Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday

by Gavan Tredoux

  In the Soviet Union . . . [l]egally there is fairly complete freedom of speech. And actually there is a good deal. I have heard a man say that he could not see much difference between Stalin and Nicholas. A member of an important Soviet merely replied that there was quite a big difference. But on the whole custom is more stringent than law; so that there is somewhat less verbal criticism of the government than in England.23

  One supposes that extra-judicial sentencing by a troika might be considered “custom.” But Haldane nevertheless conceded some limits to freedom of speech. “In the Soviet Union any attempt to start an opposition journal would probably meet with practical rather than legal difficulties.”24 Writing elsewhere, he conceded somewhat obliquely that there had indeed been some ideological imposition, but no longer. “I do not think that non-Marxist biologists need fear an attempt to impose Marxist dogmas on science, such as probably occurred in some quarters in the Soviet Union between 1922 and 1932.”25 Shortly after the end of the Second World War, when republishing some of his earlier essays, Haldane added even more qualifications.

  [T]he overthrow of the class state has meant a period of ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ with considerable restrictions on freedom, in the Soviet Union, and would probably do so elsewhere. . . . I wrote this essay during the winter of 1939–40. . . . The Nazis had bought, blackmailed, or persuaded members of men in every country to become their supporters. The only state which was taking adequate measures against them in 1938 was the Soviet Union. These measures, like other measures of national defence, involved certain restrictions on freedom, which appeared to many of its foreign friends to be excessive. They did so to me in 1939 when I wrote this essay. I do not now think that they were so. I have no doubt that these restrictions will disappear as the Soviet Union feels itself safer. This is made highly probable by the fact that in the Soviet Union alone among belligerent nations there have been very substantial increases in freedom during the war . . . freedom in the transmission of opinions is strongly on the upgrade in the Soviet Union.26

  If Haldane thought in 1938 that “restrictions” on freedom were excessive in the Soviet Union, he showed no sign in print. But he remained sensitive to this line of criticism, if only as a debating technique: “it is claimed that in practice all power is in the hands of the Communist party and its sympathisers. In practice, however, parliaments are also controlled from outside. . . . The plain fact is that over most of the world such parliaments as survive are at least as subservient to Big Business as is the Supreme Soviet in Moscow to the Communist Party.”27

  Religious freedom was thriving, too: “there is about as much religious freedom in the Soviet Union as in Great Britain . . . I do not know of any legislative step in that direction taken in the last ten years in Britain which is comparable with the enfranchisement of priests in the Soviet Union in 1937. . . . Of course, in so far as they are followers of Engels, Communists are definitely enjoined not to use the police [to attack religion, but] . . . this does not mean that they should not argue against religion or suppress organizations which use religious forms for political ends.”28 The war demonstrated that the people themselves were not unhappy. “The heroic resistance of the Soviet Peoples has shown to the world what I knew before, that by and large, they are pretty satisfied with their way of life, and certainly not longing for deliverance from it.”29

  The unstoppable praise for Stalin and the USSR that flowed from Haldane’s pen raises the question of how much he really knew about it. A single visit in 1928 of one month is not much to go on in 1938 or 1947. He did not read Russian, so he was completely dependent on translations for information. He continually complained that it was hard to get hold of translated scientific papers. As he never quotes any source, even for the purpose of criticism, that is not pro-Soviet, one suspects that he just repeated whatever the Soviets provided him with. There is some justification for this suspicion. In the Haldane Papers at UCL an “information” leaflet issued by a Soviet propaganda agency survives, with a summary of new and marvelous “achievements” in the USSR, paragraph by paragraph. Haldane annotated “use” next to those paragraphs he found interesting.

  When Haldane wrote his rosy descriptions of Soviet science, concerns about the fate of Vavilov had been circulating for a while. The state-sanctioned ideology had increasingly turned against orthodox genetics, and a peasant scientist by the name of Trofim D. Lysenko had steadily gained influence, winning Stalin’s support. Leading geneticists had been arrested and, after confessing under torture to lurid conspiracies and deviant behavior, had been either shot or exiled to deadly terms of forced labor. Coherent reasons for this turn against genetics have to be teased out of, and reconstructed from, the confused propaganda and general opprobrium that the Party ideologues rained down on the subjects and personalities involved. Lysenko was just one aspect of this process.

