Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday

by Gavan Tredoux

  6th Nov.

  Dear Haldane

  I suppose you have read Darlington’s latest in the ‘19th Century and After’. He qualifies for membership of the Committee on un-American activities! A full dozen Russian geneticists who have died or faded from public view in recent years are assumed to be the victims of oriental despot Lysenko. He treats all other existing geneticists as worthless. A week or so ago I heard him denounce Zhebrak as ‘another gangster’. Now that news reaches us that Zhebrak has been denounced in Pravda (presumably by Lysenko) he has been elevated to martyrdom. Do you not think it undesirable that this anti-Soviet tripe should be pedaled by a leading British cyto-geneticist without his being openly disowned by his colleagues? I have been thinking whether it would not be a good plan for a resolution to be tabled at the next Genetical Society meeting. It might state that the members of the G.S.42 while not wishing to defend Lysenko’s views on genetics are entirely opposed to attempts to insinuate without any evidence that it is regarded as a political crime to be an orthodox geneticist in the USSR—or words to that effect.

  I could not associate myself openly with such a resolution. You will know that it would be more than my job is worth, and I have a wife and child to keep. Perhaps you would be prepared to move it. One can’t help feeling that if C.D.D.43 believed all he wrote and was really interested in the welfare of Russian science he would desist from these anti-Soviet tirades which can only inflame Lysenko’s antagonism to anyone who professes similar genetical beliefs to Darlington and strengthen his case in the eyes of the Soviet public.

  Darlington is notorious for scathing criticism of his colleagues behind their backs. I feel that he can indulge in his slanderous attacks on Russians not merely with impunity but is at the same time hailed as a bulwark of Western civilization and gets as much publicity as he could wish.

  Now I have got that off my chest I want to come to the point of my letter. Of course, if the G.S. is of such a nature that the resolution would be rejected by an overwhelming majority it were best not moved. . . .

  No such resolution seems to have been introduced at the Genetical Society. Bateman would go on the following year to do influential work on sexual selection among fruit flies that would no doubt have made Lysenko even angrier.

  In 1948 the anti-Lysenkoists found a more powerful champion in the form of Yury Zhdanov, who had married Stalin’s daughter and was a son of the Politburo member Andrei Zhdanov. Yury had studied genetics himself, and evidently felt that his political connections would shield him when he launched the first serious public attack on Lysenko on April 10, 1948. In this he did no more than notice what others had noticed, and point out that spurious appeals to Marxism and anti-fascism would not change the facts on the ground or in the lab. Lysenko, who had a well-developed sense for the ramifications of this kind of criticism, promptly wrote a letter to his patron Stalin, resigning his presidency of VASKhNIL—an unprecedented step.

  Stalin had a vested interest in Lysenko, who had eagerly agreed to develop a miraculous “branched wheat” that would vastly increase yields. Since this had been Stalin’s own suggestion, and he had even supplied Lysenko with supposed “branched wheat” seed that had been sent to him by peasants from his native Georgia, Stalin depended on Lysenko’s success. The “branched wheat” was a longstanding myth, but Lysenko compensated for this in the same way that he always had, by simply reporting large harvests using it, and claiming victory. A Politburo meeting was called. Stalin lit into critics of Lysenko, and Zhdanov in particular. They had “insulted” and “defamed” Lysenko. Emboldened, his protégé now sought complete demolition of the foreign-influenced “Menshevizing idealists.”

