Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  When Zhdanov heard all this he responded with fury, and on 28 January 1947 he summoned Kliueva to the Kremlin for interrogation. In a Politburo meeting held on the very day the American propaganda station Voice of America began its broadcasts, 17 February 1947, Stalin announced the renewal of the spiritual struggle with the West. All this pervasive ‘kowtowing to the West’ had to stop, once and for all! He picked out the KR Affair as typical. Parin (who had only just got back home) was arrested as soon as the meeting was over. He was later condemned to twenty-five years’ imprisonment as an American spy.

  The question then remained, what to do with the couple whose sterling medical research had triggered the crisis. Specialists now operated much closer to power; they were not to be thrown away without consequence and, anyway, they were now of a generation that had grown up under Soviet rule. They were the state’s own children, and disciplining them required tact as well as authority.

  In late March 1947, ‘honour courts’ appeared in ministries and other central agencies, including the Academy of Sciences. Honour courts were a throwback to tsarist times, when they had dealt with unbecoming conduct in the military – cheating at cards and the like. The court, consisting of the commander and a few other elected members, would conduct its investigation and announce its verdict at a public meeting of the entire corps. There were no official punishments: it was assumed that those judged guilty would be shamed into leaving their unit and sometimes the military altogether. Honour courts were also convened in pre-revolutionary Russian universities to deal with cases of plagiarism.

  Resurrecting them now, the Politburo announced that the courts were to be ‘a new and effective form of the reeducation of the intelligentsia’.11

  Zhdanov directed the trial of Kliueva and Roskin. He even wrote the script, for this was truly a ‘show trial’. Between 5 and 7 June 1947, in a large Moscow theatre, before an audience of more than a thousand specially invited senior bureaucrats, Roskin and Kliueva, those two ‘murderers in white coats’, were accused of treason against the Motherland. ‘Clean yourselves of the disgrace and shame that you have inflicted upon yourselves by your unworthy deeds,’ cried the biochemist Boris Zbarsky, ‘you have never been patriots.’

  The show concluded with a ‘public reprimand’ for Kliueva and Roskin – and that was all. There were no press campaigns, no hostile publicity, no sackings, no internal exile, and no lasting consequences. Just a month later, on 12 July 1947, ministries were ordered ‘to help Professor Kliueva with materials and equipment to build her laboratory’.

  But the purpose of the show trial had been fulfilled: it had reestablished the authority of the Party, which had been so loosened by the massive and indiscriminate expansion of membership during the war. Disclosing information regarded as a state secret was now ‘punishable by confinement in a reformatory labour camp for a term of from eight to twenty years’. The Academy of Sciences issued a special instruction, ‘On Principles of Scientific Publications’, and all scientific journals of the Academy ceased translating their abstracts and tables of contents into English and other Western languages. The column ‘On the Pages of Foreign Scientific Periodicals’ vanished from the Academy’s bulletin. Soviet scientists were told to resign from all foreign scientific societies, and foreign visits were curtailed.

  *

  The ‘patriotic’ campaign triggered by the KR affair ended the post-war thaw in Soviet science, and it could not have happened at a worse time. International contacts were necessary to allow Soviet science to ‘catch up with and overtake’ Western science – and in agronomy they desperately needed to.

  Spanning 1946–7, the third Soviet-era famine was not just the result of bad weather or war-damaged infrastructure. The Party and state, desperate for foreign exchange, had resorted to the very policy the tsarist authorities had followed in 1897: selling grain on the international market, instead of using it to offset the famine at home. Now, though, the consequences were far worse. Even regions not visited by drought, starved. Virtually the whole Soviet countryside suffered, some 100 million people. Two million died. In 1947, one in three children perished in infancy. While the newspapers censored reports of the famine (which remained largely hidden from the West for twenty years, when Khrushchev published his memoirs), it was clear enough that the country was in crisis, and that something would have to be done.

  On New Year’s Eve of 1946, Stalin summoned Trofim Lysenko to the Kremlin.

