Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  Late in the afternoon of 1 December 1934, Sergei Kirov was shot in the neck in a hallway of the Solnyi Institute. Efforts to resuscitate him proved useless.

  The next day Joseph Stalin and a team descended on Leningrad. They returned to Moscow with Kirov’s body late the next day, by which time the slain leader was already halfway to secular sainthood. The papers at the time of Kirov’s death were filled with his praises, and with expressions of grief far exceeding those which followed the death of Lenin. For at least twelve days all Soviet newspapers devoted themselves to Kirov’s life and death. By 5 December entire books about him, with reminiscences by former comrades, stories about his childhood and reproductions of his speeches, had gone to press.

  Oddly, no one in the press thought to mention that a key witness to the murder, Kirov’s bodyguard M. D. Borisov, was killed in an accident a day after the crime, while on the way to be questioned by Stalin. Although news of the accident spread quickly around Leningrad, the newspapers ignored this event completely. And while there is no direct evidence that Kirov was shot by the NKVD on Stalin’s orders, it is certain that Kirov’s death gave Stalin the opportunity to dismantle all the many networks of friendship and patronage that might otherwise have opposed him. It gave him carte blanche to disembowel Russia’s second city, Peter the Great’s ‘window on the West’ and home to Russia’s most prominent intellectual and cultural figures. It let him obliterate the last vestiges of Russia’s liberal tradition, and shift the nation’s balance of power from Leningrad to Moscow, once and for all.

  Whether or not Gorky really had been toying with conspiracy – and whether or not Stalin ever suspected him of doing so – in any event, Kirov’s death marked the end of Gorky’s welcome within Stalin’s inner circle. In late 1935, a series of hostile articles in Pravda announced a marked change in the official attitude toward him. He found himself under unofficial house arrest in his country villa, about fifty kilometres from Moscow. From 6 to 17 June 1936, all the many newspapers that Gorky read daily were printed for him separately. These special editions omitted the bulletins about his health, with which the country and the world were being prepared for his death on 18 June, at the age of 68. Maxim Gorky died, ‘the result of pulmonary congestion following grip’, according to the New York Times: ‘His heart weakness had already given rise to anxiety, which was greatly accentuated yesterday.’

  The story of Gorky’s death fooled the New York Times, as it fooled the world. And those who were not fooled needed only to wait two years before Gorky’s doctor, Dmitry Pletnev, was accused of killing his client Maxim Gorky, on the instructions of a right-wing conspiracy. Pletnev was sentenced and died in a prison camp.

  The fiendishness of the state’s manoeuvring here is instructive. Whether you believed in the story of Gorky’s heart weakness or not, whether you thought the man had died of natural causes or been murdered in his sleep, you were overwhelmingly likely to believe one or other official version of events.11

  When Kirov declined the opportunity to replace Stalin as General Secretary of the Party, he sealed his own fate. He also left a position open in Moscow. The man who filled that position was Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov, the Proconsul (local Party chief) of the city of Nizhny Novgorod. An opportunistic survivor, cautious to the point of cowardice, Andrei Zhdanov was to set the tone of Russian cultural and scientific life for the next twenty years.

  His background was patrician: his mother was the daughter of nobility, his father a student of theology. The family had gone to ruin with the death of his father, and Andrei had been a committed Marxist since his teens. His breeding showed through though in his musical tastes, his education and his manners. Lavrenty Beria, Party Secretary for Georgia and Stalin’s most trusted subordinate, couldn’t stand him: ‘He can just manage to play the piano with two fingers and to distinguish between a man and a bull in a picture, yet he holds forth on abstract painting!’12

  From behind his desk in Nizhny Novgorod, Andrei Zhdanov had herded the local peasantry into collective farms. The exercise, a comprehensive economic failure, had established Zhdanov’s leadership and loyalty and marked him for high office.

  For a week after Kirov’s assassination, Zhdanov and Stalin held lengthy meetings in the Kremlin, thrashing out how Zhdanov was to divide his time between his work in Moscow as Central Committee secretary, and his new responsibilities as head of the Leningrad Party organisation.