  A session of VASKhNIL was arranged in August 1948, packed in advance with new members elected by Lysenko himself. His opening “report” to the congress was privately approved and annotated by Stalin.44 Stalin did not notice Lysenko’s bad Russian, but struck out his more outrageous claims, such as “any science is based on class,” which Stalin marked up “Ha, ha, ha . . . And mathematics? And Darwin?”45 The “report” merely redoubled political phrase-mongering and attacks on the motives of Lysenko’s critics. The speeches that followed were assigned to Lysenko’s supporters, who called for police action against his critics, to “cleanse” the institutions they infested. Western geneticists and statisticians were excoriated, including Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, R. A. Fisher, and Sewall Wright. But J. B. S. Haldane was not mentioned. Raissa Berg later suggested that this was because Lysenko was counting on Haldane’s support.46

  Few participants dared to speak out against Lysenko, partly because most critics had been excluded in advance. Those who did were repeatedly shouted down; they later found that their contributions had been largely edited out of the published transcript. By the last day of the conference, Pravda had printed Zhdanov’s personal repentance before Comrade Stalin: “I unquestionably committed a whole series of grave mistakes.”47 The congress officially adopted Lysenko’s edicts, “On the Situation in Biological Science.” The requisite purge of anti-Lysenkoists proceeded, enforced all over the country by Communist Party inquisitions, with obligatory public recantations. Within months this process would sweep around the world to “cleanse” orthodox “Marxist science” everywhere.

  Haldane was behind the Iron Curtain at a conference in Budapest when the news about VASKhNIL broke; he had just come from the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace at Wroclaw in Poland. Time magazine tracked him down there for commentary, but he pleaded a “lack of exact information.” “Until he could be sure, said Haldane, that Lysenko’s current theories are unscientific and that opponents had been punished for disagreeing, he would make no decision.” But when he lectured on genetics in Prague in the coming winter, “I shall say just what I think . . . and if what I say does not agree with Lysenko, it’s just too bad.”48 That promise was never put to the test, since Haldane ultimately canceled the Prague lectures. On his return home to the UK, he discovered that he was now required to fall in with the Party line on Lysenko, whether he liked it or not. Declaring him good in parts, as he had loyally done in the past, would no longer cut it.

  Several prominent Western scientists resigned their “corresponding” memberships of the Soviet Academy in protest at these latest developments, including Hermann Muller. Haldane was a corresponding member too, having been elected in 1942. A few years earlier, in response to a claim made by H. G. Wells, Haldane had himself stated that “It is alleged that where, as in the Soviet Union, almost all research is paid for by the State, the free expression of scientific opinion is necessarily checked. . . . As a member of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., I should have protested had this been proved correct.” Having satisfied himself of the baselessness of the claim that any such suppression existed—his sources included, he stated, White Russian exiles—he had no need to.49 Now he neither protested to the Academy nor resigned, and appears to have remained a member for the rest of his life.

  Responding to growing publicity about the affair in newspaper editorials and journal articles, the BBC arranged a radio symposium on the Lysenko affair, which was first broadcast in the early evening of Tuesday, November 30, 1948.50 A brilliant panel had been assembled: R. A. Fisher, the leading statistical geneticist in the world; Cyril Darlington, the cytogeneticist who had made fundamental contributions to the study of chromosomes; Sydney Cross Harland, a fellow of the Royal Society and pioneer agro-geneticist; and Haldane himself. Each contribution had been recorded separately, so that the element of an adversarial debate was removed and each had to address the question at hand, despite Haldane’s protests to the producers.

  Harland was put on first, perhaps because he was the only panelist who had personally met Lysenko, during a visit in 1933 that had been arranged by Vavilov. “In Odessa we went to see a young man called Trofim Lysenko, who Vavilov said was working on the vernalisation or treatment of seeds in order to secure earlier maturity or greater productivity. I interviewed Ly
senko for nearly three hours. I found him nearly completely ignorant of the elementary principles of genetics and plant physiology.” Moreover, “to talk to Lysenko was like trying to explain the differential calculus to a man who did not know his twelve times table.” Worse, he was “what I should call a biological circle squarer.” More ominously, Vavilov had confided to Harland that Lysenko was of an “angry species.”

