by Simon Ings
These were individuals who did pioneering research on extending human lifespan as well as on language, brain function and child development; founded the first management consultancy; explored the effect of living matter on rocks and minerals while building a model of the evolution of the biosphere; showed how Darwin’s theory of natural selection could be reconciled with the findings of genetics; invented the modern conservation movement; and devoted decades of international exploration to amassing a seed collection that was one of the scientific wonders of the day. (During the Second World War, Adolf Hitler established a commando unit to seize this seed bank, hoping one day to control the world’s food supply.)
The human cost of that peculiar, twisted, and ultimately tragic marriage between the state and its scientists was horrendous. Nevertheless, I hope I can make clear, and celebrate, what Soviet science managed to do for us.
Notes
1. The English translation of Malen’kaia knizhka o bol’shoi pamiati first appeared in 1960 through Basic Books.
2. On the outbreak of war in August 1914, the Russian capital’s Germanic name, Saint Petersburg, was changed to the more Russian-sounding equivalent, Petrograd.
3. If you convert Old Style Julian dates to their Gregorian equivalents (as, in a fit of tidiness, I have throughout) then the ‘October Revolution’ took place in November. Russia adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1918.
PROLOGUE: Fuses (1856–1905)
For centuries the government has regarded knowledge as a necessary evil.1
Vladimir Vernadsky
Every year, between 1550 and 1800, Russia conquered territory the size of today’s Netherlands until, in the eighteenth century, it dawned on European writers that Russia had become larger than the surface of the visible moon.2
With no natural geographical boundaries to speak of, Russia’s only means of defence was to control its neighbours, using them as buffers against a possible attack. To do that, it built up what by the nineteenth century was by far the largest standing army in Europe – an army that even in peacetime swallowed nearly two-thirds of the nation’s annual budget. (Education and health took 7 per cent.)
It was a ramshackle sort of empire: a vast agglomeration of backward colonies, held together by military force and hootch.3 There was no money for roads, let alone hospitals, let alone schools. The army itself suffered: there was no strategic railway network and in 1875, during Russia’s military adventures in the east, the War Ministry in St Petersburg told a Russian commander that while he could have additional troops, he should not expect them for almost a year since they would ‘have to walk from Europe to Asia’.
Without civic institutions, politics is devilishly hard to do. In Russia there were no institutions for reformers to reform: no councils, no unions, no guilds, no professional bodies, few schools, few hospitals worth the name; in many places, no roads. Peter the Great, attempting to modernise his nation at the end of the seventeenth century, reached for a ‘Prussian solution’ to the problem of governing such a large, sprawling, uneducated mass. He saw to it that an elite was educated abroad, in Western Europe; on its return, this elite was expected to take up the reins of what was still an essentially feudal system. For the masses, modernisation consisted of containment, regimentation, curfew and exemplary punishment.4
By the late nineteenth century, Russian civic society had become more complex, and there was some political life to the place. But the dream of state power refashioning the land by fiat persisted. It appealed even to those whose ultimate vision was a stateless society. No one, from the tsars to their fiercest opponents, ever felt that they could trust Russia’s illiterate and suspicious masses with the task of creating their own forms of government. Lenin’s nannyish dream of a ‘tutelary state’ was fuelled by this mistrust, while Stalin’s forced collectivisation of agriculture took tsarist megalomania to new depths. By the time dissidents were being dumped in mental hospitals under Leonid Brezhnev, state megalomania had entered realms of Alice-like surrealism. The communist ideal did not fail; it was never really tried, and the shadow of the Prussian solution hung, and still hangs, over all.
The pity of it was that Russia had never been poor. At the start of the twentieth century it was the world’s largest grain exporter, and its fifth-largest industrial power. ‘In terms of the size of its population Russia occupies first place amongst the civilised countries of the world,’ boasted a government statistical annual in 1905.5 On almost every other scale, though, Russia came last. In 1913, the empire had the lowest per capita income in Europe save for the Ottoman Empire. The average life expectancy – thirty years – put it about 150 years behind Britain and the United States.
What held Russia back was its form of government. For centuries the tsars had maintained tight bureaucratic control over the smallest details of national life. It was a good way to expand and settle a vast territory. It was a hopeless way to develop a big economy.
Western commentators bemoaned Russia’s failure to adopt capitalism: without a free market, how would Russia ever emerge from its dark age? They were right, in a way: capitalism would have made all the difference to Russia, just as, over the preceding hundred years, it had made all the difference to Western Europe and turned a small island nation on its Atlantic periphery into the hub of an empire on which the sun famously never set.
The trouble lay in the iron physical limits imposed by Russia itself. Quite simply, whenever capitalism tried to penetrate Russia’s heartland, it caught a cold and died.
