Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday

by Gavan Tredoux

  The UK now abounded with organizations that had been organized along the same lines as the Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR, to promote “friendly relations” with Stalin’s dominions, old and new. Haldane served on many of these, including the British Soviet Society and the British Roumanian Friendship Association. Likewise, he lent his presence to gatherings like the International Conference for Aid to Democratic Greece held in Paris on April 11, 1948.23 This was organized by the Communist Party of Greece, then engaged in a long civil war aimed at taking the country into the Soviet sphere, which it finally lost in 1949. If there were front organizations he did not join, it could only have been through lack of opportunity. He was invariably joined on these by his old comrade INTELLIGENTSIA—Ivor Montagu.

  Montagu appears to have kept active throughout this period, but he received a shock when developments in Eastern Europe progressed inexorably to that intermediate stage of full socialism, show trials and rampant terror. His concern was personal rather than altruistic, as he had long been associated with some of the accused, a dangerous position to be in. In Czechoslovakia, the number-two communist Rudolf Slansky was arrested in late 1951, along with many of his associates, and charged with the usual nefarious plots. Included among the co-accused, who were mostly Jewish, was none other than Otto Katz, an old associate of Montagu dating back to the 1930s and perhaps even earlier. Katz had helped Montagu extensively with his propaganda documentaries, including those he made about the Spanish Civil War. This was the same Otto Katz visited by Hans Kahle en route to England after the Spanish Civil War. Now back in Czechoslovakia under the name Andre Simone, Katz had been arrested.

  In late October 1952, Montagu was recorded discussing the Slansky/Katz case with his fellow Party members. Montagu was worried that if Katz was going to be “scrubbed” he might implicate his old friend, Ivor the foreigner, who was looking forward to being decorated by the Bulgarians. There was also the delicate matter that Montagu had had extensive dealings with Otto’s old boss Willi Münzenberg, who had been “liquidated” in the late 1930s. The transcript gives important insight into the extent that Party members had real knowledge of events in Eastern Europe at the time.24

  14.05. Visitor comes in saying he came to see the International Department but there is no-one there.

  BOB25 enquires for his health and then asks if all the people are home now.

  No, BASIN?? ph26 should have come yesterday, but the rest are waiting until November. Relates a long and complicated story of muddled arrangements involving several cables.

  BOB asks if it was a successful conference.

  Visitor’s immediate reply inaudible. He then says he has brought a lot of stuff for the International Department. Visitor says he wanted a word with BOB because of the arrest of OTTO KATZ, connected with the Reichstag Fire. Then Visitor (believe he is Ivor Montagu) outlines KATZ’ history for BOB. He tells BOB that when he went through Prague between 8 and 15 he rang KATZ up, as he was in the habit of doing when in Prague to arrange for them to lunch together. His wife answered and said he would be sorry to have missed him but he (KATZ) was away for ten days. A day later a girl employed in the Ministry of Information called into the World Council and said as MONTAGU knew KATZ she thought she should tell him he’d been arrested. MONTAGU left a message with ROY to tell HARRY when he went through as HARRY knew him well. MONTAGU is a bit worried in case KATZ is ‘scrubbed’. He (KATZ) has many times been near people who have turned out bad ones, e.g. WILLI MUNZENBERG. If on the one hand KATZ is all right IVOR does not want to stop seeing him; on the other hand if he has done anything wrong he does not think he should conceal the fact that he used to go and see him. They were in the habit of exchanging propaganda material. Asks BOB what he should do about it; should he keep his mouth shut and say nothing or if that is the wrong thing to do.

  BOB doesn’t think it is easy to say. Adds ‘If you talk to them here at the Embassy they don’t know a damn thing’.

  IVOR was wondering if he ought to say anything to the Soviet comrade in charge of . . . (GOULAEV? phon27) or to (HODINNA-SPURNY phon). He did not say a word when he came through this time, but thought he would ask BOB. Goes on to say one irony is that on the 29th the Bulgarians are going to decorate ‘us all’. And of course it is he who ought to be decorated. Laughs.

  BOB replies they must hope there is nothing wrong with the chap; of course everyone who has been in that bloody country is under suspicion.

