by Simon Ings
For Ivanov, artificial insemination was also an experimental technique. His lifelong ambition was to investigate the mechanisms of evolution, establishing the genetic relationships between different animals. He created a zeedonk (the hybrid of a zebra and a donkey), crossed cattle with wisent, antelope and yak, crossed mouse with rat, mouse with guinea pig, guinea pig with rabbit, and created a fine-haired breed of arkharo-merino sheep which one can still find grazing the hillsides of Kirghizia and Kazakhstan.
The revolution disordered Ivanov’s work and robbed him of his patrons. In desperate need of new backers, in 1922 Ivanov asked his research associate Mikhail Nesturkh to start preparing abstracts for him on the subject of primate biology, and he began a correspondence with the American biologist Raymond Pearl concerning the possibility of cross-breeding a human being with a chimpanzee.
Interest in the project was intense. Sergei Novikov, the Education Commissariat’s Berlin representative, called Ivanov’s area of study an ‘exclusively important problem for Materialism’. Lev Fridrichson of the Agriculture Commissariat thought ‘the topic proposed by Professor Ivanov … should become a decisive blow to religious teachings, and may be aptly used in our propaganda and in our struggle for the liberation of working people from the power of the Church’.15 Ivanov presented his proposal to the Academy of Sciences on 30 September 1925. He played to a packed house: Sergei Oldenburg was there; so too were Fersman and Pavlov. Armed with $10,000 in roubles, and with his project overseen by the Academy of Sciences, Ivanov left Russia to drum up international support for his mission.
He garnered plenty of headlines. A provocative piece in the New York Times, ‘Soviet Backs Plan to Test Evolution’, prompted threatening letters from the Ku Klux Klan. And with the backing of the Pasteur Institute in Paris, Ivanov did visit Guinea twice to attempt the cross, in February and November 1926.
Inseminating chimpanzees proved an injurious and difficult endeavour (Ivanov’s son, who had accompanied him on his trip, was hospitalised during one gruesome and rapine experiment), so Ivanov returned to his post at the Moscow Zootechnical Institute, intending to use sperm harvested from a laboratory primate to impregnate a Soviet woman. He had several takers.16 But his breakneck and increasingly iconoclastic career was abruptly checked, once the Academy of Sciences discovered that he had already attempted to impregnate African women – without their knowledge.
On 19 April 1929 Gorbunov’s Department of Scientific Institutions invited several scientists from the government-friendly Communist Academy for a one-day discussion on Ivanov’s work. Alexander Serebrovsky and Solomon Levit were among the attendees. Though the meeting was fully aware of Ivanov’s ethical transgressions, it reserved its criticisms for the mutinous and bourgeois Academy of Sciences, noting that it had sat on Ivanov’s report for eighteen months since the last African expedition. If the Academy of Sciences was incapable of acting, then the project would have to be handed over to the Communist Academy in order ‘to arrange a comprehensive review of the proposal by Prof. Ivanov … and carry out the necessary experiments’. The Society of Materialist Biologists set up a commission ‘on the interspecific hybridisation of primates’ to oversee the work. Solomon Levit was chairman. Serebrovsky was a member.
As the tide of political opinion turned against eugenics, the two men could not have found themselves in a more exposed position.
*
As the 1930s advanced, extreme negative eugenics swept the Western world. Every Nordic nation in Europe adopted stringent eugenics legislation, but by far the most far-reaching statute was Germany’s Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Progeny, passed in 1933. Modelled in part on California’s compulsory sterilisation law, it mandated the sterilisation of persons suffering from congenital feeble-mindedness, schizophrenia, manic depression, severe physical deformity, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington’s disease, hereditary blindness or deafness, or severe alcoholism. ‘We must see to it that these inferior people do not procreate,’ the eminent biologist Erwin Baur declared. ‘No one approves of the new sterilisation laws more than I do, but I must repeat over and over that they constitute only a beginning.’ Between 1933 and 1945 around 300,000 German citizens were sterilised.
In the year before he left for Texas, Solomon Levit did what he could to refashion Soviet eugenics to distinguish it from the negative eugenics taking hold in the West. He was well placed for the task: in March 1930 he was appointed director of the Moscow Medical–Biological Institute, now housed in a new, luxurious, constructivist building complex on Kaluzhskaya, across from the mansion that, from the late 1930s, would house the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences.
