Stalin and the Scientists Read online

  So much for luck: the rest was down to preparedness and hard work. Vernadsky knew that different proportions of different elements, reacting with each other under different conditions, give rise to different kinds of mineral. It dawned on him that it might be possible to look at living processes the same way – as a series of chemical reactions. Obviously this highly reductive approach wouldn’t explain much about life, but it might reveal how living things harness the non-living stuff of the planet for their growth and expansion.

  ‘There in the meadows I worked quickly,’ he later recalled. ‘I sorted out in my own mind the basic concepts of biogeochemistry, I clearly distinguished the biosphere from the other envelopes of the earth, and came to understand what the multiplication of living matter in the biosphere actually meant.’18

  In the space of a month, Vernadsky had filled forty pages of graph paper with notes, and held in his hands the blueprint for a previously unheard-of science: ecology.

  Following his month at Staroselsky, Vernadsky returned to Petrograd. His old friend and patron Sergei Oldenburg, Russia’s foremost scholar of Buddhism and now minister of education in the Provisional Government, immediately appointed him his assistant minister.

  They lasted a month, from the end of July to the end of August, but the awkward political arrangement in place at that time – with the capital jointly governed by the Provisional Government and the Petrograd Soviet – was never going to hold. Eventually, workers in the Red Guard took up arms and overwhelmed the government’s guard at the Winter Palace. There was very little violence. On 7 November 1917 the Provisional Government was disbanded and authority was assumed by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets.

  *

  The next day Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the revolution, presented two bills: a peace decree, inviting Russia’s enemies to enter into immediate negotiations; and a land reallocation act. All the vast estates of the imperial family, the church, the monasteries and the large landowners were to be expropriated without compensation, and the land distributed to the peasants.

  In one crude stroke, the Bolsheviks achieved what Tsar Alexander II had failed to achieve: a true liberation of the serfs. The crudity of the bill was deliberate. The chaos it unleashed made it impossible for vested interests to game the system – because there wasn’t one.

  However, this then left the Bolsheviks with the business of putting the genie back in the bottle and reasserting control over the largest country on earth. That they even contemplated such a task says much for their optimism, and this optimism ran deeper than the euphoria of the moment. The Bolsheviks’ philosophy preached optimism as a virtue, even a moral duty.

  The Bolsheviks truly believed that the practice of government would fill the gaps in their political knowledge. Armed with Marx’s science of government, they simply had to stay the course, hold on to power, stick by their beliefs, and wait for the world to deliver on its promise. In this, they were a kind of mirror-image of a very different, and much more recent sort of idealist – the market animists of Wall Street and the City of London who asserted, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, that a free market finds its own natural level, making big government redundant. Both sets of idealists hoodwinked their era into believing in a ‘science’ that turned out not to exist. Worse, both convinced themselves that they were being wholly ‘scientific’.

  Anyway, the circumstances for the Bolsheviks’ brave experiment in practice-makes-perfect could not have been less promising. Why would Germany sue for peace now? Its high command was making hay of the total collapse of Russia’s war effort, detaching the Ukraine from Russia and making it a German puppet state. Now the Ukraine was fast becoming a gathering ground for anti-Bolshevik Cossacks and anti-Bolshevik ‘White’ forces across the south.

  At the peace negotiations at Brest-Litovsk, the Bolsheviks fully expected to have their hand strengthened any day, as copycat revolutions blazed across Western Europe. While they waited, they tried to drag out proceedings as long as possible. Leon Trotsky, president of the Petrograd Soviet and Lenin’s number two, declared that Soviet Russia would make ‘neither war nor peace’ and left for Petrograd. The German Supreme Command threw up their hands in exasperation and resumed the fighting.

  Lenin eventually managed to convince the Party leadership and the Congress of Soviets that only peace could save the revolution, and they had to accept terms. By then, however, German forces had advanced 250 kilometres further onto Russian soil, and their demands were far more severe.

