Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  7. Quoted in Krementsov, ‘A “Second Front” in Soviet Genetics’, p. 241.

  8. See, for example, H. J. Muller, ‘It Still Isn’t a Science. A Reply to George Bernard Shaw’, Saturday Review of Literature, 16 April 1949, 11–12, p. 61.

  9. Shostakovich’s reputation was not helped by persistent rumours surrounding Orango, a satirical opera, begun in 1932 and hurriedly aborted, about the nightclub adventures of an experimental ape-man. See Gerard McBurney’s optimistically titled ‘Some Frequently Asked Questions about Shostakovich’s “Orango”’, Tempo, 64 (2010), pp. 38–40.

  10. Montefiore, Stalin, p. 555.

  11. Krementsov, Stalinist Science, p. 137.

  12. At the outbreak of war Lysenko’s younger brother Pavel was an industrial chemist working at the Institute of Coal Chemistry in Kharkov. His research into converting coal into coke went well, conjured envy in his colleagues, and led to his denunciation and arrest. Pavel seems to have shared his brother’s difficulty in making friends: when war came his colleagues even tried to get him drafted (though, as a Scientific Worker, he was exempt). He defected to the Germans when they overran the city and impressed them so much that they made him mayor. After their defeat the Germans took Pavel with them as they retreated, and he finally ended up in the American Zone in Munich. US authorities found him running a factory that turned horse chestnuts into artificial honey.

  13. Krementsov, Stalinist Science, p. 112.

  14. Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, pp. 47–8.

  15. Ibid.

  16. Douglas R. Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev, p. 458 n. 36.

  17. Ibid., p. 74.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Ibid.

  20. Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, p. 50.

  21. Krementsov, Stalinist Science, p. 165.

  22. Zhores A. Medvedev, The Unknown Stalin, p. 183.

  23. Two papers by Kirill O. Rossianov reveal Stalin’s editorial style: ‘Editing Nature: Joseph Stalin and the “New” Soviet Biology’, Isis, 84 (1993), pp. 728–45; and ‘Stalin as Lysenko’s Editor: Reshaping Political Discourse in Soviet Science’, Configurations, 1 (1993), pp. 439–56.

  24. Mark A. Popovsky, Manipulated Science: The Crisis of Science and Scientists in the Soviet Union Today, p. 149.

  25. Krementsov, Stalinist Science, p. 172.

  26. Quoted in Cook, ‘Lysenko’s Marxist Genetics’, p. 188.

  27. Quoted in Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, p.65.

  28. Stephen Jay Gould, Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes (Norton, 1983), p. 135.

  19: Higher nervous activity

  Boris Yefimov’s cartoon to accompany the article ‘Fly Lovers, Man Haters’ in the popular journal A Little Light (1949) casts genetics in a fascist guise.

  Imagine that someone wants to know you better.

  He takes a picture of your skull, and if this skull contains some thoughts, the negative will reveal them as black blots, or snakelike spirals, or some other unattractive form.

  If he wishes, he can try to photograph your conscience, and the negative will also show all the excrescences and blots.

  In a word, every person will be seen through now, and however thick and impenetrable your skin might be, the new light makes it transparent like glass.1

  Maxim Gorky, 1896

  Within a week of the August Session, letters began appearing in Pravda. One by one, intellectuals with a stake in Mendelian genetics backed down, apologised and experienced Damascene conversions to ‘Michurinism’. Given the memories these people carried of the Terror, their actions now seem only politic.

  More culpable were the actions of Academician Alexander Oparin, a food scientist best known for some remarkable hypotheses about the origin of life. Oparin knew perfectly well what genetics involved. Nevertheless he chose this moment to publish a full-page letter in Pravda railing against ‘fenced-in pontiffs toying with fruit-flies’ – and he called on the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences to renounce genetics.

  And so it did. Between 24 and 26 August the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences convened for one of those self-conscious sessions of ‘criticism and self-criticism’ so beloved of its Bolshevik paymasters. The Academy’s president, Nikolai Vavilov’s brother Sergei, bit his tongue and took upon himself the ‘blame’ for the Academy’s support of genetics, and reproached his colleagues for their neutrality in trying to balance the claims of ‘the two directions in biology’.

