Stalin and the Scientists Read online

  In Moscow, in an attempt to restore order, the army moved in. In December 1905 they shelled the city, killing over a thousand people.

  The peasants revolted. In an attempt to quell rural rioting, thousands were sentenced to death by military court-martial, and 14,000 were shot dead. Punitive expeditions scoured the Baltic, Poland and the route of the Trans-Siberian Railway sacking, burning and killing. ‘Don’t skimp on bullets,’ came the order, ‘and make no arrests.’

  The gentry, in a panic, rushed to sell up. Land prices and rents collapsed.

  There was hunger that winter; nothing like on the scale of 1891–2, but bad enough, and made far worse by the political chaos. In Tambov, Vernadsky, his son George and the Vernadovka estate’s overseer organised famine relief, and took the opportunity to tell starving peasants about the forthcoming parliamentary elections. They were promptly arrested. George was free after a week but it took Vladimir a visit to the prime minister, Count Sergei Witte, to get his overseer’s family out of jail.

  In the capital, St Petersburg, ‘an icy shudder of disenchantment with parties, politics and organisations pierced the hearts of all like a knife. Bitter quarrels arose. Finally no one gave a damn about anything … There was no faith in anything or anyone.’

  This grotesque picture of the city comes from the poet Alexei Kapitonovich Gastev, returning from Stockholm in the spring of 1906:

  Desperate, exhausted people stagger down magnificent Nevsky Prospekt. Miserable, useless, they commit suicide in the Neva and in the Fontanka and Mojka canals, they throw themselves from tall buildings onto the pavement, shoot themselves, take poison, even hang themselves on the crosses in the cemeteries. Suicides became so common that the newspapers finally took notice of only the most ‘interesting’ cases.17

  The First Duma met first in April 1906. But it was a pale imitation of what the tsar had promised, and when the Kadets protested, it was promptly dissolved. In April 1906 Peter Stolypin became prime minister and set about expunging all trace of radical thought, dissolving the second Duma in 1907. As everyone involved started watching out for themselves, the Kadets quickly lost support. The Third Duma was a rubber-stamp affair, dominated by the landed gentry. Tsar Nicholas II was becoming ever more obsessed with his own royal privileges and, as he got rid of honest advisors, toadies and charlatans like Rasputin took their place.

  The mood of national hopelessness is not hard to spot. The novels, poetry and plays of the period smack of apocalypse. Blok, Bely and Briusov all wrote as though the End Times were nigh, if they had not already arrived. Years before he produced his celebrated dystopian novel We, the satirist Yevgeny Zamyatin was writing stories that welcomed catastrophe as the quickest route out of Russia’s political impasse.

  *

  On 20 November 1910 the writer Leo Tolstoy died. Though his political views were outdated, the young had regarded him with great affection. Students in universities all over the country held memorial services and passed resolutions promising to honour Tolstoy’s memory by fighting against capital punishment. In St Petersburg, thousands of students gathering for a demonstration on the Nevsky Prospekt were confronted by the city’s police. When the pro-rector of the university, Ivan Andreev, tried to persuade the students to disperse; they lifted him on their shoulders and carried him along as they sang.

  By the end of November, over 400 students had been arrested. The Russian News, Moscow’s liberal newspaper, recorded how:

  many police with rifles and fixed bayonets [were] ranged along the long corridors of the university; professors, along with small numbers of students, are escorted by armed police to lectures. Armed police stand in the lecture halls. Students storm in, trying to interrupt lectures with whistles, noxious gases, and the singing of revolutionary songs.18

  One professor, accosted by a student, collapsed in hysterics and had to be carried away.

  Police stormed Moscow University. With their institution now fatally compromised, its three highest officials decided to resign. With them went Vladimir Vernadsky and more than a third of the teaching staff. It looked as though the university was finished. By now, though, it hardly mattered. Both professors and students had better uses for their time.

