Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  Proletkult withered away over a couple of years but Bogdanov continued to publish. Bogdanov believed that, ultimately, everything was explainable in terms of everything else. This did not make him a scientist. If anything, it made him a magician. When Bogdanov left off his Martian prophesying and attempted to do real science, as head of a ‘scientific research institute of blood transfusion’, he resembled an hermetic philosopher of the sixteenth century. He relied on risky analogies, treated hypotheses as facts, and – most telling of all – never offered up his studies to the review of his peers. In fact he never wrote any actual science at all, just propaganda for the popular press. In this, he resembled no one so much as Trofim Lysenko. Indeed, it was his example made Trofim Lysenko politically possible.

  Bogdanov was a follower of Lamarck. He believed that characteristics acquired during life were passed down to one’s offspring. In his utopian science fiction, blood exchanges among his Martian protagonists levelled out their individual and sexual differences and extended their life span through the inheritance of acquired characteristics (an idea comprehensively dashed by experiments on rabbits conducted by Francis Galton forty years earlier). Bogdanov’s scientific fantasies took an experimental turn in 1921 when Leonid Krasin, who like Bogdanov also been expelled from the Bolshevik Party in 1909, took him on a trade junket to London. There, Bogdanov happened across Blood Transfusion, a book by Geoffrey Keynes (younger brother of the economist).

  Two years of private experiments followed.9 When Krasin, now Russia’s ambassador to Britain, became ill, Bogdanov treated him with a transfusion of blood. Krasin’s condition improved markedly, and this miraculous cure won Bogdanov an appointment with the Communist Party’s general secretary, Joseph Stalin. Up until this time, Russia lacked any kind of blood transfusion service, and Bogdanov was quickly installed as head of a new research institute, housed in the resplendent, Empire-style Igumnov mansion in Moscow. (It is now part of the French embassy.) The locks were changed overnight to keep out the factory workers who had been using the house as a cultural club.

  Bogdanov promoted blood transfusion as a ‘universal’ technique for bodily rejuvenation. Blood, Bogdanov claimed, was a universal tissue that unified all other organs, tissues and cells. Blood’s chemical composition reflected the activity of the whole organism. Transfusions offered the client better sleep, a fresher complexion, a change in eyeglass prescriptions, and greater resistance to fatigue, and although his institute had already managed to give a client syphilis, Bogdanov claimed that his transfusions were safe.

  On 24 March 1928, Bogdanov conducted a typically Martian experiment, mutually transfusing blood with a 21-year-old male student. The men’s blood groups matched, but Bogdanov suffered a massive transfusion reaction, probably because, after eleven previous experiments in this line, his blood was riddled with foreign antibodies. Despite vigorous therapy, Alexander Bogdanov died two weeks later at the age of fifty-four.

  Other kinds of new Soviet person were imagined. For the poet and ergonomist Gastev, the revolution promised a new way of life and a new kind of culture. ‘In building anew,’ he once asked, ‘do we need to take those “treasures” that have come down to us from the nobles’ culture, with its “monuments” of art, habits, and way of life, or should we uncover the face of a new culture, born from technique and production?’10

  The future beckoned: ‘It is time to stop being sentimental about human nature,’ Gastev wrote, in the pages of his institute’s quarterly journal; ‘It is time not just to study and analyse society, but recreate it. To introduce new social norms, make a new choreography of movement and new sets of social behaviour.’ Gastev’s industrial training institute was ‘the battlefield where a new, technical culture went to battle against our historically formed humanitarian dreaminess’ – and it won. The Stakhanovite movement fitted perfectly with Gastev’s plans. As early as 1923 he had been putting forward the idea of a labour championship ‘in which a finely performed labour operation will be honoured with a decoration before thousands of professional workers’.11

  Bogdanov took Gastev to task for equating work habits and production behaviour with culture. The life of the working class, Bogdanov argued, wasn’t just work. It made no sense ‘to break off one piece, even if it is very important’. Bogdanov nursed a deeper worry, too – that, in following Gastev’s ‘sinister and fantastic’ agenda, all the creative, original functions of the economy would fall in the laps of a few educated engineers.12

  He was right to worry. Ultimately, the Soviet state never threw up lasting, ideologically correct versions of any of the basic rituals by which a community celebrates a human life. There was never any Soviet marriage ceremony worth the name. No burial service. No secular christening.13

  Under Stalin’s rule the ‘new Soviet man’ took its final shape, and the chief and most dreadful feature of this creature was that he was ageless.

