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Wealth and Destruction: The Seventeenth International Geology Congress in Moscow
On 22 July 1937, the Seventeenth International Geologists Congress was opened in the great hall of the Moscow Conservatory. The following day, one of the chief speakers at the congress, Vladimir I. Vernadskii, who had spoken about ground-penetrating radar, noted in his diary on his return to his dacha in Uzkoye:
Uzkoye, 23 July 1937. At the congress yesterday. The Germans did not even turn up. None of the major Americans came, or the English either. There can be no doubt that a number of people were deterred by the political circumstances, the fear that there might be some kind of coup. But, in general, the congress went on with its work. Arrests continue among the scientists. Evidently, those who have previously been arrested are now being arrested again. But life still goes on and continues to develop. Geological work goes on despite the huge – unnecessary – loss of people and financial resources.1
Vladimir Vernadskii was not just anybody; he was one of the world’s leading scientists in his field – geochemistry. Having received his training in Russia and Europe before the Revolution, and having enjoyed years of experience abroad, he was particularly struck by the absence of foreign scientists, especially since this was the first international geologists’ congress to be held in Russia for almost half a century – the last occasion had been in St Petersburg in 1897 (admittedly this had been restricted to European Russia). Vernadskii associated their absence with the unease triggered by the recent arrest and execution of leading members of the military, an unease that had also gripped him, since he seems to have breathed a sigh of relief at the thought that a military putsch had been averted in the nick of time.2 The Fourteenth Congress had been held in Madrid in 1926, the Fifteenth in Pretoria in 1929, and the Sixteenth in Washington in 1933. Hence the fact that the congress now took place in Moscow was a great triumph for Soviet science and was taken as an acknowledgement of its achievements by scientists throughout the world. What had shaken Vernadskii was not so much the absence of foreign participants as what was happening behind the scenes, namely the annihilation of scientists who had spent their entire lives struggling to help turn Russia into a rich and thriving nation.3
The emergence of Soviet geologists: science and the dream of anaffluent nation
For geology and related sciences – mineralogy, geography and soil science – Russia and in fact the Soviet Union was a vast field of opportunity with huge challenges. As a late entrant to industrialization, its first task was to investigate its mineral resources, climate, transport infrastructure and energy resources – in short, to take a kind of audit of the economic geography of the nation. As had been the case in Europe a century earlier and in the vast spaces of North America opened up by European settlers, Russia too had a great need of expert knowledge, prospecting and exploration. Institutes, societies, associations – private, semi-private and state-run – sprang up in the second half of the nineteenth century. Among them was the Geological Committee, which was established in 1882. It was responsible for the planned and systematic exploration of the geological structure of the country and its mineral wealth, and for the production of a general geological map of Russia. Where previously there had been only the isolated, fragmentary maps and charts to be found in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – we need think only of Alexander von Humboldt’s journey to Siberia – these were now replaced by a systematic map embracing the whole of Russia, and then the whole of the USSR. In scientific, staffing and financial terms, we are talking about major projects of national importance. These had not only survived the Revolution and the collapse of the ancien régime, but were continued at an accelerated rate and on a larger scale in the second phase of industrialization at the end of the 1920s with the introduction of the First Five-Year Plan. All the major projects of the first two Five-Year Plans that brought about fundamental changes in the map of the USSR would have been inconceivable without the expeditions and fundamental studies undertaken by the geologists, mineralogists, cartographers, petroleum chemists and crystallographers. This remains true whether the object of research was the search for gold deposits, for oil in the Urals, for potash in Solikamsk, or for coal and ore in the Urals and the Kuzbass or the building of hydroelectric power plants. In the eyes of many scientists and scholars of the old generation, the attraction of the new system lay in the fact that it had set itself the task of bringing a new approach to the large-scale opening up and modernization of the country. This was the point at which the ambitions of the old intelligentsia, its scientific ethos and sense of patriotism, coincided with those of the new powers that did not scruple to exploit those moral qualities for their own purposes.