  The subject of their conversation was so-called branching wheat – a variety of wheat that produces an unusually large number of seeds per plant. There was very little else good you could say about it, though. Its outsize grains were frequently disease-ridden. Ancient Egyptians had tried to grow it and gave it up as a bad job, and ever since it had been used almost exclusively for stock and poultry feed. It might have been possible to make some rather grim pasta out of it – its nearest relative is durum wheat. For bread though, it was useless; it had no gluten to speak of and only half the protein of other varieties.

  The press photograph that emerged from Lysenko’s meeting with Stalin (their only personal exchange) circulated in newspapers, books and posters for years. Indeed, the photograph was the real purpose of the meeting. Branching wheat was virtually inedible, but it was certainly photogenic, and the message was clear – that Stalin and his favourite barefoot scientist were again on top of the situation, poised and ready to pull the nation from the brink of catastrophe.

  If that interpretation is too cynical, then the alternative is actually worse: that Stalin, the old-fashioned Michurinist, who dreamt of one day plucking fruit from Arctic lemon trees, genuinely thought that branching wheat would help to overcome the crisis – and ran roughshod over the expert opinion available to him in order to promote this latest hobby horse.

  Shortly after his meeting with Stalin, 200 kilograms of seeds arrived at Lysenko’s door, to aid his further study of branching wheat. Even Lysenko balked at this one. He had never had much to guide him but the practical wisdom picked up from his father, and while this did him little good in the normal course of things, it surely told him that branching wheat was so much diseased rubbish. He kept Stalin abreast of his work, and he kept promising better results tomorrow, but he made no attempt to conceal the abject failure of his trials.

  If the meeting with Stalin did not provide Lysenko with a magical cure-all for Russia’s famine, it at least saved his career. From this point on, he countered critics and hostile bureaucrats by pointing to his important personal correspondence with the nation’s leader.

  The recent and widely circulated photograph of him in Stalin’s company was especially timely, since the very next month, February 1947, the Western propaganda channel Voice of America started broadcasting; and one of its very first voices belonged to Trofim’s brother Pavel Lysenko. Pavel, who had escaped to the United States after the war, was speaking none too flatteringly of his homeland, and this made Trofim a family member of an enemy of the people, and therefore liable to arrest.12

  The protections offered him by one meeting, and one photograph, would, he knew, not last him long. Lysenko knew he was in trouble, and that the trouble had been long in coming and was impossible to avoid. The number of members of all other Soviet academies had risen after the war. The Lenin Academy under Lysenko, however, had grown moribund. A ministerial report in November 1946 stated that the Lenin Academy was on the point of ‘disintegration’. It had become exclusively preoccupied with problems invented by Lysenko and had neglected everything else. Even Nikolai Tsitsin, the vice-president of the Lenin Academy, ‘in fact does not work in the academy and does not attend its plenary meetings, because of his disagreements with academician Lysenko over organisational matters and principles’.13

  For twelve years Lysenko had held off new elections, waiting in vain for friendly faces to dominate his academy’s candidate lists. By the end of the war, on the contrary, fewer than half of his academicians were still alive. By 1947 arrests and natur
al deaths had reduced the number of academicians to just seventeen. Try as he might to procrastinate even further – pointing Benediktov to his important work on branching wheat and so on – elections had to happen for the Lenin Academy to survive, and new elections, along with a whole raft of other measures, would amount to a wholesale reorganisation.

  Andrei Zhdanov was deaf to Lysenko’s entreaties, so Lysenko now shifted his allegiance to the Council of Ministers. Here the situation was more favourable to him, because in charge of agriculture was Georgy Malenkov, Zhdanov’s life-long rival for political power.

