Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  The next morning Muller met Vavilov in his hotel. Vavilov was extremely anxious. Muller had effectively accused the Soviet government of fascist sympathies, and a public retraction of some kind was urgently required: ‘Neither Vavilov, nor others, said any more to me about the matter,’ Muller later recalled, ‘but there were evidences that the chasm between the opposed groups had permanently widened.’18

  Muller issued a rather mealy-mouthed retraction and left the Soviet Union temporarily for Berlin. En route, he wrote to his friend Julian Huxley, noting unhappily that the Soviet Union ‘is hardly the place, at present and probably for some years to come, where one can hope to develop genetics effectively, let alone the application of genetics to man which I had hoped might gradually be introduced’.19

  Arriving in Berlin, Muller headed directly to the Timofeev-Ressovskys’ home at the Brain Institute. At this point he probably did not know that Izrail Agol, the Soviet geneticist who had studied under him at Texas, had been shot. But the news he did bear was bad enough: Nikolai Timofeev-Ressovsky’s colleague Vlad Slepkov, who had been recalled to Russia from Buch, had been shot. Nikolai’s brother Vladimir, who had worked in Leningrad with Sergei Kirov, had been shot. Another of Timofeev-Ressovsky’s brothers, Dmitry, was imprisoned, and so were many of his wife’s relatives. Muller passed on to Timofeev-Ressovsky Koltsov’s and Vavilov’s explicit wishes that he stay put for the sake of his own and his family’s safety.20

  Muller returned to Moscow briefly in September to pack up his things, then left for good.21 ‘As time passed, the sad conclusion was forced on me that in the USSR genetics was passing under too much of a cloud for my return there to be of any help.’

  *

  For Solomon Levit there were no exits to take, no gestures to make. Stalin, as patron, permitted no rivals, no alternatives, and the Bolshevik idealists of the Communist Academy were particular targets of his Great Purge.

  On 5 July 1937 Levit was removed as director of the Medical– Biological Institute. On 17 September his institute was closed down ‘for the purpose of organising a truly scientific study of medical genetics’. Levit’s internal passport was suspended. He had nothing to do but remain in Moscow and await arrest. At home, he hid the newspapers in case his wife and daughter came across printed attacks on him. Every day he left home, pretending that he was going to work; he headed instead to the Lenin Library. The NKVD shadowed him closely. One day he managed to get away and made a payphone call to a close friend, asking him to look after his wife and daughter. The friend snubbed him.

  Levit’s arrest was scheduled for the night of 10 January 1938. To let his daughter sleep Levit led his police escort on a walk through night-time Moscow. In the morning NKVD agents found him at his apartment, talking with his daughter who was still tucked up in bed.

  They took him to the Lubyanka prison and accused him of being an American spy. He held firm for four months, then signed a false confession in return for a phone call with his daughter.

  On 17 May Levit was sentenced to death for terrorism and espionage. He was shot twelve days later.

  Notes

  1. In Zimmer, Delbrück and Timofeev-Resovskii, Creating a Physical Biology, p. 61.

  2. Muller’s early trials and tribulations are very well handled by his biographer Elof A. Carlson in his brief memoir Hermann Joseph Muller 1890–1967 (National Academy of Sciences, 2009); available at http://bit.ly/1L3wiPY.

  3. H. J. Muller, ‘The Dominance of Economics over Eugenics’, Scientific Monthly 37 (1933), pp. 40–7.

  4. In Donald F. Jones, Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Genetics, Ithaca, New York, 1932; available at http://www.esp.org/books/6th-congress/facsimile/contents/6th-cong-p213-muller.pdf.

  5. Yakov G. Rokityanskij, ‘N. V. Timofeeff-Ressovsky in Germany (July 1925–September 1945)’, Journal of Biosciences 30, no. 5 (December 2005), pp. 573–80.

  6. ‘On the nature of gene mutation and gene structure’ was given a ‘funeral first class’ – as Delbrück later remarked – published in the reports of the biology section of the journal of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences, which folded after three issues. It was rescued from obscurity by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger who sang its praises and summarised its contents (none too accurately) in his book What Is Life?