  IVOR says KATZ spoke to him about that once or twice, IVOR thinks extremely ably. A joke was made of what they called the English disease that it was a trial for comrades and a test of character because those who hadn’t made a good job of this didn’t realise the inevitability of it—on the other hand those who were real comrades understood the necessity of it and took it well. KATZ gave as an instance of this the young fellow (Paul) EISLER who married the daughter of the man who owns the News Chronicle, Layton28 (Jean LAYTON). He’d been private secretary to GOTLOV29 and on the basis of the precautions against everybody who had been outside they’d removed him from his post and put him in a factory and how well she’d taken it. She said she was delighted with it because she said it was the first time her husband had ever worker30 on regular hours.31 IVOR says KATZ was putting himself in the context of that of course from his clearing out of (RUDE PRAVO32 phon.) IVOR thinks ‘they’ are under heavier tension than any of the others.

  BOB explains that is because they are not such experienced people.

  IVOR goes on they have such a vulnerable frontier with the Americans concentrating on it.

  BOB answers you judge that from them here. Says, a bit sadly, our friend KAVAN33 is also in jail.

  Apparently Katz—who knew the conveyor-belt interrogation routine only too well—immediately signed a full confession and was promptly executed.

  Haldane, for one, was certain that Slansky and his co-accused were guilty and had got the punishment they deserved, or so he told his incredulous colleague Peter Medawar.34 Logically, JBS would have been bound to see Montagu hang too, if Comrade Ivor had been so unlucky. But Montagu survived this scare and went on to upgrade his Bulgarian medal to the Lenin Peace Prize (1959) and to holiday often in Mongolia. The inevitable travelogue featured homely yurts, a beaming Ivor, and blissful communal farmworkers.35 As late as the 1970s, he was to be found writing scathing dismissals of the notion that Stalin had in 1940 ordered the massacre at Katyn of 20,000 Polish officers, and lashing out at the “Solzhenitsyn Industry.”36 The first installment of his wistful autobiography Younger Son (1970) made no mention of his days in the X Group. Death without benefit of reanimatology in 1983 meant that the second installment was left unfinished, but those who have consulted the manuscript say that it, too, makes no mention of INTELLIGENTSIA, BARON, or NOBILITY.37 To save some blushes, he was never prosecuted.

  As for Haldane, he never let go of Stalin. The Society for Cultural Relations with the USSR passed him a letter of condolence to co-sign when Stalin, “one of the great men of world history,” died in 1953. He was glad to do so. A letter to a friend written during his final days in India shows that he did not even accept Khrushchev’s renunciation of Stalin in his secret speech of 1956, which had flushed so many of his old comrades in the Party out of the fold. “I certainly don’t go all the way with Khrushchev. As you know, I disagreed, during Stalin’s lifetime, with some of his actions. But I thought, and think, that he was a very great man who did a very good job. And as I did not denounce him then, I am not going to do so now.”38

  If Haldane ever criticized Stalin, as he claimed, in any important respect, in any known forum, no trace has ever surfaced. The treasure lies in the opposite direction—Haldane was always drawn to violence. Khrushchev’s revelations provoked only regret: the inconvenient details were now generally, undeniably, known.

  10. LYSENKO AND LAMARXISM

  Since Lysenko’s victory over Vavilov and the rest of the main-stream geneticists in the Soviet Union, his reach had
steadily expanded. Those of his opponents who were not shot, imprisoned, or otherwise done away with were forced to disperse through the sprawling reaches of the state-science complex of research institutes and universities. By 1948, the dispersed biologists had regained enough confidence to mount a fresh challenge to Lysenko’s increasingly obscure theories, provoking what may be thought of as the second major crisis of genetics in the USSR. The reaction of the Communist Party to this put Haldane’s own communist loyalties into an ideological wind tunnel where no deviation of form could be concealed.

  Haldane had been one of Lysenko’s earliest and most ardent supporters in the West. “A Great Soviet Biologist,” a Daily Worker article from the late 1930s, was entirely devoted to the Ukrainian’s scientific advances.1 It is an important early statement of Haldane’s approach to the matter, and shows his style of popularizing science. Since it has been overlooked in the literature and is now rather hard to find, its text is given in full here.

