Here, where biology once grew freely as a natural science, Stalin’s favourites degraded it into an ideological farce. Not all the Lutsino dachniki were natural scientists: some were in the social sciences. On the way back from the Biostation, I took the loop in the road that leads past dacha No. 7, whose grounds are grander than most in the colony. Said to have a parquet floor, the dacha was given to Academician Andrei Vyshinsky to mark his years of scholarly service to the Soviet state. However, after the arrest of the Old Bolshevik Leonid Serebryakov (Galina Serebryakova’s first husband) in 1936, Vyshinsky had acquired Serebryakov’s state dacha at nearby Nikolina Gora, which he had long coveted openly, so the smaller Lutsino dacha was merely a ‘reserve’ dacha, and the Chief Prosecutor’s visits were rare.
I had found Vyshinsky in Moscow, among Molotov’s books, and here he was again, at his property in the country. When he replaced Molotov as foreign minister in 1949 (a few weeks after Zhemchuzhina’s arrest), Vyshinsky took over his second-floor office at No. 24 Kuznetsky Most. Vyshinsky was sensitive, it seems, to the accusation that he was attached to comfort and property. After his death, a red file was found in his safe, with a loaded Browning pistol lying on top of it. In the file was a letter to Stalin from the former head of the Comintern, Dmitri Manuilsky, written in 1948, which had been forwarded to Vyshinsky by Stalin, who loved to set his men against each other. Manuilsky and Vyshinsky had worked as comrades for years, sitting side by side as Soviet delegates to the UN; their books lie crammed together in the dark of the bookcase in the Molotov apartment. In the letter, Manuilsky told Stalin that Vyshinsky was a coward and a traitor, a man of petit-bourgeois tastes, loyal only to his own craving for luxury and security.
Recorded in the annals of the colony as a ‘lawyer, historian, and state activist’, in suit and tie, with his high brow, square face and dark-rimmed spectacles, Vyshinsky was made an academician (the highest title for a Soviet scholar) in 1939, not long after the conclusion of the Moscow show trials. He was a learned man. The son of a pharmacist, he taught Latin at a gymnasium, an elite school with a classical curriculum, before the Revolution. In the 1920s, before he set his mind to questions of jurisprudence in the dictatorship of the proletariat, he wrote popular books charting the primordial human longing for a just and beautiful world: from the Garden of Eden, through Hesiod, Virgil and Plato, Thomas More’s Utopia and Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun, to Engels and Marx. The Stalin Constitution of 1936, which Vyshinsky had a hand in drafting, guaranteed citizens freedom from arbitrary arrest and the right of defence in a public trial before an independent judge ‘subject only to the law’, but Vyshinsky skilfully turned law into an instrument of state power, at once brutal and subtle. He demolished the ‘bourgeois’ concept of advocacy with all its ‘false pathos’, and defined the signed confession (even extracted under torture) as the highest form of evidence. Law was the state and the state was the law. At the trial of his former comrades Bukharin and Rykov, he screamed, in words which Andrei Sakharov could not forget: ‘Our people demand that we crush the accursed vermin … the graves of the hated traitors will grow with tall weeds and thistles, covered with the eternal contempt of honest Soviet people.’ They ‘tried with their dirty feet to stamp out the best, most fragrant flowers in our socialist state’; they should be shot like ‘mad dogs’. Summing up in the last of the trials, Vyshinsky described the accused as ‘a foul-smelling heap of human garbage … the last scum and filth of the past’.
Dusya Fetisova, who lived in the chauffeur’s quarters of Vyshinsky’s dacha, serving its inhabitants from the late 1940s until her death in 1994, would have known nothing of her landlord’s role in the corruption of Soviet jurisprudence. She is remembered in Lutsino for her good heart, her skill in making plants grow in poor soil, and her freely told tales of life at No. 7. Hard as she tried to please them, tidying the house and arranging rowanberry branches in vases, Dusya received from Vyshinsky’s widow and his daughter Zinaida neither money nor thanks. They withdrew from other people, she said, always resenting their eviction from Nikolina Gora after Vyshinsky’s death. After the death of Vyshinsky’s widow (who was gentler and more sociable than her daughter), Zinaida, a legal scholar like her father, came only for short spells in the summer. She was afraid of sleeping in the dacha alone, and, as Dusya put it, it was hard for someone so proud and suspicious to find companionship. Dusya always wished that the little chauffeur’s cottage in which she lived should be bequeathed to her, but Zinaida, she said, did not want to bequeath anything to anyone. Despite the rumours of its opulence, Dusya says that the dacha was sparsely furnished and some of its rooms quite empty. One of Nina’s friends in the colony has some battered cane furniture bought from the Vyshinsky family. To Nina Balandina, Vyshinsky will always be the agent of her father’s deliverance from exile.
