Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

I cannot believe that the whole glory of Soviet science, and Soviet physics in particular, was worth the life of these enslaved women.

THE PROTEST OF PROFESSOR Otto Krayer against the Nazi Party’s policy of anti-Semitism was a rare occurrence. Most of his colleagues had no qualms about taking over the position of an expelled Jewish colleague. The same situation existed in the Soviet Union. Comparing Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Paul Josephson, a researcher on science in both countries, wrote: “…Nazi and Soviet biology shared transformationist visions of changing society through the dedicated application of the science…. Direct and indirect political interference in the activities of scientists gave these transformationist visions their brutality and dominance.” 2

I am absolutely convinced that there can be no excuse for a scientist who collaborated with the NKVD-KGB. Certainly, it was impossible to live in the Soviet system without a certain compromise of one’s morals. But the level of compromise could be kept to a minimum. There were choices. The first choice was whether to join the Communist Party. Membership imparted clear career opportunities unavailable to nonmembers. The next choice was whether to cooperate with the KGB (every scientist was approached for cooperation in some form by the KGB). In Mairanovsky’s case, it is not merely the chemists who synthesized poison chemicals and the doctors who implemented and studied them who are guilty. The guilt also belongs to those scientists who approved his results and supported his dissertation.

These scientists could have held back their approval. Even among Soviet high-ranking biologists there were individuals who refused to follow KGB or Communist Party orders both during the time when Mairanovsky worked for the KGB and afterward. To prove my point, I will only give some examples, since this issue is complex and deserves a separate study.

As I described in Chapter 1, Nikolai Koltsov, director of the Institute of Experimental Biology, was one of those accused during the first Soviet show trial—the case against the supposedly anti-Soviet Tactical Center. Professor Koltsov, whom his Western colleagues considered “probably the best Russian zoologist of the last generation,” 3established his institute in the middle of 1917 just before the Bolshevik Revolution. 4A prediction of the crossing over in 1902 and later, in 1927, of the submicroscopic structure and template process of reproduction of the chromosome’s macromolecular structure was among Koltsov’s scientific achievements. 5Private Moscow donors funded the organization of Koltsov’s institute. Prior to that, Professor Koltsov had problems with official scientific institutions that were under the control of St. Petersburg imperial bureaucrats. In 1906, he refused to defend his doctorate thesis at Moscow University during the student strike. Moreover, the same year, he published a brochure in memory of students killed by Cossacks 6during the first revolt in Moscow of the Russian Revolution in October–December 1905. The brochure included names of the murdered students, and Koltsov planned to donate money received for the brochure to those university students who had been arrested. 7The authorities immediately confiscated the brochure. Finally, Koltsov was among 123 Moscow University professors who left the university protesting the order of the tsar’s minister of education, Lev Kasso, to deprive Moscow University of its independent status. A prominent zoologist, Mikhail Menzbir, had been elected (and not appointed from St. Petersburg) as Moscow University’s rector. In 1911, Minister Kasso ordered the restoration of imperial rules and an end to the electoral procedure. Professor Menzbir was dismissed from his post, and 123 professors left the university. 8Koltsov was invited to two private Moscow colleges and returned to Moscow University only in 1917. At that point he had already been elected corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. No wonder the new Soviet regime was suspicious of this independent scientist.

In 1920, when Koltsov was arrested, the VCheKa was as yet inexperienced in the details of show trials and treated the defendants during the trial rather mildly. On March 8, 1920, Koltsov’s colleagues and pupils wrote a letter to the VCheKa in Koltsov’s defense. 9Because of this letter, Koltsov was not arrested and from August 16 to 20, he attended the court trial as a defendant. He was accused of keeping money to help families of arrested members of the nonexistent Tactical Center. 10He also supposedly allowed his apartment and office at the institute to be used for meetings of members of the Moscow branch of the Tactical Center, the National Center. 11After the trial, Koltsov published a scientific paper that included a detailed description of the physiological changes to a defendant’s body caused by the stress of a death sentence:

During the first days of the trial I slept at home and every morning checked my weight. It was the same until the morning of August 19. In the evening of that day, after the Prosecutor demanded the death penalty for four defendants and different prison terms for the others, I was arrested and spent a night in the VCheKa Special Department custody. On August 20, after four hours of waiting, the verdict was announced. According to the verdict, 24 of the accused must be shot. However, another verdict, with lighter punishment, replacing this one, was immediately announced. Half of the accused were released immediately. I was among the released. After coming back home at midnight, I checked my weight again and found out that… during the last 38 hours I lost 5 pounds…. During the next three days of rest I slept a lot and moved a lot (I walked for about 15 km with a weight of 20–30 lb.) and ate 2,500 calories a day. On the morning of August 24, my weight increased by 4 lb., i.e., I gained 7 lb. in three days. 12

Koltsov’s scientific study on changes in his own body during this terrifying time was a remarkable response to the violence of the state. But the courageous response from Koltsov’s colleagues and pupils, who defended him despite the danger of bringing on their own deaths by doing so, is far more remarkable.

In the 1920s, Koltsov’s institute (which was within the Commissariat of Health, the Narkomzdrav) became one of the leading genetic institutions of its time. 13In 1927, Koltsov described the duplicate structure of genetic material (the “double helix,” although he didn’t call it that) for the first time. 14But the OGPU-NKVD did not leave Koltsov and his institute alone. In 1929, the head of the Genetics Laboratory, the outstanding geneticist Sergei Chetverikov, was arrested by the OGPU and sent into exile without a trial. 15In 1932, Vladimir Efroimson, who had been both Koltsov’s and Chetverikov’s pupil, was arrested. The investigator demanded that Efroimson testify in the investigation against Koltsov. 16Efroimson managed to withstand the pressure of the interrogation and refused to comply. He was then condemned to three years’ imprisonment in a labor camp. This was his first term in the camps. Efroimson’s second term of seven years started in 1949, after he protested publicly against Lysenko.