Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  ‘The orders for filming Michurin at Mosfilm have been issued,’ Dovzhenko wrote in his diary in 1946:

  Leaving Mosfilm after making Aerograd eleven years ago, I swore to myself, ‘Praise the Lord that He has freed me from this hideous den of iniquity! Never again, under any circumstances, will I return to this house of cretins where everything is twisted and perverted.’ And here I am again.

  Aerograd (1935), a semi-science-fictional film about building an ‘air city’ on the border with Japan, had been such a hit, the authorities had let Dovzhenko off the leash a little: he had been able to return to the Ukraine for his film Shchors, about the Ukrainian Civil War. But his good fortune did not last: Stalin castigated him for the ‘nationalist bias’ of a subsequent documentary Ukraine in Flames, and Dovzhenko was summoned to Moscow for a severe reprimand by no less a figure than Lavrenty Beria.

  Filming Michurin in Moscow was the only way Dovzhenko could see of clinging on to his career. A film on Michurin seemed ‘a cozy retreat’ at first: ‘The subject doesn’t seem to go with my “nationalism”,’ he reflected, ‘after all, it’s Russian.’

  Dovzhenko was already familiar with the material. Years before, he had written a play about Ivan Michurin, and the chance now to make a film of his play, in sumptuous colour (his first colour film!) and with a virtually unlimited budget, attracted him. The script needed some work, of course. The play was weak stuff – a poetic paean to nature – and Mosfilm wanted to see some sharper dialogue that reflected the real issues and brought out the global scientific importance of this humble old plantsman. And there would have to be new characters, of course – predatory foreigners, obfuscatory opponents – to bring out Michurin’s credentials as a homegrown genius and a man of the people …

  The film took four years to make, and Dovzhenko hated every minute of it.

  I pulled that film out of the barren ground. I suffered, exhausted by heart attacks and the insults of dull bureaucratism. Then, after superhuman efforts, when the film finally began to show signs of life, and pleased even trained snobs, I found myself in some mystical zone where the film was to be judged by the Supreme Arts Council. Then the Minister ran around with it someplace, and they showed it to the Great Leader, the greatest mortal since time began, and the Supreme Being proscribed my work … Now the film agency have me on the rack again. I spend days sitting at my desk. I have to throw away everything that I have written, turn against everything I was enthusiastic about, which is composed of many delicate elements, and create a hybrid – an old poem about his work and a new story about selection. And my heart bleeds. I often get up from my desk after a day’s labour and look over what I have written, and I see how mournfully little of it there is. And I am exhausted as if I had been dragging heavy rocks around all day long.1

  Shostakovich, meanwhile, was having an utterly miserable time with the music. There is no written record of what Shostakovich thought of the movie itself, but his score, being very dreadful, speaks for itself. As he wrote in a letter to his good friend Isaak Glikman on 12 December 1948: ‘Physically, I feel quite low … I suffer from frequent headaches and besides that I feel constantly nervous, or, to put it simply, I feel like throwing up.’ As well he might: after being condemned in 1948 for a second time by the Communist Party, after his music was banned and he was fired from his teaching posts, Shostakovich was having to compose film music as his only means of earning money. This time round, apparently, Stalin had personally chosen Shostakovich to write the score. The pressure was well-nigh unbearable.

  The plot of Michurin2 goes something like this. Near a railway station in the province of Ryazan stands an orchard, looked after by a man who repairs watches for a living. He has a season ticket, and he sells little pamphlets to his fellow passengers as he travels back and forth along the railway line that passes the bottom of his garden. The pamphlet describes the kinds of apples his orchard grows. They’re not the usual kind. Everyone admires his orchard. It’s the pride of the town.

  One day the old man decides to select new varieties of apple that will grow just about anywhere – maybe even in the severe dry cold of northern Russia. He buys a plot on the riverbank, where the soil is all gravel and silt and appears utterly sterile. He digs up his trees and his wife helps him carry them down to the river, and bites her lip as she does so. The neighbours think the old man’s gone out of his mind.