  Years later, Delbrück wrote to Timofeev-Ressovsky to say that re-reading the paper – bound in that peculiar, desaturated green card (it goes by the name ‘Green Pamphlet’ sometimes; more often as ‘The Three-Man Paper’) ‘brings back to memory the idyllic and enthusiastic sessions at your house and at our house where we delighted in our first adventures at bringing genetics and physics together’ (Max Delbrück to Nikolai Timofeev-Ressovsky, 1 October 1970; in Zimmer et al., Creating a Physical Biology, p. 61).

  7. Susan Gross Solomon, Doing Medicine Together: Germany and Russia between the Wars, p. 354, n. 10.

  8. H. J. Muller, Out of the Night: A Biologist’s View of the Future, pp. 113 and 122.

  9. Quoted in Babkov, The Dawn of Human Genetics, p. 643. See also Larson, ‘Biology and the Emergence of the Anglo-American Eugenics Movement’. See also Diane B. Paul, ‘“Our Load of Mutations” Revisited’, Journal of the History of Biology 20, no. 3 (1 September 1987), pp. 321–35.

  10. One report has it that the secretary who translated the manuscript into Russian was later arrested and shot.

  11. See Krementsov, International Science between the World Wars.

  12. Leon Trotsky, My Life: An Attempt at an Autobiography, p. 315.

  13. Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair, p. 218.

  14. Loren R. Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, n. 58.

  15. Lysenko’s linguistic tactics are unpicked by Dmitri Stanchevici in Stalinist Genetics: The Constitutional Rhetoric of T. D. Lysenko. See also Paul M. Dombrowski, ‘Plastic Language for Plastic Science: The Rhetoric of Comrade Lysenko’, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 31, no. 3 (2001), pp. 293–333.

  16. Quoted in Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair, p. 104.

  17. Roll-Hansen, The Lysenko Effect, p. 203.

  18. Pringle, The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, p. 211.

  19. H. J. Muller to Julian Huxley, 9 and 11 March 1937, Lilly Library. See Mark B. Adams, ‘The Politics of Human Heredity in the USSR, 1920–1940’, Genome 31, no. 2 (1989), pp. 879–84.

  20. The message was repeated a year later, following an official instruction to return home. Nikolai Koltsov managed to smuggle a letter to Timofeev-Ressovsky through the Swedish embassy: ‘Of all the methods of suicide, you have chosen the most agonising and difficult. And this not only for yourself, but also for your family … If you do decide to come back, though, then book your ticket straight through to Siberia!’

  21. Muller stayed in Spain through the siege of Madrid. He joined the International Brigade and served with the Canadian physician Norman Bethune, testing a new form of blood transfusion involving extracting blood from cadavers. With the Republican Army on the verge of defeat, Muller’s friend Julian Huxley heard of his difficulties and contacted Francis Crew, the director of the Institute for Animal Genetics at the University of Edinburgh. Crew was not at all taken with the idea of having Muller in Edinburgh: as he wrote to a colleague, ‘Huxley now writes to me to find Muller a job, but I doubt very much that I can, and I am not quite sure that I particularly want to.’ But the move proved successful. Muller met and married his second wife, Thea Kantorowicz, and for the first time, and quite unexpectedly, seems to have experienced real happiness.

  14: Office politics

  Trofim Lysenko measures the growth of wheat in the field of a collective farm near Odessa in the Ukraine.

  They did not want to make room for a simple peasant like me. 1

  Trofim Lysenko

  Lenin Academy vice-president Georgy Meister was a crop breeder who actually did understand something about genetics. When he summed up December’s Lenin Academy session, he was punctilious in his even-handed account. But he could see
well enough the danger implicit in Lysenko’s contrarian behaviour. ‘We cannot permit a groundless condemnation of theories and methods whose practical value has been established through broad scientific experience,’ he warned. The press worried him too:

  We know that some not so well-considered statements by Lysenko on pure lines, inbreeding and genetics have in certain places been interpreted to mean that work with inbreeding is almost a counterrevolutionary activity and some of our newspapers and publishers refuse to print articles about inbreeding and even about genetics.2

  Away from the headlines and the popular press, the geneticists had won a considerable victory. Experimental work on ‘issues of heredity’ was expanded. Additional funding was found for genetics research. Even the cancelled International Genetics Congress was revived, when the Politburo agreed to reschedule it for Moscow in 1938.

