J D Bernal

by Andrew Brown

  On 17th November, Bernal’s party took their leave of Nanking and caught the train to Shanghai. The next few days were taken up with the customary site visits and long evening lectures. He made a one-day visit to the beautiful city of Hangzhou, where he held meetings with scientists and was taken to see Buddhist and Taoist temples, and the local museum, where the greatest treasure on view was the magic fish bowl. This is a bronze bowl, which when filled with water and has its handles suitably rubbed, produces four jets of water rising about two feet from the surface. It was clear to Sage that ‘it is a question of ultrasonic vibrations. The attendant did it magnificently. My scientific knowledge only produced a few drops of water.’37 Sage by now was addicted to Chinese opera and would try to attend a production in each new city: among his favourites were ‘Chang Yu boils the sea’ and the ‘Lohan coin’.

  He spent his last few days in the People’s Republic in Canton, the gateway to China. As usual, the time was packed with university and museum visits. As he was about to board the train for Kowloon, Wu and Chien asked him for an honest appraisal of their hospitality. Sage was touched by their earnestness but did manage one criticism. He told them they should be careful not to ask other foreign scientists to work continuously from 6 am until midnight, because people were not used to it. In reply, Chien and Wu said that he had worked them too hard!

  The train to Kowloon ran alongside what he thought must be one of the most beautiful coasts in the world and gave the impression of passing a series of holiday resorts. After two months in mainland China, the affluence and brashness of Hong Kong came as a shock to his senses. He was met at the station by a number of reporters eager to hear about the state of science in China. Bernal sat down and gave them a lengthy account, which was generously carried in the newspapers, in a way it would not have been in England. One of his first impressions of Hong Kong was of the enormous prevalence of every kind of religious institute. He presumed ‘this is partly a kind of reflux of the missionary movement from the rest of China, but I cannot imagine anywhere, even in Spain, that has a higher density of religious establishments’.38

  From Hong Kong, Sage flew to India, where at the invitation of Sir Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar FRS, the Minister for Science, he carried out another detailed review of the country’s scientific institutes in a hectic three-week tour. He also took the opportunity to address the plenary session of the All-India Congress for Peace, where he appealed for cooperation with those political leaders who were demanding an absolute ban on atom and H-bombs. In an interview with the Indian Express newspaper in Madras, Sage was asked to compare scientific progress in India with that in China. He replied that ‘science progress in India, though good, was not fast enough as compared to China’. When the reporter wondered whether this was due to the different political systems, Sage stated that both countries had mixed economies, but in China the government was in control of things. He wondered who in India was in such control.39 He flew back to London on New Year’s Day 1955, having been away for over three months, with more information about technological developments in the USSR, China and India stored in his head than any Western government agency could match.

  Khrushchev’s devastating speech exposing some of the crushing inhumanity of Stalin’s regime (in which he served throughout) was made in a closed session of the communist party congress in February 1956. In March, Bernal attended a small meeting of the European Cultural Association in Venice, where he seems to have been baited at every turn by Stephen Spender, the writer who had become an active anti-communist.40 According to Spender, one of the interpreters asked how it was that Bernal ‘who is so logical in every way, so objective, and who also has a sense of humour, can be so completely illogical and unobjective whenever the discussion comes round to Communism?’41 Spender asked Sage what he thought about Stalin. He replied, ‘We seem to have made some very serious mistakes.’ When Spender suggested that such mistakes were inevitable under communism, Bernal stated that he still preferred communism to the alternative system. When asked why, he referred to the ‘utter unnecessary misery and waste and lack of opportunity that exists in the world as it is at present… One person who is greedy and dishonest who gets into a strong position can undo the good done by hundreds.’