  Orthodox genetics was unacceptable to the Party because, in essence, it was just too slow, implying that organisms had an essential nature that was resistant to change, requiring repeated natural or artificial selection over a long period. This understanding frustrated an underlying communist theme, the idea of perfectibility—of man, of nature, and of society. It also contradicted the idea that all of the social “superstructure” was determined by the “modes of production” of its economic base. Reflexively, Marxists preferred to explain everything in terms of social class. Perfectibility through Communist Party policy set itself the task of remaking society, and even creating new kinds of humans, as they put it. Until the 1930s, this tension had remained latent. However, the second wave of eugenicists from 1910 to 1930 were mostly, though not all, left-wing radicals of Haldane’s type. The eugenicists believed in a radically different program for perfectibility that involved improving the human stock slowly through selective breeding, gradually but inexorably altering the gene pool in desired directions.

  Russia and the Soviet Union itself had an active eugenics movement up until the early 1930s.30 It was pioneered by Nikolai Konstantinovich Koltsov (1872–1940), a zoologist and geneticist who had been strongly influenced by Francis Galton and the English school of eugenics. Koltsov had been educated at Moscow University, graduating from there in 1894, after which he held a professorship from 1895 to 1911. He had spent some years abroad in Germany, France, and Italy, and was politically a socialist. The influential Institute for Experimental Biology had been founded at his initiative in January 1917. As a foretaste of things to come, Koltsov’s career was almost cut short in 1920 when he was arrested as part of one of Lenin’s prototype show trials. The “anti-Soviet Tactical Center” affair implicated a collection of politicians, intellectuals, and scientists in an imaginary espionage plot. Along with Koltsov, the accused included the historian Sergei Melgunov and Leo Tolstoy’s daughter Aleksandra. While he was on trial, Koltsov kept detailed observations of his weight to test the relationship between anxiety and weight loss. Only an appeal from Maxim Gorky, an admirer of Koltsov, saved him from execution.

  The Russian Eugenics Society was founded by Koltsov in the early 1920s to promote the scientific study of human genetics. At that time, as in the West, knowledge of human genetics and remedial measures to reduce genetic disease or otherwise direct the gene pool were not clearly distinguished. Koltsov’s aims were entirely scholarly, and early twin studies as well as genealogical investigations were conducted. By 1925, more than one hundred twin pairs in Moscow were under observation. Koltsov’s remedial eugenics was essentially Galtonian, a religious urge to favor the wellborn, more by selection of positive traits than selection against defects, which would instead be crowded out.

  Koltsov’s musings on the possibilities for genetic alteration would have appealed to Haldane. Both recognized that changes need not be improvements. Koltsov illustrated this by speculating that, if Martians really did descend on Earth to colonize it, they might decide to “domesticate” man, in the same way that man domesticated wolves. Men could rapidly be selected to their needs a
nd tastes. Any tendency to independence could be weeded out. Instead timidity or slavishness might be selected for, “because humankind has always had and has now and will for a long time have inborn slaves.” Distinct breeds of physical laborers, musicians, and craftsmen suggest themselves. Who could predict the aesthetic tastes of the Martians for form and shape? They might breed men for merely decorative purposes, or breed them to test the laws of genetics.31

  In parallel, a Society for the Study of Racial Pathology was founded in 1928 to study differences in patterns of disease exhibited by isolated subpopulations, particularly in areas like the Caucasus—in the 1950s Haldane would suggest a similar line of inquiry for endogamous Indian castes. Other members of the Society included Solomon Levit, who had trained in medicine and founded a Laboratory of Human Heredity that year. Born in Lithuania to a poor Jewish family, Levit was a Communist Party man, but had been converted from Lamarckism by a course in fly genetics. Nevertheless, he remained a member of the Society of Materialist Physicians. His institute conducted twin studies and collected medical genealogies to study the etiology of racial pathologies. Levit was also closely associated with a fellow Lithuanian Jew and Party member, Israel Agol, who pursued genetics at the Moscow Zoo Biological Institute.