  Michurin faces down every conceivable obstacle, frustration and disappointment in pursuit of a crazy dream: that one day, fruit gardens will bloom all over his cold, tough country. The work takes many decades of fanatically focused effort. And then his wife dies: the only person who ever truly believed in him. She dies, and Michurin steps into the night, into a howling wind and drifting autumn leaves and the horror of death. This is, rightly, one of Dovzhenko’s most celebrated cinematic sequences, and just about the last good scene in the movie.

  Because, from this point on, everyone starts shouting. Katashev, a fictional figure, is talking to Michurin about genes, chromosomes and mutations. Michurin answers: ‘It is time for biology to get off the pedestal! It should speak the language of the people, and not get lost in the fog!’ Two pot-bellied capitalist professors from the United States tempt him with bags of gold and promises of glory in America. Michurin waves a violet-scented lily under their noses. (Whenever his ideas are challenged, he reaches into a pocket or a desk drawer and – eh, presto! – produces a specimen that deflates the opposition.) He tells them his flower is a hybrid of a violet and a lily. ‘That’s the trouble with the Mendelians, they can’t explain hybrids!’ The capitalists withdraw, muttering and cursing.

  A priest wags a finger, shouting: ‘Do not turn God’s garden into a brothel!’ The old gardener ignores him. He focuses even deeper on his work.

  At last the tsar is overthrown, and simple folk come to power. They understand Michurin. They understand everything. They come up with brilliant suggestions, and Michurin makes several important discoveries. In a long, lyrical passage, Michurin stands on a ladder in the orchard waving his arms like an orchestra conductor.

  This is the moral. Be pure. Be impatient. Be focused. Be monosyllabic. Do your work. Fulfil your crazy dream. Do not despair: the natural world will yield.

  ‘All those who interested themselves even a little in the national situation saw the difficult situation in agriculture,’ Nikita Khrushchev reported later, in his famous ‘de-Stalinisation speech’ of February 1956,

  But Stalin never even noted it … He knew the country and agriculture only from films. And these films had dressed up and beautified the existing situation in agriculture. Many films so pictured life on collective farms that the tables were bending from the weight of turkeys and geese. Evidently, Stalin thought that it was actually so.3

  The grain harvests of 1947 and 1948, while better than the disastrous harvest of 1946, nonetheless failed to match pre-revolutionary levels, and Stalin’s love of commanding, cinematic gestures extended now beyond the studio doors of Mosfilm and into the natural world itself. On 20 October 1948, Stalin made his grandest cinematic gesture yet, signing off the Stalin Plan for the Great Transformation of Nature.

  More properly known as the ‘Plan for Shelter Belt Plantings, Grass Crop Rotation, and the Construction of Ponds and Reservoirs to Secure High Yields and Stable Harvests in Steppe and Forest-Steppe Regions of the European Part of the USSR’, the Stalin Plan was much more than a leader’s whim. Its recommendations had been put together at a conference of agronomists and forestry experts, who themselves were drawing from over half a century of ecological planning. As early as 1892 the influential soil scientist Vasily Dokuchaev, appointed by Tsar Alexander III to explain the devastating drought the year before, had concluded that the steppes of Russia had been damaged by centuries of desultory agricultural development. Dokuchaev had urged a series of water conservation measures, including the planting of enormous forest belts throughout the south, hoping to recreate a time when southern and central Russia wer
e united under one canopy of trees.

  The Stalin Plan revived Dokuchaev’s ambitious vision. The thirty-year projections of the Stalin Plan foresaw the creation, by 1965, of nearly 6 million hectares of new forest – an area greater than that of all the forests of Western Europe. These new forests would halt the arid winds from the steppes of Kazakhstan and the deserts of Central Asia, cool and dampen the climate of southern Russia, and eliminate the periodic droughts that afflicted the steppe. Additionally there would be seven forest belts, each one thousands of kilometres long, running north to south across the dry steppes of the Volga basin.

