Dear Prime Minister,
This letter will not reach you, but might reach one of your subordinates who can convey some of its contents. In 1961 you visited the I.S.I. I had made rather full arrangements for you to see the work my colls. were doing. Prof. M. arrived on the previous day, countermanded the arrangements without consulting me, and asked me to arrange my colleagues’ research material according to a plan of his own. Two of the three were absent taking students round an agri. exhibition. My wife and I instantly resigned. However, during the visit I was in the Inst. as I should have been [as] an Academic of the Sov. Union. However, Prof. M. did not think it fit to inform you of my presence. I must therefore have appeared extremely impolite, if not worse.
The letter shows that he was still a member of the Soviet Academy in 1964. When it came to certain authorities, Haldane was remarkably subservient.
Haldane died of cancer on December 1, 1964, not long after his seventy-second birthday. The BBC broadcast his recorded self-obituary a few days later. Few, if any, scientists would get that treatment today. It did not last, though. His memory has been kept alive in subsequent years mainly through the influence of his former students and colleagues in India, who continue to promote his works and stature.31
13. A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF MURDER
Some communists lost their faith gradually, almost imperceptibly, eventually realizing that they were no longer in sympathy with the Party. But most of those who broke decisively with the Party, and homologously the Soviet Union, were prompted by a specific episode. The decisive event may have been the Civil War, with its famines and “blocking units” behind the front lines; the show trials of the twenties and thirties (Whittaker Chambers); the “liquidation” of the POUM and others in Spain (George Orwell); the Nazi-Soviet Pact (Victor Gollancz); the invasion of Finland; the crushing of the Hungary Revolution of 1956; the invasion of Prague in 1968; or something else from that long list. Or it may have been a personal entanglement with the serious men, such as a sojourn in the Gulag after the customary torture and defilement, or such treatment of a relative or comrade.1 The last case is surprisingly rare, as most victims of that sort of thing simultaneously believed that, while they were of course innocent—if only Comrade Stalin could learn the truth!—the others were certainly guilty. The endurance of the faithful through this grim procession of events could be used as a test of the depth of their commitment, and it often was by agencies like MI5. Those who kept on believing even after 1968 exhibited an extreme form.
Disillusionment led to a new system of coordinates, after which events previously waived became part of the narrative of the disillusionment, inverting their meaning. So a stalwart communist could keep faith from the Revolution through the purges of the 1930s and then break only after the invasion of Hungary in 1956, yet go on to revile Stalin retrospectively for the monstrosities of the show trials in the 1930s, the famine in the Ukraine, and so on, even though those events had always been known but encased in mental permafrost.
Reasons for breaking with the faith were never in short supply. The Bolshevik revolution was notoriously a violent coup d’état by a ruthless minority, originally inserted by the German army, who prevailed by killing and exiling their opponents.2 Their grip on power depended from the beginning on political terror, pioneered by Lenin and Trotsky, along with the use of famine as a political weapon. The concept of a “class enemy” entailed a dehumanization of large swathes of the population. The imposition of ideological conformity in intellectual life was in full swing by 1918, after which it only reached further levels of refinement and penetration into all facets of life. It has been estimated that on Lenin’s watch at least 1.5 million people were murdered, quite apart from the casualties of the Civil War itself. Estimates vary for Stalin’s tally: choose, say, 20 million.3 Deliberate famines; relentless quotas of arbitrary offerings for forced confession and shooting; slave laborers deliberately worked to death, or deported and abandoned to die in the Arctic wastes; a peasantry broken and stripped of everything to export grain and stock the meat-grinder slave camps; the entire 20,000-strong officer corps of the Polish army, executed one after the other by pistol-shot, and dumped in mass graves; the Old Bolsheviks, minced up as steak tartare and seasoned with their own ideology; executioners recursively executing previous executioners; foreigners, like the American Finns and others who had come to find “universal plenty,” arrested wholesale and poured down the memory hole of the Gulag; scientists shot, banished, and humiliated into nothingness for pursuing “bourgeois idealism”; entire nations shattered as “disloyal,” along with Soviet prisoners of war returned from Germany; the Jews, “cosmopolitans” tangled up into fantastic imaginary plots to poison Stalin in concert with foreign powers. Whole libraries cannot comprehend it all.
Few of the Communist faithful and their fellow travelers could have known all these details, but all knew the broad outline. Reading through personal accounts of their loss of faith, one is struck by how seldom a lack of information per se plays a role. It is not as if those who lost faith were not aware of events—they were only too well aware, at various levels. Consider Haldane’s protégé John Maynard Smith, who was, like his mentor, a Communist Party member for twenty years during the height of Stalin’s reign. Remembering those days in conversation with Richard Dawkins, he had explanations on hand.