  By this, I do not mean so much that Stalin was interested in longevity research, though that was certainly one of his pet projects. A fascination with life extension was par for the period, and the Soviet version was really just an ideologically boosted version of a desire – universal to the rich and powerful (if they can’t take it with them, then they’re not bloody going) – to cling on forever.14 Aged and worn men who religiously believed in science, Bolsheviks like Gorky and Lunacharsky, were suckers for the latest rejuvenation technique: implantations of monkey glands, vasectomies, Olga Lepeshinskaya’s soda baths (let’s not forget them) and gravidan, a curious substance extracted from pregnant women’s urine. Soviet leaders, meanwhile, shunned retirement, left the country baffled as to succession, and weathered terrible illnesses and handicaps in their determination to go on, and on, and on, into the impossible future.

  Never mind all that: the truly hideous thing about immortality is the way it erodes life at both ends. It banishes senescence and death, yes, but at the same stroke it erases birth, and renders youth so fleeting as to be irrelevant – a sort of pupa stage. There was, for many years, no youth culture in Soviet Russia. There were, on the other hand, many means of managing and regimenting and indoctrinating the young, not so much into a living ideology, as into an approved adult way of behaving. The Party’s youth wing dragged you by the collar into adulthood and kept you there. Once past your babbling infant stage, the point of you was to be the responsible young man or woman on the poster.

  You can see the process unfolding in the pages of Alexei Gastev’s journal. The early editions are intellectually voracious, full of references to what ergonomists and industrial designers are up to in Germany and the USA. Then, as the First Five-Year Plan takes effect, Gastev’s institute starts to focus less on people and more on machines, on production planning and economic output. In a way this is exciting. Never mind how to swing a hammer: now the institute is issuing manuals on how to start up entire factories, complete with everything from architectural plans to management schedules! But along with that vaunting ambition comes an ever-more removed view of what the worker’s life is actually like. More worrying still, the pages begin to be filled with pictures of Stalin, with quotes from Stalin’s speeches, with invocations to Stalin and what amount to hymns of praise.

  The last issue of Gastev’s journal came out in 1938, by which time it was clear that disarmament and declarations of loyalty were no defence against Stalin’s pogrom of Party intellectuals. On the night of 7 September Gastev was taken away by the NKVD. His apartment, which was located in the same building as his Central Institute of Labour, was thoroughly searched and his papers were confiscated. The following spring he was sentenced to ten years’ hard labour and died, shot by firing squad, in a Moscow suburb on 1 October 1941, by which time the Soviet Union was already beginning to resemble a ghastly, grim parody of his poem ‘Express’.

  Numbers, acronyms and fake names littered the Soviet landscape, as gulag camps and colonies sprang up to fuel the NKVD’s slave economy. By the 1950s, the gulag’s dehumanising nomenclature h
ad passed into the everyday vocabulary of the Soviet defence industry, an enormous archipelago of institutes, factories and ministries that, by some accounts, made up 40 per cent of the Soviet economy. Hundred of thousands of workers played out limited lives in post-office boxes, special facilities, secret cities and fictitious towns.

  The transition from the gulag economy to the military–industrial economy was an easy one. In many cases, prison science teams working under guard became ‘free’ enterprises overnight simply by allowing the scientists and engineers to go home at the end of the day. As Sergei Korolev once joked, the guards who protected him in his high position as the chief designer of the Soviet space programme were probably the same ones who watched over him in the sharashka. In both cases, the guards were doing the same job – maintaining the wall that separated scientists and the outside world.

