In April 1918 the new Soviet government signed an agreement promising the Academy of Sciences its autonomy. Lenin spent his last years insisting that a backward country had to learn from the bourgeois specialists it had inherited, and could not improvise a 'proletarian science' of its own. Bukharin answered Pavlov's public attacks on Marxism with courtesy, and the two became friends. Then came the grain procurement crisis of 1928, forced-march industrialisation and 'party-mindedness in science'. Genetics took the worst of it. With Stalin behind him, Lysenko drove out Vavilov, who died in Saratov prison in 1943, and did damage to Soviet agriculture that lasted well beyond Stalin. This article from the Fourth Internationalist magazine in Italian, Bandiera Rossa, printed in the Castilian edition of Inprecor in 1991, traces how the Soviet state got from the first position to the second. Our translation to English is, we think, the first.
The development of Soviet ecology must be situated within the broader context of the relationship between science and power in the USSR from 1917 onwards. For some time now, with regard to this issue, the most serious historiography has drawn a clear distinction between an initial phase (which we might call ‘Leninist’) and the phase of science’s total submission to bureaucratic power, dating from the early 1930s and hence from the growing ascendancy of the men and methods of the Kremlin’s new master within scientific institutions as well.
A clear expression of Lenin’s approach to the problem of the relationship between science and power was the agreement signed in April 1918 between Lunacharsky, People’s Commissar for Education, and Sergei Oldenburg [1], Permanent Secretary of the Academy of Sciences, whereby the new revolutionary government undertook to respect the autonomy of scientific and university institutions; whilst these institutions, for their part, agreed to cooperate loyally with the new government (even in the late 1920s, party members represented a tiny minority amongst researchers and state officials).
Learning…
Lenin’s position (shared by Trotsky) stemmed from the firm conviction that it was not possible to improvise a new ‘proletarian science’, as other Bolsheviks (notably Bogdanov) attempted to do, a science set in opposition to the old ‘bourgeois science’ on the basis of an utterly mechanistic and abstract interpretation of Marxism. At the heart of Lenin’s concerns lay the country’s tremendous backwardness; for this reason, on the one hand, it was necessary to call upon the so-called ‘bourgeois specialists’ (granting them certain material privileges which stood in clear contrast to the spirit of the revolution), and on the other, it was necessary to undertake a major effort in basic education in order to enable millions of workers and peasants to become conscious agents in the construction of the new society.
‘For a start, we should be satisfied with real bourgeois culture; for a start we should be glad to dispense with the crude types of pre-bourgeois culture, i.e., bureaucratic culture or serf culture, etc.,’ wrote Lenin in ‘Better Fewer, But Better’ [2], an article from 1923; therefore, ‘we must at all costs set out, first, to learn, secondly, to learn, and thirdly, to learn, and then see to it that learning shall not remain a dead letter, or a fashionable catch-phrase (and we should admit in all frankness that this happens very often with us), that learning shall really become part of our very being, that it shall actually and fully become a constituent element of our social life’ [3]. It was therefore necessary for the new State to succeed in mobilising, alongside itself and in the interests of the immense tasks that lay ahead, the maximum of the available scientific and cultural forces – which had been inherited from the preceding phase and which were often deeply imbued with conservative and reactionary ideologies. Moreover, progress in this field could not be the result of voluntarist interventions, as in the political and military spheres, but could only be achieved through long and patient work that had its own means and methods – namely, intellectual verification and the lessons of experience – within a framework of cultural pluralism and research autonomy.
When, in January 1922, a group of Marxist researchers (including Deborin) founded the journal Pod znamenem marksizma [4] (Under the Banner of Marxism) with the intention of making it the ‘organ of militant materialism’, Lenin sent a communication (which appeared in the second issue of the journal) in which he outlined the priorities on which the cultural struggle should be based. It was necessary to secure ‘an alliance with consistent materialists who do not belong to the Communist Party’, and above all ‘an alliance with those modern natural scientists who incline towards materialism’. Communist researchers were not to distance themselves from non-communists. A ‘modern’ – that is to say, ‘dialectical’ – form of materialism was required, and to this end Lenin emphasised the importance of studying Hegel from a materialist standpoint. Furthermore, particular attention had to be paid to the natural sciences, which were ‘progressing so fast and … undergoing such a profound revolutionary upheaval in all spheres’ that they could not ‘possibly dispense with philosophical deductions’ [5].