Just as Freudians have a sort of built-in defence against any criticism, if you disagree with a Freudian he says, ‘Oh, that’s all because you saw something nasty in the woodshed when you were a child,’ and dismisses your arguments as being irrational. The Marxists dismissed evidence against their beliefs on the grounds that this was all capitalist propaganda. I know this, to you, will sound absurd, and to me, it sounds absurd today, but we, my contemporaries, knew of the stories about the purges, about the excesses of Stalinism, not what is known now but we knew that such stories existed, but we dismissed them on the grounds that that’s the kind of thing you’d expect the capitalist press to say. We didn’t believe them. And we were wrong not to believe them, but we didn’t. We had a coherent world view, which fitted together, which explained things, and . . . enabled us to ignore those facts which didn’t fit.4
Note the term “excesses,” of which more later. The trouble with Maynard Smith’s explanation is that more than enough information could be obtained from the official Soviet press. That was the point of the show trials, which spared no details of the cockamamie conspiracies supposedly “confessed” to. Often the officially blessed details were not even internally consistent as to dates and places. No matter, they were believed, or at least embraced, anyway. The same is true of the Gulag. Lenin had established slave labor camps early on—for example, in the Solovetsky islands. In the early days, before security was perfected, people once in a while escaped from there to Finland and published their experiences in the West. To take only one case, in 1926 S. Malsagoff published An Island Hell describing the Solovetsky camps with many of the gruesome details, such as “torture by mosquito infestation while tied naked to a tree overnight,” now associated popularly with later works like the Gulag Archipelago. This raised enough attention to persuade Stalin to rope in Maxim Gorky for the usual Potemkin tour of the area to provide a glowing testimonial to soothe the West.
Enough of these reports had reached London by 1931 to raise a wave of protests. Russian timber was being exported to Britain under a new trade agreement concluded by the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald, but the timber was produced by the forced labor of the camp system. The Times ran a long report on the system in three parts, titled “Russian Conscripts.” They made a point of using only official statements from Soviet publications as sources.5 Official sources had not yet been cleaned up to hide the details. The Times report had all the essential elements of the Gulag system accurately worked out, and it was popular enough to be republished as a pamphlet that ran through several editions. Questions had already been raised in Parliament, and protest meetings were called to e
xclude Russian timber produced by slave labor. One of these was held at the Royal Albert Hall on March 6, 1931. The Times reported that the house was full. The speakers included Winston Churchill. “The conditions there, he said, were tantamount to slavery. That Government possessed despotic power, and used that power against their political opponents, and sent them in scores of thousands to those hideous places of punishment.” Firsthand accounts were also on offer.
An escaped Russian political prisoner, speaking through an interpreter, explained that he could not give his name, because after he was arrested, his wife—in order to avoid being exiled to the north—escaped with their child and was now living in the south-east of Russia. ‘If my name were known,’ he declared, ‘she might be traced by the Secret Police and made to suffer because I have spoken to you’. He was, he said, a small farmer in Russia, but a little over a year ago was arrested as a political prisoner as part of the general attack which the Soviet Government had been making on the better-class farmers. He gave a moving description of the treatment of political prisoners, and said that as a result of insufficient and bad food, lack of pure water and the excessive tasks imposed (30 trees to be felled per day), disease was widespread and the mortality was very high.
(Conditions would get a lot worse later.) Throughout the meeting, counterprotesters disrupted the speakers and had to be removed by force.6 The Communist Party had quickly mobilized and soon brought out their own pamphlets to argue that these reports were all inventions. Through entities like Ivor Montagu’s Film Society, they distributed films like Solovki (1928) showing model facilities for prisoner “reeducation.” But this is just a brief taste of the information published. A select bibliography of early sources on the subject of the Gulag and related persecution in the USSR, by year of publication, is provided at the end of this book. Though only items published between 1918 and 1961 are included, it is a long list, consisting mainly of personal accounts from camp inmates and terror survivors. (Haldane was alive when every single one of these was published.)
What communist devotion really amounted to was a decision, conscious or unconscious, to accept a certain amount of murder. The final calibration of devotion was only how much? That is what Maynard Smith meant by “excesses.” A certain amount of terror was not excessive. With Haldane’s help, a quantity might be arrived at. For someone like Bertrand Russell, who could plainly see in the early 1920s that the Soviet Union was a police state, even though he never exerted himself all that much in an anti-Soviet way, it was rather less than, say, Arthur Koestler, who would only draw the line at the purges of the 1930s, and far less than, for example, E. P. Thompson, who could not stomach the events in Hungary of 1956, but had been able to embrace all that came before. Along these lines it might be possible to derive some strictly numerical measure of just how much strain produced a breaking point, rough but useful—a normalized quotient of communist resolve.
All this analysis, the traditional measure of a post-Stalinist communist, is moot for Haldane, who never expressed any disillusionment with Stalin, let alone for communism or any of its works. Khrushchev’s revelations in 1956 disappointed him only in Khrushchev. Lysenko was always and forever a “great biologist.” He accepted his own suppression with nothing more than glum silence, perhaps because of the delicate matter of the X Group. He scratched out his own photographs in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. No public break ever followed. Of course, he took diligent care not to accept that holiday in the Soviet Union, or any subsequent offer, but the need to wriggle from the grasp of Stalin didn’t seem to embitter him in any way. At a personal level, Haldane’s abandonment of his former friend Vavilov allowed him to show a finer appreciation of logical niceties than his Bloomsbury acquaintance E. M. Forster. Whereas Forster hoped to betray his country rather than his friend, Haldane knew that he could just as well betray both.