  The meeting dismissed the Stalin Prize laureate Leon Orbeli as head of the Biological Sciences Section, though, significantly, it put Oparin in his place instead of the obvious candidate, Trofim Lysenko. (Oparin at least had a scientific track record.) Oparin promised that all experimenters in natural science would fundamentally revise their work and cease their ‘fawning and servility before foreign pseudo-science’.

  For working geneticists, disarming in the face of political disapproval would not be anywhere near enough. Over the coming weeks they saw their Drosophila stocks destroyed, and their literature taken from the libraries. Courses and textbooks were rewritten to reflect the victory of Michurinism.2 Hundreds of decrees were issued, filling noticeboards and agendas in ministries, bureaux, boards, publishers, universities, institutes, experiment stations, editorial boards … In 1949 even Soviet Frontier Guard published an article on the reactionary nature of the Mendelism–Morganism passing across Russia’s borders. The suppression continued for years. ‘In 1951,’ remembers Raissa Berg, a geneticist,

  India ink was used to cover the names of the most famous geneticists in all books where they were mentioned … I witnessed these procedures in the library of the Geographical Society. My father had died in 1950. Deprived of any hope of continuing with population studies, I had begun to study the scientific life of my father, and I was using the archives and the library of the Geographical Society. At first, I could not even understand what was happening.3

  A week after the session, the sackings began. In research and teaching establishments, scientific journals and elsewhere, Lysenko’s cohort replaced the ‘reactionary supporters of Mendelism–Morganism’. Thousands were removed from their teaching and research positions. They took whatever work they could: as translators, accountants. Zoia Nikoro, who’d once assisted Sergei Chetverikov, found work as a ballroom pianist at a club. Most ended up working on dreary agrostations far from the capital, their years of experience wasted.

  Nikolai Dubinin, a main target of Lysenko’s attacks during the session, was pushed out of Koltsov’s institute and the whole institute was abolished. The botanist and pioneering ecologist Vladimir Sukachev took him in, giving him a job at the Institute of Forestry. Dubinin spent the next five years bird-watching in the Ural mountains.

  Pushed out, his department dissolved, the wheat specialist Anton Zhebrak offered a wishy-washy self-criticism in Pravda, got a job at the Moscow Pharmaceutical Institute, and promptly created a secret little centre of genetics of his own. Dmitry Sabinin, a professor of plant physiology at Moscow University, who used to make fun of Lysenko in lectures, was exiled from Moscow altogether and wandered jobless from place to place until, in 1951, he shot himself.

  On 24 September 1948, Hermann Muller, now back in the USA and working at Indiana University,4 publicly resigned from the Soviet Academy of Sciences. So too did virtually every other foreign member. The actions of the leaders of the Soviet Academy were ‘disgraceful’, Muller said; he compared them to Nazis. He wrote to Leslie Dunn in 1949: ‘Let me say that I do not think there is the slightest chance for reconciliation with the Soviet authorities over this matter – it has been tried for some thirteen years now – and I think all which is left is to call a spade a spade.’5

  *

  The Michurinist campaign of 1948 appears on the face of it to have got far out of hand, swallowing fields that had nothing remotely to do with genetics or even biology. A member of an editorial board of a learned journal
‘struggled against the Morganism’ of the editor-in-chief; textbook authors attacked rival textbooks for their ‘idealist content’ (sometimes they even laid into their own co-authors); researchers noted the ‘anti-Michurinist tendencies’ or the ‘servility to the West’ of their colleagues. Leaders of fields as far apart as physics and linguistics gathered to discuss how to revamp their work ‘in light of decisions of the meeting of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences’. Chemists found ‘Mendels’ and ‘Morgans’ in the prominent Western scientists Linus Pauling and Christopher Ingold, and their own ‘Michurin’ in a founding father of Russian chemistry, Alexander Butlerov. They even coined a label, ‘Ingoldist–Paulingist,’ to demonise their opponents. None of this had anything to do with political conviction. It had to do with self-preservation.