  Why fight the dismal state education system, when you could simply replace it? In Germany a network of well-funded research institutions, the Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft, was being created. What if Russian entrepreneurs could do the same?

  Moscow’s professors came in the main from merchant families or had personal ties to local merchants and industrialists. They set up entrepreneurial organisations based on German and British models to lobby for private funding. They taught at private universities and on highly regarded women’s courses, set up by liberal-minded industrial philanthropists. Many of the professors who resigned from Moscow University never went back. They enjoyed more freedom teaching outside the system, in institutions like Moscow City People’s University, founded in 1908 on endowments from General Alfons Shaniavsky, a retired Polish officer and gold magnate who had already piled cash into women’s medical education.

  The state wouldn’t employ the Shaniavsky’s graduates the way it employed those who had earned a ‘real’ degree, but no one cared. Few imagined the state would last past the next winter. Courses in public administration, the cooperative movement, public health and education conscientiously prepared a new generation for a new era.

  *

  Having resigned from Moscow University, Vladimir Vernadsky was elected to the Imperial Academy of Sciences and moved to St Petersburg. As an able administrator, he nursed ambitious plans for learning, and in particular for the physical sciences. With his favourite student, Alexander Fersman, he lobbied the government to develop the country’s mining potential. Annual expeditions with his students to remote regions of the empire identified and mapped sites rich in aluminium. But it was hopeless. In the summer of 1913, in Canada to attend an International Geological Congress, he wrote to his wife Natalia:

  Over the past ten years the United States has made huge advances in science: today America gets along without the help of German universities, which not long ago was considered indispensable. When I involuntarily compare these years in Russia – the activity of Kasso and Company, that whole gang that constitutes our Imperial government – I feel depressed and uneasy.

  Come the war, when a rich deposit of tungsten in Turkestan was put out of bounds because one of the grand dukes owned the land, another academician, the mathematician Alexei Krylov, went a lot further. If they lost the war, he snapped, the grand dukes weren’t the only ones who stood to lose everything; the whole dynasty would go to the devil’s mother.19

  In the aftermath of the assassination of Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as Russia toppled towards war, a crucial weakness was revealed: Russia’s utter dependence on trade with Germany. Its science, its industry, its very economy depended on good relations with the country it was fighting.

  The hopelessness of the situation was movingly summed up on 18 July 1914 by Alexander Sergeevich Serebrovsky, later one of the Soviet Union’s leading geneticists. He wrote in his diary:

  I am a soldier now. The city was decorated with flags and so on. God, what a sea of unrestrained lies in all this … Many people I know were waiting for a manifesto and equal rights for nationalities. Jews were walking with the torah singing God, Save the Tsar. Some intellectuals shouted hurray when the tsar passed by.

  All these expectations turned out to be crap. The tsar didn’t have enough state wisdom. He could with one scratch of his pen affirm his throne for many years to come, create a faithful Russia for himself, and win the sympathy of the people, including the intelligentsia. They could really reach the unification of the people and the government. Oh, I know that I would have gone to the front with a totally different feeling and state of mind … They drove expectations to the highest tension, made even streetcar drivers take part in parades, and gave nothing …

  I love Russia too much
to wish it a victorious war now. A victorious war for Russia is like a return to a distant past. Losing the war is another step forward to the bright future.20

  Notes

  1. Quoted in David Holloway, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939–1956, p. 112.

  2. Quoted in Bailes, Science and Russian Culture, p. 9.

  3. Ibid., p. 17.

  4. Ibid., p. 26.

  5. The restrictions placed on women, and their efforts to get around them, generated some bizarre headlines, as when some Jewish women who had registered as prostitutes in order to gain residence rights in St Petersburg were discovered to have enrolled as auditors in medical institutes and private higher courses for women. The story (which was perfectly true) combined high-mindedness and salaciousness in such exquisite proportions that it inspired four feature films by the end of the First World War. See Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (University of California Press, 2004). Also worth a look are Ann Koblitz, Science, Women and Revolution in Russia, and Samuel Kassow, Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia.

