Stalin and the Scientists Read online

  It took hardly a year for a major split to develop within the Social Democratic Workers’ Party. Lenin, Bogdanov and the majority wanted Party membership limited to activists. A minority, including Trotsky, wanted to encourage broader support. The controversy, pitting purity against compromise, divided the Party into Lenin and Bogdanov’s Bolsheviks (from bolshoi, meaning large), and Trotsky’s Mensheviks (from menshe: smaller).

  By 1905 the factions were so estranged that they held their congresses in separate cities – the Bolsheviks in London and the Mensheviks in Geneva – and they quite missed the 1905 revolution.

  Exiled after the revolution petered out, Bogdanov hid out in Finland with Lenin and his family, and supported Lenin through his acrimonious split with Leon Trotsky. Lenin and Bogdanov were the closest of friends, and, with Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, established a seemingly unbreakable bond.

  But 1905 was also the year Bogdanov’s thinking began to stray from what Lenin considered the straight path. The failure of the 1905 revolution had convinced Bogdanov that Russian workers were not ready for political power. Bogdanov’s political education had begun while delivering lectures to factory workers; now he wanted the Bolsheviks to ally themselves to underground workers’ organisations. Lenin’s continued dabbling with the Duma seemed a waste of time. Increasingly, therefore, Bogdanov began to resemble the sort of puffed-up intellectual revolutionary that Lenin despised: the sort who joined the Party for the thrill of conspiracy, but had no patience or aptitude for the churn and grind of day-to-day politics.

  On the other hand, Bogdanov was extraordinarily good at getting hold of money. His piratical raids on the funds of political opponents, and the districts harbouring them, had sustained the Bolsheviks for years. And, as the two old friends began to bicker, Lenin found it harder and harder to fund his own projects.

  Bogdanov was fascinated with the possibilities of mutualism, workers’ power, and trade unions. Like Western Marxists (and unlike Lenin), Bogdanov was interested in people’s alienation from the world and from each other. The individual ‘I’, Bogdanov argued, is a capitalist artefact, reflecting society’s emphasis on private property and individual profit. In a socialist society, the self will exist only as part of the whole, and ‘people will be immortal’ in so far as they ‘develop their “I” beyond the limits of the individual and more toward the workings of community.’9

  What, he wondered, would it take to turn a society of the alienated ‘I’ into the socialist utopia of the ‘we’? A keen student of Georges Sorel’s book Reflections on Violence (which was translated into Russian in 1907), Bogdanov argued that workers needed a myth to inspire them to action.

  Although subsequent events give Bogdanov’s talk of ‘we’ overcoming ‘I’ a sinister edge, it is hard to see at first why his well-intentioned handwaving should have aroused his friend Lenin to such fury. But arouse him it did. Bogdanov’s three-volume Empiriomonism – a fully worked-out programme for the creation of a new and truly revolutionary mutual culture – drove Lenin, who didn’t have the cleanest mouth to start with, to a correspondence so extraordinarily abusive, Bogdanov returned Lenin’s long letter (it took up three notebooks and was passive-aggressively titled ‘A Declaration of Love’) with a note saying that if Lenin wanted to remain his acquaintance, what he had written would have to be considered ‘unwritten, unsent and unread’.

  Even contemporaries thought ‘Lenin was going slightly out of his mind’ to be so exercised over Bogdanov’s philosophising. But the more one understands the predicament of Bolshevism at the turn of the century, the more one realises what was at stake. The two men were fighting for the nothing less than the soul of the revolution.

  For Marx and Engels, the history of science had been a story of constant improvement. Science pursues a complete explanation of the world. Like Zeno’s tortoise, science will never entirely achieve this high goal. But the gap between what we know and what is actually out there will always be closing. Over time, science gets closer and closer to the Truth.

  But while Marxists were enthusing over the scientific potential of Marxism, large sections of the scientific community were turning away from scientism, away from ever-more-reasonable explanations of things, and towards descriptions of the world that were counter-intuitive and mutually incompatible, and in some cases (notoriously so in quantum physics) literally made no sense.