  Koltsov’s protégés by now included two eminent geneticists, Sergei Chetverikov (1880–1959) and Nikolay Timofeev-Ressovsky (1900–1981), though neither shared his enthusiasm for eugenic engineering of the gene pool, nor were they Party men. But political changes were under way, and fine distinctions were not in order. Chetverikov was arrested by the OGPU in 1929 and sentenced to internal exile without trial. In 1930, Stalin turned more decisively against eugenics and the general idea of innate human nature. Along with its leading advocates, eugenics quickly disappeared from the Soviet world and was subject to ritual abuse. Human intelligence testing, also taken to imply limits on perfectibility, was banned by 1936.32 Linking social phenomena to biology was henceforth forbidden (a taboo that became a staple of left-wing thought worldwide, especially in the social sciences). “Biologizing” became a term of abuse: it might be materialism, but it was the wrong kind of materialism, a “bourgeois-reactionary-fascist” and “Menshevizing idealist” kind. Marxism, correctly interpreted, understood “modes of economic production” and “class” only. Koltsov came under open attack in the official organs by the Marxist philosopher Isak Prezent, who was later to play a much bigger role in the war on genetics. In April 1931, the Society of Materialist Biologists (OBM) issued a report demanding that Koltsov be “unmasked” as a “reactionary.”33 All this was duly solemnized by the Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1932. The five-year plans were going to reconstruct society and it was defeatist to suppose that there were obstacles they could not overcome. Koltsov was denounced as the instigator of “fascist eugenics.” The Russian translation of R. A. Fisher’s classic Genetical Theory of Natural Selection34 included only the first seven chapters; the remaining four, dealing with “social biology,” were quietly dropped.

  In the interim, Solomon Levit reorganized his lab as a Genetics department and moved it to the Medical Biological Institute. In 1931 both he and Agol were awarded Rockefeller grants to study abroad. They spent the year with Hermann Muller in Austin, at the University of Texas, with a summer interlude at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. On returning to Moscow in early 1932, they discovered that Levit had been under public attack in absentia as a “Menshevizing idealist.” He was promptly removed as the director of the Medical Biological Institute, but managed to get himself reinstated by enlisting Maxim Gorky’s personal aid (interventions of that kind almost always proved latently fatal). Muller, who had been politically influenced by Levit and Agol toward communism, followed them to the USSR in 1933. He hoped to persuade Stalin to adopt a program in positive eugenics through measures like sperm banks for the gifted. But he had not read the Great Soviet Encyclopedia carefully enough. Nor, it seems, had Solomon Levit, who continued to pursue human genetics by amassing twin pairs, going from 600 in 1933 to 700 the next year, increasing to some 1,700 by 1937.

  Parallel developments were under way in plant genetics. Agriculture was particularly important to the “Great Break” that Stalin had initiated in 1929, and plant genetics was, in principle, part of the same enterprise as human genetics. To create their new society, the Soviets proposed to “revolutionize” agriculture (they ended up by utterly destroying it). The idea that plant genetics could limit their ambitions was a festering sore, though it took some time to burst open. Trofim D. Lysenko exploited this developing tension by promising a “socialist” alternative steeped in claims about homegrown, folksy, peasant science. All that resonated with Stalin and the Party, who reflexively despised traditional specialists.

  Lysenko, the son of a peasant, was born in 1898 in the Ukraine. He received a rudimentary education at a vocational school for gardeners in Uman and some practical training as an agronomist at the Kiev Agricultural Institute, graduating from there in 1925. Early on he learned the value of publicity, making the pages of Pravda for work he had done on legumes in Azerbaijan, with some ambitious claims of success. He would build his career on a fantastic elaboration of his next subject, the effect of low temperatures on the maturation of plants. It had been known since 1858 (and even before that) that slightly earlier maturation of plants could be produced by exposing seeds to low temperatures to provoke germination before the growing season, under the right conditions. This “vernalization” process was reinvented by Lysenko, who made increasingly ambitious, and always shifting, claims for its benefits.

