoke privately to Lysenko, in an attempt to make sense of what they had just heard. To their dismay, they found that the translator had been extremely proficient, accurately rendering some of the maddest material they had ever encountered. ‘Fertilisation is mutual digestion,’ Lysenko explained,
The egg digests the sperm, and at the same time the sperm digests the egg. They assimilate each other. This assimilation is not complete. We know in our persons what happens when it is so. We belch. Segregation is Nature’s belching. Unassimilated material is belched out.
Huxley and Ashby left the sumptuous lecture-hall in stunned silence. When they gained the street their eyes met – and, according to the geneticist Raissa Berg, who was with them, ‘these two tall restrained men simultaneously put their hands on each other’s shoulders and burst out laughing’.3
Ashby devoted a considerable portion of his account of his year-long visit to Lysenko, and noted that biologists put little stock in his queer ideas. His anomalous status greatly puzzled Western commentators, none more so than Robert Cook, writing in the Journal of Heredity in 1949:
In a country as great as Russia, with such an impressive body of first-class scientists, who are familiar with science in the rest of the world and are contributing substantially to it, the ‘new genetics’ is a strange anomaly. It is well past its zenith but it still flourishes in uneasy truce beside the ‘old genetics’. Lysenko and his school are clearly a deep embarrassment to bona-fide biologists; yet the school goes on, and Lysenko was made a Hero of Socialist Labour, the Soviet equivalent of an Order of Merit, in June 1945. How can the Academy tolerate such a departure from its catholic standards? And how can Lysenko pose as leader of genetics when he is patently unfamiliar with most of the advances in the subject over the last twenty-five years?4
The question was a good one, and it was being asked in Russia, not just within the Academy but in the corridors of government. The more the Soviets engaged with world science, the more Lysenko proved a political embarrassment. Around the talented geneticist Anton Zhebrak – a Party member and president of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences – an anti-Lysenko campaign began to form. In May 1945 Zhebrak went to San Francisco, to the founding conference of the United Nations. A few weeks before, he had an audience with Molotov, the minister of foreign affairs, and one of the subjects of their conversation was the situation in Soviet ge
netics. It was presumably with Molotov’s permission that Zhebrak, once in the United States, set about spreading the word among the genetics community there: Lysenko was out. As the evolutionary biologist Isador Lerner reported to Hermann Muller, ‘It will not be too long before Lysenko has enough rope to hang himself. In the present situation, the support of American geneticists is tremendously important.’5
Critics of Lysenko in the West needed little encouragement. Many blamed him personally for the disappearance of his mentor and rival, the much-revered Nikolai Vavilov. Publication in Russia of Lysenko’s book Heredity and Its Variability in 1943 had coincided unhappily with the release of definite information that Vavilov was dead, and had inspired several critical articles in British and American scientific journals.6
This kind of criticism, however – which condemned, either by implication or quite stridently, the way Russia treated its elites – was unlikely to be of much practical use to living Russian geneticists. The chance for a more targeted, scientifically rigorous campaign against Lysenko arose early in the spring of 1945 when the publishing company McGraw-Hill sent the Russian edition of Lysenko’s book to Leslie Dunn. They were thinking about commissioning an English translation.
Dunn, leaping at the opportunity, immediately recruited the Russian ex-pat geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky to read and review the book, and wrote back to the publisher:
Notwithstanding the fact that most geneticists here believe that [Lysenko’s] views are erroneous, he is a person of such importance and the question at issue is so important that it would probably be of much service both to American and Russian science to have this book available in English, even though the views expressed prove to be wrong.
McGraw-Hill backed out of the scheme in the end, but Dunn and Dobzhansky decided to publish a translation under their own auspices. As Dunn wrote to Lerner:
We believe the best way to deal with Lysenko’s influence is to make known his ideas and evidence in the form in which he himself has published them. We have no doubt that the judgment of Americans will be adverse and that this will strengthen the hands of those in the Soviet Union who oppose him.
Dobzhansky started the translation. It was, he told Dunn, ‘one of the most unpleasant tasks I had in my whole life, and surely I would never undertake a thing like that for money – it can be done only for a “cause”’.7
Heredity and Its Variability was published by King’s Crown Press in 1946. A storm of embarrassment and hilarity ensued. Fellow travellers, apostates and lifelong critics of the Soviet project tussled in the columns of most major newspapers. In Britain, Hermann Muller and George Bernard Shaw gave readers of The Listener the greatest intellectual punch-up that polite publication ever ran.8
With Soviet pride no longer firmly nailed to the Lysenkoist standard, real work could begin again, and Soviet biologists once more found themselves part of an international community. At the Academy of Sciences, an ‘International Publishing House’ was established. The Academy’s Bulletin ran special columns entitled ‘On the Pages of Foreign Scientific Periodicals’ and ‘The Western Press on Soviet Science’. The exchange of genetics literature and even of Drosophila stocks was revived. Large numbers of reprints, journals and books were sent to Russian geneticists, and research papers of Soviet geneticists found their way into Western periodicals. Alexander Serebrovksy, Anton Zhebrak and Koltsov’s successor Nikolai Dubinin used American journals to announce a new dawn in Soviet genetics, and worked hard to make that claim a reality, chasing foreign contacts, and grabbing at the suggestion from Western colleagues that they host the next international congress of genetics in the Soviet Union.
Lysenko and his colleagues could only fulminate in the popular press, but even here they found their currency devalued. The Party apparatus, normally so sensitive to adverse headlines and angry letters, had stopped listening. When opponents of Lysenko tried to get Prezent dismissed as Leningrad University’s head of Darwinism, the Party cell of Lysenko’s Lenin Academy issued a memorandum ‘on the controversy in genetics’, claiming (quite correctly) that geneticists were trying to undermine Lysenko’s authority. They asked no less a figure than Andrei Zhdanov to take ‘appropriate measures’. But Zhdanov – returned from Leningrad a hero, now Stalin’s right-hand man and tipped to be his successor – never replied.