  If we want to draw a line in the sand and pick a date when the tide turned, we could do a lot worse than plump for 1898, the year ‘Mme Curie threw the bomb … she called radium. There remained no hole to hide in,’ wrote Henry Adams in his autobiography. ‘Even metaphysics swept back over science with the green water of the deep-sea ocean and no one could longer hope to bar out the unknowable, for the unknowable was known.’10

  The unprecedented energy of Mme Curie’s invisible rays cracked scientism wide open. Science ceased to be merely a matter of what you observed; now you had to consider seriously how you were observing. You didn’t have to be a quantum physicist to hit this problem. You could as easily be attempting to induce mutations in fruit flies. You could be a physiologist studying salivation in dogs.11

  Among those who surfed this tidal change in scientific thinking, one of the more eloquent was the Austrian Ernst Mach. He is best remembered today as the man who first accurately measured the speed of sound, and the popular assumption that he was a physicist is a fair one – but not quite accurate. Mach’s most interesting work pushed him into an unlabelled zone between physics, physiology and psychology.12 His work on optical illusions, and the physiology of sensation, and how our senses cleverly but somewhat imperfectly register the world, led him to a devastating conclusion about science.

  Mach argued that science makes no pronouncements about ultimate reality. All scientists can do is select the most elegant explanations for their results. These results are useful, but they aren’t true. Indeed, the same body of knowledge can lead scientists to several, equally valid conclusions!

  Marxism was supposed to be the capstone for a certain sort of nineteenth-century science. Now Mach had come along and demolished the whole edifice. Needless to say, Lenin hated Mach’s ‘empiriomonism’. As far as he was concerned, it was a recipe for disaster: a retreat from the real world into idealist handwaving. His response was strident: ‘For the sole “property” of matter with whose recognition philosophical materialism is bound up is the property of being an objective reality, of existing outside our mind.’13 This is not so much an argument as a howl.

  Mach’s views (bolstered, it seemed, by the discoveries of X-rays and the electron) were extremely worrying for Lenin. They seemed to flatly contradict the idea that matter is real.

  But Bogdanov approached Mach’s arguments much more phlegmatically. He understood – as Lenin did not – that Mach was writing for scientists, about the ever-narrowing but everpresent gap between our experience and the world as it is. Mapping that ever-narrowing gap did not make the gap wider: Lenin’s fears were unfounded.

  Bogdanov found that gap to be a fascinating place. In exploring it, he refined what we mean by the word ‘experience’. Say that, for a moment, you put this book aside and reach through the open window of your room to pluck a rose. You are now ‘experiencing’ the rose in two ways. You can smell the flower, see it, prick your thumb on a thorn. And there is also your experience of the rose. Its beauty. Its transience. Its colour, so close to the colour of your child’s lips, or your favourite ice cream, or what have you.

  Bogdanov called these two orders of experience objective and subjective. He defined objective sensations as those that are ‘socially organised’ – in other words, they are more or less accessible to, and categorisable by, everyone. Subjective sensations are ‘individually organised’, and belong to just a single consciousness. He then attempted to unite these realms in a philosophical system called empiriomonism: the ‘organisation of experience’.

  This took him down a path towards perception and philosophy of
mind, and well out of sight of the world beloved of those great materialist thinkers Engels and Marx. The material world. The world ‘as it is’.

  So much for philosophy. The philosophy matters – how much it matters will become clear over the next 400 or so pages – but this rather abstruse disagreement between old friends was also part and parcel of a widening political split between Lenin’s faction and Bogdanov’s. It seemed unbridgeable, though the writer Maxim Gorky was indefatigable in his efforts to bring the two old friends back together to sort out their differences. In 1908 Alexander Bogdanov was staying in Gorky’s aristocratic mansion on Capri (a resort once favoured by Roman emperors). Lenin, living in Geneva, had a standing invitation to visit, and in April 1908 he was finally cajoled onto the boat. It took Lenin no time at all to get into an argument with his host, however: ‘I know, Alexei Maximovich, that you’re hoping to bring about my reconciliation with the Machists, though my letter has warned you that it’s impossible. So please don’t try!’14

  It was probably Gorky who suggested a friendly chess game to clear the air. At any rate, he is there in the photograph taken by the film-maker Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky, looking on as Lenin, seated with his back to the Tyrrhenian Sea, steadily loses control of the game and his own temper. It astonished Gorky how angry and childish Lenin became.