  Darlington’s contribution was characteristically crisp in its summary of the affair to date, and perceptive about its xenophobic aspects and Lysenko’s attempts to improve Darwin on the same lines as Prince Kropotkin the cooperator. “Last year . . . Lysenko had asserted that there was no such thing as competition between members of the same species. Even pigs and potatoes, it seems, have the right communistic attitude; even cannibals co-operate in a friendly way with their victims.” Darlington also dismissed the idea that Lysenko was a fluke. Rather, he was “the inevitable end of the long persecution of science in Russia,” but less shocking than “the indifference to this persecution on the part of our own scientists”—an obvious reference to Haldane himself. He closed with a call to support the dissidents within Russian genetics.

  R. A. Fisher was less inclined than either Harland or Darlington to write Lysenko off as a mere crank or yokel, feeling that Lysenko’s “mind does not seem to work in either of these ways.” Rather, Lysenko came across to Fisher as a more straightforward dogmatist and megalomaniac, unembarrassed by the need for any evidence, unconcerned that he might be refuted with ease by anyone who cared to graft tomatoes for a while, but happy to make up for this with political threats and invocations of Stalin. “The reward he is so eagerly grasping is power, power for himself, power to threaten, power to torture, power to kill.” In the light of subsequent knowledge, this was an insightful remark.

  Haldane was up last, and the most confrontational of the four. He disagreed with many of Lysenko’s points but agreed with some. He held out for the possibility of heritable acquired characters in rare cases, which he speculated would not obey Mendel’s laws. Lysenko might derive support from the fact that X-rays and other treatments can alter genes, gently sliding past the difficulty that those are not acquired characters, but rather random mutations. Lysenko’s more unusual claims, he conceded, would be “very revolutionary” if they were true, but more evidence was required before minds could be made up. Still, he was “inclined to believe” in them, supposing that Lysenko had somehow altered germ cells on shoots by altering the temperature; perhaps others had not replicated those results because they had not done the experiments the right way. More reasons to believe could be derived from the fact that the Soviet government was backing Lysenko, and they had done well at fighting the Germans. He was ready to grant that Lysenko had been “quite unduly critical of earlier workers,” but then R. A. Fisher himself had been critical of Mendel when he questioned the too-perfect ratios Mendel claimed in his sweet pea experiments, “a charge at least as serious as Lysenko’s accusation of idealism.” And there were some scientists in England who agreed with Lysenko. Regarding persecution of scientists in the USSR, he was “very sorry to hear” that N. P. Dubinin’s laboratory had been closed, but the situation in London concerned him more, since there was “no regular practical course in plant genetics” to be had there. Samizdat humor suggests itself.

  Comrade Haldane, leaping energetically in the air and waving his hands: Comrades, comrades! Come quick, someone set my house on fire!

  Comrade Dubinin, bending double and rocking with laughter: Now, now tovarich! You know perfectly well there are thousands of people in Moscow who cannot even get a light when they need one!

  Haldane went on to include the dissimulations about the fate of Vavilov that we have noted above. His performance was unconvincing, especially when measured next to the other participants. Where he bobbed and weaved, they took definite positions. The evasions he offered were much the same as his previous attempts to avoid commitment. Equating “criticism” by Fisher with “criticism” by Lysenko would not fool many, given that one involved hurling denunciations that led to the Saratov prison, while the other was stated coherently enough to roil a tea party at Trinity College, but not much more.

  Curiously, Haldane’s waiting for more information bluff was called by a few patient listeners. Four years later, one of these, a schoolteacher at Eltham, politely wrote to him, noting that Haldane had reserved judgment in 1948 during his BBC broadcast and wondering if he had by now digested the relevant “printed matter” so that his considered opinion could be given. Haldane replied that, alas, he was too busy at the moment.51 Other requests elicited similar responses.

  The Engels Society unanimously endorsed Haldane’s BBC talk, but the Party was far from pleased with Haldane’s performance. A meeting of the inner circle held on December 1 attracted the interest of MI5. Emile Burns and several others had met with Haldane about his views, and “EMIL said that for the first time he had had the impression that HALDANE was being dishonest in the expression of his views.” Johnny Campbell said that “his own attitude on the whole controversy would be to defend the right of the Soviet Government to intervene.” Emile went on to say that “he had felt HALDANE was being dishonest because instead of trying to see what there really was in LYSENKO’s theory, he only tried to prove that it was illogical, contradictory and unscientific.” He would have to have a talk with Haldane. James Klugmann (1912–1977) anticipated trouble for Haldane within the Party after his speech to “the enemies,” leading to “rumours, discussions and coldness,” and phrases like “the silly old fool.”

