Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  With no obvious link to be made between the medical sciences and the controversies shredding agriculture, the September meeting of the Academy of Medical Sciences set about examining Pavlov’s legacy in genetics. Perhaps, through the work of their founding father, some politically convenient link could be made.

  In his report to the meeting, the academy’s vice-president, Ivan Razenkov, who also had happened to be a Pavlov pupil, recalled the experiments his colleague Nikolai Studentsov had conducted on mice:

  In a whole series of investigations, it was proved that typical characteristics of higher nervous activity could be radically changed under the influence of external factors artificially created in an experimental environment. This Pavlovian position wholly corresponded to his anti-Morganist orientation on the question of the inheritance of acquired activity. The belief in the possibility of such transmission through heredity had led him to his personal dispute with Morgan and to his arranging of special experiments.10

  In other words, Pavlov had overseen work that proved that acquired behaviours could be inherited, and this had put him at loggerheads with the international genetics community. A nice story – and a complete reversal of what had actually happened.

  At once, a dissenting voice arose. Leon Orbeli, recently dismissed as head of biology at the Academy of Sciences, was an Armenian physiologist who had known Pavlov better than anyone else in the hall: he had joined the Military Medical Academy at seventeen and he and Pavlov had trained together. He had been Pavlov’s loyal lieutenant throughout the great man’s life, and on Pavlov’s death had effectively inherited his empire. He was scientific director of three Pavlovian institutes, overseeing the work of twenty-eight laboratories in the Leningrad area. He ran the colossal All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine, which boasted a staff of around 3,000. He was head of the Military Medical Academy, president of the All-Union Physiology Society, and a member of numerous governmental commissions and committees. And he remembered everything about Studentsov’s experiments with mice.

  To Razenkov’s deep embarrassment, Leon Orbeli proceeded to recount in detail the history of Studentsov’s experiments and Pavlov’s later forays into the inheritance of acquired behaviour. Not only had these later experiments proved that acquired behaviours were not inherited, said Orbeli, Pavlov did not even think the studies were particularly important.

  Orbeli was far too significant a bureaucrat to be attacked head-on, and Lysenko’s response to Orbeli’s opposition was – for Lysenko – positively diplomatic: he proposed that Orbeli organise collaborative research: ‘Let’s show the inheritance of conditioned reflexes, their transformation into unconditioned ones, in all wild birds, mice, rats.’ In the meantime, Orbeli was expected to review the scientific personnel of the Koltushi Institute, and sack its geneticists.

  Orbeli did not dismiss anyone; he simply removed and stored the bust of Mendel which had been set up by Pavlov in 1934 in front of the building. (However, the situation at Koltushi remained so tense that R. A. Masing, a talented geneticist and a former pupil of Yuri Filipchenko, stopped working with Drosophila altogether and, without Orbeli’s knowledge, set them free.11)

  The collaborative work that Lysenko proposed never happened. Instead, Orbeli used Lysenko’s ideas as rhetorical cover, including ‘the inheritance of conditioned reflexes’ in the research plans of his institutes. He set his young assistant Viktor Fedorov the task of ‘studying the hereditary transmission of acquired features in mice’ but when Fedorov began to outline how he would do his research, Orbeli interrupted him: ‘We will talk about it later. What we need now is a title for the plan. I think it could be entitled “The Fixation of the Changes in Functional Characteristics of the Nervous System”.’ The ‘corrected’ plan was sent to the Academy of Medical Sciences and approved. It was the only study Orbeli’s institutes ever conducted into ‘the inheritance of acquired behavioural features’, though that formula appeared in virtually every plan and report Orbeli signed. Needless to say, Fedorov’s work showed that the phenomenon did not exist.

  Orbeli’s rise to pre-eminence in the field of physiology had not been without controversy. Pavlov had clearly tipped him as his successor, but Pavlov’s family weren’t very keen on him for some reason, and protested when he assumed (in an entirely above-board way) the running of Pavlov’s institutes. There was resentment, too, from a couple of Pavlov’s less illustrious colleagues, who disliked Orbeli’s approach to physiology, not least because it involved them having to think.

