Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

At that time Kovalev was serving a term in a labor camp for political prisoners. In 1970, Kovalev, a well-known electrophysiologist, was forced out of Moscow State University after he became a founding member of the Initiative Group for Human Rights in Moscow. In 1974, he and several other human rights activists reestablished publishing the Chronicle of Current Events , an unofficial underground magazine devoted to descriptions of human rights violations in the USSR (the first issue was published in 1968). At the end of 1974, Kovalev was arrested by the KGB, and in December of 1975, he was tried in Vilnius, Lithuania. He was accused of editing Issues 28–34 of the Chronicle . Kovalev received the maximum punishment for Soviet political prisoners (Article No. 70 of the Soviet Criminal Code), seven years in a special labor camp and three years in exile. He returned to Moscow in the late 1980s.

When Lyusya and I entered Sakharov’s apartment, Andrei Dmitrievich asked me to keep him informed on the events at the Fourteenth International Congress of Genetics scheduled for the next month, August. August 1978 was a special date—thirty years after Lysenko’s triumph at the August 1948 Session and ten years after the oppression of the Prague Spring by Soviet troops. It had already become known that many foreign geneticists had refused to go to the Moscow congress because of the trials against Orlov and Shcharansky.

However, the congress sessions went smoothly. I had a feeling that the number of plainclothes KGB agents exceeded the number of foreign scientists who attended the meeting. There was only one unsuccessful attempt to show solidarity with the imprisoned Kovalev. During the last general session, the Soviet embryologist Aleksandr Neyfakh came up to the microphone and started to read a letter in defense of Kovalev signed by some of the participants of the congress. Immediately, biochemist Academician Aleksandr Baev, who himself spent seventeen years in Stalin’s camps and exile, rushed to the microphone and interrupted Neyfakh’s effort. Most participants did not even notice or understand what had happened.

I visited Academician Sakharov at his dacha. He was sitting at an outside table in front of the dacha writing something. I noticed that he was left-handed. I apologized for the intrusion and told him my impressions about the congress and Neyfakh’s attempt.

It is evident that against all odds during the existence of the Soviet Union, moral opposition to the regime was expressed by at least some scientists. During the 1920s–1930s, it was basically in the form of letters to the highest Party and state officials in defense of arrested colleagues. For this form of protest, a person needed to have courage. Each letter could be used by the secret services as a reason to arrest the defender. Despite the danger, these letters, especially those written by academicians elected before the Bolshevik Revolution, were not rare. Thus, Academician Vernadsky, who was already a famous scientist and politician before the revolution (he was even a member of the Provisional Government), was not aware of the fact that the OGPU/NKVD had been preparing a case against him. For this, the NKVD used “testimonies” of several scientists arrested in 1933–1934 among a hundred intellectuals accused of having been members of the Russian National Party (RNP). 478This “Party” never existed and was invented by the OGPU/NKVD. Vernadsky sent numerous letters to the heads of the OGPU/NKVD, Molotov, and other Soviet functionaries in defense of the hydrologist Boris Lichkov (1888–1960), who was among the alleged RNP members. 479After spending almost six years in labor camps, Lichkov was released and lived in Samarkand until 1945, when he was allowed to return to Leningrad. Vernadsky constantly wrote friendly letters to Lichkov when he was in labor camps and exile, despite the danger of being in contact with a political convict. Besides Lichkov, Vernadsky tried to save other arrested scientists—the historian and corresponding member Vladimir Beneshevich (1874–1943), Dmitrii Shakhovskoi (1861–1939), the geologist professors Anatolii Boldyrev (1883–1946) and Vladimir Arshinov, Veniamin Zilbermints, chemists Bruno Brunovsky and Aleksandr Simorin. Of all of them, only Arshinov was released, in 1940. After Vernadsky’s letter to Chief Prosecutor Vyshinsky and letters from other scientists, Boldyrev was also released from one of the Kolyma labor camps. However, he was allowed to work only in the same area, in the Dalstroi system. In 1946, Boldyrev froze to death on the way to one of the Kolyma mines. 480

There are many other examples. As mentioned, before Nikolai Vavilov was arrested, he defended his imprisoned coworkers. And after Vavilov had been arrested, his teacher, Academician Pryanishnikov, and some of Vavilov’s colleagues tried to defend him. In the 1930s, Lysenko’s rise to power was accompanied by the arrests of many geneticists. Lysenko, whose weird theories became the Party line and were approved by Stalin himself, simply used his connections at the highest Party level and the OGPU/NKVD to eliminate opponents such as Vavilov. The numerous attacks of Prezent, who from 1932 became the main ideologist of Lysenko, on biologists working in different fields usually ended with the arrests of his opponents.

The triumphal procession of Lysenko to complete power over biology was temporarily interrupted by World War II. As a high-ranking bureaucrat stated later, “the [Soviet] geneticists were saved by the Nazis. If not for the war [against Germany], we would destroy you [the geneticists] in 1941.” 481After the August 1948 Session of VASKhNIL, not only the defense of arrested colleagues but even the expression of a professional opinion that contradicted the Party-approved Lysenko “biology” became a crime and was punished. The form of punishment had also changed. The arrests of biologists because of their anti-Lysenkoist views became rare, and the open anti-Lysenkoists were simply fired without hope of finding a new professional position. This meant professional unemployment for years, sometimes for the rest of one’s days.

According to Soviet rules, to be employed, a professional needed to have a good reference (kharakteristika) from the former place of work signed by the director of the institution, the secretary of the institution’s Party organization, and the chair of the institution’s trade union organization. Trade unions formally existed in the Soviet Union, but in fact they were simply an additional mechanism of Communist Party control. A biologist who was described in his or her reference as a person who did not follow the Party-approved line in biology had almost no chance of finding a new job, especially in the main scientific centers of Moscow or Leningrad. A kharakteristika was needed also for keeping the job of researcher or teacher, because once every several years, a contest for the position was announced and only a person with a loyal political background and behavior had a chance of winning it. But even so, most biologists refused to accept Lysenko’s nonsense.

It is amazing that decisions about Soviet biology and theoretical medicine were made at the highest Party and state level. Stalin expressed his views on genetics to Vavilov at personal meetings, edited texts of Lysenko’s speeches, and read the book about cruzin written by Drs. Roskin and Klyueva. He recommended how to deal with opposition to Lysenko and how to punish Academician Parin. All these actions were approved by the Politburo. Thus, any scientist who defended an arrested colleague or even refused to accept Lysenko’s doctrine automatically became a political enemy of the state. The arrest of such a person was simply a matter of time. I think that only Stalin’s death prevented the mass arrests of those who withstood Lysenko during the late 1940s and early 1950s.