Stalin and the Scientists

by Simon Ings

  A year later, in the spring of 1956, genetics returned to Moscow State University, when the rumour went round that Timofeev-Ressovsky, that infamous traitor and Nazi collaborator, was coming to speak at the biology department. The young radiobiologist Gennady Polikarpov remembered that the head of his department, Professor Boris Tarussov, used to show Timofeev-Ressovsky around the university’s labs ‘without permission and against the sound categoric prohibition, issued by the Dean of the Biology department, to “slap the doors of the department in front of this Mendelist–Morganist–Weismannist”’.3

  Now it was time to come clean: Polikarpov remembered standing with half a dozen other postgraduates to see Timofeev-Ressovsky safely into the department through a side door. The main entrance was on the alert and impossible to enter – the dean had issued orders not to let Timofeev-Ressovsky set foot in the building. Timofeev-Ressovsky arrived, if not in secret, then discreetly, in a hat and loose coat. The students ushered him in. Polikarpov’s colleague Vladimir Ivanovich Korogodin takes up the story:

  I found out where the lecture was going to be and went there … The lecture hall was overcrowded. Then a man came out from behind the scene. He was thickset, with mane-like hair. He looked over the audience. Then he put off his jacket and hung it on the back of the chair. The next moment he started speaking … and his speech was so vivid that we realised we had never heard such a lecture before … we returned to the department room feeling enchanted and bewildered.4

  Timofeev-Ressovsky’s freedom turned out to be rather restricted. Denied the opportunity to live and work in the capital, he returned to the Urals and worked in Sverdlovsk, where he organised a biophysics lab at the Ural Division of the Academy of Sciences. He also founded an experimental station and summer school at nearby Lake Miassovo in the Ilmen National Park with an agenda ranging ‘from astronomy to gastronomy’.

  This school, with more than a hundred participants – some released from his old sharashka, Object 0211 – re-awoke the tradition of Mendelian genetics. The social climate at the station was amazingly informal. For all the work that was done there, there seemed to be no such thing as a working day. ‘While doing research work you should not be aggressively serious,’ Timofeev-Ressovsky would say. The days were filled with lab work, excursions around the reserve, discussions, meals, lectures (sometimes conducted in the lake itself – the summer heat could be punishing) and practical jokes. ‘Those who worked in Miassovo became invisibly marked with a special token, like Muslims after they visited Mecca,’ Korogodin recalled. This vibrant atmosphere of intellectual holiday was a job of work to maintain, and a lot of it fell to Timofeev-Ressovsky’s wife Elena, whose indefatigable letter-writing kept the summer school running smoothly and out of trouble. She had extraordinary tact. ‘Quite an absurd gentleman!’ she once exclaimed, out of earshot of her target. It was the nearest she ever got to being rude.5

  *

  To couch genetics as a branch of physics involved a certain amount of special pleading. As the 1950s wore on, however, a new discipline emerged that promised to refashion genetics completely, turning it from a branch of natural history into a science of how information is replicated and exchanged.

  It was Alexei Andreevich Liapunov – a Moscow graduate who had studied under the celebrated mathematician Nikolai Luzin – who introduced cybernetics to the Soviet Union. His encyclopedic list of interests had drawn him into a long-term friendship with several leading Soviet geneticists. Towards the end of the 1940s Liapunov had organised a home study group for his two school-age daughters and their friends, to teach them the fundamentals of genetics. Consequently when his daughters entered the Biology Department of Moscow University in 1954, they were practically the only ones to know what classic genetics looked like. Liapunov’s study circle expanded as students from Moscow came to hear his ever-more-impressive list of guest speakers. Dubinin, Sakharov, Timofeev-Ressovsky, Zavadovsky, and Zhebrak all spoke to the group.

