Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  5. Schultz, ‘Industrial Psychology in the Soviet Union’, p. 265.

  6. Helen Rappaport, Joseph Stalin: a Biographical Companion, p. 258.

  7. V. Andrle discusses the political uses of Stakhanovism in ‘How Backward Workers Became Soviet: Industrialization of Labour and the Politics of Efficiency under the Second Five-Year Plan, 1933–1937’, Social History, 10 (1985), pp. 147–69. Aside from anything else, the ferment took workers’ minds off their money troubles: over the course of the First Five-Year Plan, the average industrial worker’s wage plummeted.

  8. One intriguing attempt to settle Siberia with volunteers was the creation of Birobidzhan, a region on the Amur River in the Far East, which was established as a homeland for the Jews of the USSR in the 1920s. Many sincere and elaborate inducements were offered; still, Birobidzhan failed.

  9. Edwin Bacon, The Gulag at War: Stalin’s Forced Labour System in the Light of the Archives, p. 48.

  10. Ivanov, ‘Why Did Stalin Kill Gorky?’, p. 64.

  11. By spinning a tale of murder and conspiracy two years after Gorky’s death, Stalin also managed to get rid of one of the doctors who had refused to put his name to the post mortem issued on the death of his wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva. Pletnev had been reluctant to accept that Nadezhda had died from appendicitis. She had in fact shot herself in the head.

  12. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, p. 553.

  13. Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb, p. 27.

  14. See Robert A. McCutcheon, ‘The 1936–1937 Purge of Soviet Astronomers’, Slavic Review, 50 (1991), pp. 100–17; and A. I. Eremeeva, ‘Political Repression and Personality: The History of Political Repression Against Soviet Astronomers’, Journal for the History of Astronomy 26 (1995), p. 297.

  15. Jeroen Van Dongen, ‘On Einstein’s Opponents, and Other Crackpots’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 41 (2010), p. 78.

  16. Milena Wazeck, Einstein’s Opponents: The Public Controversy about the Theory of Relativity in the 1920s, pp. 59, 250.

  17. Josephson, Physics and Politics in Revolutionary Russia, pp. 229–31.

  18. Loren R. Graham, ‘The Socio-Political Roots of Boris Hessen: Soviet Marxism and the History of Science’, Social Studies of Science 15, no. 4 (1985), p. 711.

  19. N. I. Vavilov, ‘The Problem of the Origin of the World’s Agriculture in the Light of the Latest Investigations’, Science at the Crossroads; available at https://www.marxists.org/subject/science/essays/vavilov.htm. This and the other papers were edited by the leader of the delegation, Nikolai Bukharin, in the space of just a fortnight, for immediate multilingual publication.

  20. Roll-Hansen, ‘Wishful Science’, p. 175.

  21. In works that sold in their tens of thousands and were frequently reprinted, Eddington and Jeans had each contrived to find comfort in the way relativity and quantum theory scotched hopes that science might provide mutually coherent answers to everything. The quantum mechanics revolution, according to Sir Arthur Eddington, revealed that ‘all was vanity, that unreason lay at the very basis of reality – in the quanta of action and the behaviour of electrons’. Sir James Jeans asserted that ‘the universe begins to took more like a great thought than like a great machine’. Mind was no longer ‘an accidental intruder’, but ‘the creator and governor of the realm of matter’. The genre they were writing into was already well-developed; in 1920 the popular science writer John Sullivan skewered it neatly as ‘works [which] seem to result from a close collaboration between, say, a professor of physics and a Bond Street Crystal Gazer’.

  22. Newton’s laws depend on formal logic. This is the kind of logic that says that one plus one equals two, and never three. Formal logic sees us through most everyday situations, so it seems like common sense. But it breaks down when it tries to deal with change. One egg plus another egg equals two eggs, unless one of them has hatched into a chicken. And if there are two eggs, and you have one, and your brother-in-law has the other, and he’s late for supper, what are the words ‘plus’ and ‘equals’ worth? These are facetious examples of a serious problem for formal logic and for the Newtonian model: nothing ever stays still. ‘The fundamental flaw in vulgar thought’, wrote Trotsky, ‘lies in the fact that it wishes to content itself with motionless imprints of reality which consists of eternal motion.’

