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Reflections in Mutation Research

Lysenko and Stalin: Commemorating the 50th anniversary of theAugust 1948 LAAAS Conference and the 100th anniversary of

T.D. Lysenko’s birth, September 29, 1898 1

Zhores A. Medvedev4 Osborn Gardens, Mill Hill, London NW7 1DY, UK

Ž .Translated from Russian by Charles Severens

Keywords: Reflections; Lysenko; Stalin; Vavilov; Lamarckism; Soviet science

On July 27, 1948, after a 10-day interruptioncaused by an unknown malady and late in the eveningas was his habit, Stalin made an appearance in hisKremlin office. At 10 min past 10:00 that eveningtwo other people arrived at Stalin’s office: Malenkov

w xand T.D. Lysenko 1 . They anticipated that Stalinwould turn over to them with his stamp of approval areport by Lysenko entitled ‘‘On the Situation inBiological Science.’’ Malenkov had sent this reportto Stalin’s country home in Kuntsevo on July 23rd.Malenkov had already read Lysenko’s paper and hadmade no comments. He and Lysenko were startled tofind that Stalin had made a number of changes andcorrections as well as critical comments in the mar-gins of the pages. In the course of 1 h, as Lysenko

w xhimself later noted 2 , Stalin ‘‘gave me a detailedexplanation of his corrections and instructions onhow better to present particular parts of my report.’’An hour later, at 11:10 p.m., they were joinedby Beria, Bulganin, Mikoyan, Voznesensky and

1 To suggest topics or authors for Reflections, readers shouldcontact either of the editors by mail at the addresses shown on theinside front cover or by e-mail:

Ž .G.R. Hoffmann ghoffmann@holycross.edu , D.G. MacPheeŽ .D.MacPhee@rerf.or.jp .

Kaganovitch. There ensued an hour-long discussionof certain problems. Lysenko, in particular, was toldby Stalin to announce at the final assembly of theconference that the report had been examined andapproved by the Central Committee of the All-Union

Ž .Communist Party Bolshevik , in other words he wasto make an announcement about something which infact had not taken place.

The status of Lysenko as the President of theLenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural SciencesŽ .LAAAS grew steadily more unstable after the endof WWII. This crisis came to a head in April of 1948at a seminar for the regional party cadre when YuriZhdanov openly criticized Lysenko and his

Ž‘‘Michurin biology.’’ Michurin biology takes itsname from the Russian horticulturalist I.V. Michurin,whose thoughts on plant breeding ran counter to

.Mendelian genetics. Yuri Zhdanov was the son ofA.A. Zhdanov, a member of the Politburo. Theyoung Zhdanov, although only 29 then, had an ad-vanced degree in chemistry thanks to the connectionsof his father and of Stalin himself. Yuri was, afterall, Stalin’s son-in-law by virtue of his marriage toSvetlana. Not surprisingly, Yuri held the impressivepost of head of the Central Committee’s ScienceDivision which neither his scientific nor Party expe-

1383-5742r00r$ - see front matter q 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.Ž .PII: S1383-5742 99 00087-3

( )Z.A. MedÕedeÕrMutation Research 462 2000 3–114

rience warranted. Yuri Zhdanov criticized Lysenkoon many points and inadvertently revealed that hewas expressing his own opinion and not a new lineof the Party. However, the regional party cadreaccepted the report unconditionally as if it were adirective. Lysenko was not present in the auditoriumbut listened to Zhdanov’s speech through a hook-upin the office of M. Mitin, a professor of philosophy.Lysenko was very alarmed. On April 17th, he sent aletter of protest to Stalin, Chairman of the USSRCouncil of Ministers, and to A.A. Zhdanov, Secre-tary of the Communist Party’s Central Committee.Failing to get an answer after a month, Lysenko senta formal letter of resignation from his post as Presi-dent of LAAAS to the Minister of Agriculture, I.A.

w xBenediktov 3 .Inasmuch as Benediktov could not resolve such a

problem independently, Stalin’s intervention in oneform or another was inevitable. The opportunity forthis arose on May 31st when the Politburo met toconsider candidates for Stalin prizes in science andinvention. Traditionally, Stalin himself would an-nounce the final recommendations for recipients ofthe ‘‘first rank’’ of awards. Present at this session inaddition to members of the Politburo were Vyach-

Ž .eslav Malyshev Minister of Shipbuilding , S.V. Kaf-Ž .tanov Minister of Higher Education , and Academi-

Žcian Alexander Nesmeyanov Chairman of the Stalin.Prize Awards committee .