  The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed on 3 March 1918 between Russia and the Quadruple Alliance, was one of the harshest in modern history. Territorial losses amounted to 3.4 million square kilometres. Thirty-four per cent of the Russian Empire’s population was lost or seceded. Over half of Russia’s industrial capacity vanished overnight, along with invaluable natural resources. Russia also agreed to demobilise its armed forces. Eight months later, on 11 November, Germany’s armistice with the Allied powers nullified the treaty, and the Soviet government eventually regained most of its lost territories. But the damage had been done. The cession of the Ukraine meant that Soviet Russia would have to obtain its grain from regions that could barely even feed themselves. The treaty left Russia with butchered national borders, a food crisis, and no friends. It hopelessly alienated the Bolsheviks’ socialist allies, and a full-blown civil war seemed (indeed was) inevitable.

  *

  The Bolsheviks had control of government, but were hardly in a position to run the country. It wasn’t the tiny party of Bolsheviks who had seized the nation’s farms and factories. It was the people: without resources, or education, or training, or indeed much self-discipline. Throwing a foreman in the river is easy. How do you run a factory?

  The Bolsheviks had won a great victory for the people; but the people were melting away. They regarded the Bolsheviks much as they had regarded the last lot of absentee landlords – with a mask of servility concealing a great quantity of guile. By the end of the Civil War, the total number of industrial workers in Russia had dropped to just over a million – a third of what it had been in 1917.

  The Bolsheviks never meant to nationalise industry on a mass scale. Now, driven by necessity, they changed tack; by January 1919 nearly all large factories were owned by the state. Now came the harder job: finding people to manage them.

  Communists, technical specialists and trade unionists rubbed up against each other, none too comfortably, in an attempt to manage the economy. The biologist Mikhail Novikov worked closely with state-owned heavy industry even while, as the rector of Moscow University, he was organising strikes. Vladimir Nikolayevich Ipatiev, a nobleman and monarchist, owned the holiday home in which Nicholas II and his family were murdered on 17 July 1918. Yet in 1920 he was picked to direct the Central Chemical Laboratory in Petrograd: Lenin called him ‘the head of our chemical industry’.

  Charming exceptions aside, the turn of the 1920s was a bad time for those who wore their learning on their sleeve. An open letter addressed to Lenin and published by Pravda gives a glimpse of the ‘specialist baiting’ that scourged the nation, and wasn’t really quelled till 1921:

  … these newly minted unconscientious Communists, made up of former lower middle class elements, village policemen, small-time civil servants, shopkeepers … It is difficult to describe the full horror of the humiliations and sufferings caused at their hands. Constant, shameful denunciations and accusations, futile but extremely humiliating searches, threats of execution, requisitions and confiscations, meddling in the most intimate sides of personal life. (The head of a squad demanded that I, who am living in the school where I teach, absolutely must sleep in the same bed as my wife.)19

  The All-Russian Union of Engineers spent a great deal of its time arranging for the release and safe-conduct of its members. Every once in a while someone in the uniform of the Cheka, the Bolsheviks’ secret police, showed up at a Soviet technical bureau and handed over a rumpled, unshaven prisoner who turned out to be a
senior employee.

  The specialists did not take this sort of treatment lying down. In the Academy of Sciences – that venerable centre of learning founded in 1755 by Peter the Great himself – most members regarded the Bolshevik takeover as a national catastrophe. Vernadsky and Oldenburg had turned in their ministerial portfolios at once, and Vernadsky went further, involving himself in an effort to continue the Provisional Government’s work underground, even though most of its members had been arrested.

  Learning that Vernadsky was on an arrest list, the Academy voted to send him ‘to the Southern part of the country because of his bad health’. The same day, he left Petrograd and headed back to the Ukraine; his life was saved.

  Oldenburg and fellow academics formed a delegation to protest the Cheka’s programme of arrests. They arrived at Communist Party headquarters, then established at the Smolny Convent on the edge of St Petersburg. The convent, famous for its elegant architecture and its dull blue dome with silver stars, was once a finishing school for young ladies. Now it resounded to the thud of muddy boots as thousands of soldiers, sailors and factory workers traipsed through wide hallways fitfully lit by a faltering electrical system.