The themes and tasks of the Moscow congress of 1937, as well as the associated excursions, reflect the optimistic mood prevailing among geologists and related disciplines very accurately. A total of 409 talks were given, or at least announced. The chief themes related to oil and global oil supplies (48 papers), the Precambrian and its mineral deposits (33), Permian formations and their stratigraphic location (50), connections between tectonics, magma and ore deposits (54), Asian tectonics (49), problems of geochemistry (19), geophysical methods and geology (25), the geology of the Arctic regions (17), contributions to our knowledge of the Palaeozoic and Precambrian climates (25) and others (29). Even the lay observer will have no difficulty in realizing what was at stake: the search for oil, the origins of oil deposits, the geology of the Precambrian coalfields: major ore deposits, gold and copper, nickel ore and other minerals are all to be found in the earth’s crust formed in the Precambrian period. Similarly, the stratigraphy of the Permian period and research into tectonics and magma arose basically from the same interest in the evaluation of deposits. Soviet geologists were able to make important contributions to the topic of Arctic geology and the division of European Russia into eleven mineralogical provinces. Moreover, the extensive reports on expeditions that were published along with the congress proceedings reveal a candid interest in opening up and surveying the territory of the USSR as part of the second industrial revolution. Excursions were made to the Kola Peninsula and Karelia, to Novaia Zemlia in the Arctic, to the ore deposits in the Urals, to the Dnieper dam in the south, to the manganese ore district of Nikopol, and to the Crimea. A major oil excursion led the participants to Central Asia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and as far as the Fergana Valley. A further large expedition went to the Caucasus, while the most ambitious went to Siberia. Where mining was concerned, congress participants could learn that the Soviet Union had moved up into the first rank of the producers of the most important minerals – coal, oil, iron ore, manganese and gold. The estimated coal reserves of the Kuzbass alone – 450 billion tonnes – exceeded the reserves of Britain and Germany, the two largest coal-producing countries of Europe. Even so, additional coalfields had already been explored: in Siberia, on Sakhalin and in Karaganda. Whereas Russia had been an importer of coal up to the First World War, it now became self-sufficient. And in oil production too, the USSR now moved up into the first rank, as a German participant in the congress noted. ‘It is the intention of the USSR to surpass US oil production in the next 10–15 years.’4 The focus here is on the oilfields of Baku, Grozny, Turkmenistan and Central Asia, and Sakhalin, as well as the oilfields on the River Kama and the construction of oil pipelines. The USSR also had a leading position in iron and especially manganese production.
Figure 17.1 Geological map of the USSR
‘Where previously there had been only isolated, fragmentary maps and charts, these were now replaced by a systematic map embracing the whole of the USSR.’
Gold mining is of great significance for the Russian economy in the post-war period. But it is hard to provide a statistical assessment of this branch of the Russian mining industry. No production figures are given for the individual fields. It is a fact, however, that no other sector has been given so much attention and capital by the state planning authorities. 500,0
00–600,000 people are said to be employed in gold mining.
Russia’s intention was to become No. 1 gold producer in the world – ahead of South Africa.5
The seriousness with which the Soviet leadership pursued fundamental research and exploration in the context of the second industrial revolution can be seen not only in moving the Academy of Sciences to Moscow in 1934, not only in speeding up the development of the natural sciences, technology and engineering or in building up an ‘incubator’ for new scientists and technologists in science and technology.6 There had been an explosive expansion of tertiary institutions and their graduates particularly in the technical and scientific disciplines: the Mining Academy, the Moscow Petrochemical Institute, the Bauman Institute for Steel, the Electromechanical Institute, the Chemical Technology Institute, and numerous new academies – elite institutions of industrialization. The targeted promotion of the children of workers and above all peasants turned the scientific and technical colleges into the most important channels of social advancement.7 The greater prestige now accorded to the natural sciences was reflected even in the planning and reconstruction of the capital.8 The General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow of 1935 envisaged not just extravagant buildings but an entire science city, a kind of campus in which the scientific elite of the nation, liberated from all cares and constraints, would produce supreme achievements. The entire southwest of the city beyond the Moscow River and behind the Sparrow Hills was to be the home of a scientific quarter – a vision that must have seemed utopian at the time.9 Starting out with Moscow, the whole country was to be explored and surveyed anew. This is where sensational expeditions began and ended, to fanfares from the media. Among them was the Arctic expedition of Otto Schmidt in 1937–8.10
Pioneers the nation does not need: geologists as enemies of the people
It goes without saying that the Soviet participants in the international congress belonged to the elite members of the discipline. But this did not prevent a large number of participants – forty-six from the Soviet delegation – from being arrested subsequently, some of them immediately following the closing session of the congress, and from being accused and convicted of fantastic crimes.11
The 968 geologists who were repressed during the period of Soviet rule can be divided according to the punishments they received. In the period 1936–8, some 600 (actually 561, according to my calculations) received punishments, ranging from loss of their jobs to the death sentence, from imprisonment in the camps to reinstatement and rehabilitation. In many cases this meant years-long detention or banishment, and very often death. It also means that between half and three-quarters of these persecutions took place in the one year, so that we are talking about a genuine caesura and an authentic high point.
Other caesuras to have left their mark on the world of science and scholarship were the consequences of the Red Terror of 1918, which had been waged against scientists, scholars, university staff and intellectuals who had resisted Bolshevik attempts to bring everyone into line and who had links with the liberals, monarchists or left-revolutionaries who had been driven underground. This resulted in a whole series of fictitious ‘conspiracies’, such as the Tagantsev conspiracy, in which scholars and university academics were supposed to have been involved and may indeed have been implicated.