  Malenkov’s star had declined since the end of the war. He had been one of the top five most powerful men in the Soviet Union, supervising military aircraft production and the development of nuclear weapons. Now Stalin was cutting his wartime political aides down to size. (The demotion of Marshal Zhukov and the arrest of Marshal Alexander Novikov of the Air Force, both of whom had dared to criticise some of Stalin’s military decisions in private, were among the more notorious examples of Stalin’s ‘reorganisation’.) In May 1946 Malenkov had been removed from the Party secretariat and sent off to supervise the grain harvest in Central Asia. For several months he and his family had been awaiting his arrest – but it never came. Now, as Zhdanov’s power reached its apogee, and his health began once more to deteriorate, it seemed that the see-saw of Stalin’s political favour was about to lift Malenkov again.

  *

  The autumn of 1947 saw Andrei Zhdanov leaving Moscow for Sochi, a resort town on the Black Sea. At fifty-one, exhaustion and hypertension had finally overtaken him.

  Lysenko took advantage of Zhdanov’s absence, writing directly to Stalin in October concerning branching wheat. Almost immediately, however, he slid into ‘theoretical’ concerns. ‘I dare state’, he wrote, ‘that Mendelism–Morganism, Weismannist neo-Darwinism is a bourgeois metaphysical science of living bodies, of living nature developed in Western capitalist countries not for agricultural purposes but for reactionary eugenics, racism and other purposes.’14

  Three days later, Stalin dashed off a personal response: ‘Regarding the theoretical tenets in biology, I think that Michurin’s tenet is the only scientific tenet,’ he wrote. ‘The future belongs to Michurin.’15

  For some while, Lysenko and his confederates had been citing Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin as an intellectual influence. Michurin, born in 1855, had been a talented plantsman, a sort of Russian equivalent of the self-schooled American Luther Burbank. Ignored under the tsarist administration, he had been championed as a homegrown talent by the Bolsheviks, who liked to think that they had unearthed all manner of geniuses their predecessors had been too hidebound or prejudiced to appreciate. Michurin was, in other words, one of those latecomers to the intellectual party who shoehorned a lifetime’s valuable practical experience into an odd vessel and named it ‘theory’. This naturally appealed to Lysenko.

  Stalin’s own interest in Michurin was rather more wide-ranging. Part of his attraction to the Michurin story was personal: Stalin considered him an upholder of Lamarck. But there was a political angle also to Stalin’s regard.

  The late 1940s and the early 1950s saw the publication of countless ‘lives’, describing the manifest destiny of the Russian people through stories of the nation’s ‘forefathers’. This bit of national myth-making was exceptional in both its fulsomeness and its monotony. Whether you were Michurin, or Tsiolkowsky the rocket pioneer, or Pavlov the physiologist, or one of any number of others, your story followed the same pattern. You were Russian (or, in those few instances where the historical record could not be got around, as Russian as made no odds). You spent your life in splendid isolation, founding an entire field of intellectual endeavour. Not even God was on your side, because from the very beginning you were a convinced materialist. You sympathised with socialism, and when finally the opportunity presented itself, you worked fruitfully for the common good, and this made up somewhat for a lifetime spent being vilified, abused, mistreated or, worse, just plain ignored by every foreigner who crossed your path or stumbled on your work.

  From a fashionable love of the homegrown underdog, Lysenko’s respect for Michurin had evolved into a full-grown myth in which Mendel, Weismann, and finally Thomas Hunt Morgan had concocted, across the span of generations, a fiendish method of withholding practical knowledge of nature from the proletariat – a conspiracy supported and encouraged by a superstition-ridden church and craven, wealthy capitalists.

  This was not exactly the political use to which Stalin hoped to put Michurin – in these Cold War years Michurin’s Russianness was more important to Stalin than his proletarian credentials – but it would serve. Michurin was a founding father, supported in his last years by the Bolshevik state, elected an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences, and safely dead since 1935. He was a hero in exactly the mould required by Stalin and Zhdanov. Their fusty and stentorious tales about Russia’s isolated greatness were not just the maunderings of old men (though they were certainly that): they were concerted national campaigns, meant to shore up their nation for the big chill to come. As yet without a bomb of their own (it was still more than a year away) stories like Michurin’s were more than folk tales. They were ammunition.

