Stalin and the Scientists Read online

  STALIN

  AND THE SCIENTISTS

  A History of Triumph and Tragedy 1905–1953

  SIMON INGS

  For my children—

  Leo, whose every Christmas, more or less, has been spent under a tree topped with a hand-fashioned cardboard Stalin,

  and Natalie, who supplied the glue for same.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  List of Illustrations

  Preface

  Prologue: Fuses (1856–1905)

  PART ONE: CONTROL (1905–1929)

  1 Scholars

  2 Revolutionaries

  3 Entrepreneurs

  4 Workers

  5 Exploring the mind

  6 Understanding evolution

  7 Shaping humanity

  PART TWO: POWER (1929–1941)

  8 ‘Storming the fortress of science’

  9 Eccentrics

  10 The primacy of practice

  11 Kooperatorka

  12 The great patron

  13 ‘Fascist links’

  14 Office politics

  15 ‘We shall go to the pyre’

  PART THREE: DOMINION (1941–1953)

  16 ‘Lucky stiffs’

  17 ‘Can I go to the reactor?’

  18 ‘How did anyone dare insult Comrade Lysenko?’

  19 Higher nervous activity

  20 ‘The death agony was horrible’

  21 Succession

  Epilogue: Spoil

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Index

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  Copyright

  Illustrations

  Soviet citizen science: an air velocipede invented by a worker in Moscow. Bettmann/Getty

  Vladimir Vernadsky and friends at St Petersburg University. Courtesy of Synergetic Press/The Commission on Elaboration of Scientific Heritage of Academician V. I. Vernadsky, Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences

  Vladimir Lenin plays chess with Alexander Bogdanov, 1908.

  Paul Dirac and guests of the Sixth National Congress of the Russian Association of Physicists sail down the Volga. AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives

  Biometric studies at Alexei Gastev’s Central Institute of Labour.

  Vsevolod Pudovkin’s film Mechanics of the Brain: The Behaviour of Animals and Man popularised Ivan Pavlov’s physiology as a ‘materialist’ science.

  Scene from Salamandra (1928), a film based on the life and work of Austrian Lamarckist biologist Paul Kammerer.

  Part of the collection of the Moscow Brain Institute. Courtesy of Alla A. Vein

  A model of the Magnitogorsk steel works, on display at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. Sovfoto/UIG via Getty Images

  News of show trials reaches the factory floor, 1936. Sovfoto/UIG via Getty Images

  Ivan Michurin and an assistant. Sputnik/Science Photo Library

  A collection of wheat from the Bureau of Applied Botany’s collection. Sputnik/Alamy

  Children in Donetsk dig potatoes out of the frozen ground.

  Coal miner and national hero Alexei Stakhanov. Sputnik/Alamy Stock Photo

  Nikolai Timofeev-Ressovsky, Cecile and Oskar Vogt, and Hermann Muller in Berlin.

  Trofim Lysenko measuring the growth of a wheat crop. Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis

  Nikolai Vavilov in a prison photograph.

  Young men and women parade a papier maché harvest across Red Square. Framepool

  At the Volkovo cemetery, men bury victims of Leningrad’s siege. Sputnik/Alamy Stock Photo

  Yulii Khariton sits beside a copy of the first Soviet atomic bomb.

  The August 1948 Session of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Courtesy of RGAKFD

  A cartoon by Boris Yefimov casts genetics in a fascist guise.

  A 1949 poster shows Stalin drawing up new forests to change the Russian climate. Courtesy of Stephen Brain

  Nikolai Timofeev-Ressovsky and the mathematician Alexei Liapunov. Nauka Press/V. I. Ivanov/N. A. Ljapunova

  A ship rusts away in what was once the Aral Sea. Courtesy of P. Christopher Staecker

  Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers would be pleased to rectify any omissions or errors brought to their notice at the earliest opportunity.

  Preface

  Come, brethren, let us look in the tomb at the ashes and dust, from which we were fashioned.

  Verse from the Orthodox burial service

  This book – about more or less the whole of scientific life in the Soviet Union, from its birth until the mid-1950s – grew out of my fascination with someone other than Joseph Stalin.