  Afterwards Bogdanov and the others went for a walk, and Lenin unburdened himself to his hostess, Gorky’s common-law wife Maria Andreyeva. Of Bogdanov and his set, Lenin said – more in sorrow than in anger – ‘They are intelligent, talented people. They have done a great deal for the Party, they could do ten times more, but they won’t go with us! They can’t. Scores and hundreds like them are broken and crippled by this criminal system.’15

  Lenin had disliked Bogdanov’s philosophy for years, but he had held back from attacking a fellow Bolshevik in public. The appearance of Essays on the Philosophy of Marxism by Bogdanov and his allies in January 1908, however, seriously undermined Lenin’s hold over his own party. Lenin’s cautious policy of parliamentary participation was losing ground to Bogdanov’s confrontational manifesto.

  Lenin’s response was a book – a fully worked-out version of the long letter he had sent to Bogdanov, rubbishing his philosophy. Written between February and October 1908 in the reading room of the British Museum, Materialism and Empiriocriticism was a rush job (Lenin even considered offering the printer a bribe of a hundred roubles to speed up his work) and advanced a brutally materialist argument. Materialism, Lenin said, is incompatible with any doubts about the comprehensibility of the world. He advanced a copy theory of knowledge, in which our sensations are ‘copies, photographs, images, mirror reflections of things’. ‘Matter’, he explained, ‘is a philosophical category which is given to man by his sensations, and which is copied, photographed and reflected by our sensations, while existing independently of them.’ He goes on to assert – against evidence, reason, and every serious thinker since Plato – that what we see in our heads are literally copies of external objects.

  Materialism and Empiriocriticism puzzled reviewers at the time and has been a running sore in Marxist studies ever since. It is not just shrill, not just offensive – it is, in many places, profoundly stupid.16 It makes psychological sense, however. Lenin understood how thin the ice was beneath him, and his panic is palpable. His party was haemorrhaging badly; its membership fell from more than 40,000 in 1907, to a few hundred in 1910, fractured into cells that were themselves riddled with tsarist secret police.

  But this was not how the document was remembered. It was Lenin’s first full-blooded stab at philosophical analysis, and over the coming years it acquired the status of scripture. This is what makes Lenin’s tract so frightening: the way the exigencies of that wobbly moment in Bolshevik history got frozen, not just into print, but into policy.

  *

  The meshwork of alliances binding Europe together at the beginning of the twentieth century was supposed to privilege diplomacy and prevent war.

  In the four weeks following Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassination on 28 June 1914, the unimaginable happened. The tsar mobilised 15 million men, mostly peasants. Conscripts were transported thousands of kilometres to the Eastern Front, or south to launch attacks on Turkey. By the summer of 1915, a million were dead, wounded or missing, and three-quarters of a million had been taken prisoner. Russian casualties in the First World War proved even more severe than those in Western Europe. When added to deaths during the civil war and ensuing famine, they total 16 million.

  In late April 1915 a series of German offensives began that would lead to the so-called Great Retreat. The Russian Army was grotesquely under-equipped. Whole units were wiped out, retreats turned into routs, and hundreds of thousands of Russian soldiers – some without bullets for their rifles, some without rifles altogether – surrendered. Galicia was lost, then Warsaw, then the rest of Poland; by late August it appeared that Riga might be taken. Millions of refugees, starving or sick, got in the way of the army’s retreat.

  Among the governing classes, this catalogue of shortages, defeats and unpreparedness was greeted with dismay and anger. They insisted the Duma be reconvened. It opened on 1 August, the anniversary of the outbreak of war, and straight away a coalition formed to press for social and political reforms.

