by Andrew Brown
The President of the Soviet Academy, who received Dale’s letter, was a physicist, who must have wept when he read these principled words: his name was Sergei Vavilov – he was Nikolai’s younger brother.
The climax of Lysenko’s campaign to control biological science in the USSR came at a stage-managed conference of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences in August 1948. Lysenko had survived a period of uncertainty immediately after the war, but retained the patronage of Stalin, who allowed him to pack the Academy with his scientific supporters; Stalin now reaffirmed his public support of Lysenkoism. At the August conference, Lysenko gave a speech, pre-approved by Stalin, in which he denounced several senior biologists and called for proletarian science. His proposals were soon endorsed by the Supreme Soviet – about three thousand biologists were dismissed from their academic posts (some were arrested), and various institutions were closed down. The upheavals were openly reported in Pravda and naturally caused comment amongst scientists in the West.
The issue came up in a BBC radio debate between Bernal and Michael Polanyi on ‘The organization of science and scientists’.19 Bernal made his customary case for the central planning of collective research, while Polanyi stressed the need for individualism. He dismissed Bernal’s ideas as a wildgoose chase that started a decade before with his book, The Social Function of Science, in which Sage espoused Marxist values and suggested that scientific discoveries in Russia were made in response to human need. In Polanyi’s opinion, the most important consequence of the planning movement was the fate of Russian scientists, ‘who still have to submit to regimentation by planning, [and] remain constantly in danger of falling victim to the machinations of political careerists – men who gain influence on science by pretending to be the fulfillers of Marxism and who may at any moment direct against their fellow scientists the deadly shafts of Marxian suspicion and Marxian invective. The fate of Vavilov and of his many collaborators who succumbed to the planning of science as exercised by Lysenko, can never be absent from the thoughts of any Russian scientist.’20 Sage did not respond to this point.
The BBC then decided to examine the Lysenko affair, specifically, in a radio broadcast in November 1948. Darlington was one of three scientists who attacked Lysenkoism and its baleful consequences, but the fourth discussant, J.B.S. Haldane, mounted a rearguard defence. He argued against a rush to judgement, likening his adversaries to the jury in Alice in Wonderland, giving their verdict before they had heard the evidence. This was somewhat disingenuous since one of the three scientists had interviewed Lysenko, and translated summaries of the August meeting of the Lenin Academy of Agriculture were available. Haldane gave an indication of what level of information he would require when he stated on the subject of Vavilov’s death that there were discrepancies in the various accounts circulating, and that he would be satisfied only by an official announcement from the Soviet government.21
Haldane was caught in a dilemma between his allegiance to the Soviet Union and his knowledge of scientific facts. His defence of orthodox Mendelian genetics in the broadcast was, however, so sotto voce that it was lost in his charitable portrayal of Lysenkoism. The Daily Worker, whose editorial board he chaired, had no hesitation in reporting that Haldane had given his complete support to Lysenko. Haldane was furious, but had only himself to blame. A meeting of the Engels Society (a debating club for communist British intellectuals) was called, at which the majority of scientists present were hostile to Lysenkoism. It was left to Bernal, at the end of the meeting, to soothe high tempers and to avoid a vote that might embarrass the Party.22 The next meeting was a two-day affair with Emile Burns, the communist writer, in the chair and Bernal sitting beside him.23 Again there was no reconciliation between obedience to the Party and science.
The debate was also carried in print, most prominently in the columns of the New Statesman. Waddington wrote articles stating that while he was not convinced about Lysenko’s experiments and claims that ‘seem so unlikely in view of all our present knowledge that they cannot possibly be accepted until repeated, in other laboratories, and under much more carefully controlled conditions’, nevertheless the ‘Russians have an arguable (though I do not say convincing) case that the kind of actions they have taken are justifiable’.24 For this evasive effort, he earned a stinging rebuke from Darlington, who described him as a friend of the Soviet regime seeking ‘to release a fog over the Lysenko controversy’.25 After carefully reviewing what was known about Vavilov’s death, Darlington pointed out that the Soviet government ‘had put to death eight other leading geneticists’.
