As a result of Lenin’s requests to Dzerzhinsky, in June 1922 the Politburo adopted the following recently declassified resolution introducing strong GPU/OGPU censorship of all intellectual activity in the Soviet Union:
To guarantee the order in VU [High School, i.e., universities and colleges] institutions, it is necessary to establish a commission consisting of representatives of the Glavprofobr [Main Directorate of Professional Education] and the GPU (Yakovleva114 and Unshlikht) to work on the following questions:
• filtration of students for the next academic year;
• establishing of strong restrictions for acceptance of students of non-proletarian origin;
• establishing of political loyalty certificates for students that are not sent by professional Party organizations and are paying fees for education.
The same Commission should introduce rules for meetings and unions of students and professors, which should restrict the autonomous status of the VUZ (i.e., the university or college).
No Meeting or All-Russian Congress of specialists (medical doctors, agronomists, engineers, lawyers, etc.) should be allowed without GPU authorization…
Beginning from June 10, the GPU should register once again all scientific, religious, academic, and other societies and unions through the Narkomvnudel [Commissariat of Inner Affairs or NKVD].115 New societies cannot be created without the appropriate registration by the GPU. All unregistered societies must be considered illegal and immediately disbanded.
The VTsSPS [All-Russian Council of Trade Unions] should not allow the creation and/or function of any union of specialists besides professional unions, and the existent sections within unions should be reorganized with the involvement of the GPU. The VTsSPS can issue permits for the creation of new sections of specialists only after receiving GPU permission.
The VTsSPS Presidium should give the GPU a [legal] right to use administrative exile for three years and the deportation abroad for all persons whose presence in the territory of the Soviet Republic is dangerous for revolutionary order.
Together with the GPU, the Politotdel [Political Department] of the Gosizdat [State Publishing Company] should check all periodicals published by private societies, sections of specialists within Trade Unions, and by different Narkomats (Narkomzem [Commissariat of Agriculture], Narkompros [Commissariat of Education], etc.) The publications which do not correspond to the line of Soviet politics must be closed (the Journal of Pirogov Society [the Society of Medical Doctors], etc.).116
This draft was based on a report to Dzerzhinsky by Yakov Agranov, dated June 1, 1922.117 The draft was accepted at the Politburo meeting on June 8, 1922.118 A special GPU commission began to control the acceptance of students by the universities and colleges.119 A social-class-based selection of students had already been introduced by the Sovnarkom decree signed by Lenin and published on August 6, 1918.120 The decree instructed the Commissariat of Education (Narkompros) that priority should be given to students from the proletariat and poor peasantry, who were to be assured of receiving stipends. The OGPU restricted the number of students with “non-proletarian” backgrounds (children from the intelligentsia class). For acceptance, students had to have a special certificate of their political loyalty to the regime provided by the GPU.121 Additionally, any student organization had to be approved by the administration of the institution and registered at the local NKVD.122 The famous academician Ivan Pavlov was among the very few scientists who protested against the restrictive admission policies.123
I remember my mother’s own stories about how the selection worked in 1927–1928. She applied for admission to the medical departments of two Moscow universities of the time. At the first she was rejected after the first exam on “political science,” which, in fact, was a kind of interrogation about her background, family, and political opinions by Party functionaries. She was not accepted because of her “bourgeois” background: My grandfather, Georgii Luppo, was an agricultural scientist who organized and directed a small museum at the Moscow Society of Agriculture. So my mother went dressed up as a peasant girl to the same “exam” at the second institute and pretended that she had just arrived from a distant provincial place. This time she was accepted.[1]
The resolution introduced the censorship of all professional scientific journals and books, and the GPU took charge of enforcing this censorship. That same June, the Main Directorate on the Literature and Publishing Houses (Glavlit) was created. Its duty was “a preliminary study of all works prepared for publication or distribution, manuscripts or printed materials, periodicals and non-periodical materials, photos, drawings, maps, etc.”124 Later on, the selling of used books and published materials was also taken under control. Lists of forbidden publications were sent periodically to every bookstore, and any used book could not be sold without the special stamp of a GPU/NKVD/MGB/KGB inspector.125 This system existed until the end of the 1980s.
With direction from Lenin, on September 5, 1922, Dzerzhinsky wrote his deputy, Unshlikht, the following instruction:
The information [on the intelligentsia] should be collected by all our [the GPU] departments and transferred to the Department on Intelligentsia. An investigation file should be established on each intellectual, and each group and subgroup [of intelligentsia] should be investigated in all capacities by the competent comrades among whom our Department [on Intelligentsia] will distribute the study of these groups…. You should remember that the goal of our Department should be not only sending them to exile, but also… demoralizing [the intelligentsia] and promoting those persons who are ready to support the Soviet government without any reservation.126
This instruction is key to understanding many events that followed in the history of Soviet science, some of which I will discuss in other chapters. Apparently, this instruction was also the first step in the creation of the special Secret Political Department within the Main Directorate of State Security (GUGB) in the NKVD, and after many reorganizations, in 1949 it became the Fifth MGB Directorate and ended up as the notorious Fifth KGB Directorate, the office that in the 1970s–1980s was in charge of combating Soviet dissidents such as Academician Andrei Sakharov, physicist Yurii Orlov, biologist Sergei Kovalev, and many other scientists.127
THE LAST STRAW
In February 1923, Lenin’s health completely deteriorated. According to the memoirs of Vyacheslav Molotov, a Bolshevik colleague of Lenin and then Stalin, Lenin “asked Stalin to bring him some poison. Stalin didn’t bring it, even though he had promised. He said later that Lenin probably bore a grudge towards him because of this. ‘Even if you insist, I cannot do it,’ Stalin said. The problem was discussed at the Politburo.”128 Molotov did not deny the possibility that later, in 1953, Stalin was poisoned. To the question of an interviewer, “Was Stalin poisoned?” Molotov answered: “Possibly. But who is there to prove it now?”129 Poisons definitely played a serious role in Soviet history. The most mysterious of all poisoning cases will be discussed in Chapter 2.