  The first to spot storm-clouds on the horizon was the zoologist Ivan Schmalhausen. In early January 1948 he wrote two letters to Andrei Zhdanov, complaining about the way Lysenko’s latest theoretical pronouncement had been covered in the Literary Gazette, under the editorship of the philosopher Mark Mitin.

  Lysenko had decided that animals of the same species did not compete in any way that influenced their evolution. (Like most of his ideas, this one came to him frayed and third-hand – on this occasion, from the nineteenth-century zoologist Nikolai Nodzhin, who had Darwin down as a ‘bourgeois naturalist’ who relied on ‘Malthusian assumptions’.) When critics took Lysenko to task for this latest bit of baseless thinking, Mitin had published the most violent and dangerous political smears against them. Schmalhausen was appalled.

  So, rather unexpectedly, was Nikolai Tsitsin. Tsitsin had for years been a card-carrying Lysenkoist and had chaired the ‘Court of Honour’ of the Academy of Sciences which condemned Anton Zhebrak, the man who had told the American scientific community that Lysenko was on his way out. Shortly afterwards Zhebrak had been dismissed as president of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences.

  However odious some of Tsitsin’s actions appear, he was a conflicted man, more a victim of circumstances than their author: ‘a very cultured, modest person’, according to the ecologist Sergei Zonn. ‘He found himself in a bind. He was squeezed between his public position of authority and his inner beliefs.’16

  Tsitsin’s early association with Lysenko was sincere enough: both men had been born the same year, and both had shown early talent as plant breeders. Tsitsin had crossed wheat and couch grass, making perennial varieties of wheat. They had turned out to be useless for agriculture, but that took nothing away from Tsitsin’s scientific work, earned him a reputation as an expert in interspecies hybrids – and, given that he clearly knew what he was doing, probably put a brake on his enthusiasm for Lysenko.

  Not only had Tsitsin been playing second fiddle to Lysenko as the Lenin Academy disintegrated around them, he was also chairman of the Government Commission for Seed Testing, the whole purpose of which was to separate genuine from bogus advances in agricultural research. If Tsitsin had not had reservations about Lysenko’s work before, he surely developed them now that he was obliged to read the results from about a thousand eighty-hectare testing stations.

  Written on 5 February 1948, Tsitsin’s thirty-page letter to Stalin about the uselessness of Lysenko’s work in general, and branched wheat in particular, is a masterpiece of exasperated invective. ‘Many representatives of biological science in recent years have been living in an atmosphere in which they feel shut in,’ he complained,

  an atmosphere of fear of one-sided criticism and of biased exposition of many questio
ns that have already been solved by them. An organised discussion could identify much that is new and of value both for theory and for practice and could enable us to assess what is of value, to discard that which is not or which is actively harmful. A discussion might allow us to find a common line in tackling the problems of our agriculture … I ask you, Comrade Stalin, to permit us to hold such a discussion at the nearest future time.17

  The same day, Tsitsin sent an extended scientific critique of Lysenko to Andrei Zhdanov. Since Zhdanov’s contempt for Lysenko was well-known, Tsitsin wrote more directly. He lambasted Lysenko’s theories, ‘on the basis of which, by the way, during the course of twenty years, not one acceptable variety has been produced, notwithstanding the numerous promises and loud assurances’.18 But what really exercised him was the way Lysenko was ‘surrounding himself with a clique of unscrupulous individuals’. Lysenko had transformed the Lenin Academy into a vacuous bureaucracy, excluding all scientists except his own yes-men. ‘I may boldly state not fearing to exaggerate matters that the situation now is such that the normal development of biological and agricultural sciences … has become impossible without the intervention and serious assistance of our Party and government.’19

  The need to have it out with Lysenko, once and for all, was becoming painfully apparent, and it wasn’t just scientists themselves who were saying so. Lysenko’s cock-and-bull theories were starting to interfere with the work of Stalin’s own inner circle.