Responding to a session of the Soviet Academy of Sciences devoted to the history of Russian science, a Pravda columnist claimed in January 1948 that ‘throughout its history, the Great Russian People have enriched national and world technology with outstanding discoveries and inventions’. A headline in Komsomol’skaya Pravda that same month proclaimed, ‘The Aeroplane Is a Russian Invention’. According to the author of this article:
It is impossible to find one area in which the Russian people have not blazed new paths. A. S. Popov invented radio. A. N. Lodygin created the incandescent bulb. I. I. Pozunov built the world’s first steam engine. The first locomotive, invented by the Cherepanovs, moved on Russian land. The serf Fedor Blinov flew over Russian land in a plane heavier than air, created by the genius Aleksandr Fedorovich Mozhaiskii, twenty-one years before the Wright Brothers.219
When the centenary of Ivan Pavlov’s birth was celebrated in September 1949, the headline of Pravda’s front-page editorial was a ‘A Great Son of the Russian People’.220 Immortalised by his research on conditioned reflexes that gave rise to the concept of a Pavlovian response, the physiologist-cum-psychologist Ivan P. Pavlov (1849–1936) was in his time the Soviet Union’s most famous scientist. He was the first Russian awarded a Nobel Prize – for Medicine in 1904 – and, unlike many other eminent Tsarist-era scientists, he opted to stay in the country after the 1917 revolution. Although not a Bolshevik, his materialist scientific research methods were deemed compatible with Marxism and seen as far preferable to the introspection and subjectivism of Freudianism. While his approach was dominant among Soviet physiologists, and remained so after his death, there were sceptics and doubters who questioned some of Pavlov’s more mechanistic and reductionist research.
It’s not clear how much Stalin knew about Pavlov or his work. His library contained a copy of the Russian edition of Pavlov’s Twenty Years of Experience of the Objective Study of the Higher Nervous Activities of Animals, but it is unmarked.221 What we do know is that he agreed wholeheartedly with a long memo sent to him by Yury Zhdanov in September 1949 that criticised ‘anti-Pavlovian revisionism’ among Soviet physiologists and psychologists. Zhdanov, the chastened former critic of Lysenko, was by this time married to Stalin’s daughter Svetlana (though not for very much longer). He wanted to ‘unmask’ the revisionists and restructure research and teaching institutes to ensure orthodox, patriotic scientists were in charge. To that end, he proposed to convene a scientific discussion meeting that would smoke out the western-influenced anti-Pavlov elements. Stalin agreed with this strategy and kindly offered some tactical advice:
It is necessary first of all to quietly gather together the supporters of Pavlov, to organise them, allocate roles and then convene the conference of physiologists . . . where you should engage the opposition in a general battle. Without this the cause may collapse. Remember: for complete success you need to beat the enemy for sure.222
A joint Academy of Sciences and Academy of Medical Sciences ‘Scientific Session on the Physiological Teachings of Academician I. P. Pavlov’ duly took place in June 1950. With more than a thousand people in attendance, the leading doubters were criticised and subsequently demoted and a true believer placed in charge of a new Pavlov Institute of Physiology. This proved to be a temporary victory since within a couple of years of Stalin’s death the status quo ante had been restored. Zhdanov’s central committee Science Council was abolished and party interference in strictly scientific matters became frowned upon. Pavlovianism remained dominant but its critics recovered their place and status within the Academy.
Stalin believed himself to be a master of dialectical materialism – the Marxist methodology for understanding all aspects of human existence, including the natural world. He knew his limits, however, and generally stuck to subjects such as history, politics, economics and philosophy. However, in 1950 he intervened in a debate about linguistics focused on the views of the Anglo-Georgian language historian and theorist Nikolai Marr (1865–1934).
Marr specialised in the languages of the Caucasus but believed all the world’s languages were related and had a common root in four basic syllables – SAL, BER, ROSH, YON. After the revolution he adapted his theories to Marxist categories. All languages were class-based, he argued, and changed in accordance with transformations of the economic bases of societies. In compliance with the Marxist base–superstructure metaphor, language was categorised as an aspect of the cultural-ideological superstructure of a society which in turn rested on a class-based socio-economic mode of production. All aspects of the superstructure, including language, were shaped and determined by class relations and the dynamics of the economic base. Different classes spoke different languages and the language of homologous classes in different countries had more in common with each other than with their compatriots who belonged to a different class. Language, Marr insisted, was a class question, not an national or ethnic one.
In the 1920s Marr was centrally involved in discussions about the Latinisation of the Cyrillic alphabet and was consulted by Stalin’s staff about this matter.223 Latinisation was a project promoted by enlightenment commissar Anatoly Lunacharsky, as part of the Bolsheviks’ modernisation ethos. Cyrillic was deemed backward, bourgeois and chauvinistic, while the Latin alphabet was deemed modern and the core of a future world language. A number of minority, non-Cyrillic Soviet languages were Latinised in the 1920s but Stalin and the Politburo baulked when it came to Russian and vetoed the idea in a resolution passed in January 1930. Such a policy would have been hugely disruptive and ran counter to the emerging trend of resuscitating Russian history and culture as the foundation of a Soviet patriotism.224
Marr was selected to represent Soviet scientists at the 16th party congress in June 1930, telling delegates that he was dedicated to using all his ‘revolutionary creativity to be a warrior on the scientific front for the unequivocal general line of proletarian scientific theory’. He joined the party immediately after the congress and within a year had become a member of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Union Congress of Soviets.225 When Marr sought an audience with the dictator in 1932, he was politely turned down but Stalin said that he might be able to spare forty to fifty minutes at some point in the future.226 That meeting never took place because in October 1933 Marr had a debilitating stroke and in December 1934 he died.227
The Marrites were strongly entrenched in the Soviet linguistics establishment but had critics such as Victor Vinogradov (1894–1969) and Arnold Chikobava (1898–1985). Vinogradov was a Russianist literary and grammar scholar who believed languages were best studied as members of family groups such as the Indo-European – a traditionalist approach despised by Marr’s supporters. Chikobava, a Georgian linguist and philologist, also valorised the national-cultural character of different languages. Vinogradov’s study of the evolution of Russian literary naturalism was part of Stalin’s book collection, as was Chikobava’s Georgian text on ancient nominal stems in the Kartvelian language of the South Caucasus.228
Among Marr’s books in Stalin’s library was the edited volume Tristan and Isolde: From the Heroic Love of Feudal Europe to the Goddess of Matriarchal AfroEurAsia (1932), his Svan-Russian dictionary (1922) and a collection of essays about the language and the history of Abkhazia (1938).229
Like the Pavlovites, the Marrites tried to use the Lysenko affair to promote themselves and their theories as the epitome of patriotic Soviet linguistics. Meetings were held, articles were published and there were orchestrated attacks on Marr’s critics. Stalin’s involvement was precipitated by a December 1949 letter from Georgian communist leader Kandid Charkviani.230 Prompted, and probably drafted by Chikobava, it contained a detailed critique of Marr’s views, which Stalin read carefully. Marr was a vulgar not a dialectical materialist, wrote Charkviani. His theories were not and should not be the basis for a proper Marxist-Leninist analysis of the origins, relations and roles of language and languages. Marr was wrong to believe that all languages were class-based from their inception and that there was no such thing as a non-class language. During the Latinisation debates Marr had adopted a ‘cosmopolitan’ position that disrespected local languages. He thought the main goal of Soviet linguistics was to work towards a single world language, whereas Stalin had stated that during the transition to world socialism national languages would persist.