Stalin and the Scientists Page 8
Out of the congress was born the Russian Association of Physicists, the brainchild of Abram Fedorovich Ioffe, an expert in electromagnetism. Ioffe found the association a two-storey brick building in a park on the outskirts of Petrograd. On Sundays, scientists gathered to clean the place up. They mended and scrubbed and hauled furniture from room to room. Electrical gear, pipes, laboratory equipment and even furniture were in short supply. The Commissariat of Education, with few resources, showed willing by cannibalising the inventory of the few museums. Chemicals, instruments, books and journals and marble slabs were lifted from the Agricultural Institute. The Winter Palace donated items ‘without artistic value’: an oak table, lamps, a clock, curtains, a piano, padded chairs, a rug.
There was no heating. Even the main building of the Polytechnical Institute went unheated. Practical demonstrations and examinations were held in a small room with a brick stove in the centre and an exhaust pipe poking through a window. Experiments were conducted in dense smoke.
The 1922 famine was an entirely predictable disaster. For years, while botanists in the universities and the Academy were studying wild species, European-educated agricultural experts had struggled without support or patronage, studying crop varieties and trying to modernise Russian agriculture.
The Bureau of Applied Botany, established in 1894 in St Petersburg, was supposed to bring botanical expertise in line with the needs of agriculture. Its first director, Alexander Batalin, conducted a huge amount of research into cultivated crops. But there was a limit to what he could do: he was, after all, the grandly titled Bureau’s only member of staff, and had to run the Imperial Botanical Gardens in Petersburg at the same time. Ivan Borodin took over in 1899 but he too juggled too many posts to do the Bureau justice. Robert Eduardovich Regel became director in 1905 and got the place running at last, beginning its first collection of cultivated plants. He too struggled with scant resources. To a keen graduate applying for an internship he wrote: ‘We expect you in Petersburg in the near future. PS. We have a spare microscope. It would be good if you could bring your magnifying glass with you.’6
The intern was Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, the grandson of an indentured peasant. Nikolai was one of four children, all of whom became scientists. Lydia, a microbiologist, died young, succumbing to the smallpox she had rushed to treat during an outbreak in Voronezh, in the south-west of the country. Alexandra was a physician. Sergei, a physicist, would in time become Permanent Secretary of the Academy of Sciences under Stalin. And Nikolai? He was destined to become Stalin’s leading agronomist, a champion of genetics, and arguably the most celebrated scientific martyr of the twentieth century.
Nikolai Vavilov’s interest in botany, and in collecting, began early, as he played with his brother Sergei in the ponds and birch forests of their home in Ivashkovo, 100 kilometres west of Moscow. The two also developed a keen interest in chemistry, on one occasion setting off an explosion that permanently damaged the vision in Nikolai’s left eye.
In 1906 Nikolai Vavilov enrolled at the Petrovsky Agricultural Institute and studied under Dmitry Pryanishnikov – a fearless man who, much later, would expend his dying energies trying to prise his former student out of death row.
In 1911 Vavilov’s thesis on the ecology of field slugs, a serious pest, won a science fair competition at the Moscow Polytechnical Museum. Robert Regel spotted the young man’s talent straight away, and his year’s internship at the Bureau evolved into a regular and eager correspondence as Vavilov embarked on a strenuous programme of foreign study and exotic field trips.
Returning from an expedition to the Pamir mountains, the fabled ‘roof of the world’, Vavilov took up a professorship at Saratov University, arriving there a month after the October Revolution. Saratov had once boasted a music conservatory and the country’s first free art museum, but during the Civil War it was reduced to little more than an army camp. Drunken soldiers mugged the unwary. Anyone with money fled, and the city was crammed with hungry refugees from the countryside. Typhus and cholera ran amok. Spanish flu, measles, diphtheria and dysentery went untreated for lack of medicines. Soldiers fresh from the front slept in the streets. A great fire rendered one-eighth of the population homeless.