  In truth, this great quantity of noise in fields other than genetics hid a marked lack of real action. Leaders in all disciplines, survivors of the Great Purge, had learned their parts well, and used the Michurinist campaign to pursue their own agendas: declaring their loyalty, sticking the knife into the handful of people they didn’t like, and laying a layer of protective political cant over whatever work they happened to be engaged in at the time – work that rarely had anything to do with genetics.

  By staging your own purge, you could leave business as usual free to operate beneath a gauze of insincere political hysteria. Psychologists and hygienists, pedagogues and specialists in physical education preserved their fields (and their tenure, and their incomes) by staging shows of conformity. The academies of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and other republics passed resolutions underlining the necessity of discharging all ‘Mendelians’ from their posts. They didn’t sack anyone. The central academies, such as the Academy of Sciences, made much of the urgent need to dismiss people who, funnily enough, had already been dismissed by order of the Central Committee. If the Central Committee hadn’t booted you out of your job, you stood a good chance of staying in your post. At worst you might be moved between your academy’s various bases and branches around the country.

  In medicine, too, the August Session served as an alibi for institutional feuding, rather than as a rallying point for true believers – and in so doing, it brought into the open conflicts that had been simmering since the mid-1930s.

  The nation’s vast medical bureaucracy – bureaucracies, rather, because two gigantic organisations vied for dominance in public health – had become top-heavy, with too many old men holding too many senior posts, and too many younger men and women fighting for scraps. The trouble had started in 1934 when the government, pursuing a vision of nationwide medical care, had established an All-Union Institute for Experimental Medicine. Rather like the Lenin Academy in agriculture, this was an umbrella organisation controlling several institutes. In 1944 it expanded again, becoming a truly gargantuan Academy of Medical Sciences.

  Yet despite its size and its vast and complex bureaucracy, the Academy was only the second biggest medical organisation in the Soviet Union. The biggest was the Ministry of Health, which between 1936 and 1937 had been extended across the whole Soviet Union. These two behemoths duplicated each others’ efforts for years without too much friction; after all, if you were a senior administrator of one, you most likely held a high official position in the other. In the straitened circumstances that pertained after the war, however, this doubling of effort could not be permitted to continue. Fifteen years of discord followed.

  Like maggots trapped in a tin, medical disciplines fought each other for survival, the larger disciplines consuming the smaller ones until only one was left. That discipline was physiology. Since 1936, when the decree on abuses in pedology had put competing disciplines out of work, physiology had been spreading like knotweed into psychology, psychiatry and pedagogy, until it became the theoretical and experimental basis for the whole of Soviet medicine. The commissariats of health, agriculture, and public education, the Academy of Sciences, the Committee for Higher Education, and even the Red Army boasted physiology departments.

  ‘Removing reactionary idealist biological concepts from medical science’ was a heaven-sent chance to stir up a bloated and top-heavy discipline, and shake off the old guard. The chief trouble was how to join the fray. What connection was physiology supposed to have with genetics?

  The Academy of Medical Sciences invited Lysenko himself to deliver a report at their meeting in September 1948, but even he found himself at a loss, declaring at the meeting: ‘There is no direct connection between Michurinist teaching and medical science.’

  The physicians did, though, identify a worthy opponent for their ‘Soviet progressive materialist medical science’. They picked on the only woman in the medical academy, Lina Shtern, the sour Old Bolshevik (Pavlov wasn’t alone in not being able to stand her) who had discovered the ‘blood–brain barrier’, and had dared to acquire an international reputation for her work.

  Shtern belonged to that generation of women who had had to travel to Switzerland in order to get a higher education. A long-time revolutionary sympathiser, in 1923 Shtern had accepted a Soviet invitation to return home just as many of her generation were doing everything they could to get out. Shtern became a Distinguished Scientist of the USSR in 1934. The government even gave her a car. Five years later she became a full member of the Academy of Sciences, and its first female member. Election to the Academy of Medical Sciences soon followed. Shtern was a leading member of the government-sponsored Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee during the war, and it was this association that did her the most damage, as the state’s campaign against international contacts – against ‘cosmopolitanism’ in general – inevitably began playing to Russia’s small but persistent vein of anti-semitism.

