Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

Another fighter against Lysenko, Corresponding Member of the Academy Yurii Polyansky (1904–1993), a gifted protozoologist, was more lenient than Aleksandrov in his evaluation of the compromises some biologists made concerning Lysenko. 491Polyansky himself did not compromise with the officials, despite being a Party member. Although as a professor he should not have been drafted, like Rapoport and Lobashov, he voluntarily joined the People’s Militia at the beginning of the war with Germany in 1941.

After World War II, Polyansky returned to Leningrad State University, where he was appointed proctor and taught at the Pedagogical Institute [College]. However, in 1947, in cooperation with the Leningrad geneticist Yurii Olenov, he organized an anti-Lysenkoist seminar. Lysenko did not forget this. During the August 1948 Session, Lysenko’s ideologist, Isaak Prezent, attacked Polyansky personally. 492As a result, Polyansky lost his job both at the university and the Pedagogical Institute and became unemployed. Finally, he was accepted at the academy’s Murmansk Biological Station, located on the shore of the Barents Sea above the Arctic Circle. In 1952, Polyansky returned to Leningrad and helped Professor Nasonov to organize the Institute of Cytology. Later, he chaired the Department of Invertebrate Zoology at Leningrad University and headed a laboratory at the Institute of Cytology.

Before he died in 1993, Polyansky finished his memoirs. He wrote: “I, who lived through that horrible time, cannot blame those [biologists] who ‘repented of their errors’ and ‘accepted’ Lysenko and [Olga] Lepeshinskaya because usually each of these persons headed a group of colleagues and pupils, and these people would lose their jobs if their boss was dismissed. Therefore, it was literally a ‘struggle for life.’ Among a very few ‘recalcitrant’ cytologists first of all I would like to name D. N. Nasonov and V. Ya. Aleksandrov.” 493So, giving the examples of Nasonov and Aleksandrov, Polyansky concluded himself that it was possible to withstand the Party line and not to accept orders that contradicted one’s conscience.

However, later, at the academy meeting in 1952, Nasonov was forced to repent of the “sin” of disagreeing with Lepeshinskaya. Prominent doctor Yakov Rapoport (later, in 1953, arrested as a member of “Doctors’ Plot”) recalled: “Then he [Nasonov] rushed out into the foyer covering his face with hands and screaming: ‘I’m so ashamed, so ashamed!’ I tried to comfort him, citing the phrase of M. S. Vovsi [another doctor, later accused of being a member of the “Doctors’ Plot”]: ‘At present, nothing is shameful!’” 494

Of course, the defenders of arrested colleagues, especially in the 1920s–1930s, were not only among biologists. As I described above, Academician Kapitsa was an outstanding example among physicists. But the situation in physics and technology in the late 1940s differed from that in biology. Basically, research in these fields was secret, and numerous imprisoned physicists and engineers worked in the system of special institutes, the so-called sharashki. As mentioned in Chapters 1 and 2, special institutes for imprisoned scientists existed from the late 1920s. However, a system of secret sharashki under the NKVD Department of Special Design Bureaus was established in the late 1930s, on September 29, 1938. 495Even arrested NKVD specialists, especially those from the Foreign Intelligence, were transferred under the NKVD Special Bureau for some time for teaching and writing textbooks. 496Later, they were tried and usually executed. In July 1941, this department was renamed the NKVD/MVD Fourth Special Department, in which 489 imprisoned scientists and 662 NKVD officers worked. 497Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave a fictional description of a typical physical-technological sharashka of the late 1940s in his The First Circle, 498while Lev Kopelev and Dimitri Panin gave a nonfictional account of the same institution. 499There are memoirs of scientists and engineers who worked in aviation construction sharashki . 500In March 1953, after Stalin’s death, the NKVD/MVD Fourth Special Department was disbanded. 501

One of the former imprisoned sharashka workers, Lev Kopelev (who, like Efroimson, tried to protest against Soviet atrocities in Germany and was accused of “slandering the Soviet Army”), gave a psychological analysis (through the words of his friend, the imprisoned engineer Panin) of how the MGB turned free scientists into slaves in the sharashki :

Everything is set up very simply. Professors, engineers with higher degrees, inventors—they’re all used to being spoiled…. On the outside, your head is rarely concerned only with work…. A person like that can be helped only by our Soviet security organs. They grab him by the scruff of the neck, drag him to Lubyanka, Lefortovo or Sukhanovka 502—confess, bastard, who did you spy on, how did you wreck, where did you sabotage…. They lower him once or twice into the cooler when it’s freezing, when there’s water in it. They’ll hit him on the face, the ass, the ribs—not to kill or maim, but so that he will feel pain and shame, so that he will know that he is no longer a human being but just a nothing and that they can do whatever they want to him. The prosecutor will explain the articles [of the Russian Criminal Code] to him and promise him the maximum. The investigator threatens to arrest his wife if he doesn’t confess. And then, after all that, they will give him a magnanimous ten years…

So they’re preparing the cadres for the sharashki…. No days off. Vacation is a foreign word. Overtime is sheer pleasure; anything’s better than sleeping in the cell. You chase away thought of freedom, of home—they only bring on depression and despair. And work is no longer a duty but the only meaning of life, the substitute for all pleasures and all comforts…

…In the sharashki… they address you by your name and patronymic, feed you decently, better than many eat on the outside; you work in warmth, sleep on a straw mattress with a sheet. No worries—just make sure to use your brain, think, invent, perfect, advance science and technology. 503

Kopelev and Panin worked at the sharashka Marfino located in the suburbs of Moscow, described by Solzhenitsyn in The First Circle. Some of the German POWs also worked there in 1949. One of the Germans who had had training in radio engineering and who was released from the Soviet captivity in 1950 concluded that this secret institute was organized for high-frequency research, 504which was true.

Compared to the sharashki involved in theoretical and applied physics, biological sharashki such as Muromtsev’s laboratory were not so numerous or of the same economic and military importance. Possibly, only the sharashka created for Timofeev-Ressovsky within the Soviet atomic project was as important as the technical sharashki .

I think that the existence of sharashki during Stalin’s regime, especially during and after World War II, had a profound effect on the entire Soviet scientific community. Even those theoretical physicists who were free still worked in the same secret system as imprisoned scientists under the most powerful person in the Soviet Union after Stalin, Lavrentii Beria (head of the atomic project) and his NKVD/MVD managers such as Zavenyagin. There were Beria’s personal representatives, the special “plenipotentiaries of the Council of People’s Commissars,” at each research facility and nuclear plant involved in the atomic bomb project. 505This was the beginning of the First Departments and “curators” within each research institution. It was not possible for free scientists like young Sakharov to overlook that the secret atomic center where the Soviet A-bombs and H-bombs were created, Arzamas-16 (constructed from 1946–1951), was built by approximately 10,000 inmates of labor camps located within this town. 506The NKVD/MVD Main Directorate of Camps for Industrial Construction (Glavpromstroi) with its network of labor camps was in charge of the construction of all buildings for the atomic project. The Spetsmetupravlenie within the NKVD/MVD Main Directorate of Camps of the Mining Metallurgic Industry (GUILGMP) was in charge of the prospecting, mining, and enriching of the uranium. Many of the inmates of labor camps in Arzamas-16 were political prisoners condemned on the basis of Article 58 of the Russian Criminal Code. The head of the A-bomb project, Academician Kurchatov, had no problem with the use of slave labor. On March 25, 1947, he sent Beria (together with Beria’s “plenipotentiary Pavlov”) a request for “POWs construction workers” to build the secret Laboratory No. 2. 507