  But the popular press could not be ignored. It mattered. It was fast becoming the final arbiter in the controversies its own headlines whipped up. The fate of Leningrad’s intellectuals, the disappearance of Levit and the death of Agol were proof enough of that. A cold wind of popular opinion was blowing through science, and it made an oppressive impact on the pioneering biologist Nikolai Koltsov. He wrote to the editors of Pravda, criticising them for their ‘biased and often completely illiterate publications about the meetings of the session’. Meister’s own summing-up had been so badly distorted in the editing that ‘this “truth” undermines faith in Pravda’.3

  He asked Muralov to support the publication in Izvestiia and Pravda of ‘extensive articles, written by genuine geneticists in defence of their science’, but Muralov, with his brother facing the firing squad and his own arrest looming, simply reiterated his (by now obligatory) faith in citizen science. The problems of genetics had to be discussed in the wide circle of scientists and production workers, not only in a closed circle of narrow specialists. Koltsov was being elitist.

  Meanwhile Lysenko and Prezent and their patron Yakovlev used the popular press to heap up the pressure on the geneticists. For them, any study of human heredity was ipso facto fascist. Prezent wrote in Pravda: ‘It doesn’t matter who has taught whom, the fascists Koltsov or Koltsov the fascists. The fascists, following Koltsov’s programme, are physically destroying thousands and thousands.’

  *

  Towards the end of March 1937, the Lenin Academy summoned a special session to discuss how its scientists and bureaucrats were going to work together in the light of the new Soviet constitution. Passed on 5 December 1936 this constitution had greatly strengthened the system of nomenklatura on which everyone’s job depended.

  The March activ was essentially an informal local meeting for Moscow employees. That it opened its doors to the public was not significant: Russian science had always had a public face. Public lectures and public defences of dissertations were commonplace. What was significant on this occasion – and shocking – was the speed with which this informal talking-shop generated into a shouting match between two very clearly demarcated camps, with Lysenkoists on one side and Koltsov and the geneticists on the other.

  Even this might not have mattered had the Lenin Academy’s President Muralov – by now fighting for his freedom and his life – not used his position to demonstrate his political credentials. He went on the attack immediately, using his opening remarks to single out Koltsov, whose letter to the Lenin Academy following the Fourth Session had shown, he said, that ‘we have not organised our cadres to fight the bourgeois worldview’. He then proceeded to define this ‘worldview’ by quoting from Koltsov’s Russian Eugenics Journal articles of 1929. To hear Muralov tell it, Koltsov’s playful Martian fantasies were now evidence of his innate fascism.

  The threat to Koltsov was clear, but what comes across equally clearly from the transcript is Muralov’s own insecurity. The chief victims of the purges were party bureaucrats, and the higher your position, the more risk you ran. Koltsov and the geneticists were not actually enemies of the state so much as whipping boys for officials whose own lives hung in the balance.

  For Koltsov himself, there was an obvious and reasonably easy way out: he could disarm. Under Bolshevik rule, public disputes and discussions of this sort had acquired a theatrical form that had very little to do with the subject at hand and a great deal to do with showing who was boss and who owed loyalty to whom. Self-criticism and repentance were all part and parcel of the show. They had very little bearing indeed on what people actually did and believed, and virtually no bearing at all on their future action. All you had to do to survive was lie.

  It was a lesson that would save entire disciplines after the war, and keep brilliant minds employed and out of prison for years. Koltsov, however, was the child of a very different generation. He did not know how to bend. Muralov, he said, had wildly and deliberately misinterpreted his 1929 work. For their time and context, his claims were legitimate and scientifically well founded; why should he take back a word of what he had said?

  Koltsov’s Galileo act, posing proudly in defence of science, infuriated the room. The battle now became who held the whip-hand over the work of the Lenin Academy. Muralov had been seeing research into rust-resistant wheat through research institutions for months: ‘Should I just keep away from this?’ he asked Nikolai Vavilov, the Lenin Academy’s former president and, next to Koltsov, the senior representative of the genetics camp.

  ‘Absolutely,’ replied Vavilov from his seat.

