Vadim Birstein: The Perversion of Knowledge

IAM VERY GRATEFUL to my colleagues from the human rights organization Memorial (Moscow, Russia), Arsenii Roginsky, Nikita Petrov, Nikita Okhotin, and Gennady Kuzovkin, for their help in finding archival materials and their notes to the manuscript. Dr. Amy Knight (Institute of European and Russian Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada) and Susanne Berger (Washington, DC) patiently read the manuscript and made valuable comments. Dr. Milton Leitenberg (Center for International and Security Studies, University of Maryland) also suggested changes that improved the text immensely. Dr. Vil Mirzayanov (Princeton, NJ) provided me with the information on Soviet plans to use ricin as a chemical weapon. Dr. Maria Keipert (Politisches Archiv des Auswartigen Amt, Bonn, Germany) sent me information regarding the former German diplomats kept after World War II in Soviet captivity. Dr. Raissa Berg (Paris, France) helped me to understand many events of the 1930s–1940s. Dr. James Atz (American Museum of Natural History, NY) kindly allowed me to work with his collection of copies of papers on the Trofim Lysenko affair. Professor Erhard Geissler (Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, Berlin-Buch, Germany) sent me copies of some valuable archival materials and of his own works, despite his illness at that time. Ms. Catherine Fitzpatrick (New York) kindly provided me with a copy of her translation of the manuscript by Vladimir Bobryonev and Valery Ryazentsev. Dr. Anthony Rimmington (Center for Russian and East European Studies, University of Birmingham, Birminghan, U.K.) and Dr. Mark Wheelis (Division of Biological Sciences, University of California, Davis, CA) provided me with copies of their published and unpublished papers on biological weapons. Sergei Gitman (Moscow) gave me his photo of Vladimir Prison. Professor Daniel Wikler (Department of History of Medicine, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI) invited me to give talks on the NKVD-MGB experiments on humans at the conferences Human Genome Research in an Independent World: International Aspects of Social and Ethical Issues in Human Genome Research (Bethesda, MD, June 2–4, 1991), and at the Third Congress of Bioethics (San Francisco, November 22–24, 1996). Mr. Tug Yourgrau, vice president of Powderhouse Productions, Inc. (Somerville, MA) invited me to participate in the TV report “Poisons—Discovery Magazine” (1997).

THIS BOOK IS ABOUT the state control of science in the Soviet Union. Since I am a geneticist, my primary focus is on the fields I know best: biology and medicine. Several books have been published recently in English and Russian on the issue, but they cover only limited time periods. 1Moreover, they do not describe in detail the origins of the control and the leading role of the Soviet security services in establishing such control.

The Soviet regime was not the first to intervene in the work of the Russian Academy of Sciences and universities. The first incident occurred in the mid-eighteenth century. In 1747, Ribeiro Sanchez, a Jewish Portuguese doctor who had worked in Russia since 1731, was elected honorary academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (established by Peter the Great in 1725) and received a pension from the academy. 2In 1732, Empress Elizabeth, the daughter of Peter the Great, ordered that Sanchez be deprived of his title and pension—the empress had issued a law prohibiting any Jew from living in the Russian Empire. Ironically, in 1762 the new Russian empress, Catherine the Great, ordered that Dr. Sanchez’s membership in the academy be restored. He had saved her life many years before, when she was fifteen. In later years, liberal university professors and teachers were under constant secret scrutiny by the Special Department of the Tsarist Police Department. 3However, a unique situation developed in the twentieth-century Soviet Union. Control grew with the development of a particular tool of control—the Soviet political secret service, or VCheKa (All-Russian Extraordinary Commission)—and continued during all its transformations into the current FSB (Federal Security Service) and SVR (Foreign Intelligence Service) (see Tables 1.1 and 1.2).

The Soviet Union’s efforts to control science were part of its larger effort to control the “intelligentsia”—not an easy Russian term to define. 4In general, it is used to describe educated middle-class intellectuals. But traditionally in Russia, members of the intelligentsia were considered to have high ethical standards and a moral obligation and commitment to popular enlightenment and education. From the earliest days of their power, the Bolsheviks treated the old intelligentsia as bourgeoisie, a class they thought should gradually disappear, to be replaced by newly educated industrial workers (the proletariat) and poor peasants. According to Bolshevik doctrine, Communist society should consist of just two classes: the proletariat and peasants. The newly created proletarian intelligentsia should form a layer between these two classes and serve them. For a while, during the Civil War (1918–1921) and the years of the New Economic Policy (NEP) declared by Vladimir Lenin, the regime to some extent tolerated the old “bourgeois” intelligentsia, which included scientists. The NEP included denationalization of small businesses and legalization of private trade—that is, some capitalist economic forms were allowed to coexist with the socialist forms. The NEP was proclaimed on March 15, 1921, at the Tenth Communist Party Congress, and it officially ended in December 1929 (it ended de facto in April 1928). 5With the demise of the NEP, any tolerance toward the old intelligentsia evaporated.

iData from Kokurin and Petrov, Lubyanka , pp. 7-102; Waller, J. M., Secret Empire: The KGB in Russia Today (Boulder, CO): Westview Press, 1994), pp. 118-141, and Knight, A., Spies Without Cloaks: The KGB’s Successors (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), pp. 30-37; Mlechin, L., Predsedateli KGB: Rassekrechennye sud’by [The KGB Chairmen: Declassified Biographies] (Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 1999a), pp. 648-649 (in Russian).