  Alexander Romanovich Luria’s classic neuropsychological case study The Mind of a Mnemonist1 was one of the first books of modern popular science: a slim book that shaped a genre. In it, Luria described the strange world of Solomon Shereshevsky, a man with a memory so prodigious it ruined his life.

  Some years ago I met another Luria obsessive who wondered aloud if there was room for a new biography. I did some research and hit a wall. Luria’s most astonishing achievement, in a career full of astonishing achievements, was his ability to lead a normal life. He betrayed no one, nor was he betrayed. He led a happy family life and enjoyed many close friendships with colleagues abroad. His work was as sound as it was brilliant. Luria’s life and work are endlessly fascinating from a scientific point of view but, for a biographer, there is little to tell that has not already been told.

  Yet here was a man – a Jew in a country goaded by the state into anti-semitism – who exposed himself again and again to political risk, who was repeatedly interrogated, sacked and admonished, whose work was forever being banned. Luria’s career was an extraordinary demonstration of Winston Churchill’s adage that success consists of moving undaunted from failure to failure.

  To unpick the ambiguities of Luria’s quiet life, I realised I would need to explore Luria’s world, and the more I explored, the more I came to appreciate the generation from which Luria sprang: young men and women who grew up in revolutionary times and whom Stalin and his government had not yet cowed into obedience.

  So this has become a much bigger story: it describes what happened when, early in the twentieth century, a motley handful of impoverished and under-employed graduates, professors and entrepreneurs, collectors and, yes, charlatans, bound themselves to a failing government to create a world superpower.

  Russia’s political elites embraced science, patronised it, fetishised it and even tried to impersonate it. This process reached a head in 1939 when the supreme patron of Soviet science established a prize in his own name for scientific research, the Stalin Prize. At the same time, the ‘supreme national scientific institution’, the USSR Academy of Sciences, elected him an honorary member.

  Suspected, envied and feared by the Great Scientist himself, scientific disciplines from physics to psychology, genetics to gerontology (a Soviet invention) sought to avert the many crises facing the country: famine, drought, soil exhaustion, war, rampant alcoholism, a huge orphan problem, epidemics and an average life expectancy of thirty years. Their work, writings and wrangles with the political authorities of their day shaped global progress for well over a century.

  Tsar Alexander II, a successful war leader and diplomat, was an ambitious moderniser. Coming to power in 1856, he transformed Russia’s military, its administration and its tax system, and spurred Russia’s industrialisation. But Alexander’s battle to push his country forward went disastrously awry in 1861, when he ‘freed’ the empire’s 20 million serfs into poverty and homelessness. The tsar became a target of numerous murder plots and, after se
veral narrow escapes, he was assassinated.

  Nicholas II ascended the throne in 1894, by which time Russia’s growing industrialisation had produced a revolutionary socialist movement. By 1905, following a string of embarrassing military defeats, support for the already unpopular government had dwindled. In St Petersburg, troops fired on a peaceful demonstration, sparking the ‘liberal’ Revolution of 1905.

  The First World War brought another crisis, exposing Russia’s dismal command of its natural resources. War losses and crop failures caused the economy to collapse and in St Petersburg – now called Petrograd – riots broke out.2

  Nicholas II abdicated on 2 March 1917, and a shaky provisional government was declared. On 7 November,3 led by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin), the Bolsheviks seized power. But they were far from controlling the whole country, and a bitter civil war ensued. By 1922 Russia was devastated by battles, mass executions and, worst of all, by famine – a crisis that inspired many of the extraordinary scientific careers featured here.