  The lion’s share of the afforestation work fell to the ministry of agriculture. No one there knew much about forestry and to make matters worse they were deluged by contradictory instructions. One manager from Kursk province recalled being asked, out of nowhere, and without advice or assistance, to plant ‘five hectares of field protective belts, four hectares of forests on gullies, create a 1.5 hectare forest nursery, build two ponds, grow 50,000 seedlings and prepare ninety kilograms of acorns’.4

  To these long-discussed planting programmes, the architects of the Stalin Plan added their own technocratic and utopian schemes. The biggest and most far-reaching of these was an ambitious programme to transform the major rivers in the USSR – the Volga, Don, Dnieper, Kama, and Svir – into a single system of canals, dams, reservoirs, irrigation systems and hydroelectric power stations. At the heart of this scheme was the mechanisation of the Volga, the largest river in Europe, 3,700 kilometres long from its source near Tver to its mouth at Astrakhan on the Caspian Sea.

  Most of the Volga’s flow is generated by snowmelt; left to its own devices, the river would run most powerfully in late autumn and spring. In the summer growing season, when agriculture needed it most, the untamed Volga ran at barely a fifth of its full capacity. Before the Second World War Soviet engineers had set out to build dams, reservoirs and other huge structures to regulate the flow more evenly through the year, to keep channels deep enough for navigation, and to open the way with canals to the Don and other rivers. The war had virtually eradicated these efforts: German armies had destroyed bridges, factories and hydroelectric stations, including the iconic Dneiper station. Eager to eradicate evidence of the invasion, the government now brought the Volga to a virtual standstill with twelve major hydroelectric stations, each inundating thousands of square kilometres of land, displacing around half a million people and destroying homes, churches, schools and farmland. Six cities were submerged by the Rybinsk reservoir alone – once the largest artificial lake in the world.

  The symbolic importance of the Stalin Plan was immense. Now that the war against Germany had been won, the Soviet people were once again called upon to revive and prosecute the campaign for which the revolution had been fought – that epic struggle for a new, more rational, more humane environment. Hundreds of authors tried to outdo each other in celebrating the power of Soviet science to transform the planet. The image of thousands of kilometres of sturdy oaks breaking the strength of the parched eastern winds cropped up endlessly in films and newsreels. In newspapers and booklets, children stuffed themselves with fruits and berries while strolling through desert landscapes turned into oases. The propaganda blitz even included a patriotic oratorio composed by Dmitry Shostakovich, Song of the Forests – a work which consciously strives and only narrowly fails to be worse than his music for Michurin.

  Isaak Prezent’s article ‘The Refashioning of Living Nature’ captures the spirit of the campaign. ‘Bourgeois professors assure us that nature will not tolerate human interference and will avenge itself with natural disasters for intrusion into its regularities,’ Prezent began. Needless to say those obscurantists were mistaken. Citing Lysenko’s ‘discovery’ that planting grain around young trees prevents them from being smothered by weeds (it doesn’t, by the way), Prezent declared:

  Field and forest – protecting plantings – trees and bread – what a wonderful idea about cooperation and struggle in the green kingdom of plants. And what about the construction of ponds and reservoirs! Truly, never in the history of the world was there ever and could there ever be such a huge scale of hydroconstruction! … Soviet biologists are joyously creating new kinds of life, are renewing and enriching living nature, and together with our entire people are building Communism.5

  Lysenko’s involvement in the Stalin Plan came very late. He had not been remotely involved in the development of shelter belts in the 1930s and 1940s, and indeed had published nothing before 1948 about tree biology. Appointed to the council of the Main Shelterbelt Administration, Lysenko lost no time in formulating Promethean promises. He believed that all plants possessed a quality called ‘self-thinning’, which allows them to work together in fighting against weeds during their early years and then to pool their energy for the benefit of one shoot, to which the other shoots sacrifice themselves.6

  Lysenko’s forestry was built around this idea. To plant an oak, for instance, a central hole was dug, and four auxiliary holes dug around it, creating a ‘nest’ in the shape of a plus sign. Lysenko claimed that this formation would allow the oak seedlings to defend one another from weeds most effectively.

