Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  At a conference organised in February 1932, the Bureau of Applied Botany declared Lysenko’s work a great success. Though Vavilov missed Lysenko’s lecture, he was still full of praise: ‘We are in fact approaching the art of transforming the plant according to our will,’ he said; Lysenko’s results would provoke ‘serious revisions of some fundamental theses in genetics’.

  It is an intriguing claim. As this book is being written, the study of epigenetics – the mechanisms by which the environment regulates gene expression – is developing hand-over-fist. There indeed are, in a growing number of cases, examples of living things inheriting characteristics acquired by their parents or grandparents. No geneticist of Vavilov’s generation believed the environment had no effect on gene expression. Perhaps Vavilov thought that Lysenko had uncovered mechanisms of this sort – regulatory systems that would enrich and complicate the picture of genetics developed by Morgan and his team at Columbia.18 If so, Vavilov had some funny ideas about how such a visionary understanding would be attained. Lysenko had no desire to enrich genetics. Genetics belonged to other men. Lysenko wanted, above all else, to be an original.

  Prezent was the next speaker. Maksimov’s admission that his work was of little practical use spoke volumes about the life sciences in general, Prezent said. He mentioned two recent books, one by Yuri Filipchenko, the other by embryologist Mikhail Zavadovsky. Compared to such people Lysenko had published next to nothing, but there was no doubt who had produced the most ‘works’. Applause followed.

  Conditions for vernalisation improved over the coming years, but there turned out to be serious practical problems with the technique. These were itemised by Tatiana Krasnoselska-Maksimova, Maksimov’s wife and collaborator. The overarching problem was the amount of labour involved in vernalising an entire crop. Seeds had to be soaked in a shed for several days. You didn’t just dump them in a pile and water them. You had to spread them out, on the floor or in trays, and turn them over constantly. The work involved was herculean. Keeping the seeds in uniform condition – not too hot, not too cold, not too wet, not too dry – over long periods of time was often impossible. In many places, there were no refrigerators. In many places, there was no electricity.

  Suppose the seeds survived the soaking process and did not germinate too soon (the cause of many a crop failure); this was but the beginning. The damp conditions in which they had been kept were ideal for the spread of fungi and diseases. And the ever-decreasing amount of healthy seed represented one final, back-breaking hurdle for the keen vernaliser. The seeds were damp. They were swollen. They were heavy: costs of sowing were doubled because the seeder had to go over the fields twice to ensure the usual amount of grain was planted.

  In fact, so many things could go wrong with vernalisation, the practice itself evaded criticism. If your crop failed, what were you going to blame: the inadequacy of your equipment, the failure of your workers – or a state-sanctioned agricultural panacea with the personal blessing of Stalin?

  Commissar of Agriculture Yakov Yakovlev sincerely believed that collectivist ‘hut labs’ could replace expensive institutional science projects and develop new varieties in a third of the usual time. But he was a journalist, not a scientist, and he had no conception at all of how hard science is to do. In particular, it does not seem to have occurred to him that scientific honesty is difficult to achieve. In 1932, questionnaires were sent to thousands of collective farms. The chairmen of these farms were not held responsible for the accuracy of their reports, and they dashed off these questionnaires the way they dashed off so many other pieces of paper. ‘Anti-vernalisers’ were equivalent to kulaks, so no one in their right mind would report a failure of vernalisation. Consequently, Yakovlev’s office was deluged with sensational communications about the millions of kilos of grain brought forth by vernalisation.

  The Agriculture Commissariat had created a self-fulfilling success story. The more good news it got, the more it invested in vernalisation, the more glowing reports it received. Before long, the expansion of vernalisation was itself used as an argument for its further expansion. If so many people and resources were already involved in applying Lysenko’s technique, how could anyone possibly doubt its scientific validity?