Why [he asked] does not the Soviet Government explain officially that all these men are alive and well? Or that they have died natural deaths? Or that they were all spies and traitors – a frequent circumstance? Communists, and friends of the regime outside Russia, would be greatly relieved. The load of shame would be lifted off their shoulders. I suggest that the Soviet Government has not done so, because of the effect such a statement would have inside Russia. It would seem a sign of weakness. The disappearance or killing of some individuals always has a general, as well as a particular, value for a government of this kind. It is to terrorise those who remain.26
The atmosphere surrounding Lysenkoism was so charged, with the majority of British biologists vehemently against, that Bernal’s apparent support for it would no longer go unchallenged. Julian Huxley, who had been an enthusiastic visitor to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, was now deeply troubled about the plight of science and scientists there. He wrote to Bernal in April 1949 in connection with an article he was preparing for Nature on the ‘Soviet genetics business’.27 Huxley, the Director General of UNESCO, was concerned that despite the resignations of Dale and Muller from the Academy of Sciences, Bernal was still said to approve of Lysenkoism. Sage responded, with the voice of calm reasonableness, that: ‘My opinion on reading the accounts of the controversy is that in general all the facts of orthodox genetics are admitted, but the laws are considered far too simple an interpretation of the facts… However my judgement in this matter is, of course, very limited.’28
Huxley’s article appeared in Nature in June, and it was a passionate critique of what he saw as a great scientific nation turning its back on the universal and supra-national character of science. To Huxley, the veracity of Lysenko’s theories, the fact that Mendelian genetics had been perverted by the Nazis, the need for scientific research to be centrally planned along with the rest of the Soviet economy, even the ‘liquidation’ of some geneticists by the state were all ‘either irrelevant or merely subsidiary to the major issue, which is the official condemnation of scientific results on other than scientific grounds, and therefore the repudiation by the USSR of the concept of the scientific method and scientific activity held by the great majority of the men of science elsewhere’.29
Bernal now felt compelled to counter-attack opinions such as Huxley’s, which he believed to be alarmist, claiming as they did that Lysenkoism was ‘a blow to the liberty of science, as a turning back to confused and antiquated ideas, and as certain to result in the destruction of Soviet science and in the rapid decay of its agriculture’.30 He viewed the controversy as ‘a major intellectual weapon in the cold war’. Sage saw Lysenko’s theories and achievements as rooted in practical agriculture and not the product of orthodox academic study: the ideas were ‘in essence characteristically socialist as well as characteristically Russian’.31 He believed that Lysenko’s success had been hard-won – ‘the result of twenty years of experimentation, discussion and controversies’ – and achieved despite the scepticism of more orthodox academics, who had now been won over by his arguments. Lysenko and his ever-increasing band of supporters were the industrious scientists who were going to transform Soviet society and their achievements justified the development of science within the USSR along a separate course.