  Copies of Khrushchev’s speech began to circulate through the Warsaw Pact countries during the spring, and the CIA had a copy in early April.42 The world at large was apprised of its content by the New York Times in June, and naturally the report triggered considerable doubts amongst communists and Stalin’s loyal supporters in the West. Within the Soviet bloc, Khrushchev’s words were misinterpreted by some to signal imminent political reform. In Hungary, where there had already been some relief from the Stalinist grip, the speech encouraged bolder action towards a more liberal society. Anti-Soviet demonstrations started by students at the end of October 1956 quickly attracted mass support, and the reformer Nagy promised the far-reaching democratization of Hungarian public life. He formed a coalition government and asked the UN to guarantee Hungary’s neutrality and to shield it from the USSR. Nagy called for the Soviet troops to be withdrawn and stated that Hungary would withdraw from the Warsaw Pact. The challenge to the authority of the USSR was unmistakable and after some initial hesitation, Khrushchev took decisive action. He ordered the Red Army to crush the uprising, which they did within the first few days of November, killing about twenty thousand Hungarian citizens in the process.

  The brutality of the Red Army came as a shock to some Soviet sympathizers in Britain, who had been spared any press coverage of its liberation of Berlin a decade earlier. One of Bernal’s friends described him as looking ‘haggard and wretched’ at the time.43 Dorothy Hodgkin said he was in tears and went to the Soviet Embassy to lodge his protest, for which he was rebuked by his friend Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the CPGB.44 Aaron Klug went to a meeting arranged by the Fabian Society at University College to discuss the Soviet invasion of Hungary. Bernal was one of the speakers and it was the first time Klug heard him make a political speech – just as at Cambridge before the war, Bernal never talked politics in the laboratory. Klug was amazed by Sage’s opening statement, ‘Ever since June, we have known that things have been going on in Soviet Russia.’45 Klug was incredulous. He thought back to his boyhood in South Africa, when he had read all about the Soviet show trials in the newspapers and said to himself, ‘Ever since June – I have known it since 1938, when I was 11 years old!’

  Bernal was in Budapest six months after the Revolution and spent his first night there with an old friend, the Marxist philosopher, George Lukács. Lukács, who spent many years exiled in the USSR before and during the Second World War, had been appointed Minister of Culture in Nagy’s very short-lived administration. Nagy would be executed for attempting to overthrow the ‘democratic state order’, but Lukács’ luck held and he was merely deported to Bulgaria for a few months. Sage was apprehensive about what condition Lukács might be in, as a result of his recent experiences, and was relieved to find him ‘as cheerful, alert and intelligent as ever. His only comment on his exile was “We enjoyed the conditions of pure communism. We had no money but were given everything we asked for.” He showed no sign of suffering, bitterness or disillusion, rather, a philosophical cheerfulness and a determination to master the situation by understanding it.’46 Bernal accompanied Lukács and his wife to a neighbourhood restaurant. When they walked in ‘many heads turned and there was much whispering and smiling but no overt demonstration. If Lukács is back, things must be easier was what I gathered from the general atmosphere.’47

  Bernal wrote several articles about his visit, in which he attempted to reassure the worried fellow travellers and socialists of England. In a disgraceful piece in the New Statesman, he sought to justify the Soviet invasion on the grounds that it quelled a nascent anti-Semitism in Hungary.48 His article in Tribune, on reconstructing Hungary’s economy and science, offered the following analysis of what had gone wrong in a country that just three
years earlier displayed such spirit and affluence.

  The economic roots of the troubles of last year lay in the policy of attempting far too much… hence the pressure on the workers with a harshly operated piece work system; hence the pressure on the peasants for deliveries which left them with little of their own produce; hence, at one remove, the police tyranny needed to enforce these unpopular measures. What is now being planned is a more realistic industrial system which concentrates on the lines in which Hungarian industry has had long experience, such as diesel engines or electrical machinery, or where they have special natural resources such as aluminium ore.49

  Suggesting that the media coverage of the uprising had exaggerated its effects, Sage explained that there had been little physical damage, and what there was had already been repaired. There was more good news: ‘deliveries of grain from the Soviet Union and improved relationships with peasants… more food available than for many years past.’ The curfew was over, there were no troops on the streets and few armed police. Belief in the correctness of Marxism should not be shaken by recent events because as Lukács explained to Bernal:

