In March 1923, a stroke immobilized Lenin, and in January 1924, he died. The attitude of the Party leaders toward scientists and intellectuals became even worse. Stalin, the new Bolshevik and Soviet leader, did not tolerate any independent thinking. On the surface, the signs were encouraging. In 1925, there were forty-two full members, 268 corresponding members (103 Soviet and 165 foreign), and 924 researchers and technicians within the academy system.130 But by 1930, state control of the Academy of Sciences was largely complete.131 On June 18, 1927, the Council of People’s Commissars approved the new Academy Statute, doubling the number of academic positions from forty-three to eighty-five (which allowed the Party to restrict the influence of scientists within the academy), and introduced new rules for the voting system.132 On April 19, 1928, Pravda announced forty-two positions for the next elections. On July 21, 1928, the daily paper Izvestiya published a list of 205 candidates created by the Central Committee and the academy.133
The Politburo created a special commission to supervise the election. All regional Party organizations received the Central Committee “Top Secret” instruction “On a secret intervention in the campaign on the Academy of Sciences election” with two lists of names: List No. 1 with names of those candidates who should be supported by Party members and List No. 2 with those who should not be elected.134 The first list contained the names of ten Party functionaries, plus thirty-two well-known scientists such as Nikolai Vavilov, Dmitrii Pryanishnikov, and Nikolai Zelinsky (all three are discussed in Chapter 4). The second list contained the names of those whom the highest Party authorities did not recommend, such as Nikolai Koltsov, Leon Orbeli, and Lev (or Leo) Berg.
The results of voting in the Academy Physical, Mathematical, and Humanitarian Divisions on December 5 and 12, 1928, were depressing. Candidates from List No. 1 were elected without regard to whether they were scientists or Party functionaries. Academician Ivan Pavlov, who never accepted Bolshevik control, once again tried to protest in his letter to the Sovnarkom on December 19, 1928: “We, representatives of science, are now regarded as incompetent in our own area and we are ordered to elect as Academy members people, whom we, with clear conscience, can’t regard as scientists. Without exaggeration one can say that the old intelligentsia is partly exterminated, and partly becomes corrupt.”135
However, there was a hint of a revolt in the results of voting: Four candidates from List No. 2 (microbiologist Georgii Nadson, historian Matvei Lyubavsky, philologist Mikhail M. Pokrovsky, and Sinologist Vasilii Alekseev) were also elected. Later, two of these academicians were arrested: Lyubavsky in 1930, and Nadson in 1937. Nadson, former director of the Academy Institute of Microbiology, was condemned to death on April 14, 1939, as a “member of a counterrevolutionary organization” and was shot the next day.136 But the voting of the academy general meeting on January 12, 1929, was in fact an open revolt—academicians did not approve the election of three Communist candidates from List No. 1: philosopher Abram Deborin (1881–1963), historian Nikolai Lukin (1885–1940), and a historian of literature, Vladimir Friche (1870–1929). Academicians did not dare to vote against Bolshevik leader Nikolai Bukharin, but they did not approve Bukharin’s cousin Lukin, a poorly known scientist.
Academy President Karpinsky was afraid of the Party’s retaliation. He ordered an urgent meeting of the Presidium. Ivan Pavlov, Ivan Borodin, and some others tried in vain at the next extraordinary academy general meeting on January 17, 1929, to persuade that the reelection procedure would be a violation of the Academy Statute.137 Twenty-eight of forty-one academicians present voted for the reelection.
On February 17, 1929, the next academy general meeting repeated the reelection of the three candidates. Only fifty-four of seventy-nine academicians were present.138 The majority of those absent claimed to be ill. The newly elected “Party” academicians were included in the electorate. All three Communist candidates were elected. Soon after that, an Old Bolshevik, Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, was appointed vice president of the academy.139 This was the end. The academy had been destroyed. At the time, the government level of the academy was supervised by the Central Executive Scientific Committee. The next year (1930), Anatolii Lunacharsky, the chairman of this committee and one of the main Bolshevik critics of the old academy, was elected an academy member.140 In 1931, a new body named the Commission to Assist Scientists was created under the Council of Commissars, to be presided over by one of the main Bolshevik functionaries, Valerian Kuibyshev.141 It included the same Lunacharsky; a Marxist historian and the new permanent secretary of the academy, Vyacheslav Volgin;142 Academician Aleksei Bach, a Bolshevik supporter; and two real academicians, the physicist Ioffe and the geneticist Nikolai Vavilov.143 To make control of the academy even easier, in 1934 the Academy Presidium and its main institutions were transferred from Leningrad to Moscow.
CLEANSING
After the election in February 1929, the academy consisted of 82 full and 263 corresponding members, and the number of scientists and technicians working in its institutions reached 1,000.144 For the first time in the history of the academy, ten high-ranking Party functionaries, including Nikolai Bukharin, were elected full members of the academy as a result of intense government pressure.145 The next year, Bukharin became a member of the Academy Presidium, and in 1932, he was appointed director of the Academy Institute of the History of Natural Sciences and Technology.146 This institute had been created in 1921 as the Commission on the History of Science (later “of Knowledge”), with Academician Vernadsky as its chair. On October 3, 1930, Bukharin was elected the new chair. On February 28, 1932, after Bukharin made a request to the Presidium, the academy general meeting decided to turn the commission into an institute.
The biochemist Aleksei Bach, who directed the Institute of Biochemistry, also became an academician. He had spent thirty-two years abroad, returning to Russia after the Bolshevik coup and becoming an enthusiastic supporter of the new regime. From 1927, he headed the All-Union Association of Workers of Science and Technique to Assist the Socialist Construction (VARNITSO), which played the crucial role in the Sovietization of Russian Science and the academy.147 VARNITSO was created in Moscow in response to the independent position of the Academy of Sciences, which at the time was still located in Leningrad. Besides Bach, Boris Zbarsky, Aleksandr Oparin, and Andrei Vyshinsky (all discussed in this book) were the main organizers of VARNITSO and its work. In 1928, Bach was a public prosecutor in the Shakhty (Mines) case in Moscow, the first show trial since 1922. This trial against fifty-three representatives of the technical intelligentsia described as wreckers, spies, and saboteurs ended the NEP period and ushered in a series of “wreckers’ trials.”148 Eleven of the accused were sentenced to death. An American journalist, Eugene Lyons, witnessed the trial and described its horrifying details. The OGPU used every opportunity to destroy the defendants. Even a son of one of the accused demanded death for his father. A letter from the twelve- or thirteen-year-old Kyrill, published in that morning’s Pravda, was read into the record: “I denounce my father [Andrei Kolodoob] as a whole-hearted traitor and an enemy of the working class. I demand for him the severest penalty. I reject him and the name he bears. Hereafter, I shall no longer call myself Kolodoob but Shakhtin.”149