Levit took advantage of the move to expand his ‘office of human heredity and constitution’ into a new Genetics Division – the bland new name was deliberate – and published a second volume of papers, prefaced with an editorial that drew a sharp distinction between eugenics and ‘human genetics’, which Levit defined as ‘the science of human heredity’. He wrote: ‘I would say that before about 1926 we lived through an infantile period in the history of our society. The reason I call it infantile is that an enormous number of theoretical errors were made, some factual, some methodological.’17 The piece ended with a long, valedictory letter by Alexander Serebrovsky apologising for parts of his 1929 article.
All this proved not enough. In January 1932, while Levit was visiting the Timofeev-Ressovskys in Berlin on his way back from Texas, he was replaced as director of the Medical–Biological Institute by its acting director Boris Kogan, who suspended all genetics research there. Levit did not find out about this until he re-entered the country on 22 February. It was indeed a rude homecoming: he found his colleagues Agol and Serebrovsky under increasing ideological attack, and the three of them lumped together in hostile newspaper articles as ‘Menshevising idealists’ – a weasel formulation that more or less labelled them enemies of the state.
Levit fought back with aplomb. He wrote an article in which he fiercely attacked racism, fascism and ‘social Darwinism’ – the notion that human progress depends upon cut-throat competition – and this seems to have brought him back into political favour. Meanwhile he jockeyed for position in the new system of research institutions that had taken shape during his sojourn in Texas. We don’t know exactly what strings Levit pulled, or precisely how he brought together the pieces of his enterprise, but by 15 August 1932, when the Medical–Biological Institute was re-opened, Levit was again its director.
Once more at the helm, Levit acted quickly to establish his institute’s socialist credentials, holding a conference to settle on the right language and approach with which to discuss human genetics and heredity. Papers by Levit himself, Nikolai Koltsov, Hermann Muller and others called for the establishment of a new discipline, to be called ‘medical genetics’, as a way of improving human health and combating fascist pseudoscience.
Levit pitched the rhetoric of the conference very carefully indeed:
Our great Union has an honourable task to transform the little, wilted greenhouse plant that was grown by the capitalist world and that we call medical genetics into a strong tree, a great science, free from ugly gnarls created by racists and bourgeois eugenicists, and serving the cause of socialism, the cause of Soviet health care.18
In July 1935 the Medical–Biological Institute’s impressive fourth volume of research was sent to press. Published in 1936, the volume was arguably the best single collection of original research on human heredity that had appeared anywhere. Twenty-five original research papers included studies of hereditary factors in asthma, allergies, pernicious anaemia, diabetes, stomach ulcers and breast cancer. A remarkable series of papers on pairs of identical twins analysed their electrocardiograms, height and weight, and fingerprints.
But while Levit was boldly revamping and renaming eugenics within the purlieus of a state-run institution, Nikolai Koltsov was being much more circumspect, deciding at last to off-load his entire eugenics operation. The problem f
or Koltsov was not so much ideological as practical: independent institutions like his Institute of Experimental Biology were under increasing pressure to conform to the goals of the First Five-Year Plan, and their independence was threatened. From early 1930, in order to ensure their conformity to the goals of socialist construction, every scientific society was expected to present its charter and membership roll for review and approval to the NKVD – the Commissariat of Internal Affairs, an arm of the security services.
Koltsov saw little point in exposing the members of his Russian Eugenics Society to the attentions of the NKVD, and simply did not submit the required papers. The society ceased to exist and its journal was discontinued.
A few months later, preparing his institute’s plan for the following year, Koltsov took a leaf out of Levit’s book and renamed his department of eugenics a ‘department of human genetics’, ‘studying the various phenomena of human heredity and variability, defined not only by heredity, but also by the influences of external environment’. Koltsov also saw to it that Levit’s Medical–Biological Institute inherited all his institute’s eugenics talent. Levit was delighted.
He should have read his Marx more closely.