Capitalism depends upon surpluses. Farmers grow surplus food to feed the cities; and factories in the cities make the machines the farmers need to grow more food. Out of this virtuous circle, a capitalist economy is born. But peasants in Russia had never produced those kinds of surpluses. Their communal style of agriculture was not geared to feed cities. It was geared so that people in the countryside wouldn’t starve. We have good agricultural and climate data for Russia going back over a thousand years, from the year 873. In that span of time, Russia weathered a hundred hungry years and more than 120 famines.
Russia is as cold and as barren as it is big, and it gets colder, by tens of degrees, the further east you travel. When a shivering Ephikhodof quips in Chekhov’s play The Cherry Orchard, ‘Our climate is not adapted to contribute,’ he is not kidding: a full third of Russia languishes in the permanent grip of ice and snow. Then there are its great rivers. Most of these flow northward, away from the potentially fertile lands of Central Asia, and into the Polar Sea. Three-quarters of Russia’s population and its industry can directly access only about a sixth of its water. Then there is the land shortage. Incredibly, in an empire with more surface area than the visible moon, Russia has insufficient fertile soil to feed its population easily. It relies on a narrow belt of fertile black earth which passes from the Danube through north-east Ukraine and just north of the Black Sea to Akmolinsk in the east. South of this belt rainfall is ten inches per year and much too arid for normal agriculture. To the north the rainfall is adequate but the soil is poor, the growing season short and the winter frosts very severe. That belt of fertile black earth that runs through the middle was already under the plough by the 1880s and could not hope to supply Russia’s growing needs as its population boomed. (Between 1890 and 1913 cereal production actually shot up by more than a third – but it was promptly consumed.)
For enthusiastic students and reformers of agriculture it was clear that Russia desperately needed new strains of cereal and new varieties of fruits and vegetables that could flourish on the thinner, drier, colder lands outside the black-earth belt. Unfortunately, none of these Western-educated, academically trained enthusiasts were practical farmers, and none of them had the political clout to extend credit to millions of impoverished peasants. Their improved varieties of grain went unsold as Russian farmers persisted with their local, mongrel varieties. These were so heavily infested with weeds, it was generally assumed among farmers that seeds of wheat could grow into rye or wild
oats.
Farming in Russia’s north was not exactly primitive. It wasn’t mere subsistence farming. It was communal – and it generated no significant surpluses whatsoever.
In the central and southern regions, by contrast, farming was arranged according to a feudal system in which serfs worked under the immediate rule of the nobility. This was an obvious and apparently fixable brake on the nation’s progress, and even the notoriously repressive Nicholas I created committees to consider reform.
It was Tsar Alexander II who finally took the bull by the horns. In 1861 he released nearly half the population of the country from bondage, by freeing the empire’s 22 million serfs. The transfer of land ownership was massive, as the nobility sold up and became absentee landlords. Very few used their generous state compensation payments to improve or modernise their estates. Meanwhile, emancipation gave the peasants 13 per cent less land than they had previously farmed. In the more fertile parts of the country, former serfs had to forgo up to half of what they had previously tilled.
Taxes were levied on land, and were inflated to take into account wages earned by the newly liberated young as they ran off to the towns and cities. But whatever these youths made was far more likely to be spent in bars and shops than be sent home to the communes. Moscow in particular, with its wild mix of contemporary buildings and ramshackle little homes, palaces and factories, crooked lanes and wide streets, squares and boulevards, drew young men from across the region. The communes emptied out: only women and the elderly remained, and agriculture declined. ‘Peasants living in Moscow send scarcely half of the taxes,’ ran one report from Klin District, north-west of Moscow, ‘and the family struggles with need year-round, living half-starved. And those peasants who remain in the village, seeing around themselves decline in everything, cool toward agriculture and spend time in the taverns, which have grown to at least two in almost every village.’6
In 1861, in an attempt to stem the haemorrhaging of the countryside (and the food shortages that were becoming a constant of city life), the system of internal passports was strengthened. Fathers of delinquent sons now had a legal means to summon them back to the farm, ‘and if you don’t settle down, you scoundrel, I won’t renew your passport. I’ll have you brought home by the police, and when they’ve brought you home, I’ll whip you with a birch rod myself, in the district administrative office, in the presence of honest people …’7 The passport created a paper trail that followed you throughout life.
More or less admitting that the countryside had been made ungovernable, the government made much of the way the peasants would govern themselves through rural communes. For the young especially, this was not at all good news, given the way small rural communities traditionally exercised social control over their members. Public flogging was common.
All in all, the experience of emancipation convinced Russia’s liberal elites, few as they were, that nothing short of the imposition of democracy could unpick the mess the country was in. In the cities, meanwhile, among crowds of underfed, underpaid, under-employed young men, an altogether more revolutionary mood was brewing.
