The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Hitler had devised a system to persecute and destroy millions, but Bonhoeffer’s death was one of the last he ordered personally. He hated God even more than he hated artists.

  In 1938 a young (twenty-year-old) Russian writer, or would-be writer, sent an account of his experiences in Kolyma, the vast, inaccessible region of Siberia that contained the worst camps of the Gulag, to the Union of Writers in Moscow. Or he thought he had. Ivan Vasilievich Okunev’s report, written in a simple school notebook, never went anywhere. It was kept by the KGB in his file until it was found in the early 1990s by Vitali Shentalinsky, a fellow writer and poet who, after years of trying, finally managed to persuade the Russian authorities to divulge the KGB’s ‘literary archive.’ His tenacity was well rewarded.83

  Okunev had been arrested and sent to the Gulag because he had allowed his (internal) passport to lapse. That is all. He was put to work in a mine, as a result of which, after several weeks, the sleeves of his coat became torn. One day the camp director announced that if anyone had any complaints, they should say so before that day’s shift began. Okunev and another man explained about their sleeves, and two others said they needed new gloves. Everyone else was sent off to the mines, but the four who had raised their hands were sent instead to the punishment block. There they were sprayed with water for twenty minutes. As it was December, in Siberia, the temperature was fifty degrees below zero, and the water froze on Okunev and the others, so that the four men became united as one solid block of ice. They were cut apart with an axe, but since they couldn’t walk – their clothes being frozen solid – they were kicked over and rolled in the snow back to the hut where they slept. As he fell, Okunev hit his face on the frozen ground and lost two teeth. At the hut, he was left to thaw out near the stove. Next morning, when he woke, his clothes were still wet and he had pneumonia, from which he took a month to recover. Two of the others who had formed the same block of ice with him didn’t make it.84

  Okunev was lucky, if you call surviving in such conditions lucky. It is now known that up to 1,500 writers perished under the Soviet system, mainly in the late 1930s. Many others were driven into exile. As Robert Conquest has pointed out, The Penguin Book of Russian Verse, published in 1962, shows that since the revolution, poets who lived in exile survived to an average age of seventy-two, whereas for those who remained in or returned to the Soviet Union, it was forty-five. Many scientists were also sent into exile, imprisoned, or shot. At the same time, Stalin realised that, in order to produce more food, more machinery, and as the 1930s wore on, better weapons, he needed scientists. Great pressure was therefore put on scientists to accede to Marxist ideology, even if that meant ignoring inconvenient results. Special camps were developed for scientists, called sharashki, where they were better fed than other prisoners, while forced to work on scientific problems.

  This Russian inquisition did not arrive overnight. In summer 1918, when the civil war started, all non-Bolshevik publications were banned. However, with the New Economic Policy, unveiled in 1922, the Communist Party (as the Bolsheviks were now called) allowed a curious form of mixed economy, in which private entrepreneurs and co-operatives were established. As a result, several pre-revolutionary publishers re-emerged, but also more than a hundred literary cooperatives, some of which, like RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers), became quite powerful. In literature the 1920s were an uneasy time. Several writers went into exile, but as yet there was no firm distinction between what was and was not acceptable as literature. The mind of the leadership was clearly on more pressing things than writing, though two new journals, Krasnaya nov (1921) and Novy mir (1925), were under the control of hard-line Marxists. Certain writers, like Osip Mandelstam and Nikolay Klyuev, already found it difficult to be published. In 1936, a decade later, no fewer than 108 newspapers and 162 periodicals were still being published, in the Russian language, outside the Soviet Union.85

  Science had been ‘nationalised’ by the Bolsheviks in 1917, thus becoming the property of the state.86 To begin with, according to Nikolai Krementsov, in his history of Stalinist science, many scientists had not objected because under the tsars Russian science, though expanding slowly, lagged well behind its counterparts in other European countries. For the Bolsheviks, science was expected to play an important role in a technocratic future, and during the civil war scientists were given several privileges, including enlarged food rations (paiki) and exemption from military service. In 1919 there was a special decree ‘to improve the living conditions for scholars.’ During the early 1920s international currency was made available for scientists to buy foreign equipment and to make specially sanctioned ‘expeditions’ abroad. In 1925 the Lenin Prize for scientific research was established. Scientists occupied places on the highest councils, and under their guidance numerous institutes were opened, such as the X Ray Institute, the Soil Institute, the Optical Institute, and the Institute of Experimental Biology, a large outfit that housed departments of cytology, genetics, eugenics, zoo-psychology, hydrology, histology, and embryology.87 This modern approach was also reflected in the publication of the first Great Soviet Encyclopedia, and the period saw the great flowering of ‘Soviet physics,’ in particular the Leningrad Physico-Technical Laboratory, when relations with the West were good.88 Science was no longer bourgeois.

  In the mid-1920s, however, a change began to be seen in science in the language used. A new lexicon, and a new style – far more polemical – started to surface, even in the journals. Professional societies like the Society of Mathematician-Materialists and the Society of Marxist-Agrarians began to appear. Books with tides such as Psychology, Reflexology and Marxism (1925) were published, and the journal of the Communist Academy, Under the Banner of Marxism, carried a series of articles by accomplished scientists which nonetheless argued that the results of experiments had nothing to do with their interpretation. Specifically Communist universities were formed, along with an Institute of Red Professors, the aim of both being ‘to create a new, Communist intelligentsia.’89 In May 1928, at the Eighth Congress of the Union of Communist Youth – the Komsomol – Stalin indicated that he was ready for a new phase in Soviet life. In a speech he said, ‘A new fortress stands before us. This fortress is called science, with its numerous fields of knowledge. We must seize this fortress at any cost. Young people must seize this fortress, if they want to be builders of a new life, if they want truly to replace the old guard…. A mass attack of the revolutionary youth on science is what we need now, comrades.’90

  A year later, what Stalin called Velikii Perelom (the Great Break, or Great Leap Forward) was launched. All private initiative was crushed, market forces removed, and the peasantry collectivised. On Stalin’s orders, the state exercised from now on a total monopoly over resources and production. In science there was a period of ‘sharpened class struggle,’ in effect the first arrests, exiles, and show trials, but also the intervention of party cadres into agriculture. This was disastrous and led directly to the famines of 1931–3. Science was expanded (by about 50 percent) under the first Five-Year Plan, which was the main plank under the Great Break, but it was as much a political move as an intellectual one. Party activists took over all the new establishments and also infiltrated those that already existed, including the Academy of Sciences.91 Even Ivan Pavlov, the great psychologist and a Nobel Prize winner in physiology, was shadowed continually (he was eighty), and the ‘Great Proletarian Writer,’ Maxim Gorky, a friend of Stalin, was put in charge of genetics and medical research.92 Later, in July 1936, entire areas of psychology and pedagogy were abolished; the Academy of Sciences, originally a club for award-winning scholars, was forced to become the administrative head of more than a hundred laboratories, observatories, and other research institutions, though of course by then the academy was stuffed with ‘red directors’ at the highest levels. ‘Cadres decide everything’ was the official slogan: Kadry reshaiut vse. A circle of physicists-mathematicians-materialists was established. ‘It sought to a
pply Marxist methodology to mathematics and physics.’93 The Nomenklatura was a list of posts that could not be occupied (or, indeed, vacated) without permission of the appropriate party committee, the higher the post, the higher the committee that had to authorise appointment: the president of the Academy, for instance, had to be authorised by the Politburo.94 At the same time, foreign contacts were discouraged; there was careful screening of scientists who applied to travel and of foreign scientists who wished to come to Russia. A special agency, Glavlit, censored all publications, even scientific ones, sometimes removing ‘harmful’ literature from libraries.95

  By now, some scientists had learned to live with the system, liberally sprinkling the introductions to their publications with appropriate quotations from approved writers, like Marx, before getting on with the main business of the paper. Beginning in December 1930, Stalin charged the discipline of philosophy with the task of combating traditional notions and with developing Lenin’s philosophy. This policy was launched through the Institute of Red Professors of Philosophy and Natural Sciences. The idea behind it was that science had a ‘class nature’ and must be made more ‘proletarian.’96 There was also a campaign to make science more ‘practical.’ Applied science was lauded over basic research. ‘Militant’ scientists criticised their less militant (but often more talented) colleagues and engaged them in public discussions where these colleagues were forced to admit previous ‘errors.’ By the mid-1930s, therefore, Soviet science had changed completely in character. It was now run by party bureaucrats and, insofar as this was possible, organised along lines in keeping with the tenets of Marxism and Leninism. Naturally, this led to absurdities.97 The most notorious occurred in the discipline of genetics. Genetics had not existed in Russia prior to the revolution, but in the 1920s it began to flourish. In 1921 a Bureau of Eugenics was created, though in Russia this was predominantly concerned with plant breeding, and in 1922 one of T. H. Morgan’s aides had visited Russia and brought valuable Drosophila stocks. Morgan, William Bateson, and Hugo de Vries were all elected foreign members of the Academy of Sciences in 1923 and I924.98

  In the latter half of the 1920s, however, the situation became more complex and sinister. In the immediate postrevolutionary climate in Russia, Darwinism was at first seen as aiding Marxism in creating a new socialist society. But genetics, besides explaining how societies evolve, inevitably drew attention to the fact that many characteristics are inherited. This was inconvenient for the Bolsheviks, and geneticists who espoused this view were suppressed in 1930, along with the Russian Eugenics Society. In the Soviet context, with the country’s food problems, its vast expanses of land, and its inhospitable extremes of climate, genetics was potentially of enormous importance in developing strains of wheat, for example, that gave higher yields and/or grew on previously inhospitable land. The key figure here in the late 1920s and early 1930s was Nikolai Vavilov, one of the three scientists who had helped establish the science in the early 1920s, who was close to many foreign geneticists such as T. H. Morgan in the United States and C. D. Darlington in Great Britain. But this, of course, was a ‘traditional’ way of thinking. In the early 1930s a new name began to be heard in Russian genetics circles – Trofim Lysenko.99

  Born in 1898 into a peasant family, Lysenko had no formal academic training, and in fact research was never his strong point; instead he became noted for a number of polemical papers about the role of genetics in Soviet society, in particular what genetics research ought to show. This was exactly what the party bosses wanted to hear – it was, after all, extremely ‘practical’ – and in 1934 Lysenko was appointed scientific chief of the Odessa Institute of Genetics and Breeding and ‘elected’ to membership of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences.100 Lysenko’s doctrine, termed ‘agrobiology,’ was an amalgam of physiology, cytology, genetics, and evolutionary theory in which the new element was his concept of vernalisation. Vernalisation relates to the way plant seeds respond to the temperature of the seasons; Lysenko argued that if temperature could be manipulated, plants would ‘think’ that spring and summer had come early, and produce their harvest sooner rather than later. The question was – did it work? And second, with agriculture used as metaphor, vernalisation showed that what a plant produced was at least partly due to the way it was treated, and therefore not entirely due to its genetic component. To Marxists, this showed that surroundings – and by extension society, upbringing, education, in the human context – were as important, if not more important, than genetics. Throughout the early 1930s, in his Bulletin of Vernalization and in press campaigns organised for him by party friends, Lysenko conducted a noisy assault on his rivals.101 This culminated in 1935, when Vavilov was dismissed from the presidency of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the most prestigious position in plant breeding and genetics, and replaced by a party hack. At the same time, Lysenko was appointed as a member of the same academy. The changing landscape was clear.102

  Vavilov did not go without a fight, and the academy held a discussion of Lysenko’s controversial views, at which it was outlined how unusual and unreliable they were.103 Lysenko dismissed the very idea of the gene as a physical unit of heredity, claimed that Mendel was wrong and insisted that environmental conditions could directly influence the ‘heredity’ of organisms.104 The scientists on Vavilov’s side argued that the results of Lysenko’s experiments were of dubious validity, had never been replicated or sustained by further experimentation, and flew in the face of research in other countries. The people on Lysenko’s side, says Krementsov, accused their opponents of being ‘fascists’ and ‘anti-Darwinists,’ and pointed to the link between German biologists and the Nazis’ ideas of a master race. At that stage, the academy actually seems to have been more favourable to Vavilov than to Lysenko, at least to the extent of not accepting the latter’s results, and ordering more research. An International Genetics Conference was scheduled for Moscow in 1938, when Vavilov’s allies felt sure that contact with foreign geneticists would kill off Lysenkoism for all time. Then came the Great Terror.

  Nine leading geneticists were arrested and shot in 1937 (though in all eighty-three biologists were killed, and twenty-two physicists).105 The geneticists’ crime was to hold to a view that the gene was the unit of heredity and to be suspicious of Lysenko’s officially approved notion of vernalisation. The institutes these geneticists headed either faded away or were taken over by acolytes of Lysenko. He himself assumed the role previously occupied by Vavilov, as president of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, but he was also promoted further, to become a member of the USSR Supreme Soviet. Still, Lysenko did not have things all his own way. In 1939 Vavilov and other colleagues who had escaped the Terror, which ended in March that year, sent a joint six-page letter to Andrei Zhdanov, secretary of the Central Committee and of the Leningrad City Party, arguing for traditional genetics over Lysenkoism. (Zhdanov and his son were both chemists.)106 They were fortified by the recent award of a Nobel Prize to T. H. Morgan, in 1933.107 Their letter stressed the ‘careerism’ of Lysenko and his associates, the unreliability of his results, and the incompatibility of his ideas with both Darwinism and the international consensus in genetics. The letter received serious attention, and the Party Secretariat – which included Stalin – decided to let the philosophers judge. This meeting took place on 7–14 October 1939 at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow. All four ‘judges’ were graduates of the Institute of Red Professors.

  Fifty-three academics of one kind or another took part in the discussions. Formally, the dialogue, as identified by the philosophers in their invitation, was ‘to define the Marxist-Leninist line of work in the field of genetics and breeding, which must mobilise all workers in this field in the general struggle for the development of socialist agriculture and the real development of the theory of Darwinism.’ At one level the discussion was familiar. The Lysenkoists accused their opponents of work that was ‘impractical’ because it involved the fruit fly, w
hereas theirs used tomatoes, potatoes, and other useful plants and animals. The Lysenkoists no longer argued that the rival camp were ‘fascists,’ however. By October 1939 Russia had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop nonaggression pact, and such a reference would have been highly inappropriate. For their part, the geneticists pointed to the unreliability of Lysenko’s results, arguing that his hasty theoretical conclusions would simply lead to disaster for Soviet agriculture when they were found not to produce the predicted results. At another level, however, the debate was over Darwinism. By now, in Soviet Russia, Marxism and Darwinism had become blended.108 The inevitability of biological evolution was assumed by Marxists to be paralleled in the sociological field, which naturally made the USSR the most highly ‘evolved’ society, the pinnacle that all others would reach eventually.

  In their judgement, the philosophers found that Lysenko had transgressed some rules of Soviet bureaucracy, but they agreed with him that formal genetics was ‘anti-Darwinian’ and its methods ‘impractical.’ The Leningrad Letter, as it was called, had changed nothing. The lesser role of the formal geneticists was still allowed, but Lysenko had not been damaged and still occupied all the positions he had before the letter was written. Indeed, that position was soon consolidated; in the summer of 1940 Vavilov was arrested by the secret police as a British spy. What seems to have triggered this was his correspondence with the British geneticist C. D. Darlington, who arranged to have one of Vavilov’s publications translated into English. It was not hard for the secret police to fabricate charges or secure a ‘confession’ about how Vavilov had provided the British with important details about Russian genetics research, which could have affected her ability to feed herself.109

  Vavilov died in prison, and with him a huge part of Russian genetics. He was perhaps the most important scientist to succumb to the Great Terror, but genetics/agriculture was not the only discipline that was devastated: psychology and other areas of biology were also deeply affected. Vavilov was probably mourned more outside Russia than within, and is still remembered today as a great scientist. Lysenko remained where he was.110