  But you didn’t need to be a member of this ‘Progressive Bloc’ to regard the tsar’s next move as the act of a madman. Nicholas announced he was quitting the capital and assuming personal command of the army. His strongest loyalists were probably the ones who greeted the news with the greatest horror: now the tsar would be saddled with the blame for any future defeats. In a desperate attempt to bring him to his senses, the Council of Ministers offered their resignations. The tsar, beside himself, accepted them. He closed the Duma for nearly half a year, and appointed reactionaries and unqualified yes-men in place of the loyalists he had fired. When they failed to come up to snuff, he fired them and appointed worse people in their place. Over the next year and a half Russia endured four different prime ministers and five ministers of the interior. Since government was impossible in such circumstances, in the summer of 1916 a ‘temporary dictatorship’ was set up to deal with the worsening food supply. But the peasantry couldn’t be persuaded to sell more of their grain stock because the government didn’t have the money to buy it. (What use had the peasants for money, anyway? Thanks to the war, there was no agricultural equipment available for them to buy.) On the front line, meanwhile, discipline was disintegrating. By 1917, nine out of ten officers in the field were reserves with next to no combat experience. More and more troops simply deserted.

  Food riots in Petrograd in February 1917 turned into an anti-war protest, and then a revolution. Confined to the capital and lasting less than a week, the February Revolution was a spontaneous affair, and Nicholas appealed to his generals for loyal troops to put down the disorder. Instead, they advised that he abdicate.

  Without the backing of the army, he had no choice. On 15 March 1917, the Romanov dynasty came to an end. The tsar was replaced by a Provisional Government made up of liberals and socialists. At the same time, socialists also formed the Petrograd Soviet, which ruled alongside the Provisional Government, in a ‘dual power’ arrangement.

  The Bolsheviks, late to the party as usual, rushed to St Petersburg to lobby for the nation’s scattered soviets – collective bodies of workers, soldiers and peasants who enjoyed popular support and wielded effective power, but lacked any legal status. The Bolsheviks were reasonably successful. Aside from their desire to end the war, the workers’ demands were more practical than political: an eight-hour day, higher wages, respect at work. (Offensive and overbearing foremen and managers were beaten up. Sometimes they were daubed in red paint or tossed in a sack. A few were thrown into rivers.)

  When Lenin returned from Switzerland in April, however, he rebuked the Bolsheviks’ acting leader, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, for working so closely with the Provisional Government – and ci
rcumstances proved Lenin right, for the Provisional Government soon turned around and committed Russia to continuing the war. The protests that followed this declaration were such that both the foreign minister and war minister resigned – and the Bolsheviks, who claimed it was possible to conclude a just peace sooner rather than later, found their ranks swelling at last.

  *

  Disease was rife during the war. In 1917 Vladimir Vernadsky’s niece, who lived with the family, died of tuberculosis. Vladimir himself contracted the disease. His doctor advised a diet of fermented mare’s milk and a move south to speed his recovery. In June 1917 the remaining Vernadskys travelled south to the family’s dacha in Shishaki, Ukraine. They made a sadly depleted party. Vladimir’s son George had taken it into his head to join the army, against his father’s advice. (Vladimir observed wearily that ‘reason is often not the most powerful or important force in life’.)

  From their new home, Vernadsky wrote to his old pupil Fersman, saying he felt caught between ‘extremist Ukrainians’ and ‘extremist Russians’. He mistrusted the Bolsheviks, but as he wrote later, ‘both the [Ukrainian] Volunteer Army and the Bolsheviks did a mass of unclean deeds, and in the final analysis one was not better than the other’.17

  Once he was strong enough, Vernadsky went back to work: he left his family at their dacha and spent some weeks at the Academy’s biological research station at Staroselsky, a village on the Dnieper River near the ancient city of Vyshgorod. Chance, Louis Pasteur once said, favours the prepared mind: Vernadsky arrived just in time to witness, at first hand, a curious phenomenon dubbed by locals ‘the flowering of the waters’. At the right moment of the year, a warmish night would trigger an immense, overnight blossoming of algae in the local ponds and wells. Water that a few hours before had run clear was now clotted with life. The phenomenon is not particularly rare, but the sheer scale of this sudden growth brought Vernadsky up short: just how much did all this stuff weigh?