Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

By 1946, the success of the project was evident: Not only had the worm become a common member of the Caspian Sea benthic fauna, but fish (especially sturgeons) had started to feed on it. 361The introduction was considered a serious scientific development, and in 1948, a group of scientists from the Zoological Museum of Moscow University (my father and Professor Zenkevich) and from the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Fisheries and Oceanography (VNIRO) was recommended by the USSR Ministry of Fisheries for the prestigious Stalin Prize. Nikolai Lebedev, who did not participate in the work, also wanted to be among the awarded, but the real participants rejected his request.

Out of spite, Lebedev wrote a strongly negative review of the Nereis project addressed to the State Committee on Stalin Prizes, which he thought would be kept secret. His main point was that the introduced worm was a carnivore invertebrate that depleted the fauna. This was a lie—anyone who ever opened a textbook on invertebrate zoology and read about oligochaet worms knows this. In his review, Lebedev simply invented data that did not exist in scientific papers he cited and falsified maps of animal distribution in the Caspian Sea. To persuade those who did not know anything about invertebrates, Lebedev filmed a “documentary” about Nereis . An ugly worm enlarged to a dimension of the whole movie screen looked as if it might really be a terrible carnivore.

The campaign against my father and Professor Zenkevich started. The decision of the Biology Faculty Party Bureau (the Communist Party organization in every Soviet institution elected its bureau and its secretary, and the bureau and its secretary controlled all details of life of the institution) recommended their dismissal. During those years, such a decision was the precursor of an MGB investigation. 362All types of accusations were used, from the label “Morganists” to “Cosmopolitans” (Jews). The last was not true in the case of Professor Zenkevich, since he was a descendant of Polish nobility. But, of course, the fact that Zenkevich was arrested by the OGPU for a short time in 1933 363was used against him. As a result of the campaign, my father was forced to leave the university for several years. He became a professor at the Pedagogical Institute in the city of Yaroslavl, about 200 miles north of Moscow. During those days, many scientists and professors who lost their jobs because of persecutions or Jewish names were accepted in the institutes in small towns around Moscow.

The fight continued. In 1953, a special conference on the problem of acclimatization of Nereis took place. New scientific data supported the previous results that had indicated the success of the project. 364The materials of the conference were published as a book, Acclimatization of Nereis in the Caspian Sea. It received an award from the Moscow Society of Naturalists (MOIP), at the time the only organization free of the Lysenkoists. The authors of the Nereis project were recommended for the Stalin Prize for the second time but, of course, did not get it because of the pressure of the Biology Faculty Party organization.

On January 29, 1955, Valentin Kaverin, who was a famous Soviet writer and the brother of well-known epidemiologist and virusologist Lev Zilber, published an article entitled, “On Honesty in Science,” in the newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta. 365Kaverin described in detail the falsifications and insinuations Lebedev had used in the attempt to destroy the Nereis project. The article had no effect on Lebedev. He published a new paper in which he simply repeated his previous manipulation of data. Lebedev’s paper was criticized in a series of serious scientific publications. 366My father wrote: “The question of the reason why N. V. Lebedev tried to prove [the negative effect of Nereis in the Caspian Sea] is outside of this article.” 367Most of the readers knew the answer—greed and desire for more power were Lebedev’s motivations.

I met Lebedev for the first time in the early 1960s when he played the role of inquisitor in a student scandal. Three students secretly put a huge portrait of Lysenko into the women’s bathroom and attached it to the water tank above the toilet. The next morning, nobody noticed that Lysenko’s portrait was missing from the wall: There were many portraits of different officials along the corridors of the faculty. But a woman who entered the bathroom and saw the portrait hanging from the top became hysterical. The Party Bureau of the Biology Faculty immediately turned this stupid student prank into a “political case.”

In 1962, Lysenko was still in power and enjoyed the complete support of General Party Secretary Nikita Khrushchev. The Party Bureau started its investigation, and as a member of the bureau, Professor Lebedev was put in charge of it. After lengthy interrogations of many students, the three “insurgents” were found. The ironic side of the story was that Dmitrii P., the son of a pro-Lysenkoist professor, Vasilii P., was the organizer of the prank. The Party Bureau wanted to expel the three students from the university with the label of anti-Soviet political enemies. In order to do this, the students first had to be expelled from the Komsomol (Communist Youth Union) membership, and this could only be done at a Komsomol meeting of the biology students of our year. In the Soviet Union, almost every young person was a member of the Komsomol. It was almost impossible for a non-Komsomol member to be accepted to the university as a student.

But at this point, the whole procedure, which was so easily practiced during Stalin’s years, suddenly stopped. At the meeting, students refused to vote to expel the “insurgents” from the Komsomol. Professor Lebedev shrieked uselessly at the disobedient audience: “You must vote! All workers of the world, even the Japanese, know Comrade Lysenko! He is a member of the Supreme Council of our Government! Those students who humiliated him must be punished!” In fact, Lysenko was deputy head of the USSR Supreme Soviet earlier, from 1938 till 1956. 368Lebedev looked very strange during his tirades. For some reason, in those days he always wore a huge “Rembrandt” beret. Despite all the pressure, the students refused to vote against the three pranksters at this and at a later organized meeting.

Finally, the administration expelled the three from the university without a political charge for two years. Using his friendly connections, the pro-Lysenkoist professor put his son into a mental hospital for several months (where he was not treated). This boy was readmitted to the university the next year, and the other two were readmitted two years later.

During those years, Lebedev lectured on the so-called creative Darwinism. There were two teachers of this Darwinism, Department Chair Fyodor Dvoryankin and Lebedev. Dvoryankin looked the part of a fanatic—extremely thin, frequently dressed up in a Russian folk shirt (in contrast to the “bourgeois” professors of nonproletarian or peasant origin). He energetically tried to persuade students of the reality of all Lysenko’s “miracles,” including the lack of intraspecies competition and the existence of a kind of solidarity within plant species. Lebedev was also very emotional. I cannot forget his last lecture of the course. He plainly stated that the modern discoveries of molecular biology did not prove the physical existence of genes and that DNA had nothing to do with inheritance. He ended the lecture by drawing the main postulate of molecular biology on the board: The word “DNA,” with an arrow pointing to the word “RNA,” and a second arrow pointing from RNA to the word “protein.” Then Lebedev said: “Professor Belozersky tells you that DNA codes proteins through RNA. This is not true.” Suddenly he raised his voice and screamed: “This does not exist!” And he angrily crossed out the drawing several times with a piece of chalk.