  … the major weakness in the further development of Marxism had been its subordination, during much of the Stalin era, to the service of immediate political and economic requirements with the consequent neglect of an adequate Marxist analysis of the great and positive social achievements of the Soviet peoples. Lukács reasserted his faith in the basic superiority of the socialist system, which even despite the great mistakes that had been made, had already achieved so much.50

  There was brief reference in the Tribune article to Hungary’s scientists, and he covered their status more fully in a short note in Nature.51 Pointing out that there had been minimal disruption to university life, Sage recounted the flourishing research work being undertaken by Jánossy and others.

  More significant, however, than the continuation of work in progress is the effort that is now being made to re-organize the whole scientific activity of the country to eliminate the errors and distortions of the past and to bring it into relation with a more realistic planning of industry and agriculture. In this replanning, scientists are playing a much more important part than formerly, for it is realized that the undertaking of the over-ambitious and misdirected industrial enterprises of the former regime could have been avoided if responsible scientific and technical advice had been taken in the first place.

  In his view, Hungary was now set fair to emulate the successes of Switzerland and Denmark as a small country with a buoyant, specialized economy, underpinned by a strong research effort in pure and applied science. Nearly half a century later, the younger generation of Hungarian scientists are frustrated by ‘the grip that the old guard, and its Soviet-era thinking, still has on the Hungarian scientific establishment’.52

  Mao Zedong initially advised Khrushchev against invading Hungary to suppress the revolution, believing that the working class of Hungary would achieve this by themselves.53 Mao came to view Khrushchev as a leader of limited ability, lacking in ‘revolutionary morality’, and never forgave him for his criticism of Stalin.54 Khrushchev’s words struck too close to home – Mao’s style of ruling could be characterized by the same ‘cult of personality’ charge: he and Stalin displayed the same paranoia in their need for absolute adulation. At the time of the Hungarian uprising, Mao indicated that free speech for intellectuals in China would be encouraged, saying ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom’ and ‘a hundred schools of thought contend’. When this unleashed a torrent of criticism about the Party and the irrelevance of Marxism to Chinese life, he smartly reversed course in the summer of 1957 with an ‘Anti-Rightist campaign’ to purge dissident intellectuals, ‘the poisonous weeds’ who lurked amongst the flowers.55

  Not lacking in ‘revolutionary morality’ himself, Mao set China on a radical course to catastrophe. Known as the Great Leap Forward, it was a policy based on Mao’s faith in the limitless capacity of the peasantry to produce steel and food, if they were efficiently organized. In 1958, existing land cooperatives were merged into communes of 50,000 people for whom the state would provide childcare, cooking and medical services. All private ownership of land was abolished and even farm animals were collectivized. Agricultural techniques were based on Lysenko’s theories, coupled with some of Mao’s own nostrums such as planting seeds close together – ‘with company they grow easily.’56 Instead of the giant harvest, blithely predicted by Mao, there was famine. The harsh reality was concealed in official reports from the communes, which were euphoric in tone, and grain exports were doubled. By the following summer, stories of widespread starvation were commonplace, but the only government official who dared bring them to Mao’s attention, the Minister of Defence, Peng Dehuai, was accused of ‘factional activity’ and dismissed from his post. Where Party officials had predicted a doubling or trebling of yields in 1959, the harvest was 30 million tonnes less than the previous year’s, partly due to severe floods in July. Government statistics, nevertheless, showed a considerable increase.57 It is estimated that approximately 30 million people starved to death between 1958 and 1962 as a result of the Great Leap.