The Pavlov Episode
The incident involving the great physiologist Pavlov was characteristic of the climate that prevailed during those years. In 1924, Pavlov gave a series of lectures at the Leningrad Military Academy, attacking Marxism and, personally and in a particularly harsh manner, Bukharin. The Communist leader responded to the scientist with great courtesy: he rejected his attacks on Marxism but reaffirmed the importance of Pavlov’s scientific contributions, and emphasised his respect for the academic’s work: ‘Scientists such as these,’ wrote Bukharin, ‘regardless of their subjective intentions, are working for the very same cause for which we, the revolutionary Marxists, are working.’ Following this polemical exchange between the octogenarian researcher [6] and the young revolutionary leader (who, incidentally, was passionate about biology), a curious relationship of friendship and mutual esteem developed [7].
Towards the end of the 1920s, the atmosphere deteriorated rapidly as the clash between the Stalinist faction and the Bukharinist ‘right’ came to a head. At the heart of the conflict lay differing views on economic policy. The country was once again facing a critical period. Following the successes of the early years of the NEP (the New Economic Policy launched in 1921), it became increasingly clear that it was impossible to continue relying on the dynamics of a fundamentally private economy (particularly in agriculture). The need to promote voluntary collectivisation amongst the peasantry had already been highlighted in 1923 by the Left Opposition; but this position had been defeated. The line summarised by Bukharin’s slogan ‘Enrich yourselves!’ – directed at the peasants – had prevailed; that is to say, the line of reliance on the spontaneous forces set in motion by the NEP. However, the situation came to a head ‘with the grain procurement crisis’ [8], when the spectre of a serious food supply shortfall in the cities began to loom, partly because the peasants were hoarding their surpluses rather than selling them to the State. ‘An urgent solution was sought in early 1928’ [9], and it was implemented through administrative measures, in Stalin’s characteristic manner: the decision was taken that the first Five-Year Plan (October 1928) should establish forced-march industrialisation at completely unrealistic tempos; the collectivisation of the countryside rapidly took the form of a tragic civil war waged (by the bureaucratic regime) against the mass of peasants (under the pretext of fighting the wealthiest, the kulaks), the consequences of which were disastrous for Soviet agriculture for a long period.
A Cyclone
Against this backdrop, ‘a cyclone of immense proportions’ [10] also bore down on the scientific and cultural world. The fact is that the monopoly of absolute power inevitably entails the imposition of uniformity of thought in all spheres. From that moment on, ‘party-mindedness in science’ was openly theorised, and the existence of the dichotomy – which Lenin had once rejected – between ‘proletarian science’ and ‘bourgeois science’ was asserted. This opened the way for direct interference by the political authorities in the very heart of scientific and philosophical controversies [11]. Secondly, the modernisation projects into which Stalin was – recklessly – launching the country required the docile and subordinate collaboration of technical and scientific cadres. The criterion of ‘practice’, in the name of which this or that approach was promoted or excommunicated, had above all one meaning: immediate acquiescence to the Kremlin’s diktat; it was not for scientists to question the objectives set.
However, even this limited autonomy was extremely precarious – as the fate of genetics demonstrates – given that Stalin did not hesitate to meddle at will in theoretical matters of which he understood absolutely nothing, and it was his word that decided what was to be regarded as proven and what was not.
By the early 1930s, Soviet genetics was already producing results of international significance.
Much credit in this regard was due to Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, director of the Institute of Genetics at the Academy of Sciences and founder of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. In the early 1920s, with the support of the Government, Vavilov promoted the establishment of the All-Union Institute of Plant Industry (VIR) [12], which quickly became a unique institution of its kind, gaining worldwide renown. Plants were collected at the VIR from every corner of the USSR and, from 1925 onwards, from all over the world, with the aim of studying their adaptation to different climates in order to improve seed selection (the seed was then supplied to all the country’s agricultural organisations) and to carry out theoretical research based on Mendelian genetics. Vavilov even made original discoveries in the course of this work, such as the existence of centres of origin for cultivated plants, or the parallelism of variations among related species and genera (the law of homologous series in variation). However, the validity of Mendelian theory was the subject of controversy for essentially ideological reasons: for some, the immutability of genes was at odds with dialectical materialism. Even so, the fact remains that Vavilov’s position only began to be seriously challenged in the mid-1930s. The movement opposing Mendelian genetics found its leader in the agronomist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, who owed his notoriety to his method for accelerating seed ripening, discovered almost by chance. He had the backing of one of the most fiery theorists of party-mindedness in science, Isaak Prezent. Claiming to base his work on the empirical findings of a self-taught plant breeder, Ivan Michurin, whom he venerated (Michurin died in 1935), Lysenko sought to challenge Vavilov with a new form of genetics. In reality, what he did was to reproduce old Lamarckian ideas regarding the direct influence of the environment on the production of mutations in organisms and on the inheritance of acquired characteristics.