  Soviet agriculture was by now just one small, pernicious step away from believing that willing a thing makes it so. In 1931 Stalin remarked: ‘If there is a passionate desire to do so, every goal can be reached, every obstacle overcome.’19

  Drunk on apparent success, Lysenko’s flagship institution, the All-Union Institute of Plant Breeding in Odessa, proposed a further experiment in proletarian science: a competition to see whose approach would develop vernalisation the furthest. A brigade would be formed, made up of workers drawn equally from the Bureau of Applied Botany and the Odessa Institute. In the end the bureau did not take part – but the Communist Academy did. Prezent led its brigade to Odessa during the summer of 1932, and the following January Lysenko described this visit as a great inspiration for his general theorising about vernalisation. It taught him the dialectical method of experimentation and reasoning. According to Lysenko, ‘Prezent got so closely intertwined with my work that … not a single new issue of the theory that we’ve been developing [was made] without detailed discussion and participation of comrade Prezent.’20

  *

  Vavilov had returned home to find the Soviet Union in the grip of its worst famine since the revolution. Between 2.5 and 5 million peasants had starved to death. He knew what was coming. Who wouldn’t? Every state, of every stripe, throughout recorded history, blames its misfortunes on individuals. If there was anyone to blame for the famine, it had to be Vavilov, the absentee, the will-o’-the-wisp collector who had abandoned 20,000 researchers, 155 experimental farms and 350-odd other research sites to go hobnobbing with European and American elites. There was nothing fair about the charge. But who else could possibly be to blame? Lysenko? Stalin?

  1934 ought to have been a year of celebration: the fortieth anniversary of the Bureau of Applied Botany, the tenth anniversary of Vavilov’s leadership, and Vavilov’s own twenty-fifth year as a scientist. But with congratulatory telegrams pouring in from around the world and the offices already decorated, Yakovlev (moving up the ranks to the Party’s Central Committee) cancelled the Bureau’s celebrations.

  In May, word had come from Stalin himself that Vavilov’s bureau had let down the nation, and Yakovlev had better find out the reason why. How could Lenin’s vast agricultural research infrastructure have failed to save millions from starvation?

  There was, in fact, a simple answer to this question. In 1930, the bureau had proposed the introduction of hybrid maize.

  Vavilov had had very good reasons for regarding maize as a panacea. In the USA, maize yields had increased by between 20 and 30 per cent when hybrids had been introduced. Vavilov’s Bureau had already experimented with these plants and the results had been excellent.

  Maize produces more grain per hectare than wheat, and when the wheat crop does poorly, it is very tempting indeed to abandon wheat for maize. This temptation was multiplied once high-yield hybrid maize was available. But maize, though more resistant to drought than wheat, needs a perfect summer. It is actually more sensitive to weather conditions than wheat is. Having invested so heavily in maize, the Soviets had reaped a dismal harvest.

  There were clear lessons to learn here, and between them, Yakovlev and Vavilov would have been capable of learning them, had the political atmosphere let them. As it was, Trofim Lysenko came up with the kind of answer that high-level bureaucrats could accept. Rather than tackle the complicated business of why Soviet farming was so difficult to modernise, Lysenko gave vent to a typical piece of peasant scepticism: these new-fangled hybrid lines of maize from the USA were no good.

  Lysenko was particularly exercised at the thought that these hybrids had been produced by inbreeding. Like many a peasant farmer before him, he believed inbreeding always led to the deterioration of a line. Not con
tent with bad-mouthing America’s incestuously begotten maize, Lysenko also decided that wheat, a natural in-breeder, was long overdue a moral lesson, and before he was done, millions of peasants were sent off to strip the florets by hand, forcing the wheat crop to outcross.

  (Like most everything Lysenko did, this particular folly made no difference, for good or ill, to Soviet agriculture. Wheat being an inbreeder, all Lysenko’s peasant labourers ever managed to do was cross fields of clones with each other.)