  Lysenko’s initial claim was that the traditional process of sowing winter wheat in the fall—leaving it to germinate over winter under the snow, and only harvesting it in the summer after substantial attrition—could be sped up. If the seed was exposed to water in the winter, to induce germination, and then kept at a low temperature and planted only in the spring, it could be harvested in summer. Doing this would greatly increase the yield by avoiding attrition, or so he claimed in 1928 to have found experimentally. Like all of his later claims, there was never any hard evidence for this increased yield, since at no stage of his long career did Lysenko conduct anything resembling a controlled scientific experiment, a procedure he found unnecessary and confusing. He simply declared success, and once again made the pages of Pravda. This was the right tactic, from a political point of view, since quick fixes for the harvest were in demand, as the “Great Leap” rapidly destroyed agriculture (the superlative was correct; it was just the direction that was off). In fact, vernalization does not increase yields, since the additional opportunities for mold, and the breakage that happens when the sprouted seeds are turned during winter, offset any gains: the net result is a waste of labor and an opportunity cost.

  Nevertheless, sensing the changing political winds, Nikolai Vavilov took Lysenko up—probably in the hope of humoring and containing him within a harmless fiefdom of the Soviet agricultural establishment, one cannot be sure. Political dexterity was a requirement for survival under state-directed research. But this proved to be a fatal underestimation of Lysenko’s talents. The Ukrainian used his invitation to the 1929 All-Union Congress of Genetics in Leningrad to rapidly broaden his scope. Next he claimed to have discovered that vernalization altered the very nature of the wheat, transmuting the winter wheat variety into summer wheat. Moreover, there were, according to Lysenko, actually no varieties as such: all wheat was one variety, merely with different levels of “winterism” that could be altered at will. But soon, “winter wheat” was quietly dropped, and Lysenko was vernalizing spring varieties instead, at his new lab at the Odessa Institute of Selection and Genetics. He pressed his methods on collective farms, and though, given the chaotic state of Soviet agriculture, it is likely that only a few acres were actually planted using his methods, he kept claiming success, touting unverified questionnaires. Yields were always up by staggering amounts.

  Nobody checked Lysenko’s figures, and so he got
bolder. Armed with research money and his own journal, Vernalization, he ranged from corn to sorghum and even fruit trees, all of which could benefit from the miracle of vernalization. By now Lysenko was emerging as a hero of agriculture, a shock worker who could get results where establishment figures offered only laborious experiments and decades of tedious data collection and comparison. Vavilov, unsure how this protégé could be contained, gingerly offered more praise. Lysenko, barely educated, was eventually elected a member of the prestigious Academy and given a whole institute to wield.

  The appearance of Isak Prezent, a specialist in the Marxist philosophy of biology, added a new ideological dimension. Prezent became Lysenko’s Marxist-Leninist spirit guide. It was his idea to name this new kind of agricultural science “Michurinism,” after the homegrown, unorthodox but green-fingered plant-grafter, Ivan Michurin (1855–1935). This term was useful when contrasting the new science with the decadent ideas imported from abroad. In 1935 Lysenko denounced the “saboteur kulaks” of scientific research—for they were to be found there too—deriding the adherents of “bourgeois genetics” who were mentally crippled by capitalist agriculture. Someone in the audience stood up and applauded, “Bravo, Comrade Lysenko! Bravo!” It was Joseph Stalin himself.

  Lysenko was now a made man. Ideas multiplied. He began to advocate cross-pollination regardless of variety, a process he referred to as “love-marriage,” as opposed to the “arranged marriages” of bourgeois geneticists, who labored under the illusion that varieties with known properties ought to be preserved. Since he had abolished the concept of variety, this all made sense. Here Lysenko encountered his first real opposition, as he began to endanger the patiently collected library of plant varieties that Vavilov had devoted his life to assembling. But Vavilov’s careful criticism of this talk now backfired. He was demoted to vice president of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL) and attacked by Molotov for wasting time on his “useless collection of seeds.” By political decree, Lysenko was elected to VASKhNIL, which was followed by the first of many Order of Lenin awards.