These men are the scientists of the new socialist world, and we must expect them to appear startling and even repellant to many scient
ists brought up in the gentlemanly tradition of scholastic research. They are active and purposeful. They are politically educated. The old explicit neutrality of science is not for them. They recognise it as concealing implicitly approval of and assistance to the exploitation of capitalist economy… In the struggle between two world outlooks one cannot occupy an intermediary position.32
Huxley dismissed Bernal’s essay as ‘a specious, if brilliant, piece of apologetics, not an impartial discussion’.33 He thought Sage had ‘unfairly evaded the major issues’ such as the legitimacy of the Soviet government in ‘officially condemning a whole branch of science as false, anti-scientific, anti-patriotic, etc.’, not to mention the dubious scientific validity of Lysenko’s work: ‘If Professor Bernal were a geneticist instead of a physicist, he would realise that Lysenko’s theories are, scientifically speaking, largely nonsense – meaning that they do not make scientific sense.’34 Huxley was now able to find more common ground with Haldane, who had clarified his own position in the same summer issue of Modern Quarterly that carried Bernal’s essay. Haldane deplored the ‘ill-informed criticism of genetics by supporters of Lysenko’ in Britain, and reminded his readers that he was a modern geneticist who believed that ‘the hereditary process depends on material objects, called genes, in the nucleus of a cell, and on other objects outside the nucleus’.35 He stated that genes were neither immortal nor immutable, but if ‘they were at the mercy of every environmental change, heredity would be impossible. If they always reproduced their like, evolution, and even the production of domesticated animal and plant varieties would be impossible. Ninety-nine geneticists out of a hundred would agree to this statement.’ But Haldane was scornful of those Marxists who ‘went so far as to deny that there was a material basis of inheritance… [because] a Marxist can no more deny a material basis for heredity than for sensation or thought’.36
Up to this point, Bernal had been careful to couch his argument in moderate language, and his public persona, for example at meetings of the Engels Society, had been placatory. His position, although a minority one within the British scientific community and exasperating to some, had been carefully crafted, but this was all changed by a diatribe he unleashed in August 1949 at a peace conference in Moscow. The meeting was held in the ornate Hall of Columns with huge, garish portraits of Lenin and Stalin serving as the backdrop to the speakers’ platform. Sage was there as a representative of the World Federation of Scientific Workers, and while his remarks were not specifically concerned with Lysenko, they left his audience in no doubt about the wickedness of science practised outside the Soviet bloc.
For now in capitalist countries the direction of science is in the hands of those whose only aim is to destroy and torture people so that their own profits may be secured for some years longer. They show this by their choice of weapons, not those of combat against equally armed opponents but weapons of mass destruction, for destroying houses and fields, for poisoning and maiming women and children… The fact is that science in the hands of a decayed capitalism can never be employed usefully, it can only lead to increased exploitation, unemployment, crises and war. It is not astonishing that this should produce in capitalist countries a reactionary attitude to science and inside science itself. Under capitalism war is poisoning science. At the same time there is a move to reject science altogether and to replace it with a mysticism that can easily again turn to the perversions of the Nazis. Already from America has come the call to reduce the population of the world, which can lead logically only to an even more scientific variety of Hitler’s gas chambers… Only under capitalism is it true that science can bring no happiness but only destruction. The scientist has no freedom – he is a slave to the masters who have lost their senses.37
He praised the Soviet people for serving as the inspiration for ‘hundreds of millions of oppressed people of the world’ and credited their heroism for saving science and securing its future for mankind; he concluded by greeting ‘their great leader and protector of peace and science, Comrade Stalin’. According to the official report, this piece of demagogism brought forth ‘stormy and prolonged applause’. No one in the Hall of Columns was to know that within forty-eight hours the first Soviet plutonium bomb would be detonated on the steppes of Kazakhstan; Beria the head of the NKVD was present at the test, and if it had failed, the scientists involved expected to be shot.38
Bernal had been preceded on the platform by Sergei Vavilov, President of the Academy of Sciences, who reflected on the horrors of the two world wars and saw the symptoms of another imperialist war beginning against the USSR, under the guise of the Marshall Plan and the new NATO. Turning to the history of science, Vavilov in effect renounced his dead brother by praising Michurin (a horticulturist who had been championed by the Lysenkoists), for charting ‘new paths for remaking nature’. He held up the USSR as an example to the rest of the world, for ‘under the leadership of Comrade Stalin, brilliant scientist and great statesman, Marxist-Leninist science is a powerful instrument in building Communist society’.39 Science, he continued, was the ‘foundation for a wholesome materialist philosophy; it has strong living contact with our collective farms and the factories of our socialist industry.’ Vavilov’s peroration, ‘Glory to our teacher and leader, the great Stalin’, in contrast to Bernal’s, seemed to fall flat with the audience, who perhaps detected a note of insincerity.
Sage’s speech was immediately picked up by the British newspapers: The Times ran a short story headed ‘Prof. Bernal praises Mr Stalin’ on 29th August. Two days later, the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) began its annual meeting and released a press statement about Bernal’s status as a committee member.
