Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

Lysenko’s cynicism and pragmatism become clear in his mention of the kolkhoz system. On November 7, 1928, in the Pravda article “A Year of Great Change,” Stalin ordered the creation of kolkhozes (collective farms) to replace traditional small, separate farms. Two simultaneous processes were organized: the creation of kolkhozes and the liquidation of the kulaks, who were the most enterprising, educated, and independent-minded peasants. Millions of kulaks and members of their families were sent to the labor camps or exiled to Siberia and Central Asia. 189In addition, a five-year economic plan was introduced by the government. “Shockworkers” (udarniki) was the name given to those who claimed that they would fulfill the five-year-plan in four years.

Lysenko’s absurdity dominated Soviet biology from the mid-1930s until the late 1960s. There were three significant events during the Lysenko period: Stalin’s personal championing of Lysenko in February 1935, the election of Lysenko to the Academy of Sciences in 1939 (instead of the brilliant geneticist and evolutionist Nikolai Koltsov), and the August 1948 session of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, or Agricultural Academy (VASKhNIL), during which Lysenkoism was accepted as a party line. At the 1939 academy meeting, Lysenko was not alone in becoming a member. Stalin and other party functionaries were “elected” to the academy as “honorary members.” Stalin himself was behind the August 1948 session of the Agricultural Academy, which disrupted the development of genetics and evolutionary theory in the Soviet Union for almost thirty years. Stalin looked through the draft of the speech written by Lysenko for the session and made numerous editorial changes beforehand. 190

Julian Huxley was among those few Western biologists who understood that Lysenkoism was not a science but rather a party ideology: “A political party has imposed its own dogmatic view of what must be correct and incorrect, and so violated the essential spirit of science.” 191Another biologist, Robert Cook, even compared Lysenkoism to religious faith: “Lysenkoism… is the only scientific discipline in existence today whose validity depends, not on experiment, but on certification as to purity and truth, in content and concept, by government fiat.” 192

After Lysenko came to power, the career, freedom, and sometimes even the life of a biologist in the Soviet Union depended on his or her decision to accept or reject Lysenkoism.

Some American historians of biology did not understand the profound role of Communist ideology (which included Lysenko’s “Michurinist biology”) in the professional work of Soviet scientists. For instance, Mark Adams wrote: “I would argue, then, that ideology has played a less significant role than we have tended to assume.” 193Although Adams visited Moscow several times and collected incredibly valuable materials, including priceless interviews with old geneticists, he never worked as a Soviet employee and evidently never understood the whole picture.

Unfortunately, real geneticists at first did not understand the danger Lysenko posed. Academician Nikolai Vavilov, at the time president of the Agricultural Academy, did nothing initially to stop the rising star of “People’s Academician” Lysenko. And this had lethal consequences for him (Chapter 4).

Incredibly, very few contemporaries understood the ideological similarity between Stalin’s regime and the Nazis in the 1930s. The Russian émigré and satirical poet Aminand Shpolyansky, who wrote under the pseudonym “Don-Aminado,” was a rare example:

Narym was a group of famous Soviet labor camps in the Krasnoyarsk Region in Siberia. 195Also, to some extent, there is a parallel between Lysenko and the Nazi doctors who experimented on humans. Several of them, like Lysenko, believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Lysenko declared that through “training” at particular temperatures, plants can change their inheritance or even become new species; or that a change in diet can result in the transformation of one animal species into another. The Nazi doctors went even further. One of the most sordid SS doctors in Auschwitz, the University of Münster anatomy professor Johann Paul Kremer, believed in the inheritance of traumatically acquired deformities. 196

In 1939, Lysenko became a full academician. He had already been president of the Agricultural Academy. He received Stalin’s personal attention and represented the Party line in biology. In 1940, his archenemy Nikolai Vavilov was arrested by the NKVD (not without Lysenko’s help) and then perished. However, World War II postponed Lysenko’s final triumph, which occurred in August 1948. I will describe all these events in Chapter 4.

After World War II, in 1947, Stalin began one of his last campaigns against the intelligentsia, especially those of Jewish origin (“Cosmopolitans without the Motherland” as they were called in the mass media), which ended in 1952–1953 with the arrests of high-ranking physicians, members of the so-called Doctors’ Plot, which allegedly aimed to murder Soviet leaders, including Stalin. It is necessary to explain that in the Soviet Union, as in Nazi Germany, Jewish identity meant not religion but ethnic origin (or “race” in Nazi terminology). This critical point has created a lot of misunderstanding in the American public of events during the Holocaust in Europe and of Russian anti-Semitism in general. The Nazi laws against the Jews were racial, not religious. 197In Nazi Germany, half Jews who had a Jewish father and a non-Jewish German mother ( Mischling of the first degree) were treated as full-blooded Jews. 198In the same manner, half Jews with a Jewish family name (father’s name) were treated as full-blooded Jews in the Soviet Union. Moreover, the personnel department in any institution usually wanted to know the names of not only parents but also of grandparents of employees.

However, the arrest of Jewish doctors had a long history. The first time “doctor-killers” were discussed was at the trial of the “anti-Soviet organization of the Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists” in Kharkov in March–August 1930. One of the accused supposedly said: “We expressed desires that doctors, using their positions and providing the outstanding Communist patients with a poison or an inoculation of a bacterial culture, would help them to die.” 199The next step was in 1938: As I will describe in Chapter 2, the doctors Dmitrii Pletnev, Lev Levin, and Ignatii Kazakov were accused at the Bukharin trial of killing prominent Soviet writers and party leaders. Levin and Kazakov were shot just after the end of the trial, and Pletnev was shot in 1941.

It appears that the sentencing of Levin and Pletnev was Stalin’s personal revenge. In 1932, both refused to sign a false death certificate for Nadezhda Allilueva, Stalin’s second wife, who allegedly committed suicide with a gun. However, members of her family and others who knew Nadezhda Allilueva were convinced that Stalin had shot his wife himself, because the bullet entry wound was at the back of Nadezhda’s head. 200The Kremlin Hospital’s doctors were ordered to certify her death from appendicitis. Levin and Pletnev refused. 201

But this was not the end of Nadezhda Allilueva’s story and the implication of Stalin’s estranged family members and their friends as part of the effort to cleanse society of unsavory elements. The Allilueva case was just beginning. In 1937, Nadezhda’s brother, Pavel Alliluev, political commissar of the armed forces, was first put under NKVD surveillance and then dismissed from his post. 202He “mysteriously” died on December 2, 1938, from poisoning. Stalin kept Nadezhda Allilueva’s “History of Illness” and Pavel Alliluev’s postmortem report in his private archive at his apartment in the Kremlin. 203