Stalin’s favour enabled Lysenko to have Vavilov removed from his post; Vavilov was arrested on false charges and sentenced to death in 1940 [13]; he died in prison in January 1943 (he was posthumously rehabilitated in 1955). Some of his colleagues met the same fate. Lysenko, by contrast, completely dominated the scene throughout the Stalinist era. Although he was ousted during the first phase of de-Stalinisation, he nevertheless managed to be back in the saddle by 1961, only to be removed once and for all in 1965, following Khrushchev’s downfall; not without having first caused irreparable damage to Soviet agriculture. The man’s whole style is summed up in the letter he had the participants at the 1948 session [14] of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences send to Stalin, in which the Kremlin tyrant is grotesquely described as ‘leader of the people and coryphaeus of advanced science’ [15].
Bandiera Rossa. Spanish translation by Miquel Novajra; English translation by redmole.org.
Notes
1. Translator’s note: Sergei Fyodorovich Oldenburg (1863–1934), orientalist and permanent secretary of the Academy of Sciences. The Spanish text spells him ‘Oldemburg’.
2. Translator’s note: Lenin’s quotations in this article reached Inprecor through Italian. They are given here from the standard English edition of Lenin’s Collected Works, vol. 33.
3. Note 1 in the original: Quoted in Silvano Tagliagambe, Scienza, filosofia, politica in Unione Sovietica 1924–1939 (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1978), pp. 26–27. Lenin’s article is also an appendix to the Italian edition of Moshe Lewin, L’ultima battaglia di Lenin (Bari: Laterza, 1969), pp. 174–190; in English, Lenin’s Last Struggle (1968).
4. Translator’s note: Lenin’s contribution was ‘On the Significance of Militant Materialism’ (March 1922), Collected Works, vol. 33.
5. Note 2 in the original: Tagliagambe, Scienza, filosofia, politica, pp. 87–89.
6. Translator’s note: So in the original; Pavlov, born in 1849, was 75 in 1924.
7. Note 3 in the original: The episode is recounted by Roy Medvedev and Stephen Cohen, and in Antonio Moscato, Intellettuali e potere in URSS (1917–1956) (Lecce: Milella, 1986), pp. 28–31.
8. Translator’s note: The Spanish text has ‘the crisis of accumulations’, a literal rendering of the Italian crisi degli ammassi: the crisis in state grain procurement in the winter of 1927–28.
9. Note 4 in the original: Giuseppe Boffa, Storia dell’Unione Sovietica 1928–1941 (L’Unità, 1990), p. 11.
10. Note 5 in the original: The phrase is Tagliagambe’s, Scienza, filosofia, politica, p. 140.
11. Note 6 in the original: Among the first to ‘pay the price’ were the ‘dialecticians’, or the group that formed around Deborin, which between 1929 and 1930 enjoyed temporary hegemony in the fields of philosophy and the natural sciences. In December 1930, Stalin personally accused Deborin and his school of ‘Menshevising idealism’; immediately afterwards (January 1931) came the Central Committee’s condemnation of the movement’s journals and the administrative measures taken by the advocates of party-mindedness in science.
12. Translator’s note: The All-Union Institute of Plant Industry, so named from 1930; the Spanish text gives ‘VIRV’.
13. Translator’s note: Vavilov was arrested in August 1940 and sentenced to death in July 1941. The sentence was commuted in 1942, and he died in Saratov prison in January 1943.
14. Translator’s note: The August 1948 session of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL), at which Lysenko had genetics outlawed.
15. Note 7 in the original: The letter is printed in Silvano Tagliagambe, Scienza e marxismo in URSS (Turin: Loescher, 1979). On the Lysenko affair, see Dominique Lecourt, Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko (London: New Left Books, 1977), first published in French in 1976; and Zhores Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969). On Stalinism and the sciences, see also Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge (1971).