  6. V. I. Vernadsky, Geochemistry and the Biosphere.

  7. Vernadsky’s visionary late works are discussed in Arsenii B. Roginsky, Felix F. Perchenok, and Vadim M. Borisov, ‘Community as the Source of Vernadsky’s Concept of Noosphere’, Configurations, 1 (1993), p. 415; and Akop P. Nazaretyan, ‘Big (Universal) History Paradigm: Versions and Approaches’, Social Evolution and History, 4 (2005), pp. 61–86.

  8. Bailes, Science and Russian Culture, p. 65.

  9. David Moon, ‘The Environmental History of the Russian Steppes: Vasilii Dokuchaev and the Harvest Failure of 1891’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (Sixth Series) 15 (2005), p. 158.

  10. The question was not particularly fair. Given the scale of the disaster, the government’s measures proved effective. By 1893 the Russian economy was functioning as if the famine had never happened. But by then nobody was in a mood to hear good news. See James Simms, ‘The Economic Impact of the Russian Famine of 1891–92’, Slavonic and East European Review 60, no. 1 (1982), p. 70.

  11. Quoted in Kendall E. Bailes, Science and Russian Culture, p. 85.

  12. Kassow, Students, Professors, and the State in Tsarist Russia, p. 217.

  13. Ibid., p. 227.

  14. Ibid., p. 253.

  15. Ibid., p. 266.

  16. Ibid., p. 269.

  17. Kurt Johansson and A. K. Gastev, Aleksej Gastev, Proletarian Bard of the Machine Age, p. 29.

  18. Kassow, Students, Professors, and the State, p. 356.

  19. Bailes, Science and Russian Culture, p. 140.

  20. R. Fando, ‘The Unknown About a Well-known Biologist’, Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences 78 (2), (1 April 2008), pp. 165–6.

  2: Revolutionaries

  Friends and rivals: Vladimir Lenin plays chess with Alexander Bogdanov on a visit to Maxim Gorky on Capri. Italy, April 1908.

  Across the Earth, from corner to corner of the world revolutions howl. The war that was begun to delight the kings, the tsars, the presidents, has become a tornado that tears down imperial palaces, burns royal mantles, sends crowns flying and turns kings into dust. The world in which everything seemed to be arranged so beautifully has collapsed … And we want to be the newcomers; we shall lift the curtain from the cities, the streets, the workshops, the bazaars … We shall immediately set our factory of art humming.1

  Alexei Gastev

  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels liked to think of themselves as scientists. At least, they considered themselves philosophers of science.

  But even that isn’t quite right: German has no separate word for science; nor does Russian. The German term Wissenschaft (enquiry) and the Russian term nauka (knowledge) make no clear distinction between sciences and humanities, let alone between physical sciences and their ‘soft’ social-science cousins.

  That these languages lack a dedicated term for the physical sciences reflects their rich nineteenth-century cultural heritage. Back then it was still possible to believe that the universe was knowable, and that one kind of knowledge was, at least in principle, compatible with all other kinds of knowledge. People thought that the universe could not abide contradictions.

  It was this dream of uniting all disciplines under one roof that captivated Friedrich Engels. He constructed an entire philosophy around the idea, called ‘new materialism’. (It was a later philosopher, Georgy Plekhanov, who stuck the slightly baffling handle ‘dialectical materialism’ to it.)

  The world needed a ‘new’ materialism because the ‘old’ materialism of Newton would no longer serve. No one seriously disputes that Newtonian mechanics is a scientific triumph: a productive, insightful model of how the physical world ticks. The trouble is, the more widely we apply it, the more alienated it makes us feel. Vital for Newton’s success was the presence of organised religion to explain and describe some of the major gaps in his account of reality. (Isaac Newton was, unsurprisingly, a profoundly religious man.)