  Most of the prominent scientists of the Soviet Union are over forty. So they were at least partly educated under Tsarism, and many had also studied abroad. The younger men and women, who hardly remember Tsarism and take Socialism for granted, have seldom done enough to achieve international reputation. But Lysenko is an exception. He is the son of a peasant, and only thirty-nine years old; and so far as I know, his first work was published in 1928 in the Caucasian Republic of Azerbaijan.

  He has played a great part in the improvement of Soviet agriculture, and although some biologists doubt his theories, there is no question that his practical methods work. One of the main lines of crop improvement in the U.S.S.R. has been the selection of the best races of plant and the production of new ones by crossing. Here Vaviloff did great things for his country.

  And, of course, the development of the electrical and mineral industries has assured a supply of chemical fertilisers. But Lysenko has studied, not so much the plant or its environment, but the relation between the two. Here is the problem. Everyone knows that seeds do not always germinate the moment they are sown. For, of course, wild plants generally sow their seeds in autumn, while they come up in spring.

  Again, annual plants flower in their first year of growth, whilst others wait much longer. Thus if you try to grow a tulip from seed, instead of from a bulb, you will have to wait for at least seven years. Sometimes we want a plant to flower in its first year. For example, maize often fails to do so in England, and is killed by frost before it is any use. Sometimes we do not want it to flower. For example mangolds which flower in their first year use up the material stored in their roots to make flowers and seed. This is called “bolting,” and if you look at a field of mangolds in early autumn you will generally see a few bolters.

  Now Lysenko distinguishes sharply between development and growth. The seedling does not grow during the winter. It looks no different in March to what it did in October. But it has undergone an internal development which enables it to flower at the proper time. Similarly, all mangold and maize plants grow. But only some undergo the internal development which is needed to make them flower.

  A very great deal of work has been done on the conditions for plant growth. But Lysenko was the pioneer in working out the conditions for development in seeds, while Garner and Allard in America did the same for the later stages in development. Their work has been extended by Lysenko and other Soviet biologists, such as Razumov and Liubimenko.2

  Lysenko’s main practical problem was this. The summer is often so hot and dry in the Ukraine that the wheat plants may be damaged or killed unless they form their ears before the end of June. So rapid development is essential. Now, in England all kinds of wheat can be sown safely in the autumn, and the seedlings are not damaged by the winter frosts.

  But this is not so in Canada and Russia, where the winters are very cold. The hardy but generally slow-growing forms which can be sown in autumn are called “winter wheats.” The more delicate forms, which must be sown in spring, in some places as late as May, are called “spring wheats.” If a winter wheat is sown in spring it may not produce ears at all, or may do so very late in the season. So many kinds of wheat which are useful in other countries are no good in the Ukraine.

  Lysenko set out to treat the wheat seeds, before sowing, so that they could be sown in April, and yet get off the mark with a flying start, so to speak, and flower in June. The method, which is called yarovizatzia, or vernalisation (from the Latin ver, spring), differs for different wheats, but is as follows for some varieties:

  The wheat is watered and kept at about 50° F. for twenty-four hours until a few seeds begin to sprout. Then it is spread out about 6 inches deep on the granary floor and the door and windows opened at night till the temperature falls to about 1° above freezing-point. The granary is shut in the day-time to keep it cool, and the seed stirred every day for a fortnight to a month, when it is ready for sowing.

  As an example, one kind of wheat from Azerbaijan, if sown in the ordinary way, formed ears so late when sown at Odessa that it only gave 8 per cent. of the yield of a local wheat. When vernalised it ripened three weeks earlier, and gave a yield of 41 per cent. above the local variety. Of course, this technique, which requires a thermometer, good ventilation and careful weighing and measuring, is beyond the resources of an individual peasant, but quite easy on a big collective farm.