Marxism was more than a political philosophy; it was a cultural operation that was supposed to bind all scientific disciplines into one. Marx had dreamt of creating a scientific politics. But in the rush to fulfil his dream, the whole project was getting stood on its head. Politics wasn’t becoming any more scientific – but it was learning to dress itself in scientific motley.
Levit’s friends were aghast when they heard that Levit was taking on more eugenic work. They told him he was committing political suicide. Levit ignored them. He had no idea how incendiary his work would become.
Notes
1. Quoted in Mark B. Adams, The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia, p. 162.
2. Quoted in Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton, p. 78.
3. Edward J. Larson, ‘Biology and the Emergence of the Anglo-American Eugenics Movement’, in Denis Alexander and Ronald L. Numbers, Biology and Ideology from Descartes to Dawkins, p. 173.
4. Nikolai Krementsov, ‘From “Beastly Philosophy” to Medical Genetics: Eugenics in Russia and the Soviet Union’, Annals of Science 68, no. 1 (January 2011), p. 66.
5. Speech at the annual meeting of the Russian Eugenics Society on 20 October 1921. Published in 1922 in Russkiy evgenicheskiy zhurnal [Russian Eugenics Journal] 1(1), pp. 3–27. English translation in V. V. Babkov, The Dawn of Human Genetics, p. 71.
6. B. M. Zavadovsky in Pod znamenem marksizma [Under the Banner of Marxism], vol. 10 no. 11 (1925), pp. 100, 106. English translation in Babkov, The Dawn of Human Genetics, p. 475.
7. Karl Günter Zimmer, Max Delbrück and N. V. Timofeev-Resovskii, Creating a Physical Biology: The Three-Man Paper and Early Molecular Biology, p. 20.
8. H. J. Muller, ‘The Measurement of Gene Mutation Rate in Drosophila, its High Variability, and its Dependence upon Temperature’, Genetics vol. 1, no. 3 (1928), pp. 279–357.
9. Quoted in Gaissinovitch, The Origins of Soviet Genetics, p. 49.
10. In Mediko-biologicheskiy zhurnal [Medical–Biological Journal], no. 4–5 (1929). English translation in Babkov, The Dawn of Human Genetics, pp. 552–65.
11. Ibid., pp. 505–16.
12. By 1959 there were pop songs. ‘Hold on, geologist’, ran one popular number, ‘hold out, geologist, you are brother of the wind and sun!’ See Alla Bolotova, ‘Colonization of Nature in the Soviet Union. State Ideology, Public Discourse, and the Experience of Geologists’, Historische Sozialforschung [Historical Social Research] 29, part 3 (2004), pp. 104–23.
13. Bedny’s story is fascinating in itself: see Robert Horvath, ‘The Poet of Terror: Dem’ian Bednyi and Stalinist Culture’, Russian Review 65, no. 1 (1 January 2006), pp. 53–71.
14. One obscure regional official got all hot under the collar at the possibilities, declaring, ‘Every girl above the age of eighteen is hereby declared to be state property. Every unmarried girl who has reached the age of eighteen is obliged, on pain of severe penalty, to register with the Free Love Office of the Welfare Commissariat. A woman registered with the Free Love Office has the right to choose from men who have reached the age of eighteen. Interested persons may choose a husband or wife once a month … The offspring of such collaboration become the property of the Republic.’ See Kozulin, Psychology in Utopia, p. 84.
15. Kirill Rossiianov, ‘Beyond Species: Il’ya Ivanov and His Experiments on Cross-Breeding Humans with Anthropoid Apes’, Science in Context 15, no. 2 (2002), p. 286.
16. One, ‘G’ from Leningrad, wrote to Ivanov on 16 March 1928: ‘Dear Professor … With my private life in ruins, I don’t see any sense in my further existence … But when I think that I could do a service for science, I feel enough courage to contact you. I beg you, don’t refuse me … I ask you to accept me for the experiment.’ The attempt had to be postponed in June 1929: Ivanov cabled to G, ‘The orang has died, we are looking for a replacement.’ But nothing came of it. See Rossiianov, ‘Beyond Species’, pp. 306–7.
17. Gaissinovitch, The Origins of Soviet Genetics, p. 17.
18. In Konferentsiya po meditsinskoy genetike [The Conference on Medical Genetics], 1934, p. 16. English translation in Babkov, The Dawn of Human Genetics, p. 546.