  ‘Is it not the task of the presidium to organise research so that new varieties can be produced as quickly as possible?’ Muralov snapped back. ‘You call this bureaucratic interference, but we call it organisation of research.’

  ‘You should take advice from the best specialists,’ Vavilov replied, reeling off some names.

  ‘But you did not mention Lysenko and Tsitsin,’ Muralov observed.

  Vavilov had nothing to say to that. No one needed him to say anything: battle had already been joined.

  *

  In the autumn Muralov was arrested, and Georgy Meister appointed as acting president of the Lenin Academy. Meister’s record as a plant breeder was second to none: varieties of spring wheat produced under his direction were growing on 7 million hectares of Soviet farmland. But even practical successes were not sufficient to save him from the purges. On 11 August he too was arrested as an enemy of the people, lost his mind in prison, and died there the following year.

  Nikolai Vavilov himself took the reins of the Lenin Academy for a few months. Then, on 28 February 1938, the inevitable happened. Trofim Lysenko was appointed president, and his close follower Nikolai Tsitsin became a vice-president.

  The Great Purge had turned the world upside-down. Lysenko had ascended to the top position in Soviet agriculture, and not because the purges were particularly directed against genetics, but because, in the end, the geneticists had lost more key patrons to the firing squads than Lysenko had. (Lysenko’s champion Yakov Yakovlev was killed in July 1938; but the geneticists lost Grigory Kaminsky, the commissar of health; Karl Bauman the Central Committee’s science adviser; and several others.)

  It did not really matter whether you were a friend of Lysenko or not; your removal made room for him and his star kept on rising. With the Lenin Academy under his control, geneticists now had only one institution to call their own – the Bureau for Applied Botany, with Nikolai Vavilov himself the director.

  Lysenko did not have the power directly to remove this prominent opponent from the bureau. Worse, he had to put up with Nikolai Vavilov and Mikhail Zavadovsky as vice-presidents of the Lenin Academy. Official policy still held that all controversies could be solved through practice, and keeping Vavilov and Zavadovsky in office was supposed to encourage ‘socialist competition’. In reality, the entire bureaucratic behemoth that was the Lenin Academy came to a lumbering halt.

  So Lysenko resorted to underhand means to oust Vavilov from the bureau. Those means were already in place: Grigory Nikolaevich Shlykov had been a researcher i
n the subtropical department of the bureau since 1931, and had risen to the position of vice-director, from which lofty position he had published an article titled ‘Formal Genetics and Consistent Darwinism’, calling the bureau’s work ‘a grandiose fiasco’.

  Shlykov’s reports to the NKVD were of another order entirely. Yakovlev having fallen in the Great Purge, Shlykov claimed that Vavilov was part of Yakovlev’s group, Yakovlev’s ‘outwardly negative attitude’ towards him being ‘a cover for their actual relations as accomplices … The baseness and cunning of these people … has no bounds.’

  To supplement Shlykov’s efforts, Lysenko appointed a young specialist (and NKVD major) Stepan N. Shundenko as the bureau’s deputy director for science. Shundenko quickly befriended Shlykov and together they set about disordering the bureau’s operation. We know at least some of the institute’s staff guessed the men’s real loyalties because they made up a jingle about a ‘weedy little devil’ (Shlykov) and a ‘pint-size Napoleon’ (Shundenko), both of them fashioned from shit.4

  John Hawkes, visiting from Cambridge in September 1938, got a glimpse of the state of Soviet genetics. He visited Vavilov and found him exhausted, the subject of attacks both professional and personal. It was no secret that these attacks originated from Lysenko. Hawkes wrote:

  I can realise now, I think, why the government thinks so highly of Lysenko. He represents not the man so much as the idea. Of common peasant stock he has risen to the highest place of honour in Soviet intellectual life – that of Academician. Whether he is worth it or not is another matter. They are overwhelmed by the fact that under the new regime a man can reach the highest place from the lowest by virtue of his own efforts alone. That is a grand thing but I have a feeling it may be something of a wish fulfilment for the people who voted him there. Vavilov can lay hold to no such claims as this, for he had some of his education in England and America before the revolution. He does not claim, as Lysenko does, that Communism has done everything for him. He would have been great in any case.5