  Rather than expect his colleagues slavishly to work through research projects set by Pavlov himself, Orbeli expected physiology to surpass Pavlov and develop in new directions. This had been Orbeli’s attitude while Pavlov had been alive (the two had enjoyed magnificent arguments) and the great man’s death had done nothing to dampen Orbeli’s ambitions for their field.

  Pavlov’s old hangers-on now tried to challenge Orbeli’s position. They informed Party agencies of his ‘misconduct’ and ‘monopoly’, and accused him of ‘deviations’ from Pavlov’s legacy. They found a willing ear in Yuri Zhdanov who, having dodged a bullet over the Lysenko affair, was determined, as he wrote to Stalin, to ‘work hard to correct previous mistakes’. Yuri came to the conclusion that Pavlov’s scientific legacy was not being properly developed by Soviet physiologists, and that his successor, Leon Orbeli, had concentrated too much institutional power in his own hands. He wrote to Stalin: ‘It is necessary to liquidate Orbeli’s monopoly of the development of Pavlov’s science and to subject his mistakes to criticism.’12

  Yuri was speaking Stalin’s language at last. Stalin wrote back positively, offering advice on how to carry out the struggle most effectively:

  By falsely appointing himself as Pavlov’s most important student, Orbeli did everything he possibly could to disgracefully silence Pavlov with provisos and ambiguities. His cowardly and disguised raids against Pavlov [were meant] to dethrone and slander him … The sooner Orbeli is denounced and the more soundly his monopoly is liquidated, the better.13

  The blunt instrument Stalin and Yuri Zhdanov chose for this task – and he was none too happy about it either – was Konstantin Mikhailovich Bykov, the new director of the institute once run by the disgraced Lina Shtern. Bykov, a former pupil of the great man, was an orthodox Pavlovian, politically pliant, and seemed ideally suited to the task: ‘We are guilty of confining Bykov’s luminous science to the shadows,’ Stalin opined, ‘while a random meteor like Shtern can occupy leadership positions. It is time to be done with such abomination.’14

  Bykov had other ideas. In fact he agreed with Sergei Vavilov that Orbeli and his Pavlov Institute were doing important work. ‘It’s true,’ Stalin once admitted to Yuri Zhdanov, ‘[Bykov] is a little timid and doesn’t like to mix it up.’

  More than that, Bykov was at heart a peacemaker with a love of European culture and a creeping dread of Moscow politics. He was reported as saying, of a trip to Bucharest,

  The influence of French and German culture is still felt there. They still have not wasted this influence and it benefits them. Among them I felt like a human being. That pleasant environment was so beneficial that I felt healthy and did not even worry about my bowels. That’s sanity! I returned here and the depression, exhaustion, irritation and troubling atmosphere began again.15

  Happily for Stalin and Zhdanov – and luckily for Bykov – Bykov did not have to do very much.

  Yuri Zhdanov arranged a Scientific Session for June 1950, when the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Medical Sciences could thrash out between them how to become more ‘Pavlovian’. The joint meeting was in many ways a more tightly scripted copy of the fateful August 1948 Lenin Academy meeting. It was even held in the same venue – Moscow’s House of Scientists. The Central Committee’s Science Department wrote the script, making clear who was righteous and who was guilty. Yuri Zhdanov directed the show.

  The session began on 28 June. There were more than a thousand participants and guests f
rom over fifty cities and all the Soviet republics’ academies of science. The cost of the session came to nearly half a million roubles, including train fares, hotel rooms (guests stayed in the elite hotels Moskva, Grand and Europa), buses, stenographers’ fees, flowers and posters. Pravda ran daily coverage.

  Bykov showed up with a speech which Stalin reviewed and edited personally. Armed with a manuscript that bore Stalin’s imprimatur, Bykov declared there were in the Soviet Union genuine Pavlovians, and opponents, such as Orbeli. Bykov told his colleagues that Stalin urged the congregation to criticise and self-criticise.16

  Orbeli’s fate hung in the balance for some days, with Pavlov’s old pupils as likely to demand Bykov’s resignation from his many posts as Orbeli’s. In the end it was Orbeli’s own response to savage criticism that spoiled his chances. He refused to jump through the hoop offered – to concede that he was a good scientist whose own interests had led him to skew the field he administered towards his own concerns. Instead he faced down his accusers in forthright terms:

  If predetermined individuals are selected for rather severe criticism, then, if it is to be a free scientific discussion, it would be extremely important to let them know beforehand what they are to be accused of and criticised for. Even when criminals are involved, they are given an indictment to read, so that they can defend themselves or say something in their defence. In the present case that wasn’t done, and we, the accused, find ourselves in a difficult situation …17

  Orbeli’s defence scared even his own side. When close colleagues were called upon to speak, they claimed to be taken aback by his lack of genuine self-criticism.

