Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

In 1962, Efroimson received his Doctor of Biological Sciences diploma, fifteen years after he defended his thesis in 1947. It was not given to him before that because of his arrest. Finally, in 1967 Efroimson was accepted at the Moscow Institute of Psychiatry, where he headed the Genetics Department. In 1975, he was forced to retire from this post, and from then until his death, he was professor-consultant at the academy’s N. K. Koltsov Institute of Developmental Biology. 420This institute was organized in 1967 by another Koltsov pupil, Boris Astaurov. 421

Efroimson’s last two monographs, Genetics of Ethics and Esthetics and Genius and Genetics, were published in 1995 and 1998, unfortunately only in Russian, after his death. 422These books have no parallel in scientific literature. Their analysis of human history, interpreted by a geneticist with the understanding of biological mechanisms of aspects of human behavior, required outstanding erudition and the ability to collect and analyze data in many fields. And Efroimson had these abilities. He could talk about history and literature for hours, and he was a workaholic, able to spend eighteen hours a day at his desk. He believed that human history showed that such characteristics as altruism, heroism, conscience, respect for old people, parental love, intellectual curiosity, and so on “have entered into the basic stock of man’s inherited characteristics.” 423

Efroimson created a theory that he believed could help to select genetically gifted children. He naively thought that the Soviet authorities would be interested in finding such kids and creating the most favorable conditions for the development of their talents. It is sad that he valued this theory so much that he was afraid of meeting his former mate at the labor camp, the American Alexander Dolgun, after the latter had been released from imprisonment. This was understandable. Meetings with foreign citizens unsupervised by the KGB were still forbidden for Soviet citizens even during the late 1950s–1960s, and Efroimson did not want to jeopardize the theory he was working on. Later, Dolgun recalled: “We became very friendly in prison, although years later when I tried to look him up in Moscow he refused to see me because I was American and he feared a third term. But… in Dzhezkazgan, on our first meeting, he gave me some extra food he had saved and began to explain the camp routine to me. He seemed a man who knew his way around, and I decided to stick close to him at first, as long as I needed his help.” 424

Emotionally, it was not easy for me to write about Vladimir Pavlovich Efroimson. During the last years of his life, I spent many hours in his kitchen listening to his memories and discussing many scientific topics with him. When I received a telegram about his death, I was thousands miles away from Moscow, above the Arctic Circle. 425 It was difficult for me to get to Moscow in time for his funeral. At first I persuaded somebody who had a car to take me through 300 miles of tundra to Murmansk. Then I almost had a fistfight with people standing in a long line in Murmansk for plane tickets to Moscow.

I felt strongly that I ought to pay my last respects to Vladimir Pavlovich: He was the only scientist who tried to help me when I lost my job and was not accepted at any institute because of my confrontation with the KGB. Efroimson did not ask me what my problem was; he had too much knowledge about the NKVD-MGB-KGB and figured out what was going on without questioning me. He simply said that he would accompany me to the Leninsky Region Party Committee and would demand they find a professional job for me (the main academy research institutes and Moscow University were located in this region of Moscow). And he did. Together we had an appointment with an official at the Science Department of the committee. Efroimson said: “I want him [i.e., me] to continue what I’m working on. For this purpose he must have a job.” Of course, nothing came of this attempt. But Efroimson was the only one who tried to help. The others whom I asked for help refused.

In 1952, two scientific magazines, the Botanical Journal and Bulletin of the Moscow Society of Naturalists , started to publish papers that strongly criticized Lysenko’s “creative Darwinism.” Academician Vladimir Sukachev (1880–1967), director of the Academy Institute of Forestry, chief editor of the Botanical Journal , president of the Botanical Society since 1948, and president of the Moscow Society of Naturalists since 1955, was behind this anti-Lysenko campaign. 426Sukachev was elected corresponding member in 1920, and academician in 1943. His Institute of Forestry had worked on the problem of intraspecies competition since 1925. 427During the 1940s–1950s, Sukachev was a member of the bureau of the Academy Biology Division. This high position within the academy structure helped him to become a leader of the campaign against Lysenko. However, many years before his uncompromising fight against Lysenko, in the early 1930s, Sukachev had used Marxist political slang against his scientific rivals, calling them counterrevolutionaries, and so on. 428Evidently, this was because he was a member of the Bolshevik Party.

In 1952, the Botanical Journal started the campaign with a paper written by one of the main former supporters of Lysenko, Nikolai Turbin. After the August 1948 Session, Turbin was appointed chair of the Department of Genetics and Selection at Leningrad University. Now he openly wrote that Lysenko’s experiments were unsubstantiated. 429Among other Lysenkoists, at the beginning of 1953, Academician Oparin published a furious answer to the attack of the Botanical Journal under the title “I. V. Stalin, the Inspirer of the Leading Biological Science”:

For all Soviet biologists, this document [the text of Lysenko’s speech at the August 1948 Session], personally reviewed by I. V. Stalin, is a precious program for the creative development of biology, one that defines its course and goals. Soviet creative Darwinism constitutes the granite foundation, the solid base on which all branches of biology are tempestuously developing. 430

It was a little bit late to use Stalin’s name to defend Lysenko. On March 5, 1953, Stalin died.

The Botanical Journal invited Lysenko to write an article about his views. The paper “A New Departure in the Science of Biological Species” was published in the first 1953 issue of the journal. 431It repeated Lysenko’s usual statements about species transformations. Sukachev’s paper “On the Intraspecies and Interspecies Relationships Among Plants” followed Lysenko’s article. Sukachev analyzed Lysenko’s arguments in detail and revealed their scientific weakness. 432After that, methodically, one after another, anti-Lysenkoist articles appeared in the Botanical Journal . 433

In 1954, the Moscow Society of Naturalists (MOIP) also started to publish a series of anti-Lysenkoist articles in its Bulletin . Established in 1805, the MOIP was the oldest Russian scientific society. 434It was possibly the only scientific institution in the Soviet Union that managed to continue and maintain ethical traditions in science. In 1931, the then president of MOIP, the zoologist Menzbir, wrote a letter to Molotov in defense of an arrested member of the society, physicist academician Pyotr Lazarev, and Lazarev was released. 435Although it was a part of the Moscow University structure, the society managed to withstand Lysenkoism with minor losses. According to the memoirs of the geologist academician Aleksandr Yanshin, in 1949 the president of MOIP, the chemist and academician Nikolai Zelinsky (1861–1953), in response to the August 1948 Session of VASKhNIL organized the Genetics Section within the society. 436Zelinsky was one of the founders of organic synthesis and oil chemistry. Also, in 1915, during World War I, he invented a gas mask with a charcoal filter. He was elected to the academy in 1929.