  Bill Rust tried to defend Haldane, who had “foolishly” agreed to a public debate, but agreed that they had to “do a certain job with HALDANE.” Klugmann was worried that “the fact that a well-known Communist scientist like HALDANE should have differed from LYSENKO would give the reactionaries all over the world an opportunity to attack them,” and thought that Haldane “because he was not a sufficiently good MARXIST” was “letting his own position and prestige interfere with the interests of the Party.” Bill Rust countered that “HALDANE, although he disagreed with the line of the Party, had in his own way tried to defend the Party and the Soviet Union.” Klugmann pointed to the French, who he said had “put up a terrific show” endorsing Lysenko. As well as neglecting the “terrific conception” of the collective farm, Haldane had “failed to bring out” most of all “the Party’s basic conception that you can change nature, which to the thinking man is the greatest thing of all.” Klugmann emphasized this revealing point. “The great conception of man conquering nature and LYSENKO’s theory in support of this, was not brought out. This was what they ought to be fighting on.” The meeting concluded with a fond speculation that, provided the Party could get enough money for advertising on the BBC and in the papers, they ought to be able to sell enough copies of Lysenko’s books to retire on.52

  Moves were already being made within Party circles in December 1948 to establish the correct line on Lysenko and genetics. A working group led by Angus Bateman drew up a document “In Support of Lysenko” and circulated it among Party members.53 The contents are all the more peculiar if read while keeping in mind the fact that Bateman was a working geneticist himself, and would even establish an enduring reputation in years to come.

  To warm up, Bateman identified something called capitalist science as “a weapon in the conduct of imperialist war, fascist racialism, the fight against the working class, and the U.S.S.R.” Under the sway of this wicked influence, biology had become “limited, pessimistic, and relatively sterile.” By contrast, in the USSR science “had all the means for unlimited advance,” since it could dispense with “the last limitations imposed by reactionary bourgeois theory.” Included in the last was the theory pushed by Mendelians, which had wrongly separated changes in the cell from “changes in the mode of life of the organism” by insisting that genes changed only rarely by chance mutations, and could only be selected if already present. This was “a pess
imistic view of the possibilities of directing evolution in a way valuable to man,” given that it was very slow.

  Mendelian pessimism was useful to “Imperialist exploiters” bent on “showing that colonial peoples have an inherent inferiority in consequence of their possession of a poor complement of genes.” It was also useful closer to home, where it inured the working class to “exploitation with its consequent malnourishment, poverty, and ill-health” by telling them that this had “no effect on their children”—that is, was not heritable, a new form of ideological mystification to be sure! Mendelists were also said to be committed to the idea that “every member of a species is constantly engaged in a struggle against members of its own species for the limited supply of food,” an idea devised only to “divide the workers in their struggle by making each the enemy of his fellows.” But this struggle was “exceptional and of little evolutionary significance.”

  Fortunately, Lysenko had cleared all this up. “The definition of heredity given by Lysenko as ‘the property of a living body to require definite conditions for its life, and to respond in a definite way to various conditions’ is accurate and complete.” There was no need to wait for genetic variation, for it could be produced on demand. “Changes in the heredity of an organism are made by influencing the germ cells it will later shed. Those may be influenced by fundamental changes in the function of the organism caused by its adaptation to its environment.” To forestall the objection that mere use and disuse, or wear and tear, would be inherited in this way, Bateman decreed that only changes “which affect processes involved in the formation and life of the germ cells” would be inherited. (No explanation is given as to how the character of the experience determines which cells it affects to maintain this fortunate discrimination.)