  Lenin’s New Economic Policy, introduced in 1921, relaxed the revolutionary government’s hold over the economy, reintroduced some limited private business and ushered in a period of extraordinary social and cultural change. Stalin’s own son attended an experimental school run by psychoanalysts Sabina Spielrein and Vera Shmidt. Alexei Gastev, a poet and a leading architect of Russia’s industrialisation programme, trained tens of thousands in the subtle art of production-line engineering. His colleague Isaak Spielrein, Sabina’s brother, established a ‘psychotechnical’ community in Russia dedicated to the physical and psychological emancipation of the Soviet worker. Lev Vygotsky and his colleagues Alexander Luria and Alexei Leontiev embarked on a staggeringly ambitious project, rewriting psychology from first principles. The group’s belief in practical, clinical experience led them from trauma wards to orphanages, and from the invention of the lie detector to expeditions in remotest Uzbekistan.

  Following Lenin’s death in January 1924, the Communist Party was torn apart by a bitter power struggle. Lenin’s natural successors, including Trotsky, found themselves marginalised and ultimately destroyed by a man who had barely figured in the 1917 revolution. True, Joseph Stalin had been one of the Bolsheviks’ chief operatives in the Caucasus. He had organised paramilitary units, incited strikes, spread propaganda and raised money through bank robberies, kidnappings, ransom demands and extortion. But his appointment in 1922 as General Secretary of the Communist Party was not considered significant at the time. What Stalin spotted straight away, however, was that the post gave him control over government appointments. Stalin built up a base of support, emerged victorious from the power struggle and went on to rule the Soviet Union for a quarter of a century, becoming one of the most powerful and murderous dictators in history.

  Stalin scrapped Lenin’s New Economic Policy and replaced it with five-year economic plans dictated from the top. This was good for some scientific disciplines, guaranteeing them virtually unlimited funds. For others it was a disaster.

  Industrial development was pushed along at breakneck speed. Stalin’s repressions created a vast system of labour camps managed by a government agency known by its acronym: Gulag. The convicts’ labour, especially in Siberia, became a crucial part of the industrialisation effort. Around 18 million people passed through the gulag system, which became a sort of dark mirror of the state. Just as it boasted its own economy, the gulag boasted its own science base. Several scientists of world importance spent their careers in ‘research prisons’.

  In the end, only obedience mattered. Stalin believed that science should serve the state. ‘Pure research’ was not merely an indulgence. It was counterproductive. It was tantamount to wrecking. Even as he invested recklessly in Russian science, Stalin was arranging the sacking, imprisonment and murder of individual scientists. Ergonomists and industrial psychologists vanished without trace. Psychoanalysis was made illegal. Geneticists, botanists and agronomists languished in gulags across the Soviet Union.

  Even more damaging was the state’s approach to bureaucracy. Institutions were amalgamated with each other and centralised to the point where colleagues tore at each others’ throats in an attempt to keep their jobs. Incredibly, no one thought of introducing a mandatory retirement age. Men conditioned to the acquisition and administration of power – we are talking about professors here, not ministers – clung on and on and on. Entire disciplines went to war with each other. Physiologists attacked psychologists. Laboratory pathologists denounced clinicians.

  By the time Stalin died on 5 March 1953, the Soviet Union boasted the largest and best-funded scientific establishment in history. It was at once the glory and the laughing stock of the intellectual world.

  Stalin and the Scientists is the story of politicians, philosophers and scientists who, over the course of half a century, found themselves intruding – or being dragged by main force – onto each other’s turf. Tutting at this sort of thing comes naturally to us. Priests have no business in party politics. Scientists shouldn’t laugh at religion. The developed world maintains very clear boundaries between these different kinds of discourse and it is not kind to those who stray off their own path and go skipping over the grass.

  It was not always so. In Europe, by about the middle of the nineteenth century, it did seem possible that religion, philosophy, psychology, science and politics might achieve some sort of mutual understanding. Even the Bolsheviks weren’t above reading religion in a psychological manner, so as to fold it into their own ideas of the good life.

  What this meeting of minds required was that things be described completely in terms of their components. Imagine, for instance, that psychology is reducible to physiology, which is reducible to biology, which is reducible to chemistry, which is reducible to physics – this was pretty much the driving dream of mid-nineteenth-century scholarship.

  Friedrich Engels, the German philosopher who cooked up the Marxist style of critical thinking called dialectical materialism, believed that, at some point in the future, all sciences would cohere to form one science, and this one science was bound to bring with it huge social benefit for mankind. In this respect, his thinking was absolutely, yawningly conventional.