*
Andrei Zhdanov’s rise to the brink of absolute power was, even by Russian standards, a curiously gloomy one. Barely into his fifties, ill-health had already reduced him to an old man. His own conservatism, his hatred of cultural pretensions (indeed, his hatred of large swathes of culture) made him a natural if regrettable companion for Stalin, a self-isolated man whose own grip on reality was, by the war’s end, beginning to slip.
Together, like two crabby professors, Stalin and Zhdanov set about making over post-war Russia in their own nineteenth-century image. Writers from Akhmatova to Zoshchenko (once Stalin’s favourite author) were condemned for ‘defaming Soviet reality’. Shostakovich and Prokofiev were blamed for composing ‘formalist’ music that ordinary people found ‘incomprehensible’.9
It is hard to say whether Zhdanov’s mounting exhaustion made him more reactionary, or whether his reactionary temperament drove him to exhaustion. The one fed the other. Dmitry Shepilov, a senior Party official, remembered that Zhdanov ‘had to occupy himself with the most varied questions: the re-evacuation of factories and the abolition of bread ration-cards, the growth of fishing and the development of book-printing, the production of cement and the increase of scientists’ wages, the sowing of flax, and television’.
Then there were the ideological questions: Zhdanov seems to have had an unlimited appetite for those, and rather than waiting for his staff to come up with the answers he insisted on conjuring them up himself by re-reading classic Marxist and Leninist texts. Admirable attention to detail, perhaps, but not a survival strategy for a powerful man in ill health who was anyway beset with the obligation to attend Stalin’s notorious dinners – all-night affairs of numbing tedium, and Stalin’s favourite method of breaking the spirit of anyone who got close to him. These ‘informal’ evenings at Stalin’s dacha surely drove Zhdanov to drink, though his doctors had told him not to touch the stuff.
With Stalin now in virtual retirement, Zhdanov had no chance to sleep in. He had control of the Party. Staff whispered about ‘our crown prince’. Bureaucrats would bow to him and scrape their way in reverse out of his presence: ‘and in bowing himself out, he backed into the door, nervously trying to find the doorknob with his hand’, remembered the Yugoslav ambassador.10
Zhdanov handled the pressure of Stalin’s favour poorly. Emotionally and physically unfit for the role for which he was being groomed, he grew increasingly touchy and paranoid. Of course some form of ‘cold war’ between former Second World War allies was inevitable, given the nature, power and potential of atomic energy. But the tone of that conflict within Russia – the extreme isolationism, the extreme chauvinism, and the undoing of all the benefits the end of the war had ushered in – was set a good two years before Russia ever acquired its bomb, when Zhdanov found he had been left out of a conversation about the treatment of cancer.
The affair had its roots in the work of two doctors: Nina Kliueva and her husband Grigory Roskin. Roskin, who had once been a pupil of Nikolai Koltsov, had been studying Trypanosoma cruzi – the tropical parasitic microorganism that causes Chagas disease. When he found that the parasite had a particular appetite for tumour cells, he and his wife Nina, a microbiologist, set about extracting the protein responsible for this anti-cancer effect. In March 1946 Kliueva and Roskin published their clinical results. Their tumour suppressor ‘Preparation KR’, or ‘cruzin’, was harmless for human beings and in several cases caused tumours to dissolve.
It was a remarkable claim, the science was solid, media interest was high; even Western newspapers ran the story.
What Roskin and Kliueva needed now, if they were going to develop their work, was for
eign equipment for their laboratory. Immediately after the war, and with a savage famine to contend with, obviously the government had no spare funds, but the minister of health, Georgy Miterev, invited US ambassador Walter Bedell Smith to visit Kliueva and Roskin in an attempt to awaken American interest.
Smith visited on 20 June 1946: ‘“K” and “R” turned out to be wife and husband, charming, modest, and obviously devoted to each other and to their work.’ Smith proposed the Soviets and Americans collaborate on an institute for cancer research: if Kliueva and Roskin could deliver the ideas, America would deliver the equipment.
Georgy Miterev happily signed off on the idea, and on 6 July 1946 his ministry officially conveyed the good news to Kliueva and Roskin.
But though both the Foreign Affairs Ministry and the Ministry of State Security had cleared Smith’s visit, the Central Committee had somehow never been informed. On 3 August 1946, Andrei Zhdanov received the report on Smith’s visit, and exploded.
The report confirmed many of his and Stalin’s worst suspicions about the subversive ways of foreign intelligence. (Smith’s later career rather proved the point: in 1950 he became director of the CIA.) Furthermore, Stalin and Zhdanov saw in the report an example of government bureaucrats bypassing the Party as if it had no authority in such matters. Zhdanov saw to it that the joint institute never took shape. He took no steps against the researchers themselves though, and managed to persuade Stalin and the three deputy premiers to issue a secret Council of Ministers resolution to support their laboratory.
The connection with the United States, however, once forged, was not so easily broken. In autumn 1946 Vasily Parin, secretary of the newly organised Academy of Medical Sciences, and quite unaware of any problem, accepted an American invitation to tour hospitals and cancer centres in the USA. As he was packing he dropped into his luggage a manuscript copy of a book, already published and freely available in Russia, called The Biotherapy of Malignant Tumours – by Kliueva and Roskin. He also threw in some samples of cruzin, though before handing them over to his interested guests he made sure, once he reached America, to get permission from the foreign affairs minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, who was also visiting.