  Scientists themselves eventually breached that wall, led by Andrei Sakharov, for whom science and civics were virtually the same thing, and scientists the country’s only remaining champions of civil rights. In 1968, in his essay ‘Reflections on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence, and Intellectual Freedom’, Sakharov, speaking from a place of Cold War privilege, called for the norms of scientific discussion to be transferred to public life. He wrote: ‘We consider “scientific” that method which is based on a profound study of facts, theories and views, presupposing unprejudiced and open discussion, which is dispassionate in its conclusions.’ For Sakharov, as for Gorky, as for Bogdanov and Lenin and Marx, science was the model for politics. All politicians had to do was learn how to be good scientists.15

  But Sakharov’s belief in the civic power of science would not triumph. His and others’ dissident activities, which had been meant to reform the state, served in the end only to weaken it and speed its eventual collapse. Why should this have happened, in a nation dedicated to the ideal of scientific government, and whose very founding figures spoke – as Maxim Gorky spoke in 1917, in a lecture titled ‘Science and Democracy’ – of a society rooted in ‘the soil of exact observation, directed by the iron logic of mathematics’?

  Gorky had imagined, just as Sakharov imagined half a century later, that a society devoted to science could not help but develop civic institutions overnight. He imagined the revolution creating a Baconian ‘city of science, a series of temples where each scholar is a priest who is free to serve his god’. And turning science into politics was, naturally, the particular hope of the Bolsheviks, who wanted to use science to leap-frog all those painful years of civic development that post-tsarist Russia so desperately needed if it was to catch up with the West.

  The 1917 revolution failed to realise that dream. Lenin failed. Stalin failed (for it was his dream, too). Half a century on, Sakharov was dreaming that same dream. And still it would not be realised.

  The repeated failure of that dream was only partly historical accident, only partly bad timing, only partly to do with the failings of individual men and women. It was (and is) much more to do with the failure of the sciences themselves to cohere into a single, coherent discipline that politics might wield.

  And the longest-running failure of all – the failure of psychology and physiology to ‘meet in the middle’ (to paraphrase Trotsky) – was soon to fill the wards of the country’s mental hospitals with Sakharov, his friends and colleagues, hopeless dreamers, dissidents, ‘sluggish schizophrenics’ and the ‘philosophically intoxicated’.

  It comes as no surprise that the Soviet government found it expedient to incarcerate its political opponents in mental hospitals. The Russian state had been doing that long before the Bolsheviks were even thought of. Spending time in an asylum was considered preferable to exile to Siberia – it was a way the tsarist state showed leniency.

  What changed, as the Soviet Union moved beyond Stalinism, was the specious way in which political protest was pathologised, and the blame for this lay, not with the politicians, but with Soviet psychiatrists themselves. It was Soviet psychiatry that made waves of fresh incarcerations possible, by promulgating models of human mental functioning that were savagely reductive, doctrinaire, rigid and plain wrong.

  In the late 1940s Andrei Vladimirovich Snezhnevsky, a talented bureaucrat and clinician, was appointed to a panel of scholars tasked with preparing a Soviet psychiatric manual. The first issue of Neuropathology and Psychiatry edited by Snezhnevsky was full of predictable Stalinist phrases: readers were exhorted to ‘pay particular attention to the fight for the scientific purity of our discipline, to the fight with all enemy ideas and their conduits, and to the unmasking of the capitalist anti-national essence of neuropathology and psychiatry of the capitalist countries.’

  With Stalin out the way all that vanished, and in its place came chapters reflecting Snezhnevsky’s admiration for the German Emil Kraepelin, who wanted to classify mental diseases into a workable and intelligible system.

  So far, so good, one would have thought – except that Soviet psychiatrists had next to no understanding of human psychology. They had not been taught anything about it. They were supposed to be Pavlovian – and since Pavlov had not strayed into psychoanalysis, social psychology, or analytical or individual psychology, then no one else was entitled to, either.16 Pavlov had once instituted a playful system of fines for juniors who psychologised the behaviour of his experimental dogs. In a grotesque over-extension of that idea, Soviet psychiatrists were taught that psychological terms and expressions were subjective, idealistic and non-scientific – and they were forbidden to use them.