  By 1937, 22 million acres were sown with vernalised crops. For the method does not apply to wheat alone. Maize must be kept in darkness for a fortnight at about 70° F. before sowing. In the case of potatoes, the aim is not, of course, to encourage seed formation, but that of tubers, and the treatment is quite different. Instead of keeping them in the dark, they are threaded on string, and hung up in a greenhouse at 60–70° F., exposed to sunlight by day, and electric light at night. The idea of continuous lighting was due to Garner and Allard, but Lysenko and Dolgushin showed that it could be applied to the seed potatoes in an economical way.3

  Of course, we are only at the beginning of an understanding of the change which occurs in seeds and potatoes during vernalisation. These are being studied by biochemists in the Soviet Union. When they are worked out, still greater improvements will be possible. Lysenko is also tackling problems in plant breeding. Here he is engaged in a lively controversy with some of the older workers. This has not been very fully reported in English, but I hope that he may be able to attend the International Genetical Congress at Edinburgh next August to describe his work.[1]

  Lysenko is not only an Academician, but a Deputy in the Supreme Soviet. He believes in a flying start for boys and girls as well as wheat and potatoes. “In our Soviet Union,” he said “people are not born. Organisms are born, but people are made here—tractor-drivers, motor mechanics, academicians, scientists. I am one of these men who were made, not born. And one feels more than happy to be in such an environment.”

  [1] Unfortunately this was not possible.4

  Haldane uncritically accepted all of Lysenko’s claims about the benefits of “vernalization,” including the imaginary harvest yield increases that his colleagues in the USSR had been so skeptical of, before those critics were swept aside and under. The general reader would not know that the practical matters of crop production were very far from Haldane’s remit, and that his career was built rather on the theoretical analysis of experimental data about genetic traits collected by others (leaving aside his physiological self-experimentation).

  On the more delicate matter of Lysenko’s claim to have transmuted varieties at will—the “problems in plant breeding” that Lysenko was “tackling,” and which had led to a “lively controversy with some of the older workers,” even if many of the participants were no longer that “lively” themselves—Haldane employed a dodge that would also prove useful in the future: waiting for more data but promise to report back then. We will return to more examples of this later. Is it possible that Haldane did not grasp the full implication of Lysenko’s boast that “Organisms are born, but people are
made here”?5 That was of a piece with Lysenko’s abolition of varieties, now applied to humans.

  The supposed bounty of vernalization and the emergence of new varieties through its application periodically cropped up in subsequent years. In July 1940, Lysenko’s speech to the 1939 VASKhNIL conference was translated and published in the West, drawing critical attention. Haldane responded that the “capitalist press” and “Hitler’s friends” were blackening the name of Soviet science.6 They could not see that Lysenko was “world-famous” as “the inventor of vernalization” and practitioner of “vegetative hybridisation.” He assured his readers that in the West, unlike the USSR, “our leaders despise genetics.” In 1944, Haldane was confident that “Lysenko’s work is being applied, not only to speeding up the development of existing varieties of wheat, but to making new varieties . . . vernalization and the breeding of new early varieties have made it possible to grow wheat in northern regions of the union where summer is short. This will undoubtedly save many lives.”7 Recall also his odd argument, quoted previously, that the destruction of Vavilov’s world-famous collection of plant varieties was not much of a loss since “Lysenko’s invention of vernalization rendered many of them less valuable than they were before.”8

  Addressing general attacks on genetics, now too widely reported to be ignored, Haldane preferred to create diversions.

  Two first-rate Russian geneticists have refused to return to their country and are occupying positions elsewhere, Dobzhansky9 in Pasadena and Timofeeff-Ressovsky10 in Berlin. In the Soviet Union Tsetverikov,11 Agol, and Levit have lost their posts. Agol is alleged to have been imprisoned, or even executed . . . Dobzhansky and Timofeeff-Ressovsky got good jobs abroad, as dozens of British scientists have done in the last twenty years without any suggestion that British science is persecuted. Tsetverikov was a serious loss to research. The other two dismissed workers had not done work of great originality. But several good British geneticists have recently lost their posts, one for marrying a Chinese wife, another for trying to expose corruption in an institute, and a third for disproving one of his professor’s pet theories. Similar events have occurred in America.12