  On 4 July, the last day of the session, Orbeli spoke again, claiming that he ‘immediately understood the erroneous and dissatisfactory nature’ of his first speech, blamed his lack of experience in this style of debate, and promised to open up the field to more ‘self-criticism’.

  It was not enough. Orbeli was dismissed from all his posts at both academies. Later resolutions fired him from his editorial posts at the Physiology Journal of the USSR, Achievements in Modern Biology, Herald of the Academy of Sciences and the Soviet science magazine Priroda [Nature].

  With Orbeli marginalised, there was no one now to challenge Pavlov’s ideas; a founding father had been saved from cosmopolitan corruption; and the once vibrant science of physiology ossified overnight, becoming just one more sounding board for the political perspicacity of Old Bolsheviks in general, and Joseph Stalin in particular.

  *

  As part of the propaganda effort organised in 1948 to distinguish Russian science from Western science, Stalin saw to it personally that Lysenko and Michurin were celebrated in story and song. Poems referring to ‘the eternal glory of the academician Lysenko’ who ‘walks the Michurin path’ became fashionable.18

  The Michurinist propaganda campaign reached its high point with the celebration of the fiftieth birthday of ‘the famous heir to the Michurinist doctrine T. D. Lysenko’. Lysenko’s portraits were hung in all scientific institutions. Art stores sold busts and bas-reliefs. Monuments were erected. Central and local newspapers offered congratulations to the latest recipient of the Order of Lenin, awarded ‘for outstanding public service in the development of progressive Soviet science’.

  Absurdity piled on absurdity. On 22 May 1950 Alexander Oparin, as head of the Academy of Sciences’ biology department, invited Olga Lepeshinskaya to receive her Stalin Prize. Now in her dotage, Lepeshinskaya – who had once recommended soda baths as a rejuvenation treatment – was by this time completely entranced by the mystical concept of the ‘vital substance’, and had recruited her extended family to work in her ‘laboratory’, pounding beetroot seeds in a pestle to demonstrate that any section of a plant ovule could germinate. Now she claimed success in actually filming living cells emerge from non-cellular materials. Lysenko hailed Lepeshinskaya, declaring that her demonstration that ‘cells need not be formed from other cells’ should be taken as the basis for a new and eminently workable theory of species formation. (Actually, she had filmed the death and decomposition of cells, then ran the film backwards through the projector.)

  No one else said a word. ‘In later years, they did their best to wash themselves clean of the dirt,’ writes the physician and contemporary witness Yakov Rapoport, ‘but the fact remains that there was not one Giordano Bruno among them.’19 And after all, what did it matter? Lepeshinskaya always had been a lousy scientist, but she would make (and did make) a splendid myth. The subject of poetry. The heroine of countless plays. In school and university textbooks she was hailed as the author of the greatest biological discovery of all time.

  It did not take long for Stalin to usurp credit for Lepeshinskaya’s incredible and absurd discovery. As Stalin’s cult of personality expanded into the natural realm, Lysenko celebrated ‘Stalin’s teaching about gradual, concealed, unnoticeable quantitative changes leading to rapid, radical qualitative changes, [permitting] Soviet biologists to discover in plants … the transformation of one species into another’.20 Fraudulent reports of species transformation in Lysenko’s journal Agrobiology included wheat turning into rye, cultivated into wild oats and barley, cabbages into swede and rape, sunflowers into strangleweed, and pines into firs. All these miracles were credited to Stalin’s teaching.

  Notes

  1. Quoted in John E. Bowlt and Olga Matich, Laboratory of Dreams: The Russian Avant-Garde and Cultural Experiment, p. 92, from an article in Samarskaia Gazeta.