  No material evidence was ever presented to suggest anyone but the killer was involved in Kirov’s murder, Nonetheless, on 16 December 1934, two important political opponents of Stalin – Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev – were arrested on charges of inspiring the act. By late December, fourteen people had been sentenced to death for organising the Kirov murder. By March 1935 the NKVD in Leningrad had arrested 843 people. The Great Purge had begun.

  During the month of July 1937 troikas – a kind of emergency court – were appointed in all provinces and republics. These handed out death or labour-camp sentences to criminals and political opponents alike, using lists submitted by the NKVD. In August 1937 the arrest quota for Leningrad was established at 4,000 people for the death sentence, and 10,000 for terms in prison or labour camps. As elsewhere, the quotas were overfulfilled. The Leningrad Party leadership was purged, and 30,000–40,000 Leningraders were deported, effectively ending Leningrad’s role as a political and cultural centre to rival Moscow.

  Stalin’s decision to eradicate and terrorise all opposition, real or potential, had begun in Leningrad but soon spread to the rest of the country. The notorious Order No. 00447 sent the NKVD after ex-kulaks, Socialist Revolutionaries, nationalists, criminals, Whites, sectarians and religious leaders. The campaign soon widened to include regional Communist leaders and their clients. Order No. 00447 supplied arrest quotas for all regions and republics of the Soviet Union and specified how many should receive the death penalty and how many should ‘merely’ be dispatched to concentration camps. It was usual for regional NKVD departments to overfulfil the plan, for which they retroactively received Politburo permission. Of the quarter of a million people arrested under Order No. 00447, at least 72,000 were sentenced to death. The victims still represented only one tenth of the approximately 700,000 people shot in 1937 and 1938. All told, the Great Purge saw the arrest of some 8 million and the execution of about 1 million.

  Even the Army General Staff was not immune. The army command included many a former tsarist officer, and it was common knowledge among Communists that the Soviet military had engaged in intensive military collaboration with the Germans since the Treaty of Rapallo was signed in 1922. The General Staff was liquidated in June 1937; 80 per cent of members of the Military Council were executed.

  David Shoenberg, a physicist visiting from Cambridge, wrote later that the Great Purge was ‘rather like a plague and you could never tell who would catch it next’.13 But sciences centred in Leningrad suffered most. The small though highly prestigious fields of astrophysics and astronomy were devastated. Ten senior physicists, including leading specialists at the State Astronomical Observatory in Pulkovo, just outside Leningrad, were arrested for ‘participation in a fascist, Trotskyist terrorist organisation which arose in 1932’.14

  Physics too was changed out of all recognition, though here the catastrophe was rather longer in the making, the intellectual arguments mattered rather more, and the ultimate tragedy a matter more of fate than chance.

  *

  ‘This world is a strange madhouse,’ Albert Einstein wrote to his friend Marcel Grossmann in 1920. ‘Every coachman and every waiter is debating whether relativity theory is correct. Belief in this matter depends on political affiliation.’15

  For more than a decade after the publication of Einstein’s key papers, relativity was a political issue. Albert Einstein had done away with the notion that there had to be some invisible, ineffable medium – an aether – through which light travelled. That made his theory materialist: there was no longer any need to assume s
ome hidden ‘higher order’ to the universe. On the other hand, relativity made observations hopelessly contingent upon local conditions, which themselves could not be ascertained with any certainty. In an Einsteinian universe, there are no stationary points, and no reliable clocks. All this makes materialist science very hard to do. Common sense is shown the door, and intuition fails. No wonder amateurs everywhere railed against Einstein’s theories. Einstein had at a stroke made amateur work in the field immeasurably more difficult, even as the new, big laboratories and institutes were making amateurs themselves irrelevant.

  What this boiled down to, politically, was a sense that Einstein was helping the sciences professionalise themselves at the expense of everybody else; that physicists were talking gobbledegook and getting paid ever greater sums of money for doing so; that scientists were becoming, in an ever more godless age, a replacement priesthood.