  It is a measure of Lysenko’s popularity, or Vavilov’s vulnerability, or maybe just the chaos and desperation of the time, that Vavilov let these nonsenses go unremarked. Lysenko’s status rose. He was elected to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. In 1934, at a conference on planning genetic-selection work, Vavilov himself declared that ‘Perhaps in no other division of plant physiology have there been such profound advances as in this field … In this respect, we consider the work of T. D. Lysenko to be outstanding.’21 Vavilov even recommended that Lysenko be elected Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences: ‘Although he has so far published comparatively few works, his latest work represents such a major contribution to world science that it permits us to propose him as a candidate …’22

  The more flak Vavilov took for his grandiloquent plant collection, the more he needed vernalisation to realise the collection’s potential – the more he needed Lysenko, and was inclined to take his boosterism on trust. He wrote to Lysenko in 1934:

  It seems to me a definite necessity that you, Trofim Denisovich, would yourself spare at least a week, two or three times a year, to come to Leningrad and see what we are doing here, and to help the younger workers especially to perform faster and more effectively the vernalisation tasks which are under way here on rather a large scale. You should understand well the significance of such an involvement by you in this work both for us and for yourself.23

  Meanwhile, and with a huckster’s monomania, Lysenko was strong-arming the whole of plant physiology into ‘vernalisation’. Soon enough, vernalisation became detached from its underlying logic and was applied more or less by fiat to any agricultural situation. When it turned out that yields of winter varieties actually fell after vernalisation, spring varieties received the treatment.

  Meanwhile Lysenko, never satisfied, found something new to complain about. Why did people keep referring to vernalisation as a mere ‘technique’? Why were his theoretical pronouncements being ignored? In early 1934, he published a paper, ‘Physiology of Plant Development and Selection Work’, that included critical comments on genetics. Vavilov, for the first time, expressed irritation. Lysenko’s genetics was so elementary, it was hardly worth publishing. Worse, it was muddled. ‘If he had only opened [Danish botanist Wilhelm] Johannsen’s treatise, he would have found a brilliant exposition of the theory of genotype and phenotype.’ Lysenko was neglecting his practical work to dabble in theoretical questions that were clearly beyond him: ‘From you, comrade Lysenko, we expect concrete work on these matters.’24

  But Lysenko would not be discouraged. In 1935 Lysenko and his friend and collaborator Isaak Prezent published two pamphlets: Theoretical Bases of Vernalisation and Selection and the Theory of the Development of Plants Through Stages. Prezent brought some rhetorical rigour to Lysenko’s theory-making. Now Lysenko was not merely confused about genetics. He was hostile to it. Heredity, he claimed, was the property of the whole organism, and was dependent upon the environment. There was no gene.

  Bits of cell, nucleus or chromosome [are] not what geneticists understand by the term ‘gene’. The hereditary basis does not lie in some special self-reproducing substance. The hereditary base is the cell, which develops and becomes an organism. In this cell different organelles have different significance, but there is not a single bit that is not subject to evolutionary development.25

  The genetics community responded with dismay. In June 1935 the Lenin Academy held a meeting in Odessa to discuss Lysenko’s work, in particular his campaign to force wheat plants to outcross in order to counteract their ‘degradation’.

  Georgy Meister, a successful plant breeder with several important grain varieties to his credit, led the attack on Lysenko and Prezent. The Soviet Union had just taken on the job of hosting the next international congress of genetics. How was it going to look now that Lysenko and Prezent’s vulgar, inappropriate, ‘marketplace’ criticism of genetics was being read in newspapers ‘sold on every street corner’? Their nonsense was even appearing in scientific journals. ‘It is’, Meister wrote shortly afterwards, ‘completely incomprehensible that the official organ of the Soviet Ministry of Agriculture publishes an article that disorganises government institutions of selection and seed growing.’

  Meister was a formidable opponent: an enthusiast of genetics who was also an adept philosopher and a sincere Marxist. (His habit of putting every scientific idea through the dialectical-materialist wringer used to drive his students mad.) Lysenko and Prezent responded in a style that was to become their signature: they ignored him, and redoubled their claims.

  They claimed to have found new laws of inheritance that let them experiment with a much smaller number of plants than plant breeders considered necessary. This would greatly accelerate the speed with which new varieties could be developed. It also meant that their positive results would not have to be repeated and confirmed. They were now in a position to answer Yakovlev’s call for new varieties of cereal. In 1934, with the vernalisation programme very obviously running out of steam, Lysenko announced that he would have a new variety of spring wheat ready for testing by 1935. And he had bred it without the use of expensive growth chambers, ‘in five flowerpots in a corner of a crowded greenhouse’.