  The main practical advantages of the nest method were simplicity and speed. ‘Only three man-days are needed for the hand-planting of one hectare of oak forest using the nest-method,’ his booklet explained. Workers could accomplish in hours what ordinarily would require a decade or more.

  Forests sown by this method did not last long. By September 1951, all the nested forests in the Urals had died. By 1952 fully half of the ‘nest method’ forests had died, and the first two forest belts were near-total losses.

  But while the vast scale of the Plan invited errors and losses on a heroic scale, it did afford shelter for some real science – science that might otherwise have been expunged as ‘anti-Michurinist’. For example, while Lysenko was busy confusing the Main Shelter Belt Administration, another quite separate administrative body, the Comprehensive Scientific Expedition for Problems of Field-Protective Silviculture, was busy studying local conditions and giving genuine technical guidance to workers. Leading the expedition was the ecologist Vladimir Nikolaevich Sukachev, whose Forest Institute, founded in 1942, was by now virtually the only bulwark left against Lysenko.

  Sukachev turned the whole Expedition into a refuge for geneticists and tried to save as many persecuted biologists as he could. Sergei Vavilov, president of the Academy of Sciences, who was secretly intervening where he could to save genetics, kept Sukachev informed about whom he should hire for the project.

  *

  The Stalin Plan afforded some shelter for scientists considered politically unreliable by the state. A far greater level of protection was afforded to physicists who, at around the same time, were nearing completion of the first Soviet bomb. They enjoyed privileges, of course. Kurchatov got an elegant double-storeyed mansion with marble fireplaces, wooden panelling and a sweeping central staircase. Italian craftsmen were imported in 1946 to finish the interior. Much more important, physicists on the project were accorded a certain amount of intellectual tolerance.

  Far from having to pass through the flaming hoop of their own ‘Michurinist session’, Kurchatov and his fellows were entirely exempted from political education.7 ‘Do not bother our physicists with political seminars,’ Stalin had said. ‘Let them use all their time for their professional work.’ Stalin even went so far as to tick off Kurchatov for not being demanding enough: ‘If the baby doesn’t cry, the mother doesn’t know what he needs. Ask for anything you need. There will be no refusals.’8

  There was no guarantee that this topsy-turvy state of affairs would continue. A telling anecdote from the time has Stalin saying to Beria, ‘Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later.’ Still, the physics community was now the closest thing the Stalinist regime had to civil society – a point not lost on the physicists themselves.

  Yulii Khariton directed the final constru
ction of bombs at a secret installation deep in the forests of the Volga. His laboratory used the buildings of a wartime munitions factory on the premises of what had been, before the revolution, one of the holiest Orthodox shrines, the monastery of Sarov. The name Sarov disappeared from official maps and other Soviet documents and for the next forty years, internal documents referred to the place as Post Office Box Arzamas-16.

  Arzamas-16 grew into a town of 80,000 inhabitants and was a paradise compared with half-starved Moscow. Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich complained that the atomic cities were like ‘health resorts’.

  The scattered resources of a devastated country were mobilised to realise the bomb. According to a CIA estimate, between 330,000 and 460,000 people were employed in the effort. The physicist and dissident Andrei Sakharov began working with thermonuclear weapons in 1948 and later described how, in the years 1950–3, he watched through the window of his office at Arzamas-16 as columns of prisoners marched by under armed guard. One rebellion by manual labourers there was suppressed with live rounds: every rebel was killed. Many prison labourers were never set free; instead they were labelled especially dangerous and carted off to the gold mines of Kolyma.

  By the summer of 1949, a nuclear device was ready for testing at Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan.

  The area was barren, at least from a human point of view: a stony, sandy expanse grown over here and there with feather-grass and wormwood. There were no houses, no trees – even birds were rare. By early morning, the heat had already grown oppressive, and by the middle of the day the haze was generating mirages of mysterious mountains and lakes.

  Near the tower housing the device, wooden buildings had been constructed. Railway locomotives and carriages, tanks and artillery pieces were scattered about the area. Animals were placed in open pens and covered houses nearby, so that the effects of irradiation could be studied.