  You didn’t need to be a Marxist to deplore the passing of common sense in the field of physics. For the Bavarian occultist Max Seiling, the arrival of Einstein quite clearly spelled doom for the neighbourhood: ‘Special research has become an end in itself. Since that time, it has been ridiculous, and along with it those who carry it out and take such delight in their rag collecting.’ Nor was the Europe-wide Academy of Nations, established in 1921, a Marxist organisation. Nevertheless as an anti-Einstein organisation, it clung, Marx-like, to a dream of ‘the unification and coordination of systems of knowledge, thus procuring the development of a synthesised body of knowledge as against the highly specialised condition now existing’.16

  The face-off between ‘academic science’ and what amateur societies liked to call ‘correct natural science’ was not, then, an especially Russian phenomenon. But a few unhappy circumstances saw to it that the argument would rumble on much longer there and ultimately fuel the purges in physics.

  Albert Einstein was, for one thing, quite vocal in crediting Ernst Mach with some of the philosophical ideas that inspired both the special and general theories – the same Mach whose theories, according to Lenin’s deathless Materialism and Empiriocriticism, amounted to ‘a jumble of idle and shallow words in which he himself does not believe’.

  A further irritant was the way in which a prestigious group of theorists, following the work of Danish physicist Niels Bohr, had come to the conclusion that at a very small scale, measurements affect outcomes to the point where nothing useful can be said about the actual state of the universe. This hardly sat well with Lenin’s lumpen ‘reflection theory’ of mind, and in 1936 a physicist, K. V. Nikolsky, wrote to a philosophy journal to say so, complaining of the Copenhagen interpretation’s ‘idealism’ and ‘Machism’.

  Einstein’s own spiritual inclinations added fuel to the fire in 1930, when the New York Times Magazine and the Berliner Tageblatt ran articles of his under the titles ‘Science and Religion’ and ‘What I Believe’.

  Resistance to the special and general theories of relativity was not exceptional, and everyone – but everyone – had an opinion. In Moscow, Arkady Klimentyevich Timiryazev was making hatred of Einstein into a political platform.

  Arkady Timiryazev was a close associate of Maxim Gorky, and the son of the famous agronomist and biologist Kliment Timiryazev. At Moscow University he was referred to as a professor of physics. Behind his back he was dubbed ‘the monument’s son’, because there was little enough, aside from his impressive parentage, to recommend him. He was not an outstanding scientist. His devotion to classical Newtonian physics was absolute, and absolutely uncreative. Timiryazev hated Einstein’s theories of relativity with a passion that, so long as you did not get in the way of it, appeared positively farcical. At a public meeting in the mid-1920s he sarcastically conceded that he didn’t want Einstein actually shot. Unhappily for his colleagues – natural allies and opponents alike – it was remarkably easy to find yourself the target of one of Timiryazev’s scattergun denunciations. Timiryazev used politics as a blunt weapon as readily as any Bolshevik ideologue, and with considerably less care. Among the people he vilified were academicians including the godfather of Soviet physics Abram Ioffe and Nikolai Vavilov’s brother Sergei – later the Academy’s president. All in all he turned the physics department at his university into a kind of militant ideological camp.17

  Only Stalin expressed affection for Arkady Timiryazev – possibly because Arkady was the only person we know of who ever bothered to search the leader’s writings for references to modern physics.

  Timiryazev did not have things all his own way, however. Einstein had many fierce champions in the Soviet Union, and none so brilliant as Boris Mikhailovich Hessen, a gifted mathematician born into a middle-class Jewish family in 1893 in the town of Elisavetgrad (now Kirovgrad), a city in central Ukraine. Hessen had studied physics at the University of Edinburgh between 1913 and 1914 and at Petrograd University during the First World War. After the revolution he became a soldier in the Red Army, and at the end of the Civil War he became a student of natural science at the Institute of Red Professors in Moscow. His own Marxism was sincere and sophisticated. Hessen saw off Timiryazev’s reactionary objections to relativity theory in the pages of Under the Banner of Marxism with an argument that ran something like this: if you are a Marxist, and you claim that relativity theory is anti-Marxist, that’s all very well – right up to the point where the theory is demonstrated to be correct. Then what are you supposed to do? Did Marxists really want to create a situation for themselves in which, if Einstein was right, Marx had to be wrong?