Vavilov was married by this time – none too happily. His wife Ekaterina elected to stay in Moscow, while Vavilov, unable to find an apartment, slept on the floor of his laboratory. His plight had its comic compensations. His department was staffed almost exclusively by earnest young women, who promptly fell in love with him. Young, dashing and energetic, Vavilov took Elena Ivanovna Barulina, a Saratov native, as his lover. He spent the rest of his life with her.
Between 1918 and 1920 Vavilov’s correspondence with Regel intensified. Regel, born a German, knew he had no future in Soviet Russia and was grooming Vavilov to be his successor. Vavilov did not want to leave Saratov, but Regel’s death by typhus made a move inevitable; the opportunity, along with Vavilov’s own sense of obligation, was irresistible. At the end of October 1920, Vavilov caught a train to Petrograd to take over the running of the Bureau of Applied Botany.
The Bureau took up six apartments in 44 Herzen Street, in the centre of Petrograd. ‘There are millions of troubles,’ Vavilov wrote, a week into his stay. ‘We are fighting against the cold at home, and for furniture, flats and food … I must confess that it is quite a problem to arrange a new laboratory and an experimental station as well as to settle sixty employees. I am accumulating patience and persistence.’7
His twenty-strong team of researchers from Saratov arrived on 5 March 1921. One remembered ‘a picture of almost complete destruction, as if there had been an enemy invasion … The rooms were freezing, the central heating pipes had burst, the bulk of the seeds had been eaten by starving people, there was dust and dirt everywhere …’8
‘Already thrice I have cabled the Experimental Department about our catastrophic situation with funds,’ Vavilov complained. ‘We are unable to remunerate employees, hire day-workers, or pay for horses, and in general it is essentially impossible to work …’9
Supplies were virtually unobtainable, but there were empty buildings everywhere. Vavilov moved the Bureau around the corner to the former tsarist Ministry of Agriculture buildings at 13 St Isaac’s Square. He set up an experimental farm in Pushkin, sixty-five kilometres from Petrograd in the grounds of the tsars’ summer palace of Tsarskoye Selo. (Its headquarters were a replica of an English country house sent, piece by piece, by Queen Victoria to her godson the ex-Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich.)
There was no food to feed them, but specialists flocked to the Bureau. According to one enthusiastic arrival, Vavilov had created ‘a Babylon … a fairytale island of freedom’. Gavryl Zaitsev, an expert in cotton, wrote to his wife, ‘He reminds me very much of Mozart, who according to Pushkin’s Salieri, was an “idle reveller”. But nobody can do as much as or equally well as he does.’10
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Russian society under the tsars had been frighteningly simple. There were very few institutions, and private societies and associations were, if not banned outright, then looked on with suspicion. From the top, if you wanted to get anything done, you generated paperwork. A colossal, and colossally inefficient, bureaucracy stood in for the ordinary business of delegating duties to other organisations.
If you were somewhere further down the pecking order, and you wanted to get something done, you did your level best to avoid paperwork altogether. Instead, you cultivated people. You looked for patrons to support you, and in your turn you did your best for your clients. Whole empires have been built on less, and no one was particularly surprised to find the old pre-revolutionary system of ‘friendship circles’ surviving and persisting into the Soviet era.11 State ministers were the new patrons. It was a lot easier, if you could get to them, to deal with Bolsheviks of high calibre – with Lenin, Alexei Rykov (head of the Council of People’s Commissars), Anatoly Lunacharsky (education commissar), and Nikolai Semashko (health commissar) – than with the l
ocal authorities, who were by and large ill-educated, and tended to regard any ‘bourgeois specialist’ with suspicion.
For their part, the commissars remembered pre-revolutionary times and knew the part they were supposed to play. Lunacharsky, in particular, built his entire commissariat out of friendly non-communists, the wives of comrades, and the cash-strapped granddaughters of famous artists.
Some patrons who had operated under the tsars continued in post even after the revolution. Maxim Gorky (a pen name: he had been christened Alexei Maximovich Peshkov) was one of those rich Russians without whose assistance Lenin himself could scarcely have survived the revolution.