Part Two
POWER
(1929–1941)
An aluminium model of the Magnitogorsk steel works, the world’s largest, on display at the USSR pavilion of the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.
Too much is destroyed to the point of madness, to the point that chronology is wiped out, but even more is begun with open naiveté and faith.
ALEXEI GASTEV, How to Work, 1923
8: ‘Storming the fortress of science’
‘Wipe this Trotsky-Zinovievist band of murderers off the face of the earth – that’s the workers’ judgement.’ News of show trials meets with approval on the factory floor, 1936.
A fortress stands before us. This fortress is called science, with its numerous fields of knowledge. We must seize this fortress at any cost. Young people must seize this fortress, if they want to be builders of a new life, if they want truly to replace the old guard … A mass attack of the revolutionary youth on science is what we need now, comrades.1
Joseph Stalin, May 1928
Lenin suffered his first stroke on 26 May 1922. He worked through it, hacking out memos from his hospital bed in Gorki, a small town near Moscow. A lot of his time was spent compiling lists of intellectuals he wanted to see deported. ‘Arrest several hundred and without declaration of motives,’ he commanded on 17 July: ‘Be gone, gentlemen!’2
On his return to duty, however, Lenin found that events had overtaken him. Joseph Stalin – a man so efficient in day-to-day business and so unforthcoming in person, he had earned himself the nickname ‘Comrade Filing Cabinet’ – had ousted him.
Joseph (or Iosif) Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, later known as Stalin (from ‘stal’, the Russian word for steel), was born in the Georgian town of Gori in the Caucasus on 18 December 1879. His mother was a devout washerwoman, his father a violent drunk. The story goes that he was expelled from Tiflis Theological Seminary for reading Karl Marx under the table. Between April 1902 and March 1913, he was arrested, imprisoned and exiled, not just once, but seven times, before being exiled to Siberia for four full years.
An editor of the Bolshevik paper Pravda and Trotsky’s chief rival, Stalin worked hard for the Party, proved his capacity to lead during the Civil War, and was rewarded with two ministerial posts in the new Bolshevik government, as commissar for nationalities and as state inspector of workers and peasants. But it was his position as secretary general of the Party’s Central Committee, from 1922 until his death, that really mattered.
Stalin was a member of the Politburo, the Party’s supreme policy-making body. Work on numerous other interlocking and overlapping co
mmittees filled his remaining hours. His rivals Leon Trotsky and Grigory Zinoviev considered themselves above such drudgery. By the early 1920s Stalin not only knew the contents of every drawer in the Smolny; he also knew how to employ all that paperwork to his advantage. Since the revolution, he had been appointing his supporters as provincial officials. Some 10,000 of them now worked to administer the state on behalf of a triumvirate made up of Stalin as Party general secretary, Grigory Zinoviev (chairman of the international communist organisation Comintern) and Lev Kamenev (chairman of the Politburo).
No wonder Lenin suffered a second stroke. In December 1922 Stalin persuaded Lenin’s doctors that the leader should be kept, for his own sake, in isolation, and there he stayed, alone and politically impotent, until his death in January 1924, while the state he had built underwent the greatest political crisis of its short history.
In 1922 there had been a terrible famine. The tsarist response to such a calamity would have been to conduct trade as usual, exporting grain regardless of the needs of the people. (Cold-blooded, certainly – but the tsarist state lacked the political instruments to do much else.)
The Bolsheviks tried to do things differently, but it nearly killed them. Without foreign exchange, they had no money to buy equipment to help rebuild an economy already flattened by war. Iron and steel production fell to a level Peter the Great would have recognised two centuries earlier. Strikes broke out all over the country, and Leon Trotsky and his party of old Bolsheviks argued for a return to the brutal command-and-control government that had sustained the regime during the Civil War.
Opposing them were Zinoviev, Kamenev and Stalin, who at least paid lip-service to the utility of Lenin’s New Economic Policy. It was Marx himself, after all, who had taught that without a period of capitalism, however rudimentary, there could be no industrialisation, no proletariat; and so, ultimately, no true revolution.