  In an upstairs room, often alone, and rarely showing his face to comrades on the ground floor, Vladimir Lenin sat working. Oldenburg knew Lenin already, as the brother of the student who had tried to assassinate Alexander III. Oldenburg, by now Permanent Secretary of the Academy, had a deal to put to Russia’s new leader.

  The Academy was quite small in 1917, boasting only forty-four full members and 220 employees. But it enjoyed an enviable international reputation. Besides, it was old, and for centuries had acted as a sort of expert arm of the Russian civil service. Oldenburg promised that Academy scholars would aid the Soviet regime by addressing issues of ‘state construction’. In return, he wanted the Academy to receive financial and political support from the government. He was offering Lenin the chance to conduct business as usual – and since Lenin understood more than most the importance of specialists to the state, he agreed.

  He was as good as his word. In 1918 the education commissar, Bogdanov’s old friend Anatoly Lunacharsky, attempted a wholesale reform of the Academy. When Lenin’s 26-year-old secretary Nikolai Gorbunov caught wind of this, he went straight to his boss, who warned Lunacharsky: ‘If some brave fellow turns up in your establishment, jumps on the Academy and breaks a lot of china, then you will have to pay for it.’20

  Lunacharsky shelved his plans, the Academy received some money, local authorities were stopped from using some of the Academy’s property for housing, and Lunacharsky promised that the Academy’s press would be left alone. Lenin told Lunacharsky to publicise the deal: ‘The fact that they wish to help us is good. Tell the whole world that the Academy of Sciences has recognised the government.’21

  *

  In Bolshevik hands, revolutionary justice took on curious forms. Far from resembling Paris’s notorious tribunal at the height of the terror, Bolshevik trials were characterised, at first, by their relative objectivity. They did not deliver a single death sentence in the first six months, and freed many declared enemies of the regime.

  The idea was that the tribunals should teach Russians about the new state and how it worked. They were show trials, in fact, of an early, innocuous sort. They drew simple, easily understood lessons about what constituted a crime under the new regime. They were recorded, and re-staged as theatrical performances the length and breadth of Russia, with actors playing the parts of prosecutors and defendants. (It was risky work. On more than one occasion an actor playing the defendant had to flee lynchmobs of angry peasants.)22

  Alongside this benevolent but inadequate masquerade, however, there operated another form of justice. The Cheka, which had been set up to target counter-revolutionaries in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution, was essentially unaccountable. It acted against opponents as it saw fit. Its head, Felix Edmundovich Dzerzhinsky, a Polish nobleman turned communist, proclaimed that he did not ‘seek forms of revolutionary justice; we are not in need of justice. It is war now – face to face, a fight to the finish.’

  Food shortages in the winter of 1917–18 prompted Lenin to demand the execution without trial of speculators and bandits. On 21 February, a decree, ‘The Socialist Fatherland is in Danger’, urged that all speculators, spies, hooligans and counter-revolutionaries should be shot on the spot. The Cheka obliged. When an attempt was made on Lenin’s own life, a decree was issued on 5 September 1918 directing the Cheka to shoot opponents summarily: and they did. The Cheka shot well over 5,000 people in 1918 alone. Thousands of conservatives, liberals, Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries were executed. Many technical specialists were among those arrested. The ‘Red Terror’ had begun.

  The state had enemies aplenty in 1918 – it hardly needed to go looking for them. For a start there was the complexion Britain, France and the United States had put on Lenin’s revolutionary success. It had been German assistance and money that had enabled him to return to Russia and seize power. When he then took Russia out of the war and ceded enormous territories to Germany, the Entente powers concluded that he was some sort of German agent. Nations that had fought Germany now felt an obligation to intervene against Lenin’s new regime. Besides, large amounts of Allied war material were still in Russian hands. So, in early 1918, small parties of Allied soldiers occupied Russian ports.