‘Highly contradictory, intentionally ambiguous, and often extremely false,’ according to one account, Gorky was also a phenomenal patron. Entire institutions owed their existence and survival to him; so too did countless students and writers, who received stipends and even accommodation in Gorky’s home. Gorky’s strange late career as an apologist for Stalin ruined his posthumous reputation, but as the poet Anna Akhmatova recalled in the 1960s, ‘It is fashionable to curse Gorky now. But after all, without him we would have all starved to death.’12
‘There is practically no food and it can be said without exaggeration that there will soon be famine in Petrograd,’ Gorky wrote to his friend H. G. Wells. ‘I just can’t imagine how our scholars are going to survive.’13 The lack of food was critical but scholars faced many other challenges. Their laboratories were being confiscated, their libraries and homes overrun by refugees from the countryside. If you went off to conduct fieldwork, you ran a serious risk of coming home to find it stripped of books, letters and even furniture.
Gorky set up Committees for the Improvement of Living Conditions in cities all over Russia – and Wells, on a visit, found these ‘salvage establishments’ offering food rations, baths, barber shops, tailoring, cobbling ‘and the like conveniences’. Oldenburg and Pavlov, looking ‘careworn and unprosperous’, both buttonholed Wells on a visit to the Petrograd ‘scholars’ house’ and begged him for new scientific publications. On his return, Wells recruited London’s Royal Society in an effort to salve Russia’s book famine.
At the height of the famine proper, the Council of People’s Commissars unified Gorky’s committees under a central commission, TsEKUBU, and over the next five years TsEKUBU’s list of scholars grew until it included nearly all of Russia’s scientific and literary intelligentsia. By 1926 TsEKUBU boasted six sanatoriums, a dormitory in Moscow, pensioners’ homes in Moscow and Leningrad, and a House of Scholars in Moscow with a library and a cafeteria. Such was the power of Gorky’s well-run patronage circle – and this and like efforts put the fear of God into the authorities.
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The Civil War had dragged rich and poor alike down to abject poverty. Now, under Lenin’s NEP, some sections of the population were growing more prosperous, and those who knew how to look after their friends, while fostering the interest and support of patrons, did best of all. The intelligentsia rose quickly from the poverty of the Civil War years to become, by the mid-1920s, a sort of new Soviet bourgeoisie. Specialists employed by the government earned very high salaries. Professors, while quick to complain of ill treatment, enjoyed housing privileges and assured places in higher education for their children.
By the spring of 1922 Lenin was beginning to rue his government’s dependence on these old and frankly nepotistic networks of specialists. ‘If we take Moscow,’ he declared, ‘with its 4,700 Communists in responsible positions, and if we take that huge bureaucratic machine, that gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom? I doubt very much whether it can truthfully be said that the Communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth, they are not directing, they are being directed.’14
There didn’t seem to be any way out of the bind. Articles like the one in Pravda by Valerian Pletnev in September 1922 imagined the rise of a new generation of ‘social engineers’ capable of ‘uniting all fields on a grand scale’ but, as Lenin scrawled sarcastically across his copy, which of Pletnev’s proletarian ‘social engineers’ was going to build the locomotives?15
Lenin decided that if the revolution was not to dissolve in a meshwork of informal friendship circles, drastic action was required.