  By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, evidence against the ‘revealed knowledge’ of the Bible was piling up at an unignorable rate. Scientists and philosophers were having to look elsewhere for an explanation for non-Newtonian phenomena: things like love, and grief, and memory, and the colour green.2

  Engels’s philosophy is ‘materialist’ because it finds a home for these subjective experiences in the physical world; it doesn’t imagine that minds exist in a separate, spiritual realm. It is ‘dialectical’ in the sense that all knowledge is obtained through reasoned argument and enquiry. Knowledge is provisional, because we are provisional. We’re not the same people we were yesterday, and none of us will be around forever. So knowledge is being constantly re-reasoned, re-confirmed and re-believed.

  Dialectical materialism is interested in how things change. Everything, according to dialectical materialism, has a past and a future, and this history matters if we are to understand how the world works.

  Marx, with his lively interest in economics, history and psychology, bought into nineteenth-century ‘scientism’ in a major way, and he believed that, through Engels’ more elegant ‘new’ materialism, it might be possible to extend the natural sciences into all spheres of life.

  He believed, that is, in scientific government.3 His idea was not to politicise science, but to extend science into politics, to the point where there could be no distinction between knowledge and policy. In 1894 Lenin wrote this about Marx:

  The irresistible power of attraction that draws socialists of all countries to this theory lies precisely in the fact that it unites a rigorous and most lofty scientism (being the last word in social science) with revolutionism, and unites them not by chance, not only because the founder of the doctrine combined in his own person the qualities of a scientist and a revolutionary, but unites them in the theory itself intrinsically and inseparably.4

  Lenin’s vision of science found its embodiment in one remarkable man – a polymathic talent and close friend who founded the Bolshevik movement with him in 1904. It took Alexander Alexandrovich Bogdanov years to complete his most important philosophical work, Tektology: Universal Organisation Science, and by the time of its completion he found himself a renegade. Expelled from the Party, he became, in his own words, an ‘“official devil” who had to be “foresworn”, who had to be “blown and spat upon” as in the ritual of Christening and who could be used to frighten unruly infants into obedience in matters of theory’.5

  Bogdanov dreamt of a synthesis of all the disciplines, and sought to impose his scientist’s philosophy over the whole of human experience.6 In his Utopian novel Engineer Menni (1913), set on Mars after the creation of a communist society, he imagined the triumphant birth of a ‘Universal Science’, compared to which ‘the philosophy of former times was nothing but a vague presentiment’. Being universal, this science would describe everything in terms of everything else. This meant that everyone
, however ill-educated, would be able to understand it.

  It was capitalism that had fragmented scientific progress, shattering it as surely as God had shattered Babel, so that every discipline spoke a different, esoteric language. Separated from ‘labour’, scientists had come to believe that the more their discipline baffled outsiders, the closer it was to the truth of things. This pursuit of ‘science for its own sake’ was a tragic error. Come the dawning of a truly socialist society, practice and theory would once again be fused, and science could at last be put to the service of society. Real science was applied to the benefit of mankind, or it was nothing.7

  Reduced to one line, what Bogdanov meant was this: there is no such thing as pure science. The next sixty years would test the truth of this assertion.

  *

  The careers of Russian revolutionaries, under close observation by the tsar’s secret police, followed a predictable pattern. After a spell of exile in Central Asia or Siberia, one would generally flee to some foreign city: Geneva, or Paris, or London, some liberal place where one could compose inflammatory material and smuggle it back into Russia.

  In 1883 a group of Russian exiles in Geneva established the Liberation of Labour group to educate Russian revolutionaries in the principles of Marxism. Lenin8 visited them in 1895. On his return to Russia he was arrested, imprisoned for just over a year, then exiled to Siberia. He left Russia again in 1900. Through The Spark, a newspaper written abroad and distributed in Russian cities, Lenin made himself the centre of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party – a portmanteau grouping of revolutionary organisations. In 1902 the Marxist philosopher Leon Trotsky joined the paper’s staff.