  Come May 1918, matters became still worse for the Bolsheviks. Under the tsar, 40,000 Czech and Slovak prisoners of war had been formed into a Czech Legion, to fight on the Allied side. With Russia out of the war, the Czech Legion found itself abandoned. After endless negotiations, the Legion agreed to leave Russia, travelling along the Trans-Siberian Railway to Vladivostok, then heading by ship for Europe. As they crossed Siberia, however, the soldiers of the Legion clashed with the local Bolsheviks, then mutinied, seizing control of the railway, and with it all access to the sparsely inhabited bulk of Russian territory. The Siberian wilderness became yet another zone where the Bolsheviks’ opponents could organise resistance. In November 1918, Admiral Alexander Kolchak took charge of White forces in Siberia in a military coup. Using Allied supplies, and conscripting whoever he could find in that thinly populated region, Kolchak launched his offensive in March 1919.

  It was a war calculated to alienate vast swathes of the country for a generation and more. Reds and Whites alike conscripted unwilling peasants in massive numbers. The peasants had no dog in this increasingly vicious fight and fled the ranks of both armies almost as quickly as they could be rounded up.

  And it was a war designed to confound military historians, dividing Russia geographically and politically into a shifting patchwork of autonomous regions. The Red Army managed to hold on to both capitals, Petrograd and Moscow, but as the British spy and children’s author Arthur Ransome would have it, ‘the territory held by the Soviets was only a small part of Russia, consisting for the most part of districts in normal times either not self-supporting or barely capable of self-support. The revolution was cut off from the main sources of iron, cotton, oil, meat and bread.’23

  The artist Yuri Annenkov recalled ‘endless hungry lines, queues in front of empty “produce distributors”, an epic era of rotten, frozen offal, mouldy bread crusts, and incredible substitutes’.24 As bodies weakened, more than half the women living in large towns ceased to menstruate. Fatality rates spiralled. In the intense cold, drains and water pipes shattered, spreading typhoid, dysentery and even cholera. A malaria epidemic was under way even before the fighting began; now it got unimaginably worse. The greatest typhus epidemic in history took hold, with deaths running somewhere between 2 and 3 million. Typhus affected both sides equally – even a White general, Baron Wrangel, caught it. Refugees carried typhusbearing lice around the country and into the cities on crammed trains – a disaster that prompted Lenin to remark, in his address to the Seventh Congress of Soviets: ‘Either lice will defeat socialism or socialism will defea
t lice.’

  For the longest time, the lice held sway: in 1920 the population of Moscow nearly halved to one million. Petrograd’s 700,000 represented less than a third of the pre-war population. Seven million homeless children wandered the nation’s streets, or ended up in state orphanages, where up to half of them died.

  Vladimir Vernadsky’s apricot trees were grubbed up and stolen. The family’s dacha at Shishak was sacked. Such misfortunes, serious enough in peacetime, now barely registered. In his diary Vernadsky recorded the state of his family’s home in newly independent Ukraine without complaint.

  In Ukraine’s capital Kiev the streetcars weren’t running, traffic was at a standstill and political chaos reigned. Between 1918 and 1920, more than a dozen governments tried to run the city. Once, a gang of army deserters who had already robbed all the apartments on the first three floors of the building stormed the Vernadskys’ apartment. Vladimir turned and snapped at them: ‘Can’t you see I’m working?’ Startled, the intruders left. Mind you, by then the family had nothing worth stealing.

  Vernadsky at this time was one of the city’s more important figures: founder and president of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, which, incredibly, survived all changes of political and military power in Kiev. But his position brought him no safety. He spent much of 1919 in hiding when a local paper mistook him for Bernatsky, another, less well-liked former minister of the provincial government. Between the spring and summer of 1919 the Bolsheviks held Kiev, taking well-born hostages, executing hundreds, and murdering Vernadsky’s closest assistant.