  23. Ioffe’s grand style was already a matter of unhelpful legend. In 1928 the Russian Association of Physicists organised its sixth national congress to examine the experimental results in support of quantum mechanics. After four days of discussions in Leningrad’s Scholars’ Club, its members boarded a train to Nizhny Novgorod and then sailed down the Volga on the steamship Alexei Rykov to Stalingrad, stopping in Nizhny, Kazan and Saratov for popular lectures and discussions with local audiences. The participants were delighted. ‘How many new acquaintances were tied together on the Volga!’ the physicist and historian Torichan Kravets enthused. ‘How many interesting general gatherings were conducted in the salons of the ship! How many private conversations which were rich in content individual scholars held, strolling along the decks and slowly feasting their eyes on the broad, melancholy vistas flowing by!’ But to an increasingly class-conscious Party, the boat ride down the Volga represented these physicists’ elitism and aloofness, and the Russian Association of Physicists would convene only one more time – to arrange for its own dissolution.

  24. Karl Hall, ‘The Schooling of Lev Landau: The European Context of Postrevolutionary Soviet Theoretical Physics’, Osiris 23, no. 1 (1 January 2008), pp. 230–59.

  25. Josephson, Physics and Politics in Revolutionary Russia, p. 317.

  26. With fellow physics students Gamow, Ivanenko and Bronstein, Lev Landau had made life hell for the tenured professors of Leningrad University. Their ‘Physikalische Dummheiten’ (‘Physical Gibberish’) posters, devoted to the mistaken calculations and misguided assertions of their betters, were pasted up on the walls to greet senior physicists as they arrived to lecture. The satire was often not very well focused: they sent a scoffing telegram to Boris Hessen even as he was defending Einstein against a barrage of reactionary criticism. It was this embarrassing and self-defeating gaffe which led to a public reprimand from Ioffe and Landau’s decision to leave Leningrad.

  27. Peter Leonidovich Kapitsa, Letters to Mother: The Early Cambridge Period, p. 46.

  28. Kapitsa was immensely proud of his machinery. He once demonstrated the power of his magnetic fields by shooting a glass rod immersed in liquid oxygen (glass is strongly magnetic in that state) up to the ceiling, where it shattered. His visitor, the American physicist Robert Wood, refused to be outdone. He went up to the coil, took out the vessel of liquid oxygen, and calmly drank Kapitsa’s health. (Or appeared to: he spat the liquid out again after a few seconds – a neat conjuring trick, not to be tried at home.)

  29. Peter Kapitsa may have brought his ‘detention’ upon himself. He omitted on this occasion to collect his usual reassurance of return from the Russian consulate. And, according to his sponsor and Cambridge employer Ernest Rutherford, Kapitsa, ‘in one of his expansive moods in Russia, told the Soviet engineers that he himself would be able to alter the whole face of electrical engineeering in his lifetime’ – a tantalising claim to make in a country assured by Lenin that electrical power alone could power the success of socialism.

  30. Lawrence Badash, Kapitza, Rutherford, and the Kremlin, p. 54.

  31. A. B. Kojevnikov, Stalin’s Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists (Imperial College Press, 2004), p. 100.

  32. Stalin’s team attempted to maintain the practice of ‘criticism and self-criticism’, even at the very highest echelons of government. See J. A. Getty, ‘Samokritika Rituals in the Stalinist Central Committee, 1933–38’, Russian Review, 58 (1999), pp. 49–70.

  33. Letter to Valery Mezhlauk, 5 July 1935, in Petr L. Kapitsa et al., Kapitza in Cambridge and Moscow: Life and Letters of a
Russian Physicist, p. 328.

  34. Krementsov, Stalinist Science, pp. 40–1.

  35. Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, p. 258.

  13: ‘Fascist links’

  Nikolai Timofeev-Ressovsky leans between Cécile and Oskar Vogt for a photo at Berlin-Buch. The man second left is unidentified; Hermann Muller stands far left.