Dusya’s previous mistress at No. 7 was no kinder than Zinaida Vyshinskaya. Academician Olga Lepeshinskaya, to whom Vyshinsky lent No. 7 at the apex of her career in biology, lived there between 1949 and 1952. When I asked Nina what she knew about Lepeshinskaya, she blinked and shook her head. It was hard to remember her father’s lost years, she said, it was painful to think of what happened. Dusya’s recollections were fluent. Lepeshinskaya, an ‘Old Bolshevichka’, had known Lenin in exile in Siberia and Geneva. She boasted that when she was pregnant with her daughter, Lenin had asked her what she craved, and when she replied, ‘My baby wants lobster,’ he found her a tin of conserved crabmeat. Lepeshinskaya was so shrewish, mean and untrusting, Dusya remembered, that she would poke through the garbage to check that her servant had not stolen any leftovers for her animals. Her daughter, Olga Pantelaimonovna, and her husband and five adopted children shared the dacha with Lepeshinskaya. Dusya claims to have cared for the children who were neglected by their mother, who nonetheless, as a fanatical opponent of genetic science, always expressed the desire to adopt more children to mould into perfect communists. When I looked through the card catalogue at the Lenin Library at all the titles of biological books and treatises by the now-forgotten Lepeshinskaya, I found an anomaly, a long novel called Green Noise, published by Goslitizdat, the state literary publishing house, in 1937. It was by Lepeshinskaya’s daughter. (Librarian Fyodorov would not have approved of this mistake in the catalogue that made two distinct persons, however unworthy, into one.) Olga Pantelaimonovna, who worked in her mother’s laboratory, had a feeling for nature. Green Noise is set in a sleepy Jewish village, inhabited by characters named Hirsh, Sara, Wanda, Sholom and Farshtein. The book ends lyrically, with the biblical saying, ‘all is vanity’: ‘The sounds of a song, hardly audible, were carried from afar. The sound of the birch trees, rustling mysteriously in the cemetery, floated on the light warm breeze. The moon with its phosphorescent rays transformed the earth into a fairy tale …’
But let me return to the novelist’s mother. Like her fellow charlatan, Trofim Lysenko, who consigned hundreds of scientists who disagreed with him to execution or imprisonment, Lepeshinskaya denied the ‘bourgeois’ axioms of genetics in favour of theories consistent with Marxist–Leninist dialectical materialism, in which ‘being determines consciousness’, and environment conditions everything. The power of Lysenko and Lepeshinskaya in the scientific establishment reached its peak in 1948, at the height of Stalin’s purge of doctors, scientists and ‘rootless cosmopolitans’. While Lysenko claimed that he could produce barley from grains of wheat, Lepeshinskaya boasted that soon Soviet scientists would be able to create new forms of life, new species. At a conference on her theory organised by the Communist Party in 1950, she argued, amid innumerable references to Marx, Lenin and Stalin, that a living cell need not be produced from other cells, but may be formed new from noncellular matter. She claimed to have observed new blood cells forming from globules in the yolk of an egg. Other biologists, members of the ‘old intelligentsia’ who clung to the idea of the ‘autonomy of science’, had joked from the beginning of her career in the 1920s that Lepeshinskaya was an alchemist, a charlatan and an ignoramus. But her revolutionary credentials were tools enough for a great career in Soviet science. Konstantin Timiryazev (Stalinist son of the great Russian biologist who lived behind the Sheremetev palace on our street) had protected her from these ‘idealist’ enemies, and guided by the ‘compass’ of Marxist–Leninist dialectics, she had journeyed to the ‘fountainhead of life’. Lenin had said that nothing could exist outside the world of matter, and she would demonstrate that there was no mystery about the origins of living matter. Her aim, she said, was to probe the very essence of the living organism, to delve into the question of life, ‘convinced that in this fundamental question there could be no obstinate secrets’: ‘Life itself will show us its ancient source and be a guide to its own profoundest secrets.’ Lepeshinskaya found it easier, she said, to study ‘noncellular living matter’ in Lutsino. One day, she invited a delegation of leading scientists to her dacha and told them to look into a barrel of rainwater from the roof to witness the evidence for her theory. The scientists looked into the barrel and saw nothing but the darkness of the stagnant water, but fearing for their careers, if not for their lives, they marvelled aloud at her great discovery.