  Under the guidance of Snezhnevsky – and he was a do-er, not a thinker17 – these narrowly trained specialists now tried to classify clients and patients according to taxonomies of mental illness that were, as they remain today, vague and vulnerable to fads and fashions.

  If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Armed with Snezhnevsky’s vague manual, and with no grasp of psychology, Soviet psychiatrists came to regard everyone as a potential schizophrenic. And while the West was deinstitutionalising the mentally ill between 1950 and 1970, Soviet hospital beds for the mentally ill almost tripled, while the number of psychiatrists almost quadrupled.

  Among the symptoms of schizophrenia listed in Soviet textbooks was something called ‘ambivalence’, so God help you if you admitted to disliking a relative, lacking sympathy for some people or steering clear of official events. Extending this kind of baggy thinking to politics was easy, if not inevitable. The term ‘philosophical intoxication’ was used to diagnose schizophrenia in people who did not agree with the authorities and used Marxist terminology to criticise them. In late May 1970 the biologist Zhores Medvedev was diagnosed as suffering from ‘creeping schizophrenia’ and was placed, by force, in a psychiatric hospital in the town of Kaluga, about 150 kilometres from Moscow, for publishing the book The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko in the United States. As one of his more vigorous defenders, Andrei Sakharov, recalled later, ‘Medvedev’s work in two disparate fields – biology and political science – was regarded as evidence of a split personality, and his conduct allegedly exhibited symptoms of social maladjustment.’18 While forcibly confined, Medvedev met a middle-aged man imprisoned for pasting up handbills complaining about the local Party Committee. Diagnosed with ‘poor adaptation to the conditions of the social environment’, the complainer was administered ‘two powerful depressant drugs’ that the doctors promised would ‘change the basic structure of his psyche’. Another inmate, about twenty-four years old, incarcerated for calling the Communist Youth League a bunch of paper-pushers, suffered from ‘reformist delusion’, apparently; for three months he had been undergoing ‘periodic insulin shock’.

  A woman who complained to the prosecutor’s office, a young man who announced his intention of quitting the Party, a Lithuanian engineer who refused to participate in building a monument to the Soviet war dead unless the state also put up a monument to the victims of Stalin’s terror, young ‘hippies’, religious believers, draft dodgers: all served time in menta
l hospitals.

  By the time of its unexpected collapse, the Soviet Union had become what its founders had always dreamt it might become: a scientific state.

  In the 1980s the Soviet Union and its satellites boasted twice as many scientists for their population as the USA and Western Europe, and operated the largest and best-funded scientific establishment in the world. It was a wounded giant, at once the glory and the laughing stock of twentieth-century thought. It boasted the first and largest national health service in the world, yet fully a quarter of a medical student’s curriculum was devoted to politics – more time than was allocated to surgery.19 It ran arguably the world’s most successful and certainly its most consistent programme of space exploration, then allowed institutional and personal rivalries to dismantle its strong bid to be first to the Moon. It boasted the largest and most sophisticated planned economy on earth, yet the paucity of finished goods in its shops was an international joke. Its collectivised agriculture had for decades promised to be a breadbasket for the world – yet, from Khrushchev’s era until 1991, Russia had to import grain from the USA and Canada to feed its own people.

  Soviet science was extraordinary, and ought to have delivered many more miracles than it did. The entire Bolshevik project was extraordinary, piecing back together the remnants of Russia’s empire until it was once again the largest territorial state on earth. As time passes, however, what astonishes is not the achievements – the cities of over a million in deepest Siberia, the mines and railways and dams – but rather the sheer waste those achievements generated.

  The despoliation of Russian land was not a uniquely Bolshevik habit. As early as 1911, as he prospected for radioactive minerals around Lake Ilmen, Vladimir Vernadsky, geologist and liberal politician, witnessed the appalling condition of a land already exploited in a desultory fashion for 200 years: