Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

However, there was a hint of a revolt in the results of voting: Four candidates from List No. 2 (microbiologist Georgii Nadson, historian Matvei Lyubavsky, philologist Mikhail M. Pokrovsky, and Sinologist Vasilii Alekseev) were also elected. Later, two of these academicians were arrested: Lyubavsky in 1930, and Nadson in 1937. Nadson, former director of the Academy Institute of Microbiology, was condemned to death on April 14, 1939, as a “member of a counterrevolutionary organization” and was shot the next day. 136But the voting of the academy general meeting on January 12, 1929, was in fact an open revolt—academicians did not approve the election of three Communist candidates from List No. 1: philosopher Abram Deborin (1881–1963), historian Nikolai Lukin (1885–1940), and a historian of literature, Vladimir Friche (1870–1929). Academicians did not dare to vote against Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin, but they did not approve Bukharin’s cousin Lukin, a poorly known scientist.

Academy President Karpinsky was afraid of the Party’s retaliation. He ordered an urgent meeting of the Presidium. Ivan Pavlov, Ivan Borodin, and some others tried in vain at the next extraordinary academy general meeting on January 17, 1929, to persuade that the reelection procedure would be a violation of the Academy Statute. 137Twenty-eight of forty-one academicians present voted for the reelection.

On February 17, 1929, the next academy general meeting repeated the reelection of the three candidates. Only fifty-four of seventy-nine academicians were present. 138The majority of those absent claimed to be ill. The newly elected “Party” academicians were included in the electorate. All three Communist candidates were elected. Soon after that, an Old Bolshevik, Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, was appointed vice president of the academy. 139This was the end. The academy had been destroyed. At the time, the government level of the academy was supervised by the Central Executive Scientific Committee. The next year (1930), Anatolii Lunacharsky, the chairman of this committee and one of the main Bolshevik critics of the old academy, was elected an academy member. 140In 1931, a new body named the Commission to Assist Scientists was created under the Council of Commissars, to be presided over by one of the main Bolshevik functionaries, Valerian Kuibyshev. 141It included the same Lunacharsky; a Marxist historian and the new permanent secretary of the academy, Vyacheslav Volgin; 142Academician Aleksei Bach, a Bolshevik supporter; and two real academicians, the physicist Ioffe and the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov. 143To make control of the academy even easier, in 1934 the Academy Presidium and its main institutions were transferred from Leningrad to Moscow.

After the election in February 1929, the academy consisted of 82 full and 263 corresponding members, and the number of scientists and technicians working in its institutions reached 1,000. 144For the first time in the history of the academy, ten high-ranking Party functionaries, including Nikolai Bukharin, were elected full members of the academy as a result of intense government pressure. 145The next year, Bukharin became a member of the Academy Presidium, and in 1932, he was appointed director of the Academy Institute of the History of Natural Sciences and Technology. 146This institute had been created in 1921 as the Commission on the History of Science (later “of Knowledge”), with Academician Vernadsky as its chair. On October 3, 1930, Bukharin was elected the new chair. On February 28, 1932, after Bukharin made a request to the Presidium, the academy general meeting decided to turn the commission into an institute.

The biochemist Aleksei Bach, who directed the Institute of Biochemistry, also became an academician. He had spent thirty-two years abroad, returning to Russia after the Bolshevik coup and becoming an enthusiastic supporter of the new regime. From 1927, he headed the All-Union Association of Workers of Science and Technique to Assist the Socialist Construction (VARNITSO), which played the crucial role in the Sovietization of Russian Science and the academy. 147VARNITSO was created in Moscow in response to the independent position of the Academy of Sciences, which at the time was still located in Leningrad. Besides Bach, Boris Zbarsky, Aleksandr Oparin, and Andrei Vyshinsky (all discussed in this book) were the main organizers of VARNITSO and its work. In 1928, Bach was a public prosecutor in the Shakhty (Mines) case in Moscow, the first show trial since 1922. This trial against fifty-three representatives of the technical intelligentsia described as wreckers, spies, and saboteurs ended the NEP period and ushered in a series of “wreckers’ trials.” 148Eleven of the accused were sentenced to death. An American journalist, Eugene Lyons, witnessed the trial and described its horrifying details. The OGPU used every opportunity to destroy the defendants. Even a son of one of the accused demanded death for his father. A letter from the twelve- or thirteen-year-old Kyrill, published in that morning’s Pravda , was read into the record: “I denounce my father [Andrei Kolodoob] as a whole-hearted traitor and an enemy of the working class. I demand for him the severest penalty. I reject him and the name he bears. Hereafter, I shall no longer call myself Kolodoob but Shakhtin.” 149

In addition, the new Academy Statute of 1929 introduced a new powerful loyalty test to the regime: Paragraph 19, which declared that a member of the academy “could be deprived his Academic title for acts of sabotage against the USSR,” was included. 150The wise academician Vernadsky clearly saw what would happen next. In a secret letter to his son George dated July 16, 1929, Vernadsky wrote:

The [Communist] Party is a world of intrigues and arbitrariness. And on the Party’s orders a decent person acts indecently, justified by the [Party] discipline…. Every appointment of a Communist means that a Communist group and a Communist outside organ become extremely influential… A greedy and hungry Communist crowd finds a new way to make a profit: to take positions [in science]. Secret information on political and ideological disloyalty are sent [to the supervisors]… and a cleansing starts.

…Until now the Academy of Sciences was not touched by this process. Now it comes… 151

At the end of June 1929, a special state commission chaired by a member of the Control Commission of the Bolshevik Party Central Committee, Yurii Figatner (1889–1937), started work on “cleansing” the staff of the Academy of Sciences of its “class enemies.” The commission included a scientist, P. Nikiforov (director of the Seismology Institute), a representative of guards at the buildings of the academy, three workers from the main Leningrad factories, two other persons, and two OGPU representatives. 152The commission cleansed 781 employees from the academy, mostly specialists in humanitarian sciences, based on their noble or bourgeois origin. It became clear a couple of months later that for most of these people, losing their job was only the first step toward their arrest by the OGPU.

In October 1929, the chairman of the OGPU Special Commission on Cleansing, one of the most ruthless Chekists, Yakov Peters, and another member of the presidium of the same commission, Yakov Agranov, the intelligentsia specialist, arrived in Leningrad to help the Figatner Commission. 153On November 5, the Politburo established a new investigation commission consisting of Figatner, the Russian chief prosecutor Nikolai Krylenko, Peters, and Agranov. 154This commission found many documents, including the Acts of Abdications of Nicholas II and his brother Mikhail, stored at the Academy Library, which, according to the commission, should have been in the State Central Archive instead. The commission used the existence of these purely historical documents to fabricate a “monarchist plot.” Arrests of academy members and former academy employees started. In sum, 115 historians were arrested in Leningrad and Moscow, including four outstanding academicians, Sergei Platonov (1860–1933), Eugenii Tarle (1875–1955), Nikolai Likhachev, and Matvei Lyubavsky (1860–1936), as members of the nonexistent “All-People’s Union of Struggle for the Restoration of Free Russia.” The arrests were sanctioned by the Politburo. 155Of these academicians, Likhachev was not only an outstanding specialist in Russian history and art history but also a collector of artwork and books. He gave his collection of icons to the Russian Museum in Leningrad and his collection of manuscripts and antique books to the Academy of Sciences. The last collection became the basis of the Academy Institute of Books, Documents, and Writing.