On 13 March 1881 Tsar Alexander II rode in his carriage, as he did every Sunday, through St Petersburg to the neoclassical Michael Manege riding academy for military roll call. His route, via the Catherine Canal and over the Pevchesky Bridge, never varied. Among the pedestrians crowding the narrow pavements that day was Nikolai Ivanovich Rysakov, a young member of the Narodnaya Volya – the ‘People’s Will’ movement, bent on igniting a social revolution by any means necessary. The means that day were contained in a small white package wrapped in a handkerchief.
After a moment’s hesitation I threw the bomb. I sent it under the horses’ hooves in the supposition that it would blow up under the carriage … The explosion knocked me into the fence.8
The explosion only damaged the tsar’s bulletproof carriage, a gift from Napoleon III. The emperor emerged shaken but unhurt – and a second attacker, Ignacy Hryniewiecki, standing by the canal fence, threw his package at the emperor’s feet.
The People’s Will aimed to save Russia from tsarist autocracy. Their assassination of Alexander II ensured that the regime survived, and grew even more oppressive. The tsar’s successor never forgot or forgave his father’s ugly death: his legs torn away, his stomach ripped open, his face destroyed. Hope that the tsarist government might or could reform itself had been slim to start with. Under Alexander III it was utterly dashed.
Notes
1. Cited in Kendall E. Bailes, Science and Russian Culture in an Age of Revolutions: V. I. Vernadsky and His Scientific School, 1863–1945, p. 99.
2. Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Old Regime (Scribner, 1975), p. 84.
3. Grain not exported went mostly to make vodka. See Patricia Herlihy, The Alcoholic Empire: Vodka and Politics in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford University Press, 2002).
4. Soviet historians often dubbed this policy an ‘Arakcheev regime’ after Count Alexei Andreevich Arakcheev (1769–1834), a general famous for establishing colonies which combined agricultural hard labour with army-style discipline. See Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution.
5. Michael Haynes and Rumy Husan, A Century of State Murder?: Death and Policy in Twentieth-Century Russia, p. 28.
6. Jeffrey Burds, Peasant Dreams and Market Politics: Labor Migration and the Russian Village, 1861–1905, p. 34.
7. Ibid., p. 74
8. Edvard Radzinskii, Alexander II: The Last Great Tsar, p. 413.
Part One
CONTROL
(1905–1929)
Soviet citizen science: in trials this air velocipede, invented by a worker in Moscow, averaged a speed of over 140 kilometres an hour.
And it seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear … that they still had a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.
ANTON CHEKHOV, ‘Lady with Lapdog’, 1899
1: Scholars
‘To treat the needs of others as if they were one’s own’: Vladimir Vernadsky (seated, right) and some idealistic friends at St Petersburg University, 1884.
In the late nineteenth century in Russia there existed something of fundamental importance – a solid, middle-class, professional intelligentsia which possessed firm principles based on spiritual values. That milieu produced committed revolutionaries, poets and engineers, convinced that the most important thing is to build something, to do something useful.1
Physicist Evgeny Feinberg on his mentor Igor Tamm
Head south-east out of Moscow in the morning, and by nightfall you will reach the city of Tambov and, in nearby woodland, a handsome, single-storey wooden structure that but for the modern signage might have sprung magically from the pages of a novel by Ivan Turgenev. It is a museum now. You can wander round Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky’s study, his library and his living room. There is some simple information here about his life; his politics; how he anticipated, by over a century, James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’ theory of how living things and the planet’s geology work as one system; rather less about his being the godfather of Russian atomic energy.
Vernadsky’s father Ivan was a professor of economics and statistics in the Alexandrovsky Lycée. His first wife was Maria Shigaeva, one of Russia’s early feminists and its first female economist. She died prematurely of tuberculosis in 1860, and in 1862 his father married again, to a distant relative of his first wife, Anna Petrovna Konstantinovich, who would be Vladimir’s mother. She was a music teacher, a lively and warm personality, but she did not share the intellectual interests of Ivan’s first wife.
In 1868, during a heated debate at the Free Economic Society, Ivan suffered a stroke. He resigned his post at the Lycée, and the family relocated from St Petersburg to Kharkov, where he ran the Kharkov branch of the State Bank. Vladimir’s childhood here w
as a happy one, his memories beginning not with St Petersburg, but in the capital of the Ukraine, listening for hours to his opinionated, white-bearded uncle Evgraf Korolenko, who lived with the family.
In 1886, Vernadsky wrote to his future wife:
I recall dark, starlit winter nights. Before sleep, he loved to walk and, when I could, I always walked with him. I loved to look at the sky, the stars. The Milky Way fascinated me and on these evenings I listened as my uncle talked about them. Afterwards, for a long time I couldn’t fall asleep. In my fantasies, we wandered together through the endless spaces of the universe … These simple stories had such an immense influence on me that even now it seems I am not freed of them … It sometimes seems to me that I must work not only for myself, but for him, that not only mine, but his life will have been wasted if I accomplish nothing.2