  The announcement caused a sensation. The nation’s favourite barefoot scientist had trumped the old fogies of agriculture and slashed the time it would take to develop better crops: from up to a dozen years, to less than three! Vavilov, called in for his annual review, faced a barrage of criticism from the Lenin Academy’s governing council. None of them knew a thing about genetics but they could all read a headline. Faced with having to explain basic science to a hostile board, Vavilov for the first time found himself lost for words. Two months later the council released its report. Vavilov’s approach to the famine crisis was ‘utterly insufficient’. He had completely failed to learn from ‘the mass experience of leading state farms, machine and tractor stations, and collective farms’.26

  Lysenko, by contrast, was working miracles. Lysenko himself said so: ‘With your support,’ he wrote in his new journal Vernalisation, launched in 1935, ‘our promise to breed in two and a half years, through hybridisation, a variety of spring wheat for the Odessa region which is earlier and more productive than the regional variety “Lutescens 062”, has been fulfilled.’27

  It is worth taking a moment to understand just what ‘fulfilment’ meant in Lysenko’s book. He had taken two plants each of winter wheats Kooperatorka and Lutescens 329, and sowed them on 3 March 1935 into a single pot in a cool greenhouse until the end of April. The idea was to prevent vernalisation (the conditions were spring-like, not cold) and to keep the plants alive as long as possible without them heading.

  The Lutescens plants lived until the late autumn and died without heading. In the middle of August 1935, one of the Kooperatorka plants died when pests ate its roots. The other one, however, did manage to head. Several paired seeds were collected from the surviving plant on 9 September 1935 and sown beside ordinary Kooperatorka plants in a hothouse. Unlike their neighbours, these unvernalised seeds grew happily in warm conditions, proving that they had been transformed into spring varieties.

  Ludicrous as it was to base anything on the behaviour of just one plant, Lysenko concluded that the plant had passed its spring form to its descendants, in classic Lamarckian style.

  This was too much for the staff of Vavilov’s bureau, and they began to lobby Vavilov to stop encouraging the kid from Odessa. Mikhail Zavadovsky, in the August 1936 i
ssue of the leading Soviet agricultural journal Socialist Reconstruction of Agriculture, shredded Prezent for not knowing the difference between individual development and the evolution of species: ‘his activity is in fact obscurantist’. Lysenko, who was studying individual development, not genetics or evolution, had clearly been misled into ‘careless generalisations’.28

  But Lysenko was operating at a political level now, not a scientific one. At the Second All-Union Congress of Collective Farmers and Shock-Workers, Lysenko called for the mobilisation of the peasant masses to achieve miracles of vernalisation. His speech, ‘Vernalisation Means Millions of Pounds of Additional Harvest’, published in Pravda on 15 February 1935, is full of demagogical calls for class struggle and demands to cast off the fetters of the scientific method.

  Comrades, kulak–wreckers occur not only in your collective farm life. You know them very well. But they are no less dangerous, no less sworn enemies also in science. No little blood was spilled in defence of vernalisation in the various debates with some so-called scientists, in the struggle for its establishment; not a few blows had to be borne in practice. Tell me, comrades, was there not a class struggle on the vernalisation front? In collective farms there were kulaks and their abettors who kept whispering (and they were not the only ones, every class enemy did) into the peasant’s ears: ‘Don’t soak the seeds, it will ruin them.’ This is the way it was, such were the whispers, such were the kulak and saboteur deceptions when, instead of helping collective farmers, they did their destructive business, both in the scientific world and out of it; a class enemy is always an enemy, whether he is a scientist or not.29

  At the same time, Lysenko conceded his debt to Prezent:

  I often read Darwin, Timiryazev, Michurin. In this I was helped by my collaborator Prezent. He showed me that the roots of the work I am doing lie in Darwin. And I, comrades, must confess here straightforwardly in the presence of Josef Vissarionovich [Stalin] that to my shame I have not studied Darwin properly.