Finally, one may evaluate the posthumous reputation of Haldane’s politics in the light of what he actually said and wrote. A small sample of misleading descriptions from the literature follows. The authors are far off the mark. Either they trivialize Haldane’s long and active service for the Communist Party, or they subsume it under a vaguer term when the concrete one is called for, or they completely misrepresent the reasons for his lapse from the Party itself. (Emphasis in bold has been supplied.)
The English Communists soon recognized in him one of their greatest assets. He continued to have an editorial post on the Daily Worker until his break with Communism on the basis of the dogmatic biology of Lysenko and the Czechoslovak trials.
—NORBERT WIENER7
Although he eventually left the communist party when he learned of the magnitude of Stalin’s crimes, he probably continued to be a believer in the basic Marxist ideals.
—ERNST MAYR8
Haldane and Muller resemble twins. . . . Their careers were roughly alike . . . both were socialists (self-proclaimed Bolsheviks); both were eventually disillusioned especially by the rise of Lysenkoism and the state destruction of science as they knew it.
—ELOF AXEL CARLSON9
Long before the suppression of mendelian genetics by Lysenko (with the support of Josef Stalin) in the Soviet Union, Haldane cautioned that the close relationship which existed in the Soviet State between the state and science might prove disastrous if scientific theories ran counter to the official doctrine.
—K. R. DRONAMRAJU10
For many years he was a member of the Communist Party. . . . But his scientific integrity was too much for him when Lysenko with his bogus ideologised genetics was praised and honoured by Stalin and the Party in Russia (and consequently by the Communist Party in Britain): and he resigned from the Party.
—JULIAN HUXLEY11
It is, however, clear that a break was in any event inevitable. The reason was the commitment of the U.S.S.R. and the British Communist Party to Lysenko’s views on heredity. Haldane slipped out of his connexion quietly without the, at that time fashionable, admissions of past guilt: but not without forthright condemnation of scientific error.
—N. W. PIRIE12
The depth of his attachment to communism as a general philosophy made it extremely hard for him to face the situation within his own scientific speciality when Lysenko and his followers attacked the whole system of ‘western’ genetics and its followers in Russia. But Haldane’s fundamental honesty triumphed and he brought himself publically to admit that communist orthodoxy was mistaken, although it must have cost him a most severe effort.
—TIMES OBITUARY13
[P]eople who are tired of reading how lofty thoughts can go with silly opinions, or of how a man may fight for freedom yet sometimes condone the work of its enemies, have a simple remedy: they need read no further.
—PETER MEDAWAR14
Although Haldane fell away from the Communist Party, he insisted upon maintaining an open mind about whether some of T. D. Lysenko’s ideas might be correct and suggested that support for the possibility might be found in aspects of recent research in biochemical genetics. Still, he declared himself unconvinced by Lysenko’s sweeping contention—that environmental modifications of organisms were genetically transmissible.
—DANIEL KEVLES15
J. B. S. Haldane was one of the most socially-conscious scientists of this century. Throughout his life he was acutely concerned about the social implications of genetical findings and theories.
—P. P. MAJUMDER16
All of us participating in this Symposium must be aware that J. B. S. Haldane was a man of strong political convictions, and indeed, it was those convictions that brought him here to India and ultimately set the stage for this meeting. Some of us, and I include myself, have, when he found human fallibility too much to bear quietly, on occasion followed him to Hyde Park. But his political interests were almost as broad as his scientific, and it would be most presumptuous of me to pretend on an occasion like this to guess in what intellectual direction Haldane would have loosed his barbs and wit.
; —JAMES V. NEEL17
Based on my research, I have concluded that Haldane’s nod to Stalin was simply another aspect of the mid-1940s adulation of that [sic] was typical of this high point in Stalin’s personal glorification. This was, after all, both the time of the battle of Stalingrad and the year that Haldane joined the CPGB.
—EDWIN ROBERTS18
APPENDICES
APPENDIX 1
WHY I AM [A] COOPERATOR
Haldane wrote this incomplete set of reminiscences in the late 1930s, intending to bring it out in book form. The typescript has remained unpublished ever since.1 The text has been annotated here to clarify references and other obscurities.
WHY I AM [A] COOPERATOR
by
J. B. S. HALDANE
Dedicated to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, who converted me to cooperation—, where softer arguments had failed.
PREFACE.
By the word communist I mean not merely one who sympathizes with the general aims of Communism, and occasionally supports it with his vote or money. I mean a member of the Communist Party, which is a section of the Communist International. Readers of this book will soon see why this distinction is necessary.
This book is not intended for proletarians—or shall we say for members of families with an income of less than £4 per week. Some of them may read it out of curiosity, but my arguments are not aimed at them. Frankly I think that those of them who are not members of or active sympathizers with the Communist Party are mugs, deluded by the vast weight of propaganda which is poured over them daily.
But it is not so obvious why a member of the bourgeoisie (or Social Class 1, as the Registrar General calls it, or the Upper and middle classes) should support a movement directed against the class of which he is a member. It will be my object to explain why he or she should do so.
Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday Page 25