Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

The Academy of Sciences did not wait for the end of the OGPU investigation. In vain, then president Vladimir Karpinsky, eighty-two years old, tried to persuade his colleagues at the academy general meeting on February 2, 1931, that “there should be freedom of opinions [within the Academy] and of opportunities to express them publicly.” 156The frightened academicians and newly elected Party elite academicians voted unanimously to expel Platonov, Tarle, Likhachev, and Lyubavsky from the academy.

According to the OGPU Academicians case, since 1927 Academician Platonov allegedly headed a plot of monarchists who planned a foreign intervention to restore the monarchy in Russia. Supposedly, Platonov would have been appointed prime minister and Academician Tarle foreign minister in the new monarchist Russian government. During the investigation, Platonov was kept in a separate room. 157An OGPU interrogator, Andrei Mosevich, forced him to write false testimony. 158Also, Platonov was interrogated by the deputy head, Sergei Zhupakhin, and the head, Mikhail Stepanov, of OGPU’s Secret Department of the Leningrad Branch. The investigators had a highly professional scientific consultant—the just elected (among other Party functionaries) academician Mikhail N. Pokrovsky. He cooperated with the OGPU on the instruction of OGPU Chairman Menzhinsky. 159

On February 10, 1931, the OGPU three-member court ( troika ) convicted thirty alleged plotters to five to ten years of hard labor in labor camps. This state security three-member court existed from 1918 until July 10, 1934, when it was replaced by the Special Board of the MGB (OSO) under the NKVD. 160On May 10, 1931, forty more arrested people were condemned to ten years of hard labor in the dreaded Solovki Camp, and six members of the “plot” were condemned to death and shot. Finally, on August 8, 1931, the OGPU Collegium convicted twenty scientists to five years’ labor in Pechora labor camps and fifteen other scientists, including Platonov, Tarle, Likhachev, and Lyubavsky, to five years of exile in different provincial towns. Platonov died in 1933 while he was in exile in Samara. Lyubavsky died in exile in Ufa, Bashkiria, in 1936. Tarle was much luckier: He was released in 1932 after the intervention of the Soviet minister of culture and Academician Anatolii Lunacharsky. 161He returned to Leningrad and continued his successful career. Like Tarle, Likhachev returned to Leningrad, where he died in 1936.

Party authorities were content with the OGPU results. The chairman of the Politburo’s Commission on Assistance to the Work of the Academy of Sciences (in fact, “assistance” meant Party control), 162Avel Yenukidze wrote: “We achieved our goal. Messieurs Academicians [Yenukidze ironically used the word “Messieurs” to show that academicians were not “comrades”] have understood that they cannot make fools of us. Now they will be released [from imprisonment] step by step, but we will not allow them to conduct anti-Soviet action any more.” What Yenukidze could not predict was that in a few years, in 1937–1940, he, Figatner, and all the OGPU/KGB functionaries who took part in the organization of the Academicians case (Peters, Agranov, Zhupakhin, and Stepanov), would be arrested by the NKVD to be shot or to die in imprisonment.

After 1930, expulsion from the academy became a routine procedure. In 1938, Karpinsky’s successor as president, the botanist Vladimir Komarov reviewed a list of twenty-one members selected for expulsion at the academy general meeting. After a number of rhetorical questions—“Does anybody want to say something?” “Does anybody want an explanation?” and “Is everything clear?”—Komarov stated: “Let me conclude that the General Meeting joins the opinion of the Presidium [of the academy] and confirms the expulsion of these persons.” 163The paragraph allowing the expulsion of an academy member because of his “unpatriotic” or “anti-Soviet” behavior was kept in all later versions of the statutes of the Soviet Academy. 164People like Dmitrii Pryanishnikov, Pyotr Kapitsa, and Andrei Sakharov, who publicly raised their voices in defense of their arrested colleagues, were rare among the majority of compliant scientists who followed Party orders in exchange for their elite position in Soviet society.

However, the selection of students and scientists according to class origin and loyalty tests was not enough for the regime and its leader, Josef Stalin. Once in power, Stalin decided that he and the Party would decide which scientific theory was correct. The most odious example is the Lysenko affair, which started in 1927. Lysenko’s rise to power has been well documented, especially in recently published monographs for which authors had access to newly released archival materials. 165Here I will discuss in general Lysenko’s ideas and some events that will clarify the mechanisms the Party set in play to control science.

For some reason, biology was the scientific discipline most vulnerable to Party interference. Perhaps this was because, as Party functionaries seem to have thought, biology did not appear to require as much training or specialized skill as physics. Supposedly, it was enough to have read Friedrich Engels’s Dialectics of Nature and to follow Marx and Engels’s acceptance of Darwin’s theory of natural selection to understand the problems of biology. In any case, Marxist philosophers such as Mark Mitin, who specialized in criticizing the “bourgeois” philosophy, 166and Isaak Prezent, who became Lysenko’s chief ideologist, or even Stalin himself, who had no biology background, had no problem with participating in “discussions” on genetics and evolution with professionals. 167Although some similar “discussions” were organized in chemistry and physics in the late 1940s, they were stopped because of the military value of these sciences and their importance for the A-bomb and H-bomb projects.

Lysenkoism, a body of “dialectic Marxist” beliefs almost magical in nature, was created by Trofim Lysenko, a largely uneducated agronomist. 168Soviet leaders appreciated Lysenko’s denial of the existence of genes as the basis of inheritance (and chromosomes where the genes are located) and of species as the basis of evolution. It was much easier for them to understand Lysenko’s simplified anthropomorphic ideas that individuals within a species “help” each other (i.e., there is no competition within the same species) and inherit changes from environmental conditions than it was for them to deal with the complicated knowledge of “bourgeois” geneticists and evolutionists.

I was very surprised to see the interpretation of Lysenkoism’s roots in the recent book What Have We Learned About Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? by the well-known historian of Soviet science Loren R. Graham. 169According to Graham, the end of Lysenkoism in 1964–1965 ushered in the acceptance of Western-style genetics. This is simply not true. A profound understanding of genetics and evolution existed in Russian biology before Lysenko came to power in the middle of the 1930s and, possibly, even before American biologists recognized the importance of genetics. In Chapter 4, I will describe briefly the fate of the brilliant Russian biologist Nikolai Koltsov, one of the creators of modern evolutionary theory and genetics. His influence on Russian biology in the 1920s to the early 1930s was profound. 170Also, it is a simplification to mention Lysenko’s peasant background as his main advantage in comparison with other biologists. 171Many anti-Lysenkoist geneticists of the 1930s had a peasant or other low-class background (for instance, Professors Georgii Karpechenko and Mikhail Lobashov, Academician Anton Zhebrak, whom I will mention below).