  After being denounced in the meeting of the Academy of Medical Sciences, Shtern’s fall was precipitous. A couple of weeks later, at a joint session of the Academy of Sciences and the Moscow Society of Physiology, Shtern was accused of anti-scientific ideas, of undermining the ideas of Ivan Pavlov, of disloyalty, and of contacts with the West. She was fired from the Institute of Physiology.6

  In Shtern, the medical community had found its cosmopolitan scapegoat: its Nikolai Koltsov, its Nikolai Vavilov. What it lacked was a contemporary hero: a medical Trofim Lysenko. Olga Lepeshinskaya, an Old Bolshevik and a personal friend of Stalin, threw her hat into the ring, with a homegrown vision of biology that certainly passed on partisan grounds:

  What happiness! At last, the dialectical materialists have triumphed, the idealists are paralysed and are being liquidated as the kulaks were once liquidated. To prevent their obstruction of the forward motion of science and their propaganda of idealism … it is necessary to remove them from all leading posts and to exercise a special vigilance toward repentants, because, perhaps, among the sincere repentants there are some wolves in sheep’s clothing, trying to save themselves from liquidation.7

  Praising herself as a ‘materialist and innovator’, Lepeshinskaya dubbed her opponents (meaning cytologists, histologists, and morphologists) ‘idealists and reactionaries’.

  Her gambit failed, and for a while the medical community made do without a contemporary hero. They had, after all, a founding father, and one far more celebrated and established than Michurin would ever be. They had Ivan Pavlov.

  How had Pavlov, the state’s most celebrated opponent, become its greatest intellectual hero? Age and vanity no doubt played their part. For Pavlov, the 1930s were years of unparalleled privilege and prosperity. When he complained that traffic outside the Institute of Experimental Medicine was disturbing his dogs, the street was moved. When he fell ill and a doctor prescribed champagne, it was imported the next day from Helsinki. When he needed more space for his Physiological Institute at the Academy of Sciences, the president was ousted from his flat. Pavlov was chauffeured in a Lincoln, and his larder was full of imported food.

  In 1934 his eighty-fifth birthday was marked with even more funding for his Institute of Experimental Genetics of Higher Ne
rvous Activity at Koltushi – a science village supplied by its own collective farm (‘the Magnitostroi or Dneprostroi of the medical sciences’, the press explained). Here, Pavlov studied conditional reflexes in two apes, named Roza and Rafael, and hoped this work would lay the ground for eugenics; ‘the science of the development of an improved human type’, he told the newspapers, even as anti-eugenic campaigns were destroying the careers and lives of Nikolai Koltsov and medical geneticist Solomon Levit.

  But there was a darker side, too, to Pavlov’s reconciliation with the authorities. Simply, Pavlov feared for his son Vsevolod’s safety, for he had been an officer in the White army.

  By the mid-1930s Pavlov had withdrawn his disapproval of the Soviet regime. Reconciliation turned to positive approval just before he died when, in August 1935 at a large reception in the Kremlin, he thanked the government for its generous support and modestly wondered whether he would justify it. Molotov called out: ‘We are sure that you will, no doubt about it!’ Pavlov returned the compliment lavishly:

  As you know, I am an experimenter from head to foot. My whole life has consisted of experiments. Our government is also an experimenter, only of an incomparably higher category. I passionately want to live, to see the victorious completion of this historic social experiment.8

  Ivan Pavlov died of pneumonia on 27 February 1936, at which point his public reputation fell into the hands of the government, who refashioned it to their own taste. On the 100th anniversary of his birth, in September 1949, a public campaign was launched to establish Pavlov as a founding father of Soviet science. A front-page editorial in Pravda ran ‘A Great Son of the Russian People’, instructing readers that Pavlov was ‘close to the heart of every Soviet person’ and had been personally supported by Lenin and Stalin. He had founded ‘a new epoch in physiology’ and continually struggled against ‘reactionary, idealist, false theories … of the bourgeoisie in the United States, England and other capitalist countries’. Apparently Pavlov’s work ‘expanded especially quickly after the Revolution’ and he had ‘selflessly served his socialist motherland and his people’.9