THE PARTY KNOWS BETTER
However, the selection of students and scientists according to class origin and loyalty tests was not enough for the regime and its leader, Josef Stalin. Once in power, Stalin decided that he and the Party would decide which scientific theory was correct. The most odious example is the Lysenko affair, which started in 1927. Lysenko’s rise to power has been well documented, especially in recently published monographs for which authors had access to newly released archival materials.165 Here I will discuss in general Lysenko’s ideas and some events that will clarify the mechanisms the Party set in play to control science.
For some reason, biology was the scientific discipline most vulnerable to Party interference. Perhaps this was because, as Party functionaries seem to have thought, biology did not appear to require as much training or specialized skill as physics. Supposedly, it was enough to have read Friedrich Engels’s Dialectics of Nature and to follow Marx and Engels’s acceptance of Darwin’s theory of natural selection to understand the problems of biology. In any case, Marxist philosophers such as Mark Mitin, who specialized in criticizing the “bourgeois” philosophy,166 and Isaak Prezent, who became Lysenko’s chief ideologist, or even Stalin himself, who had no biology background, had no problem with participating in “discussions” on genetics and evolution with professionals.167 Although some similar “discussions” were organized in chemistry and physics in the late 1940s, they were stopped because of the military value of these sciences and their importance for the A-bomb and H-bomb projects.
Lysenkoism, a body of “dialectic Marxist” beliefs almost magical in nature, was created by Trofim Lysenko, a largely uneducated agronomist.168 Soviet leaders appreciated Lysenko’s denial of the existence of genes as the basis of inheritance (and chromosomes where the genes are located) and of species as the basis of evolution. It was much easier for them to understand Lysenko’s simplified anthropomorphic ideas that individuals within a species “help” each other (i.e., there is no competition within the same species) and inherit changes from environmental conditions than it was for them to deal with the complicated knowledge of “bourgeois” geneticists and evolutionists.
I was very surprised to see the interpretation of Lysenkoism’s roots in the recent book What Have We Learned About Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? by the well-known historian of Soviet science Loren R. Graham.169 According to Graham, the end of Lysenkoism in 1964–1965 ushered in the acceptance of Western-style genetics. This is simply not true. A profound understanding of genetics and evolution existed in Russian biology before Lysenko came to power in the middle of the 1930s and, possibly, even before American biologists recognized the importance of genetics. In Chapter 4, I will describe briefly the fate of the brilliant Russian biologist Nikolai Koltsov, one of the creators of modern evolutionary theory and genetics. His influence on Russian biology in the 1920s to the early 1930s was profound.170 Also, it is a simplification to mention Lysenko’s peasant background as his main advantage in comparison with other biologists.171 Many anti-Lysenkoist geneticists of the 1930s had a peasant or other low-class background (for instance, Professors Georgii Karpechenko and Mikhail Lobashov, Academician Anton Zhebrak, whom I will mention below).
The phenomenon of Lysenko should be considered not in scientific but in political and sociological terms, with an understanding of Soviet reality in the late 1920s to early 1930s, when Stalin’s ideological goal was to create a community of scientists that could be easily manipulated by Soviet leaders. Of the Western biologists, the Russian-born American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky (who emigrated to the United States in 1927) understood this better than others.172 Young Lysenko became known not as an author of scientific publications but as the hero in a long article published in 1927 in the main Communist newspaper Pravda.173
For ideological reasons, the author of the article, Vitalii Fyodorovich, highlighted Lysenko’s peasant background as the basis of his success in science. By the time of Lysenko’s first “discovery” in the late 1920s, the process of the vernalization of plants, which refers to the influence of temperature on the transition from one physiological phase to another, was already a well-established fact. Apparently, Lysenko was not aware of this because he simply did not read scientific literature. The success of vernalization, or, in Lysenko’s terminology, “yarovization,” was also announced in Pravda and other Communist Party newspapers.174 Standard scientific methods were not followed in any of Lysenko’s “experiments,” and he considered the statistical analysis of data to be “harmful” for biology. No doubt Lysenko’s refusal to use standard scientific methods had a more practical purpose—it made the disproving of his results impossible since he never clearly explained his methods. Step by step, Lysenko’s “Marxist-Michurinist genetics” replaced the “bourgeois Weismannist-Morganist-Mendelist theory” of inheritance in the Soviet Union.
Ivan Michurin (1855–1935) was a breeder of apple trees and, in fact, had nothing to do with Lysenko’s “Michurinist genetics.”175 However, Lysenko applied the terms “Michurinist genetics” or “Michurinist doctrine” to his own pseudotheories. This term had positive meaning in the Soviet ideological language. Lysenko and his followers applied negative labels to the real geneticists who were their enemies: “the Weismannists, Morganists, and/or Mendelists.” By the end of the 1940s, these terms had become almost synonymous with the ideological slur “enemies of the people.” The labels stressed the “bourgeois” roots of the real genetics: The German biologist August Weismann (1834–1914) was one of the founders of genetics; the American geneticist and Nobel Prize winner (1933) Thomas H. Morgan (1866–1945) established the chromosome theory of heredity; and the Austrian botanist Gregor Mendel (1843–1884) described the basic laws of inheritance in mathematical terms. The discoveries of these scientists were exactly what the Lysenkoists desperately tried to deny.
In 1945, the famous British evolutionist Julian Huxley and Professor Eric Ashby attended a Lysenko lecture in Moscow and were shocked by what they heard. Lysenko presented his “theory” of fertilization: The best oocyte chooses the best spermatozoon, and everything occurs as a “love-based marriage” during which one cell “eats” another. The inheritance in the first generation depends on the cell that “ate” the other one. When somebody asked Lysenko how to describe the segregation of characters in the second generation (which is the basic law in Mendelian genetics), Lysenko answered: “This is belching.” Eleonora Manevich, who translated Lysenko’s speech to Huxley and Ashby, recalled that both of them shuddered at the description of sex cells “eating” each other. Huxley hid his discomfort by fussing with his glasses.176 Later, he paraphrased Lysenko’s answer in his book on Soviet genetics: “Segregation is Nature’s belching; unassimilated hereditary material is belched out.”177
Lysenko’s understanding of speciation and evolution was more confusing nonsense. His “creative Darwinism” included the following statements:
Nobody knows what a species is, and everything written in books is not true.
Environmental conditions are the leading factor of life, and the living form of substances is a result and a derivative [of them], but this does not mean that the living form is the same as the non-living. The mutton meat is formed of hay and grass. The living form is a result of the non-living form… the living form appears from non-living form through the living form. The body of a live sheep (i.e. the sheep which is still running) is formed from the mutton meat, but not from grass.178