Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

A Party member since 1921, Prezent graduated from the Faculty of Social Sciences of Leningrad University in 1925 or 1926. 326After that, it seems he worked for a year at Vavilov’s All-Union Institute of Plants. 327By 1930, he was a senior staff member at the Leningrad Division of the Communist Academy, president of the Society of Materialist Biologists, and a docent at Leningrad Pedagogical Institute (College). 328In 1931, Prezent was appointed chair of the Department of Dialectics of Nature and Evolutionary Theory, which he created at Leningrad University. The goal of this department was to connect biology with Marxist dialectic materialism, or simply to introduce Party control in biology.

In 1930–1931, Prezent participated in the campaign against Boris Raikov, a professor at Leningrad Pedagogical Institute. 329Professor Raikov (1880–1966) was also president of the Society for the Propagation of Natural Science Education. Prezent denounced Professor Raikov as an “agent of the world bourgeoisie” and accused him and the society of teaching “a passive ‘love of nature.’” Professor Raikov was arrested in 1931, tried, and exiled to the north. He returned to Leningrad only in 1945 and was elected a member of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences. 330

In 1929, Prezent met Lysenko for the first time at the First All-Union Congress of Geneticists and Breeders. 331In May 1932, Prezent, with a group of students, visited Lysenko’s Institute of Genetics and Breeding in Odessa (now in the Ukraine). 332Then, in May 1933, Prezent and Lysenko went together to Askaniya Nova, a nature reserve located at the mouth of the Dnieper River (Khersonsky Region, currently the Ukraine). 333Their negative attitude to the complex research of the reserve ecosystem (the reserve preserved a part of the natural steppe) was fruitful: In August of the same year, an OGPU commission arrived in Askaniya Nova to investigate the director of the reserve, the ornithologist and zoogeographer Professor Vladimir Stanchinsky (1882–1941) and his staff. 334

Evidently, Prezent could not forget Professor Stanchinsky’s humiliating response at the Fourth All-Union Meeting of Zoologists in 1930. In a commentary on Stanchinsky’s presentation, Prezent expressed doubts that ecology should be considered a science without the approval of Party leaders. Stanchinsky’s answer to Prezent was quick and sharp. 335In autumn of 1933, the OGPU commission arrested three leading scientists of the reserve, the zoologists S. Medvedev and A. Gunali and the veterinarian F. Orlovsky. On February 24, 1934, Professor Stanchinsky was also arrested by the NKVD. He was condemned to five years’ forced labor and served his term as an imprisoned veterinarian at the NKVD agricultural farms. Stanchinsky was released in 1936 and managed to get a job at the Central Forest Reserve in Central Russia. On June 29, 1941, he was arrested again (most former political prisoners were arrested once more after the Nazi invasion on June 22). Stanchinsky died in Vologda Prison soon after he had been tried by the OSO, which condemned him to ten years’ forced labor as “a socially dangerous and a former condemned person.”

In 1934, Prezent was fired from Leningrad University and moved to Lysenko’s Institute of Genetics and Breeding in Odessa. 336He immediately became Lysenko’s close collaborator as the ideologist and philosopher of “Michurinist biology.” 337In 1935, he was also appointed coeditor of Lysenko’s journal Vernalization . 338Later, he lectured again on his “purified” Soviet Darwinism to the students of Leningrad University. 339

After Prezent became chair of the Darwinism Departments at Moscow and Leningrad Universities in 1948, Lysenko’s supporters replaced serious scientists. Notorious Lysenkoists became professors of Darwinism (Fyodor Dvoryankin) and genetics (Noi Feiginson and Faina Kuperman) at Moscow University. Professor Sabinin was replaced by the Lysenkoist Boris Ruban. Others, like the ichthyologist Nikolai Lebedev, moved to the “purified” Department of Darwinism. At Leningrad University, famous zoologists, embryologists, and evolutionists like Professors Nikolai Gerbil’sky, Yurii Polyansky, Pavel Terent’ev, and Pavel Svetlov lost their jobs. 340The chair of the Genetics Department, Mikhail Lobashov, was replaced by the Lysenkoist Nikolai Turbin.

Prezent introduced his own course of “Darwinism” at both faculties. I remember clearly this thick mimeographed volume. It was a real struggle to read because of the unwieldy demagogic language and terminology of the “truly Marxist dialectics.” Of course, all Lysenko’s inventions were presented as real facts. Not only students but also professors were obliged to attend Prezent’s lectures for “re-education” in the Party-approved Michurinist biology. 341

The exams at the end of this course had a specific reputation among students: Prezent preferred to invite female students to his apartment for the exam. Knowing this, strong male students accompanied their female classmates to the apartment of Professor Prezent and stayed there until the end of the exam. 342 Prezent clearly suffered from the psychological complex of a short man. He wore shoes with very high heels and a tall green hat. 343

The fall of Prezent at Moscow University was quick and unexpected. It had nothing to do with biology. The anti-Semitic wave that had become, since 1947, step by step, the new “Party line” played the main role. Beginning in late 1949, letters with complaints about Prezent (usually unsigned) overflowed the Ministry of Higher Education, the Council of Ministers, and the Party Central Committee’s Department on Science. Gennadii Kostyrchenko, a researcher on anti-Semitism during Stalin’s era, found the following unsigned appeal in one of the Moscow archives:

[Prezent] does nothing but deprive the youth in many ways…. He dismissed from Moscow University widely-known Russian scientists: Academicians M. M. Zavadovsky, I. I. Schmalhausen; Professors D. A. Sabinin, A. A. Paramonov; and many others. They were replaced by ignorami of the Jewish nationality, such as N. I. Feiginson, F. M. Kuperman, …and others. These sorts of replacements are deeply subversive actions. The university that bears the name of the great Russian scientist Lomonosov has no room for real Russian scientists; whereas the Jewish ignorami develop Russian science. 344

Of course, only a few Lysenkoists were of Jewish origin (more precisely, of the “Jewish nationality,” as was written in Soviet passports). Others were Russians, and some were Armenians or Ukrainians like Lysenko. But in the atmosphere of the late 1940s, during the “fight against the Cosmopolitans,” such letters worked well. On May 26, 1950, Prezent was dismissed by resolution of the Central Committee. 345Another Lysenkoist, Dvoryankin, was appointed to chair the Department of Darwinism. Prezent remained a full member of the Agricultural Academy and from time to time continued his attacks on the hated Mendelists-Morganists.

I remember Prezent in the middle of the 1950s. Sometimes my father took me to dinner at the restaurant at the Moscow Scientists Club. Only doctors of science could join this organization, and their family members had the right to attend the numerous events and performances at this elite place. 346 It was (and still is) located in an old, partly reconstructed prerevolutionary mansion, and some of its rooms had old richly decorated interiors. The restaurant was located in a former winter garden with walls made of deep yellow marble with bronze decorations attached to them. An additional glass wall divided the whole space into two rooms of uneven size. According to rumors, this enormous glass was brought from Venice. There were about twelve tables in the main part of the restaurant behind the glass wall, and usually the same people had dinner there almost every day.