  Like the young Ladies and Gentlemen of Boccaccio’s Decameron, we were brought together by withdrawing from the terrors of a great plague to jointly consider some of the riddles of life. 1

  Max Delbrück to Nikolai Timofeev-Ressovsky,

  1 October 1970

  In January 1932 Hermann Muller, the American geneticist who had brought Drosophila as experimental animals to the Soviet Union, disappeared from his laboratory at Austin, Texas.

  His wife Jessie called the university, asking anxiously if anyone had seen her husband. Eventually Muller’s students formed a search posse and went out looking for him in the woods near the outskirts of town. They found their professor walking about in a confused state, dishevelled and spattered with mud. He had overdosed on barbiturates in an attempt at suicide.

  The next day he turned up to class as if nothing was wrong. There was a great deal wrong.2 Muller had been working at night to avoid colleagues he had irretrievably alienated, and as a consequence his marriage had all but collapsed: he and Jessie had already discussed a separation.

  Muller’s work, far from suffering, bloomed: all his energies and hopes were now devoted to genetics and its practical, medical applications. Just days after trying to kill himself, he was at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, speaking to the Third International Congress of Eugenics.

  ‘The Dominance of Economics over Eugenics’3 was a landmark performance: a radical critique of the eugenic project, very much in the spirit of early critics like Peter Kropotkin, and armed with findings and insights from the latest research. American eugenics, Muller said, was based on false premises. Pauperism, vagrancy, feeblemindedness and criminality were almost certainly not innate. You couldn’t begin to understand the genetic component of human social behaviour until you had established an egalitarian society. Only under socialism, where all children, regardless of gender or race, had equal opportunities, could you even consider a eugenics programme.

  Not long after, the reckless professor from Texas was once again on the public stage, this time presenting ‘Further Studies on the Nature of Gene Mutation’4 to the Sixth International Congress of Genetics at Cornell. It was, many said, a work of some genius: a capstone of classical, ‘Mendelian’ genetics. Others, aware of his recent overdose, were troubled by Muller’s confused and slapdash delivery. Thomas Hunt Morgan, himself convalescing from a bad car accident, knew a casualty when he saw one: ‘Something is wrong with Muller,’ he said.

  What Muller desperately needed at this point, and what he got, was a change of scene. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, in November Muller left for Berlin and Oskar Vogt’s Institute for Brain Research.

  By the time Muller arrived, the Timofeev-Ressovskys, Nikolai and Elena and their son Dmitry, had already spent four years in Berlin. They had lived in the centre at first, Vogt’s institute at that time being little more than a shell company, with a lab in an old tenement building.

  Since then, with backing from both the German state and the Rockefeller Foundation, a new six-storey building had risen in Buch, a leafy suburb about twenty-five kilometres from the centre of town, nine kilometres outside the city limits. It was not exactly a rural idyll. The new building stood among regimented conifer plantations, part of a 15,000-bed complex of hospitals and clinics. The site had been meant for a cemetery, until the ground had turned out to be unsuitable. But a short walk led you into farmland, giving a sense of relative seclusion that would prove very welcome as the political situation deteriorated.

  Construction of the new building was completed by the end of February 1930, by which time it was already housing an imposing number of laboratories, study centres and animal departments using monkeys and other exotic animals. The Timofeev-Ressovskys and the Vogts shared a large house overlooking the main building where some ninety co-workers had rooms.

  Nikolai and Elena’s work on Drosophila was wide-ranging and attracted international interest. They had together studied wild populations of Drosophila in the grounds of Buch, and confirmed by experiment Sergei Chetverikov’s revolutionary ideas about population biology. In the laboratory, Nikolai was exposing Drosophila to X-rays to determine the size of the gene.

  Muller stayed at Buch between November 1932 and September 1933 to contribute to these X-ray studies.5 The men set out to estimate the nature and extent of the gene by recording how many mutations of a particular gene were triggered in that tissue when exposed to X-rays.

  Their results, acquired after the most painstaking study – hundreds of hours spent studying thousands of flies through the microscope – were suspiciously easy to interpret. Whether their X-ray dose was administered in a single shot, in several small shots, or continuously at a low level over a long time, a certain level of X-ray exposure invariably caused a certain number of mutations. And however weak the X-ray dose was, it always, eventually, triggered a mutation.