  Stalin and the Scientists describes what happened when this dream of science as a unified explanation of everything began to be eroded by scientists’ own discoveries. It describes what this failure meant to a state that justified itself through science, and regarded its own science, Marxism, as the capstone of the whole nineteenth-century enterprise: a science of everything. It is, ultimately, the story of how impatient believers turned on the scientific community and demanded that the future happen right away.

  No wonder they were impatient. No wonder they thought they could get away with it. The early twentieth century was a transformative and traumatic period. These were the years when the universe expanded out of all recognition. In 1917 the American astronomer Heber Curtis pointed out that the novae he observed in spiral nebulae were a hundred times farther away than novae in our own galaxy. In 1924 his close contemporary Edwin Hubble measured the distance to the nearer spiral galaxies. They were 2 million light years away. And the universe went on expanding. In 1922 and 1924, the Russian physicist and pioneer balloonist Alexander Fridman showed that the universe need not be unchanging and that space itself could stretch: insights that led to the idea of the Big Bang.

  The visible world was the least of it: in 1895, Guglielmo Marconi had sent longwave radio signals over a distance of a couple of kilometres, and since then hardly a year passed in which some researcher did not announce a new species of ray. The wildest of those claims were eclipsed in 1933, however, by Fritz Zwicky’s discovery that a considerable fraction of the mass of the universe could not be seen at all. This missing mass became known as dark matter and today it is measured through its gravitational effects.

  This was the moment the universe turned out to follow unexpected, even shocking laws. New areas of physics such as re
lativity theory and quantum mechanics were developed. Biology broke away from its descriptive origins and wrestled for years to reconcile the very different claims of natural selection and genetics. Everywhere you looked, you found unexpected interconnections between the living and the nonliving, and between the very large and the very small. In 1917 William Harkins realised that nuclear processes are turning light elements into heavy ones, and that our whole world is made, quite literally, of stars. The following year the French biologist Paul Portier showed that the mitochondria powering our cells are direct descendants of bacteria.

  This was the moment the world grew complex. In 1918 the English biologist Ronald Fisher used statistics to understand how large populations change over time. It took his peers decades to wrap their heads around his mathematics. Two years later in Germany Hermann Staudinger began Nobel prize-winning work on big molecules, and revealed for the first time the unimaginably intricate world of protein chemistry.

  The world grew rich. Scientific investigations that had once been conducted in private and academic laboratories were now being funded by industry. We learned how to mass-produce. We learned how to throw our voices along wires. We learned how to fly.

  The world grew healthy. People lived better, for longer. Medicine was changed out of all recognition by new forms of pain control, by germ theory and bacteriology, by lab-based chemical analyses, new diagnostic instruments and pharmaceuticals.

  The world grew mindful. In 1894, the Spanish histologist Santiago Ramón y Cajal made the connection between neuronal growth and learning: insight that immeasurably enriched the study of physiology, even as the psychoanalysis developed by Freud, Jung and Spielrein was taking a quite different and utterly compelling ‘top-down’ approach to the mind.

  To this ferment, Soviet scientists contributed the innovations, insights and discoveries that are the chief subject of this book. Though they had their intellectual beginnings as zoologists, psychologists, geologists and botanists, and were steeped in the classic descriptive traditions of nineteenth-century ‘life science’, my protagonists had complex lives that led them into entirely new areas of research. They operated on a heroic scale: from the biologist who took notes on the physiological effects of his own death sentence, to the botanist who delivered scientific lectures in a lightless underground cell while his wife, none the wiser, was sending food parcels to the wrong side of Russia; from the biologist who resorted to theft, fraud and kidnap to support his work, to the poet–ergonomist who built a machine – an actual machine, with pulleys and ropes – to churn out new forms of human being; and from the psychoanalyst who formulated the concept of the ‘death instinct’, to the zoologist who led an expedition to French Guinea to obtain a crossbreed of human and chimpanzee. (The film King Kong was released a year later.)