  2. One particularly egregious example was a manual written by Nikolai Turbin, dean of biology at Leningrad University. Genetics and Selection, published in 1950 and in official circulation until the mid-1960s, included such topics as ‘The struggle of the progressive Michurin theory in genetics with the reactionary genetics of Mendel and Morgan’; ‘Reactionary distortions in bourgeois genetics originating from the class ideology of the imperialistic bourgeois’; ‘Complete bankruptcy of modern Morganism in theory and practice’; ‘The Golden Age of Michurin’s genetics and selection in the USSR’, and so on. This exercise in cant sickened even the author. From the moment of his book’s publication Turbin began, bit by bit, claim by claim, to defect from Lysenko’s cause. He eventually left his post for the Belorussian Academy of Sciences in Minsk, and went on, in the mid-fifties, to build up a perfectly respectable centre of maize genetics there. See S. M. Gershenson, ‘The Grim Heritage of Lysenkoism: Four Personal Accounts. IV. Difficult Years in Soviet Genetics’, Quarterly Review of Biology 65, no. 4 (1990), pp. 447–56.

  3. Berg, On the History of Genetics in the Soviet Union.

  4. Hermann Muller’s return to the USA was a happy one. His boss Fernandus Payne, a Drosophila geneticist who had worked in the Morgan lab, had the measure of his new employee. To a doubtful friend he explained that he already had several prima donnas on his staff and one more wouldn’t matter. See J. F. Crow and S. Abrahamson. ‘Seventy Years Ago: Mutation Becomes Experimental’, Genetics vol. 147, no. 4 (1997), pp. 1491–6.

  5. Wolfe, ‘What Does It Mean to Go Public?’, pp. 64–5.

  6. Lina Shtern’s career is summarised in Alla A. Vein, ‘Science and Fate: Lina Stern (1878–1968), A Neurophysiologist and Biochemist’, Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 17, no. 2 (2008), 195–206.

  7. W. B. Gratzer, The Undergrowth of Science, p. 193.

  8. Quoted in David Joravsky, ‘The Mechanical Spirit: The Stalinist Marriage of Pavlov to Marx’, Theory and Society 4, no. 4 (1977), p. 473.

  9. Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, p. 144.

  10. Quoted in Krementsov, Stalinist Science, p. 266.

  11. Suvorov and Andreeva describe the ideological struggle over Pavlov’s legacy in ‘Problems of the Inheritance of Conditioned Reflexes in Pavlov’s School’, pp. 8–16.

  12. Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, p. 146.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Ibid., p. 141.

  15. Ibid., p. 161.

  16. See George Windholz, ‘
The 1950 Joint Scientific Session: Pavlovians as the Accusers and the Accused’, Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 33 (1997), pp. 61–81. The consequences of the session are the subject of a later paper: ‘Soviet Psychiatrists under Stalinist Duress: The Design for a “New Soviet Psychiatry” and its Demise’, History of Psychiatry, 10 (1999), pp. 329–47.

  17. Joravsky, Russian Psychology: A Critical History, p. 410.

  18. Vance Kepley, ‘The Scientist as Magician: Dovzhenko’s “Michurin” and the Lysenko Cult’, Journal of Popular Film and Television 8, no. 2 (1 January 1980), p. 19.

  19. Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher burned at the stake by the Inquisition in 1600 for claiming that stars were distant suns and that the universe, being infinite, lacked a centre.

  20. Trofim Lysenko, ‘Stalin i michurinskaya biologiya’, quoted in Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, p. 134.

  20: ‘The death agony was horrible’

  ‘And We Shall Conquer Drought’: Viktor Govorkov’s 1949 poster shows Stalin drawing up new forests to change the Russian climate.

  I realised that one cannot demand heroism from everybody.

  Yakov Rapoport, The Doctors’ Plot

  In December 1948 a new colour film, Michurin, was shown in all the country’s movie theatres and even abroad. Its music was composed by Dmitry Shostakovich. Its hero was played by one of the most popular actors of the day, Grigory Belov. The screenwriter and director was one of the Soviet Union’s most famous film directors, the Ukrainian Alexander Dovzhenko.