  Put simply, genes were getting knocked sideways at an entirely predictable rate, almost as if they were coconuts in a fairground booth, and X-rays were the balls being thrown at them. From this, Timofeev-Ressovsky developed what he and his later collaborators nicknamed ‘target theory’: the idea that the gene really was a discrete, solid mass, which X-ray photons either hit or missed.

  Measuring the gene effectively became a very complicated, small-scale game of Battleships. Timofeev-Ressovsky played this game throughout the 1930s, first with Muller, then with Karl Zimmer, a research radiologist, and Max Delbrück, a young physicist inspired by the new science of genetics. With these later researchers Timofeev-Ressovsky published a landmark paper6 revealing that a Drosophila chromosome contained no fewer than 10,000 and no more than 100,000 genes – and that a gene was a sphere, one to ten microns across. This result, crude by modern standards, was of immense importance: it showed a generation of physicists what they might be able to achieve if they shifted their attention to biology. After the war, this new field of ‘molecular biology’ transformed the life sciences.

  Muller’s stay in Berlin brought him into contact with extraordinary people. The Timofeev-Ressovskys’ circle included Bohr, Dirac, Schrödinger, Vernadsky, Darlington, Haldane … Nikolai was a regular in Copenhagen and other elite European seminars, and with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, organised annual conferences on genetics, biophysics, and radiation biology right up until the outbreak of war in 1939.

  Oskar Vogt, concerned that Timofeev-Ressovsky’s celebrity would eventually lure him to the United States, recommended that he become the head of the institute’s Department of Genetics. By signing a contract at the beginning of 1932, Timofeev-Ressovsky now enjoyed the tenure and salary of a university professor.

  Everything Muller told Timofeev-Ressovsky about academic life in the USA persuaded the Russian that he had made the right decision by staying put in Germany. Mired in the Depression, American academics had seen their wages cut by a third. Professors were being dismissed from universities and laboratories by the dozen, and funding for scientific research was drying to a trickle. Muller’s bleak accounts, and his fierce criticism of American eugenics policy, convinced Timofeev-Ressovsky not to move to the USA, even as the political situation in Germany deteriorated and war loomed.

  *

  On 30 January 1933, the National Socialists took power in Germany. Of the Brain Institute’s one hundred workers, four were communists and seven were Nazis, and all hell broke loose, with Vogt firmly resisting calls to fire any Jewish, Social Democrat or communist workers. Suspicions, claims and counterclaims circulated wildly. One of the Nazis at the institute was a cleaner who, in a denunciation of his employer, quoted Oskar Vogt’s view that
‘National Socialism is an unexplored toxic bacillus. Hitler is an uneducated man, and the party consists of murderers and criminals.’7

  In May the Nazi civil service law was extended to the Kaiser Wilhelm Society. All Jews were immediately dismissed except for institute directors, who were allowed to continue in their posts until the Nuremberg laws were passed in 1935.

  In March 1933 Vavilov visited Berlin on his return from the genetics congress in Ithaca. Seeing the political situation for himself, he offered Muller the chance to head the laboratory he had inherited from Yuri Filipchenko, his opposite number in Leningrad, and which had been grandly rechristened the Academy’s new Institute of Genetics.

  Muller needed little further encouragement. Levit and Agol had already painted him a glowing picture of Russia’s socialist future while working with him in Texas. In Buch, meanwhile, Nazi stormtroopers were repeatedly raiding the institute, forcing their way through the windows and breaking furniture as they hunted, they said, for an underground member of the Communist International. (Inevitably, they detained Muller, though he was soon released.)

  In September 1933, having been elected to the USSR Academy of Sciences, Muller moved to Leningrad.

  He did not travel light: 10,000 glass vials, 1,000 bottles, two microscopes, a suitcase packed with food-making equipment, a 1932 eight-cylinder Ford, two bicycles, trunks of clothing, books and personal effects arrived with him. Accompanying him were his long-suffering wife Jessie and his lab assistant Carlos Offerman.

  The Soviet Union afforded Muller a hero’s welcome. Muller in his turn published articles in popular magazines praising the collective farms and the government’s generous funding of science. Late in 1934, when both the Academy of Sciences and its Institute of Genetics were moved to Moscow, Muller moved too.