Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

The same year, in August 1961, Lysenko was reinstalled as president of the Agricultural Academy with the help of Nikita Khrushchev and without election. 450But in October 1964, Khrushchev was dismissed from his positions in the course of the “bloodless coup.” Leonid Brezhnev became general secretary of the Party and the Soviet leader. In February 1965, Lysenko was not reelected as president of VASKhNIL or even as a member of its presidium. 451Although Lysenko retained his membership in the USSR Academy of Sciences, the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, and VASKhNIL, his glorious days were in the Stalinist past. He died in 1976.

After Stalin’s death, a number of protests against KGB control of scientific biological institutions came out into the open. In 1956, Sergei Muromtsev, a former colleague of Mairanovsky and head of a secret MGB laboratory, was appointed director of the Gamaleya Institute of Epidemiology and Microbiology (IEM) within the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences. A former political prisoner, Academician Pavel Zdrodovsky, refused to work under his guidance. 452Beginning in 1937, Academician Zdrodovsky was arrested several times 453and finally ended up at Muromtsev’s secret MGB lab (sharashka) as an imprisoned scientist. In 1956, Dr. Zdrodovsky quit the IEM, returning to the institute only after Muromtsev’s death in 1960.

Another former political prisoner, Academician Lev Zilber (1894–1966), the author of the virus theory of cancer, continued his work at the same institute after a “serious conversation” with Muromtsev. It was well known at the institute that during this dialogue chairs were broken. 454Both Zdrodovsky and Zilber knew the brutality of Muromtsev very well. When they were forced to work as imprisoned scientists at the secret bacteriological MGB sharashka headed by Muromtsev, they were abused so much that Zilber asked the MGB administration to transfer him to a common labor camp, where he had no chance of survival. Later, at the Gamaleya Institute, Muromtsev tried to tell Zilber that he “had to” beat both him and Zdrodovsky up at the MGB sharashka because otherwise, the other MGB officers would have beaten them more severely. 455

It is worth mentioning the history of Dr. Zilber’s virus theory of cancer. Like Academician Zdrodovsky, Academician Zilber was arrested by the NKVD-MGB three times: in 1931, 1937–1939, and 1940–1944. 456In 1931, he was accused of “a deliberate attempt to infect the population” of the city of Baku with the plague virus and, in 1937, of attempting to disseminate the virus of Japanese encephalitis. In 1940, he was accused of “high treason against the Motherland.” In spite of torture during interrogations in 1937 and 1940, Zilber never signed the false papers prepared by his NKVD interrogators. His arrest in 1940 prevented the publishing of a monograph on encephalitis, which he wrote before his second arrest in 1937.

In 1940, after spending some time in the terrible labor camps in the Pechora River area in the northern part of European Russia, Dr. Zilber was brought to Moscow, where he was offered a transfer to a secret bacteriological laboratory within the NKVD-MGB system (possibly Laboratory No. 1). Dr. Zilber refused and was sent to a NKVD-MGB chemical laboratory (another sharashka ). He was forced to work on the production of alcohol from reindeer moss. Here, hiding from the MGB agents and informers at the laboratory, Dr. Zilber managed to write The Virus Theory of Cancer Etiology on very thin sheets of rice paper. Dr. Zilber smuggled these sheets secretly to Dr. Zinaida Ermol’eva, the discoverer of Soviet penicillin in 1942. She was allowed, together with Dr. Zilber’s brother, the writer Valentin Kaverin, to visit him every two or three months. After this, a group of high-ranking members of the Soviet biological and medical establishment, including Academicians Nikolai Burdenko, Leon Orbeli, and Vladimir Engelhardt, wrote a letter to Stalin defending Dr. Zilber, who was then released from prison in March 1944. Between that time and his death in 1966, Academician Zilber worked on the problem of cancer etiology. In 1952, during the hysterical anti-Semitic campaign against “cosmopolitans” and “doctor-killers,” Dr. Zilber expected to be arrested again. Only the death of Stalin prevented the arrest of his colleagues and himself.

Unfortunately, Dr. Zilber did not prevent a KGB colonel and later general, Oganes Baroyan, from becoming director of the same IEM after Muromtsev’s death, although he knew about Baroyan’s affiliation with the KGB. 457In the late 1940s, Baroyan headed a Soviet hospital in Tehran, capital of Iran, and was on good terms with the shah, whom he treated. Through Baroyan, Soviet Intelligence influenced some of the Shah’s political decisions. 458Later, as a KGB agent, Baroyan worked at the World Health Organization from which he was finally expelled. As director of the Gamaleya Institute, he was elected a member of the Medical Academy. Baroyan was well known within the scientific community for abusing his subordinates. 459

There were other examples of those who resisted Party and KGB control. Boris Astaurov, a geneticist, academician, and director of the Koltsov Institute of Developmental Biology, refused to dismiss Professor Aleksandr Neyfakh (1926–1997) from his position as head of a laboratory after Neyfakh had been expelled from the Communist Party for demonstrating sympathy toward participants in the Red Square demonstration against the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. 460Even when he was young, Astaurov showed unusual courage. In 1930, he openly refused to vote for the death penalty for the defendants of the Promparty case. 461According to the ritual of Stalin’s time, everyone was forced to vote against the defendants at meetings organized during show trials. This way the Party officials pretended that the decisions at show trials were supported by the whole population. To save Astaurov from arrest, Koltsov sent him to Central Asia to work with the silkworm. Astaurov, along with two famous physicists, Academicians Sakharov and Pyotr Kapitsa, actively defended biologist Zhores Medvedev, who in late May 1970 was diagnosed as suffering from “creeping schizophrenia” and was placed, by force, in a psychiatric hospital in the town of Kaluga (about 100 miles from Moscow) because of his dissident activity and for publishing the book The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko in the United States. As Sakharov recalled later, “Medvedev’s work in two disparate fields—biology and political science—was regarded as evidence of a split personality, and his conduct allegedly exhibited symptoms of social maladjustment. In fact, his detention was the Lysenkoites’ revenge for his book attacking them…” 462

Academician Sakharov “went to the Institute of Genetics, where an international symposium on biochemistry and genetics was in progress. Many scientists had come from the socialist countries and twenty to thirty from the West.” 463Before the session began, he wrote on the blackboard: “I am collecting signatures in defense of the biologist Zhores Medvedev, who has been forcibly and illegally placed in a psychiatric hospital for his writings. Contact me during the break or reach me at home. A. D. Sakharov.”

The director of the Institute of Genetics, Academician Nikolai Dubinin (who in 1939 betrayed his teacher, Nikolai Koltsov), erased the announcement. Despite this, many dissidents signed the letter to Soviet authorities drafted by Sakharov. The academic establishment was outraged by Sakharov’s action. “I was called in by [Mstislav] Keldysh, president of the Academy,” continued Sakharov in his memoirs, “and reprimanded for my behavior. I argued with him, and he promised to talk to the Minister of Health, Academician Boris Petrovsky.” 464The mathematician Mstislav Keldysh (1911–1978) was president of the Academy of Sciences from 1961 to 1975.