  Running the group was a risky business for Liapunov, a Party member who was working at the time on classified projects.6 Lysenko’s colleagues in Moscow University were incensed by all the ‘young Morganists’ running around, spreading tales of ‘formalist genetics’. ‘Students gather at Professor Liapunov’s home,’ one professor fumed, ‘they chatter about Lysenko, about his behaviour, and so on.’ Adding insult to injury were the songs the students cooked up and sang in the lab. These apparently ‘discredited Lysenko and the Michurinist approach’ in the most ribald fashion.

  But though attempts were made to expel Liapunov’s daughters from the Young Communist League – which would surely have got them sacked from the university – these failed. Liapunov was a loyal Party member, working responsibly in an area far from Lysenko’s zone of influence. Lysenko could only watch as Liapunov’s geneticist friends were taken up and nurtured by patrons who had nothing whatsoever to do with agrobiology. Indeed, these patrons came from the military, where computation and cybernetics were emerging as key disciplines of the Cold War.

  The geneticists regarded cybernetics with a certain amount of bemusement. ‘Liapushka is a sweetie,’ Timofeev-Ressovsky remarked. ‘With great enthusiasm, he would carry you along the wrong path; later, upon discovering his blunder, he would carry you along another path with no less enthusiasm than before, and this new path would be equally wrong.’ Timofeev-Ressovsky teased his friend mercilessly, using the term ‘cybernetics’ in their private letters in the sense of ‘cock-up’. He once described his having put a letter in the wrong envelope as a ‘complete cybernetics’. Nor was he unaware of the broader problem with cybernetics – that it was one of those ideas that people adopted without thinking through the consequences: ‘Anybody who met with mathematicians more or less regularly’, Timofeev-Ressovsky half-joked, ‘can easily imagine the catastrophic picture of the world at the moment when our life and activity are mathematised.’

  Nevertheless, the conjunction of genetics and cybernetics was a tantalising one. ‘Perhaps it would be better [for cyberneticians] to refrain from solving all global problems,’ Timofeev-Ressovsky argued, ‘but instead jointly [with biologists] to attempt the construction of mathematical and computer models of simplified ecological systems.’

  In a private letter to Liapunov in October 1957 he wrote:

  I sat down and wrote for you, cyberneticians, [an article titled] ‘Microevolution.’ I tried, on the one hand, to cover everything essential, and on the other, to be brief. It came down to 33 paragraphs in an aphoristic-axiomatic style. It came out not bad, I think, quite original and different from other writings on evolution. All basic definitions seem to be sufficiently brief and rigorous.7

  Timofeev-Ressovsky classified nature into four nested ‘levels of organisation’ – the cell, the organism, the population, and the ecology – and Liapunov, in turn, interpreted these systems as cybernetic ‘control systems’, each with its own mechanisms of information exchange. According to Liapunov, they were well on their way to modelling life as information.

  Genetics was, therefore, an information science:

  On close examination, it turns out that what is transmitted from the parents to their offspring by inheritance is hereditary information. The task of genetics is to study the structure and methods of material coding of this information and the forms of its expression in a new organism in the process of individual development.8

  Cybernetics – the study of the world as information – was familiar to Soviet philosophers through the writings of Alexander Bogdanov. Bogdanov’s works had long been proscribed, however, while in the West, through the writings of Norbert Wiener, cybernetics was making inroads in all manner of fields, including the social sciences. The irony – that models of rational, scientific government and social control were even now being built by Americans, using a science Lenin himself had suppressed – was lost on no educated person, and for one person in particular it provided a Damascene moment.

  At the turn of the 1930s Ernst Kolman had left a
career as a professional revolutionary and spy to become one of the most doctrinaire philosophers of the Stalin era. While minding the delegation to the 1931 International Congress for History of Science he had kept a close eye on Boris Hessen; in the pages of Under the Banner of Marxism he had accused the geneticist Solomon Levit of fascist sympathies countless times; and he had been a not-at-all-impartial judge of the debate between Lysenko and the genetics community in 1939. Come the war, he resumed his more overtly political activities, helping to establish Communist Party control over the Czechoslovak scientific community. The reward for his tirelessness on the state’s behalf was a predictable one: in 1948 he was summoned back to the USSR and spent the next three years in the Lubyanka prison.

  The experience was salutary. Of all the self-serving and self-justifying memoirs written by Stalin’s team after the great leader’s death, Kolman’s is the most interesting, and in its way the most convincing. He could certainly turn a phrase: ‘True, scientific disciplines were sometimes abused for reactionary aims,’ he wrote, recalling his work as a Party philosopher, ‘but instead of removing such tumours with a scalpel, we struck the healthy body with a cudgel and threw it afterwards in the cesspit.’9

  In the summer of 1953, half a year after he was released from the Lubyanka, the rehabilitated Kolman was holidaying in a little village on the Black Sea. One evening as he was taking a walk he passed by the cottage belonging to an old friend of his, the psychologist Victor Kolbanovsky, and heard the tapping of a typewriter. Kolbanovsky welcomed him in and said that he was writing an article about cybernetics.

  It was an attack, of course. Cybernetics had entered Soviet public discourse in 1951 as an eloquent example of America’s fetishisation of technology. ‘Contemporary technocrats’ in the US were conspiring ‘to step in, “scientifically” explain, and “fix” the “malfunctioning” of society … with exact mathematical formulas’.

  Kolman, who had spent the last three years in prison, was immediately captivated by this new science, which investigated the processes of control in technical automata, in living bodies and in society. It reawakened all his old hopes. In his youth he had edited Life and Technology in the Future, a collection of futuristic fantasies, and even as he was arrested he was in the middle of a book about mathematical logic in which he claimed that logical operations might one day be performed by machines. Cybernetics was all his intellectual Christmases come at once, and he ticked off his friend: ‘Victor, you are a pure philosopher without any knowledge of mathematics and of foreign languages. You have not read a single line of cybernetics. How can you judge it? How can you think that American businessmen would spend millions on faked electronic computers?’

  Kolbanovsky went ahead and published his polemic, signing it with a pseudonym ‘Materialist’. It appeared in a leading Soviet philosophical monthly magazine. Kolman, meanwhile, set out to learn as much as he could about cybernetics. But in the Lenin Library in Moscow, he found that the discipline’s founding work, Norbert Wiener’s Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948) was locked away, a prohibited book. Kolman protested to one of the secretaries of the Central Committee – and to his surprise, was given access to the book.

  In November 1954 the Party’s institute of social sciences invited Kolman to deliver a lecture on the philosophical problems of the natural sciences. Kolman chose cybernetics as his theme, and disconcerted everyone by speaking in its favour. ‘They all pounced on me as a “technophile”, and as an “admirer of bourgeois fashion”,’ Kolman recalled later. ‘The discussion continued for two weeks. Only one of those in attendance, a young postgraduate, did not fear to join me.’10

  It took Kolman a long while to get his lecture into print, but he was stubborn, and the effort was worth it. In 1958 the Academy of Sciences finally organised its own scientific council to explore the possibilities for cybernetics. Axel Berg, a former tsarist naval officer, was put in charge of it, and promptly invited Kolman aboard.

  *

  The first Soviet stored-program digital computer, the MESM, was completed in December 1951 by a small group of twelve designers and fifteen technicians led by Sergei Lebedev, director of the Institute of Electrical Engineering in Kiev. The MESM was the first operating stored-program computer in continental Europe.

  The nuclear weapons researchers (led by Igor Kurchatov) and the designers of ballistic missiles and spacecraft (supervised by Sergei Korolev) used up almost all the resources of the first Soviet digital computers. The cosmonaut Georgy Grechko has recalled his experience of working on the BESM (MESM’s successor) at the Academy Computation Centre in the mid-1950s: ‘Kurchatov’s people used it in the daytime and during the night Korolev’s people. And for all the rest of Soviet science: maybe five minutes for the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy, maybe half an hour for the chemical industry.’

  By the turn of the 1960s, cybernetics had taken on all the characteristics of the Bolsheviks’ longed-for ‘one science’. There was hardly a discipline cybernetics did not promise to subsume. As ‘physiological cybernetics’, Nikolai Bernstein’s studies of locomotion were widely applied, even finding their way into the Soviets’ nascent space programme, where they were used to assess how reliably cosmonauts would be able to move around in conditions of weightlessness. Fields as various as structural linguistics (‘cybernetic linguistics’), experiment design (‘chemical cybernetics’) and legal studies (‘legal cybernetics’) found shelter under this new institutional umbrella – and there is no doubt that these fields found cybernetic metaphors useful.

  The further Soviet society departed from Stalinism, the more radical the cybernetic project became, until its practitioners were seriously advocating the ‘cybernetisation’ of the entire science enterprise. Speaking at Moscow University in November 1961 Axel Berg looked forward to developing methods and tools ‘for controlling the entire national economy … to ensure the optimal regime of government’.

  This was Bogdanov’s dream revived. And not just Bogdanov’s dream: scientific government was every Marxist’s grail.

  *

  In 1953 no one expected Trofim Lysenko to continue. To the death of his greatest patron, Joseph Stalin, there was added the matter of the hornbeam tree, and an intellectual scandal so outrageous, no scientist with a conscience could ever have survived it.

  The story broke in the November–December 1953 issue of the Botanical Journal, when A. A. Rukhkian (who later made his name as a sheep breeder) examined one of Lysenko’s most celebrated examples of species change, reported in Lysenko’s journal Agrobiology in 1952: the case of the hornbeam tree that had been persuaded to turn into a hazelnut. Rukhkian wrote that the branch everyone was getting so excited about had actually been grafted into the fork of the hornbeam. He even managed to track down the man who had made the graft in 1923.

  Rukhkian’s approach was thoroughly decent: one case of fraud by a third party, he said, hardly discredited all Lysenko’s work on species formation. But Lysenko, true to form, spurned the graceful exit being offered him. Catching wind of the article before it was published, Lysenko wrote to the editors saying that his colleague S. K. Karapetian’s original report was entirely correct. The hornbeam had been changed into a hazelnut, and that was that.

  The Botanical Journal disagreed. They published Rukhkian’s exposé, Lysenko’s letter – and photographs showing clear evidence of the graft. Never mind Lysenko’s theories of species formation: now his personal integrity was threatened.

  For a while, things only got worse for him. In this brave new world of measurement and control, ushered in by the new science of cybernetics, Lysenko’s monolithic public profile was proving hard to maintain. Such was the state’s appetite for information, it was rushing foreign scientific and technical literature into translation. The small Academy Institute of Scientific Information was transformed, staffed with hundreds of researchers and equipped to provide translation and dissemination of the most recent reports. ‘Techn
ical attachés’ and ‘agricultural attachés’ were assigned to Soviet embassies to gather relevant information. On 2 February 1956, Izvestiia ran a report by a member of a Soviet agricultural delegation to the USA. It was an eye-opener: ‘In the USA and Canada we did not find a single farmer who planted maize with his own seed … Our trip to the USA and Canada has convinced us that we are poorly acquainted with scientific achievements in foreign countries.’11

  Lysenko stepped down from the presidency of the Lenin Academy in April 1956. Across the world, newspapers hailed his downfall. A headline in the New York Times proclaimed: ‘Lysenko, Stalin’s Protégé, Out as Soviets’ Scientific Chieftain’.

  At last, Soviet agricultural and biological science could breathe again – could, perhaps, begin to catch up with the astonishing advances made in other sciences. The Soviet Union was, after all, a nuclear power. Historically it had invested more into scientific research and development than any other nation. It had a higher proportion of scientists and engineers than any other nation. The hegemony of Lysenko had been a terrible error and an accident, to be sure, but that was all it was. An error. An accident.

  But the institutional weaknesses that had made Lysenko’s rise possible in the first place still pertained. The massive centralisation of the state around its leader, and its leader’s obligation to be a plain-speaking man of the people, played straight into Lysenko’s hands, even at this late hour.