  There was no need to get into such a tangle, Hessen said. The world was the world. Of course human explanations of how the world worked were coloured by one ideology or another, but what mattered to good scientists were the findings of science: the measurements, not the philosophical interpretations. Newton’s physics supposed a ‘divine first impulse’ that set the solar system in motion. Were atheists and Marxists going to reject Newton, now?18

  Hessen suffered for his cleverness. In 1928 his own head of department, Timiryazev’s ally Alexander Maksimov (no relation to the vernalisation expert Nikolai Maksimov) called him a ‘Machist’ and a ‘Right deviationist’ – labels which even then packed a serious political and personal threat.

  By October 1930, that threat was out in the open. At a conference on the state of Soviet philosophy, Hessen and his views on physics were heavily criticised. He was not even allowed to speak in his own defence as critics denounced him as a ‘pure idealist’, a ‘metaphysicist of the worst sort’ and as a deserter from the materialist cause. He even attracted the attention of Ernst Kolman, a Czech philosopher of science and arguably the most savage of Stalin’s intellectual cheerleaders. Kolman had once been a man of action: twice between 1918 and 1923 he had been sent under cover to Germany to foment world revolution. Now riding a desk in Moscow, Kolman spent his days hunting down ideological heresy in his own field of mathematical and physical sciences. In an article published in 1931 Kolman issued a direct challenge to Hessen, calling on him to turn over a new leaf and correct his political mistakes: ‘One must speak directly here, and say that there is no Bolshevism in Hessen’s science, nor in that of his comrades.’

  Hessen got his chance at redemption three months later when he was included in a delegation to London to attend the Second International Congress of the History of Science. The Soviet party, arriving in a special aircraft at the last minute, included both Party members and fellow-travellers. All were intellectual heavyweights. Abram Ioffe, founding father of Soviet physics, was there; so was Boris Zavadovsky. Vladimir Mitkewich attended, to speak about Faraday and that perennial favourite, the electrification of the USSR. Nikolai Vavilov, meanwhile, waxed positively millennial when describing his study of the history and prehistory of food crops:

  In approaching this problem from the point of view of dialectic materialism, we shall be led to revise many of our old concepts and, which is fundamentally important, we shall gain the possibility of controlling the historical process, in th
e sense of directing the evolution of cultivated plants and domestic animals according to our will.19

  Also on the delegation was Ernst Kolman, whom the Politburo had charged with supervising and reporting on the political behaviour of two suspect members of the delegation: Boris Hessen; and the leader of the party, Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin.

  Of the two, Bukharin was by far the more important, and the one in the more serious trouble. Lenin himself had dubbed him the Party’s ‘leading theoretician’. But the dead leader’s support now marked Bukharin out as a possible opponent of Stalin. Making his position even more delicate, Bukharin had once been a pupil of Alexander Bogdanov.

  Bukharin did not necessarily oppose Stalin’s efforts to make science over in the service of the state – to make all science into applied science, to be applied moreover in the service of the Party. Explaining the Soviet scientific revolution in London, he described how ‘the rupture between intellectual and physical labour’ was being eliminated and scientific research was rising to a new level of efficiency. (His prime example was plant breeding.)20

  But there were crucial and growing differences between Bukharin and Stalin. Stalin’s ‘Great Break’ roused nothing but contempt in Bukharin. ‘Ignorant nonsense’, he called it: one of several remarks that, by December 1930, had got him expelled from the Politburo.

  Bukharin’s opening speech was enthusiastic, politically on-point and, for the international audience gathered in London, quite uncontroversial. The days of ‘scholastic monasteries, the laboratories of alchemists and the quiet offices of individual university scholars’ were gone, he announced. Science now had to be organised along the lines of big industry. Few ambitious scientists of that time would have disagreed with him, regardless of their politics.