One obvious way out of the bind was to take the loss of skilled personnel on the chin, and expel those who threatened the Bolsheviks’ hegemony. The trick would be to throw out representatives of those disciplines the state could afford to do without on a daily basis. Gorky, for all his support of scientists, was better known as a patron of the arts, and as early as October 1920 Lenin was trying to persuade his old friend to leave. ‘If you don’t go,’ he said, as though it were a joke, ‘we’ll send you away.’ By the summer of 1921, he had grown insistent. There was no chance for Gorky to work in Russia: ‘In Europe, in a good sanatorium, you can get treatment [Gorky had tuberculosis] and do three times as much work. Truly. We don’t have treatment or work – all we have is bother. Time-wasting bother.’16
Gorky was slow to take the hint, and his barrage of personal appeals on behalf of imprisoned intellectuals finally broke Lenin’s patience. ‘[Don’t] waste yourself on the whining of decaying intellectuals,’ he wrote. ‘The intellectual forces of the workers and peasants are growing and getting stronger in their fight to overthrow the bourgeoisie and their accomplices, the educated classes, the lackeys of capital, who consider themselves the brains of the nation. In fact they are not its brains, but its shit.’17
The arrest in mid-August 1921 of Gorky’s brainchild, TsEKUBU’s famine relief committee (for orchestrating ‘counterrevolutionary intrigues’), marked the final break between the two old friends. In some disgrace, Gorky left Russia for Italy. He stayed abroad until 1928, aghast at the news of his friends’ arrests and the way Nina Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, was removing philosophers from Plato to Tolstoy from the libraries.
The obliteration of pre-revolutionary culture from the universities was part of an attempt to bring on, as fast as possible, a new revolutionary generation. In 1918 the Council of People’s Commissars had decreed that all citizens sixteen years old and over had the right to a higher education without regard to sex, nationality or social origin. Working people’s faculties, rabfaki, had been set up in universities and colleges to prepare workingclass students for higher education. But the rabfak system had achieved very little. By the early 1920s, hardly any university students had a working-class background. So the government took control of the universities: in 1921, a new charter gave the government control over the appointment of deans and rectors. This attack on the autonomy of the universities couldn’t have been better designed to rile the liberal establishment, many of whom remembered the hash made of university education under Nicholas II. In 1922, the staff of Moscow University went on strike.
The strike played directly into the hands of the government. At Lenin’s urging, non-Marxist philosophers and social scientists were stripped of their right to teach, publish and organise academic societies. In 1922, 161 of the most eminent were driven into exile. The Bolsheviks did not need philosophers. They needed engineers. In the early morning hours of 17 August 1922, Soviet security operatives fanned across Moscow and Petrograd, jarring hundreds of intellectuals and their families awake. In the Butyrka and Shpalernaia Street prisons, an assortment of the country’s most prominent philosophers, historians and litterateurs shared jail cells before boarding the steamships Oberbürgermeister Haken and Preussen for their one-way voyage to the German town of Stettin (now Polish Szczecin).18 Meanwhile scientific figures considered vital to the regime were being feted in grandiloquent ceremonies of reconciliation like the solemn (and expensive) Congress of Scientific Workers of 1923.
There was, finally, one other way Lenin’s government could reconcile its reliance on old specialists with its need to make the universities hotbeds of revolution. It could take the specialists out of the universities altogether, and ensconce them in their own well-appointed institutes.
And this, of course, was music to many a specialist’s ear. Was this not precisely the policy Germany had followed, in creating the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes? Was this not what France had done in Paris, with the Institut Pasteur? Was the humble-sounding John Innes Horticultural Institute in Merton Park, England, not leading the world in experimental biology?
When it came to new buildings, regular funding and a routine that did not involve teaching undergraduates, scientists and Soviet officials found themselves singing from the same hymn sheet. Almost every pre-revolutionary institution had managed to survive under the Bolsheviks, finding support from one governmental agency or another. Now a host of new institutes was created. Over forty were created during the Civil War – more than half of the seventy-odd that were running by 1922. Most were very small, poorly housed and poorly supplied. But this was about to change.
Vernadsky’s friend Alexander Fersman, writing in January 1922, caught the mood of enthusiasm among the surviving specialist elite. ‘The time of amateurish work has gone,’ he declared,
the time of individual endeavours, scattered unsystematic scientific literature, chaotic methods has gone. The heroic time of science is in the past, now we need to build science differently, [we] need laboratories, research institutes, expeditions, conferences, world congresses, [we] need to coordinate and unite.19