A further significant caesura was the beginning of the First Five-Year Plan and the wave of the cultural revolution – roughly 1928–32 – which was directed against the old specialists and experts and was spearheaded by fanatical young radicals. Engineers and technical specialists of the older generation who were concerned with the reconstruction of industry in the broadest sense were transformed overnight into the targets of violent ideological and physical attacks. The struggle against old-time bourgeois specialists led not only to the first large-scale show trials but also to the exposing of further ‘conspiracies on the part of bourgeois specialists’.12
The list published by the Academy of Scientists amounts to a list of martyrs. It features all the engineers and scientists who were vulnerable because of their bourgeois or aristocratic background or their training in pre-revolutionary institutions, especially foreign ones. Thus scientists from bourgeois or aristocratic backgrounds constitute a significant proportion of the ‘former people’ or ‘socially alien elements’ expelled from Leningrad, Moscow or other Soviet cities from 1934 to 1936. They are the preferred targets of the process of social cleansing.13
In the period 1936–8 we witness a broadening and deepening of these attacks. The chief criticisms are membership of earlier opposition groups, both leftist and rightist, counter-revolutionary and anti-Soviet activities, conspiracy, being an undercover agent, spying – offences mainly identified and punished as ‘counter-revolutionary’ under Article 58. Many cases attracted the supreme punishment – shooting, with immediate effect. There can be no doubt about the crucial importance of the years 1937–8 for the Soviet science community, even though the waves of repression continued afterwards and basically came to an end – at least as far as the death threat was concerned – only with Stalin’s death.14
The professions listed indicate that we are dealing with ‘living productive forces’, living knowledge and competence whose training had absorbed the energy of an entire life and an entire society. These professions point to a body of expert knowledge and skills essential for the industrialization and modernization of Russia. They include geologists, geophysicists, construction geologists, expedition leaders, ethnographers, archaeologists, Siberian experts, prospectors, cartographers, surveyors, geobotanists, palaeobotanists, sedimentologists, mining engineers, oil geologists, mining inspectors, historians and geographers, mineralogists, petrographers, mining technologists, topographers, specialists in the technology of rare and radioactive metals, hydrologists, land specialists, permafrost experts, crystallographers, coal geologists, radio geologists, radiobiologists, geotechnical engineers and volcanologists. In an emerging nation such as Russia in the first third of the twentieth century, such skills were rare and costly. This explains why such experts occupied almost all the responsible, leading positions. What follows is a short list of martyrs from the ranks of the geologists.
Nikolai Petrovich Gorbunov (1892–1938), a government official and secretary: until 1928 he was head of the Council of the National Economy. An outstanding organizer of the expedition to Tajikistan and the Pamir Mountains in the 1930s, and permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences, he was arrested in the winter of 1937–8 in Moscow and died early in 1938.15
Gavriil Ivanovich Goretskii (1900–1988), a palaeontologist from a peasant family: arrested several times in the 1920s, a member of the Belorussian Academy of Agriculture, in 1930 he was alleged to be a member of the ‘Workers’ Peasant Party’. In 1931 he was an assembler in a cardboard-box factory in Kem in the Karelian Republic, in 1932 he worked as a geologist on the White Sea Canal, and from 1934 he worked on the Kola Peninsula. He was arrested, released and rearrested in 1937, condemned to death by shooting and again released. Having spent ten years working on around ten hydrogeological projects, he was active as a geologist specializing in the Quaternary period, studying Karelia, the Kola Peninsula, the Kama territory, the Urals and Volga regions, and the Russian south and west. Not until 1965 was he reinstated once more in the Academy of Sciences; he was one of the founding members of the Botanical Gardens in Minsk.
Evgenii Aleksandrovich Gukovskii (1896–1938), a geologist working for the Gold Mining Trust in Western Siberia who prospected for gold in various regions: he came from an aristocratic family in Odessa with social revolutionary inclinations. Having studied at the University of St Petersburg, he worked as a teacher in a Petrograd children’s colony, took part in a number of expeditions in the Eniseii region and was the inventor of a special measuring instrument. Arrested in 1938 after taking his higher doctorate, he was alleged to have recruited new members to a ‘rightist Trotskyist organization’ to which he belonged and to have delayed and sabota
ged the process of gold extraction. On 15 June 1938, within the space of 109 minutes, he was condemned to death by shooting under paragraphs 7, 8 and 11 of Article 58. He was not rehabilitated until 1958.
Vera Mikhailovna Dervis (1878–1951), one of Russia’s first women geologists: from an aristocratic family, she graduated from the Moscow school of the order of St Katharine with a silver medal and attended the Bestuzhev courses for women in St Petersburg and the University of Geneva, obtaining a diploma in crystallography. She was arrested in 1945.
Tigran Arshakovich Dzhrbashian (1890–1937), a geologist and mineralogist who participated in the Seventeenth Congress: he studied at the Institute of Technology in Tbilisi and at the Sorbonne; in 1926 he was in Erevan as a mining engineer holding various posts in the Economic Council of the Republic. He was arrested on 31 August 1937.
Nikolai Nikolaevich Dingelstadt (1893–1937), a geologist, born in St Petersburg into an aristocratic family: he was a member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party from 1911 and a specialist in the gold of the Ural and Pamir Mountains. Condemned in 1936 and imprisoned in the Solovki camp, he was shot on 1 November 1937.
Moscow, 1937 Page 38