In view of Press reports of statements purporting to have been made by Professor Bernal in Moscow, which could not be reconciled with the scientific aims and objects of the association, it was decided to ask him what was actually said and, in the meantime, to defer the question of his appointment.40
Bernal was still in Moscow, spending two days after the peace conference with architects talking about building projects and then the first week of September visiting various scientific institutes. One of these was the experimental farm and greenhouses, where he talked to Lysenko for some hours. He was accompanied by J.G. Crowther, who found the chain-smoking Lysenko ‘highly strung’, although he appeared to relax when Sage confided in him that he too was the son of a farmer.41 Sage’s notes recording his first impressions of Lysenko stand as a testament to his monumental misjudgment. Viewing him as a ‘scientist of the Darwin Rutherford type’ who ‘cannot accept what is presented [to him] in a mathematical form’, Sage thought of Lysenko as ‘a poet with vivid imagination [who] forms his own ideas in a qualitative world’.42 Lysenko was ‘antipathetic to formal argument’ and had no time for orthodox Mendelian genetics: he left Sage in no doubt that ‘if the Mendelists oppose him, he will remove them from office’43 but it seems Sage preferred not to think of the consequences of such ruthlessness.
When he flew into Northolt Airport on 9th September, Sage found the press waiting for him. He told them that he stood by what he had said in Moscow, but was not prepared to stand by what had been reported until he had seen it. He added: ‘The energies of the leading scientists in the capitalist countries are principally devoted to military development. Because 60 per cent of money devoted to science is in preparation for war, science can hardly be in any doubt about it.’44 Speaking a few days later at the conference of ‘Soviet Partisans for Peace’ in London, Sage was reproachful of BAAS, saying ‘I think it is highly irregular that a person who is absent should be judged and in a limited way condemned, before he is heard.’45
Sage received mail accusing him of treason and even an offer from a gentleman in Gloucestershire of a stipend of £250 per annum, if he would go and live in Russia. The News Chronicle published a robust attack on Sage’s shameless support of Stalin’s regime. Sage in turn accused the newspaper of Goebbels style anti-Soviet propaganda
for suggesting that ‘millions of the people live in abject misery and poverty’ where on his visit he ‘only saw the happy, well-fed crowds that fill the streets of Moscow at all hours, the good clothes, the full shops. The contrast with 15 years ago is simply staggering…. The Soviet Union is about as different as anything could be from an ordered totalitarian state where masses of people are doing precisely what they are told by an arbitrary higher authority.’46 The newspaper’s columnist, A.J. Cummings, was not deterred and wrote a second article, ‘Prof. Bernal, These are Facts’,47 saying ‘It is now clearer than ever that Professor J.D. Bernal lives in cloud-cuckoo land.’ In a perceptive piece about the Gulag system, Cummings cited documented evidence of Russian labour camps containing millions of slaves that have become ‘an organic element, a normal component of the social structure’. He accepted that these were never mentioned in the Soviet press, but every citizen had friends or relatives who had been a part of it. Sage was completely unmoved by Cummings’ argument and complained to the editor that the ‘facts’ quoted by Cummings on labour camps were ‘allegations from professed anti-Soviet sources which are unverifiable and not even self-consistent’.48 Just like Haldane, Bernal would give credence only to an official Soviet announcement.
The debate about Soviet science assumed new importance after 23rd September, when it was announced from Washington that ‘within recent weeks an atomic explosion occurred in the USSR’.49 American and British government scientists had detected an increase in radioactive fission products in the atmosphere, and were able to trace back their time of release to within an hour. The next public criticism of Sage came from an unexpected quarter. The Nobel Laureate, Sir Edward Appleton, now Principal of Edinburgh University, lambasted him in an after-dinner speech, which was fully reported in The Times. His audience was an international one, and he sought to assure them that there was no country which gave warmer support to scientific research than Great Britain, and that the fact that most money was given by way of grants and not by contracts ensured great freedom for university researchers. He continued: