by Simon Ings
The leader of this new, more open, ostensibly more rational Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev, had happily admitted that he knew nothing about science, and this pronouncement, if comforting to the laity, had its shadow side. It meant that Khrushchev judged rival agricultural proposals intuitively, showing interest only in quick fixes and immediate returns, and associating savings with losses. How else to explain Khrushchev’s disastrous ‘virgin lands’ campaign? This was a plan, launched in 1953, to plough and sow 13 million hectares of previously uncultivated and dangerously dry land on the right bank of the Volga, in the northern Caucasus, western Siberia, and northern Kazakhstan. The crop of choice was hybrid maize. Lysenko, the man who had kept Soviet fields free of hybrid maize for a generation, acted as though nothing had happened and in 1956 humbly offered the Twentieth Party Congress a ‘square-cluster’ method of planting the stuff which would, he said ‘accumulate and preserve moisture’ in the soil.
Lysenko’s ‘quick fix’ mentality appealed to Khrushchev. Here was someone he could work with – which is to say, someone who would not contradict him. Khrushchev’s celebrated bullheadedness and the warmth and loyalty he showed to his friends were of a piece. In May 1962, for example, Khrushchev went on a press junket to Lenin Hills, where Lysenko conducted his research. This trip happened to coincide with Lysenko being censured by an Academy commission into molecular biology. The commission was promptly dissolved, and all its materials sequestered by the Central Executive Committee. To insulate Khrushchev from embarrassment, Lysenko was given space in Pravda and Izvestiia for an article (handed down by the Central Executive Committee and not to be edited) reaffirming his ever more absurd beliefs.
The following year, two Lysenkoist scientists were up for the Lenin Prize: Alexander Samsonovich Musiyko, director of the Plant Breeding and Genetics Institute, and Vasily Remeslo, a leading wheat breeder. The prize committee, by secret ballot, rejected them. Normally the committee’s decisions were rubber-stamped, but not this time. On 13 April, a week before the announcement, Khrushchev blew his top and insisted the committee reconsider.
A year passed, and still the two Lysenkoite candidates were being repeatedly rejected. In 1964, Lysenko added fuel to the fire by adding Nikolai Ivanovich Nuzhdin as a candidate. This sent the Academy into uproar. Nuzhdin had worked at Vavilov’s institute under Hermann Muller and was widely considered to have contributed to the arrests of both Vavilov and Timofeev-Ressovsky. Andrei Sakharov spoke for the large group – uniting mathematicians, physicists, chemists, astronomers and cyberneticists – who opposed the nomination, blaming Nuzhdin directly ‘for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudoscientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists’.12 With Nuzhdin not only rejected but publicly unmasked, Lysenko left the meeting in a furious and vengeful mood.
Khrushchev’s own reaction was even more extreme: he threatened to re-form the Academy as a ‘Committee on science’. In fact it was this declared willingness to tear down the science base to support Lysenko that soon brought about his downfall. Not long afterwards, he learned that the Timiryazev Agricultural Academy had shaken free of Lysenko’s institutional control and was opposing Lysenko’s activities, and with an unauthorised personal order (later quickly rescinded), he shut the academy down.
On 13 October Yakov Rapoport, the Jewish doctor who had been caught up in the Doctors’ Plot, received a strange phone call. Normally he was being threatened with dismissal. Now the agricultural section of the Central Executive Committee was asking him to write a page-long article on the achievements of genetics.
Even as the bemused Rapoport prepared his article, the Central Committee of the Communist Party was insisting upon Khrushchev’s resignation. The embarrassment over having to import ever-growing quantities of wheat from Canada and the USA was if anything greater than the embarrassment over the Cuba crisis. ‘Many examples of Khrushchev’s activities deserving of extreme censure were discussed,’ writes the geneticist Raissa Berg, ‘including his unconditional support of Lysenko and, in particular, the episode involving the attempt to elect Nuzhdin and Remeslo to the Academy of Sciences, with Khrushchev’s subsequent desire to invoke sanctions against the Academy.’13 The reward for Khrushchev’s graceful exit was a quiet life. He lived peaceably in Moscow, penning his memoirs, and died on 11 September 1971.
The day after Khrushchev’s removal, Rapoport’s article was passed for publication in the newspaper Rural Life. The following February Lysenko was dismissed as director of the Academy’s Institute of Genetics, replaced by his old rival Nikolai Dubinin. New textbooks of biology for schools were prepared, and Lysenko vanished from school and university programmes.
With his institutional clout gone, and his patron Khrushchev removed in a bloodless coup, Lysenko still wasn’t finished. He remained the nation’s favourite barefoot scientist, pouring out simple and folksy farming advice. His barnstorming approach to agriculture took him next into dairy farming – and it was here that he came irretrievably unstuck. There would be no coming back from this one.
In May 1957 Khrushchev had set the country the challenge of increasing milk output to overtake the USA. Lysenko announced his solution just two months later. At his Lenin Hills farm, he said, he had found away of crossing Jersey bulls and ordinary farm cows that would increase milk yields, generation on generation.
This last point is important. Cross a purebred Jersey bull with a cow of an unexceptional breed, and you will sire a new generation of cows that produce more milk. The problem is that the higher milk yields vanish in the generation after that. There is no way to fix the Jersey bull’s hereditary advantage.
Lysenko disagreed: once certain precautions were observed, his cross-bred cows gave and kept on giving. All you needed was especially big cows. Feed them well during gestation, Lysenko said, and the unborn calf would develop the butterfat capabilities of a pure-bred Jersey. Subsequent generations didn’t even need special feeding; the bulls could be used freely without fear of decline in milk yield or quality.
Collective and state farms put in immediate orders for the bulls from Lysenko’s farm. The Ministry of Agriculture itself recommended their purchase. Lysenko’s Lenin Hills farm grew wealthy on the business. And by January 1965 the scale of the calamity – a nation’s purebred stock lost in a mess of crossbreeding – was unignorable. An eight-man committee from the Academy of Sciences went to conduct a thorough investigation of Lysenko’s farm. The committee spent over five weeks going over its records, examining its crops and its cattle. Balance sheets, crop yields, fertiliser consumption, milk and egg output, purchase and sale data on cattle: for the first time, Lysenko’s claims were subjected to a serious scientific and statistical analysis.
On 2 September 1965 the committee presented its conclusions: the Lenin Hills farm gave high yields and turned a good profit. But so it should: it boasted 500 hectares of arable land, and operated up to fifteen tractors, eleven cars, two bulldozers, two excavators, and two combine harvesters. It was more or less exempt from having to supply grain to the government. It received more favourable terms, more investment, more electricity than its neighbours. Taking all this into account, the committee reported that the yields from the Lenin Hills farm were, at the very best, mediocre.
Even this Lysenko might have managed to flannel through. He had got through worse. But the cows did for him: in the past ten years, the committee reported, the average milk yield per cow had dropped from nearly 7,000 kilograms to less than 4,500. Milk yields were falling away with every generation. Lysenko’s low-pedigree bulls had ruined herds of higher purity. Repairing the damage would require decades.
Lysenko’s reputation never recovered. He got to keep his experimental farm but his journal, Agrobiology, was terminated. Two new journals of genetics, Genetika and Ontogenez, came into being. And the bust of Gregor Mendel, the father of clas
sical genetics, which had been languishing in storage since 1949, was returned to the place the great Ivan Pavlov had chosen for it: right in front of his institute in Koltushi.
Notes
1. Richard Levins and Richard C. Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist, p. 65.
2. David Joravsky, ‘The Stalinist Mentality and the Higher Learning’, Slavic Review 42, no. 4 (1983), p. 580.
3. G. G. Polikarpov, ‘Sketches to the Portrait of Nikolai Timofeeff-Ressovsky’; available at http://bit.ly/1PEsLgl.
4. V. I. Korogodin, G. G. Polikarpov and V. V. Velkov, ‘The Blazing Life of N. V. Timofeeff-Ressovsky’, Journal of Biosciences 25, no. 2 (June 2000), pp. 125–31.
5. V. I. Ivanov, ‘A True Scientist and a Most Amiable Person: To the Centenary of the Birthday of H. A. Timofeeff-Ressovsky’, trans. Irina V. Kronshtadtova (12 January 1999); available at http://bit.ly/1Pn7uEo.
6. See Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics.
7. Nikolai and Elena Timofeev-Ressovsky to Liapunov, 5 October 1957, in Timofeev-Ressovsky, The Stories Told by Himself with Letters, Photos and Documents, p. 489.
8. Sergei L. Sobolev and Aleksei A. Liapunov, ‘Kibernetika i estestvoznanie’ [‘Cybernetics and Science’], in Filosofskie problemy sovremennogo estestvoznaniia: Trudy Vsesoiuznogo soveshchaniia po filosofskim voprosam estestvoznaniia [Philosophical Problems of Modern Science: Proceedings of the All-Union Conference on the Philosophical Problems of the Natural Sciences], ed. P. Fedoseev (Izd-vo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1959), pp. 251–2.
9. Arnost Kolman, ‘A Life-Time in Soviet Science Reconsidered: The Adventure of Cybernetics in the Soviet Union’, Minerva 16, no. 3 (1 September 1978), p. 418.
10. Ibid., p. 422}
11. Graham, Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union, p. 241.
12. Andrei D. Sakharov, Memoirs (Knopf, 1990), p. 236.
13. Berg, On the History of Genetics in the Soviet Union.
EPILOGUE: Spoil
‘These limits are real; they are not imaginary and they are not theoretical.’ 2003: a ship rusts away in what was once the Aral Sea.
Without science democracy has no future.
Maxim Gorky, April 1917
Careless of his personal reputation, Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov never had any ambitions for his writing, and his works survive only because his acolytes diligently gathered together the scraps left behind on his death in 1903.1
A former schoolteacher, Fedorov worked at Moscow’s Rumiantsev Museum. ‘He is sixty,’ Leo Tolstoy wrote, ‘a pauper, gives away all he has, is always cheerful and meek.’ He was also one of the most powerful cult figures in pre-revolutionary Russia, numbering among his followers the mystic Peter Ouspensky, the novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the rocket theorist Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky.
Unusually for a Russian, Fedorov took seriously the population theories of the English historian Thomas Malthus. Malthus’s ‘Essay on the Principle of Population’ of 1798 had argued that human beings, like any other animal, would consume resources to the point where poverty, starvation, disease and war would virtually exterminate them. Where utopians like William Godwin believed that God would provide food for all mouths, Malthus argued that God had already provided more than enough mouths for all the food.
Fedorov, too, worried that the earth would become overcrowded, and he came up with a novel solution to the problem: colonise outer space. (He also made one or two remarks about taking to the oceans.) In The Philosophy of the Common Cause, Fedorov explains that as humans evolve hand in hand with their technology, they will be able to get rid of their digestive and sexual parts, harvest cosmic energy for their food, achieve psychological perfection, and become immortal.
Fedorov’s ‘cosmism’ succeeded, not because it was wild and apocalyptic, but because it gave the millennial outpourings, cults and beliefs flying around Russia in the nineteenth century a rational-seeming explanation.
In fact Fedorov rivalled Karl Marx as an intellectual driver of the 1917 revolution, and his influence over the Bolsheviks themselves was tremendous and long-lasting. You hardly need pan the outpourings of men like Lenin, Bogdanov, Gastev or Lunacharsky for more than a few minutes before you catch a glint of Fedorovian gold.
‘Man will finally begin to really harmonise himself,’ prophesied another Old Bolshevik, Leon Trotsky, in 1922:
He will put forward the task to introduce into the movement of his own organs – during work, walk, play – the highest precision, expediency, economy, and thus beauty. He will want to control semi-unconscious, and then unconscious processes in his own organism: breathing, blood circulation, digestion, and reproduction – and will subjugate them to the control of reason and will. Life, even purely physiological life, will become collectively-experimental. The humankind, frozen Homo sapiens, will again enter into a radical reconstruction and will become – under his own fingers – an object of most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training … Man will put forward a goal … to raise himself to a new level – to create a higher socio-biological type, an Ubermensch, if you will.2
Trotsky was a notorious blow-hard, of course – but then, who among that crowd was not? Here is the character Rybin in Maxim Gorky’s Mother (1906): ‘Let thousands of us die to resurrect millions of people all over the earth!’ he declaims. ‘That’s what: dying’s easy for the sake of resurrection! If only the people rise!’
In his two-volume Religion and Socialism (1908 and 1911) and other writings, Anatoly Lunacharsky called for a collectivist culture that would teach the masses to ‘die for the common good’ and to ‘sacrifice to realise this conception’ of socialism, which ‘starts not with his “I” but with our “we”’. In a future socialist society, one of Alexander Bogdanov’s followers wrote, ‘people will be immortal’ insofar as they ‘develop their “I” beyond the limits of individualism into a tendency toward community’.
Perhaps they should have been more careful what they wished for; and a handful of the old guard did try to apply the brake.
Alexander Bogdanov simply jumped off the train.
When Anatoly Lunacharsky, his brother-in-law and for a long time his comrade-in-arms, was appointed education commissar in Lenin’s government, one of his first acts was to offer Bogdanov a government post. Bogdanov’s reply was terse: ‘The bayonet is not a creative instrument, however widespread its application.’3 Bogdanov, who had played no part in the 1917 coup, nursed little hope for Lenin’s administration.
It means nothing to me that this soldiers’ socialism is being implemented by a crude chess player like Lenin, or by a conceited actor like Trotsky. What saddens me is that someone like you should have become involved in this affair; firstly because your disenchantment will be much greater than theirs; and secondly because you could have achieved something different, something less conspicuous at the present moment but no less important and more lasting.
Bogdanov was referring to the men’s long-nursed plans for encouraging a truly working-class culture. Bogdanov held that without a cultural revolution, a political revolution was pointless. As he argued elsewhere: ‘if [proletarian culture] were beyond one’s strength, the working class would have nothing to count on, except the transition from one enslavement to another; from under the yoke of capitalists to the yoke of engineers and the educated’.4
A lesser man – or a less indulgent one5 – would have taken umbrage at Bogdanov’s letter. Lunacharsky’s reaction was quite different: he made room for his brother-in-law’s experiment in his Commissariat of Education. The ‘proletarian cultural and educational organisations’ of Proletkult, held their first All-Russian Conference in September 1918. Incredibly, the project, meant to bootstrap an entire proletarian culture out of little more than a heap of good intentions, met with immediate success.6
Proletkult cells were established in every factory. Studios were set up around the country, where 80,000 workers learned and practised the arts and sciences.
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Proletkult grew so fast, Bogdanov had no chance to give it a real ideological direction. It remained a rag-bag collection of studios, clubs, theatres and workshops. But this was not necessarily a bad thing: at its height, Bogdanov’s cultural movement won the public allegiance of virtually every significant artist, musician and writer in Russia. Experimental art, music and theatre flourished. The Tula Proletkult music section had a symphony orchestra, a brass band, an orchestra for folk instruments, and special classes in solo and operatic singing. Even tiny Arctic Archangel, perched on the coast of the White Sea, boasted a choir.
Besides, ideological uniformity was hardly Bogdanov’s style: workers’ culture was supposed to be anti-authoritarian, and – most important of all – organised from the bottom.7
In failing to lead Proletkult in any meaningful way, Bogdanov managed to disseminate tektology, his Ernst Mach-flavoured ‘science of organisation’, to around half a million working people. When Lenin, attending a conference of Soviet educators in May 1919, discovered the great influence of Bogdanov’s philosophy, he declared ‘merciless hostility’ toward the movement, and at Proletkult’s Second Congress in 1920, he invoked the authority of the Party’s Central Committee to dismantle it.8 Lunacharsky’s own commissariat was closed down soon after.
Alexander Bogdanov was one of those people who win every battle on the way to losing the war. At Gorky’s villa on Capri, he had thrashed Lenin at chess but failed to heal the rift that had opened up between him and his friend – if indeed he really tried. Shortly after, his became by far the most dominant faction of the Party, but he lost interest in politics, even as control came within his grasp, because he wanted more time for his science-fiction writing. Those two novels of his, Red Star and Engineer Menni, contained the seeds of a fully worked-out philosophy of systems he called ‘tektology’. But by the time he got around to publishing the full work he had become, as he himself put it, ‘an official devil who had to be foresworn’.