  The 1959 harvest coincided with the tenth anniversary celebrations of the founding of the People’s Republic, and once again Sage found himself rubbing shoulders with communist leaders in Peking. His first impression was how much modernization had occurred since his last visit, with wide roads now leading into the city from a modern airport. Khrushchev was nominally the guest of honour, but was treated with utter contempt by the hosts because of his recent criticism of the Great Leap and his refusal to supply China with a prototype atomic bomb.58 As Sage was watching the firework display from the Gate of Heavenly Peace, he was approached by a tall Russian, who asked ‘Anglichani?’ Sage nodded and the Russian said ‘Bernal’. ‘I had to admit it, and he said “Nikita Sergeyevich wants to speak to you.”’59 Bernal followed to where Khrushchev was just taking leave of Mao. Bernal had a friendly exchange with the Russian leader, and the two agreed to have a serious talk on the morrow. He also saw Zhou Enlai, who promised him an interview later. Finally he spoke to Mao, who enquired after his book Science in History, which had just been translated into Chinese.

  Bernal’s son, Martin, now in his early twenties and an outstanding Orientalist, was a postgraduate student in Peking, and that evening they were reunited. Martin took his father to a party, where Sage soon abandoned a more adult gathering to join the younger generation and learned to rock and roll. He went to bed at 2.30 am and rose at 6 am to meet Ho Chi Minh, who was on a diplomatic mission to raise support for the communist struggle in Vietnam. Later that morning, he had his promised meeting with Khrushchev. As we shall see, Bernal found that the two politicians held divergent views on the situation in SE Asia, and Khrushchev was forthcoming about the cold war. After a late lunch, Sage visited an agricultural show, where the techniques of modern farming and the large communes were being celebrated – with no mention of the disastrous harvest.

  The schedule for the following week was a familiar one for Sage, visiting schools, scientific institutes, tractor works and a massive construction project where thousands were toiling to dam the Yellow River. The cultural highlight was a visit to the ancient capital of flian with its huge Buddhist pagodas, dating from the Tang dynasty. Sage and Martin flew back to Peking in rough weather. At one stopover, they were given a banquet of chicken, duck, mutton, beef and fish. Sage arrived in Peking feeling ill and depressed. His spirits were further dampened by an undiplomatic message from Zhou Enlai, saying that ‘he did not see any value in seeing me’.60

  Before leaving China, Bernal was taken to the showpiece Yellow Ridge Commune, about 15 miles from Peking. Started in 1958, it was smaller than many Great Leap communes. In total there were 26,000 people living there, engaged in agriculture as well as operating 26 small factories. Bernal thought the commune did not have enough new buildings, and the factories were on a primitive scale, but with introduction of electric
power, he could imagine productivity improving and a high standard of living for the peasants. Martin, by this time, was becoming disillusioned with Mao and the Great Leap Forward because he had heard many stories about the famine in rural areas. He thought that the optimistic official statistics were fraudulent. He raised these doubts with his father, and Sage agreed that the government figures were neither valid nor accurate.61 Back in London, Martin’s mother, Margaret Gardiner, asked Bernal what he would do if Martin were to be arrested in China. He replied that he would go straight to Mao Zedong and demand his release.62

  Just as the late 1950s was a period of upheaval for the Soviet Empire, it saw the rapid unravelling of the British Empire. The independence of India had been the first step in 1947, and a decade later decolonization spread to Africa. Ghana, previously the Gold Coast, was one of the first nations to gain independence and was eager to establish institutions with an African face. Dorothy Hodgkin’s husband, Thomas, was a leading spokesman for the cause of African nationalism and formed friendships with many future leaders, including Kwame Nkrumah, the first President of Ghana. Hodgkin was experienced in the field of adult education and it was natural that Nkrumah should turn to him for advice on reforming Ghana’s university system. Hodgkin wrote to Sage in the summer of 1960, asking him to serve on a small advisory committee to redesign the tertiary education system so that it would relate ‘as closely as possible to the needs of modern Ghana and modern Africa [and] take the place of the existing (strongly Cambridge influenced) model, which dates from the colonial period’.63 Sage naturally accepted the invitation, and a visit to Ghana was arranged for the Christmas vacation.