V. Malyshev noted the next day in his diaryrecently uncovered in party archives: ‘‘Before re-

Ž .viewing these questions about the awards , ComradeStalin brought everyone’s attention to the fact that

Ž .Yuri Zhdanov the son of A.A. Zhdanov had deliv-ered a lecture condemning Lysenko and, in so doing,stated himself that he was expressing his own per-sonal opinions. Comrade Stalin said that personalopinions and personal points of view had no place inthe Party, and that only the Party could have anopinion. Yuri Zhdanov had set as his goal Lysenko’sdestruction and annihilation. This is wrong.’’ ‘‘Onemust not forget,’’ said Comrade Stalin, ‘‘that Ly-senko today is the Michurin of agrotechnology. Ly-senko has his faults and errors as a scientist and man,and he has to be controlled, but to set as his goal thedestruction of Lysenko as a scientist is like pouring

w x Žoil on the fires of the Zhebrakians’’ 4 . Prof. AntonRomanovich Zhebrak was then the head of the De-

partment of Genetics and Plant Selection at Moscow’sŽ .Timiryazev Academy of Agriculture TAA . In 1947,

Zhebrak was also elected President of the Belorus-sian Academy of Sciences. Zhebrak was an energeticopponent of Lysenko, and it was thought that he was

.the person who advised Yuri Zhdanov on genetics.

1. Malenkov, Zhdanov and Lysenko

Stalin’s remarks meant that some decisions wouldhave to be made. The job of laying the groundworkfor these decisions fell to A.A. Zhdanov since hewas the one answerable to the Secretariat of theCentral Committee and to the Politburo for ideologi-cal, scientific and cultural correctness. He wouldhave to come up with the necessary initiative. Thejob of producing a proposal for the Central Commit-tee’s consideration fell to D.T. Shepilov, editor ofthe newspaper PraÕda and to M.B. Mitin, academi-cian in charge of party philosophy. This report wasfinished on July 7th, edited by A.A. Zhdanov and

w xsent to Stalin 5 . Stalin, however, was against sim-ple directives. He considered it more appropriate toorganize an ostensibly open discussion of Lysenko’soriginal report. Plans for holding an LAAAS confer-ence to elect new academicians had been in theworks since 1947 but postponed several times due tothe fact that Lysenko saw as too slim his chances ofgetting his own cohorts elected to the Academy.Suddenly, there was now an urgent need to preparefor an LAAAS conference which was to start on July31st. Malenkov, rather than Zhdanov, handled thepreparations for the conference.

Instead of electing new members to the academy,the Council of Ministers of the USSR simply an-nounced the appointment of 35 new academicianswhom they had chosen on July 15th from a list of

Žnames submitted by Lysenko. This decision of theCouncil of Ministers was not published in the centralpress until July 28th, after Stalin’s Kremlin meeting

.with Lysenko. Before July 30th, the date on whichStalin got Lysenko’s paper edited by Malenkov andincorporating Stalin’s suggestions, any communica-tion between Lysenko and Stalin was accomplishedwith Malenkov acting as go-between.

Malenkov’s interest in organizing the LAAASconference has led several historians to suggest that

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Malenkov was concerned not only in saving Lysenkobut in compromising A.A. Zhdanov who was at thattime Malenkov’s primary rival. Strictly speaking,Zhdanov was ranked second in the party hierarchyafter Stalin. However, while Zhdanov was located inLeningrad during the war, Malenkov was in Moscowtaking charge of all party matters even though hewas not a member of the Politburo but only acandidate for a seat in it. A significant number ofimportant documents being sent by various agenciesto Stalin for his own information or for approvalwere sent also to Molotov and Malenkov. The threeformed a unique triumvirate which ran the countryw x6 .

In 1946, Zhdanov relocated in Moscow and as-sumed the roles of head Party ideologue and over-seer of the activities of foreign Communist Parties.

Ž .The Communist Information Bureau Cominformwas created to replace the earlier disbanded Com-intern. Zhdanov was an extremely conservative Stal-inist whose sphere of activities in Moscow includedamong other things, companies which tried to free

ŽSoviet culture from foreign influences the struggleagainst ‘‘cosmopolitanism’’ and ‘‘reverence for any-thing foreign,’’ the persecution of certain writers and

.composers and the introduction of myriad restric-tions in science. Although Malenkov was elected to

Ž .the Politburo in March of 1946 along with Beria ,Zhdanov managed to squeeze him out of operationalcontrol of the country. Ever since May of 1946,memoranda, especially those from the MVDŽ .Ministry of Internal Affairs , did not get toMalenkov; his name had been crossed off the distri-bution list. Among the names on the distribution list,in addition to Stalin and Molotov, one saw withincreasing frequency those of Beria, Zhdanov, andN.A. Voznesensky. Malenkov was, as is well known,put in charge of the Central Committee of the Com-munist Party of Uzbekistan. However, Malenkovspent precious little time in Tashkent and continuedas before to meet three or four times a week with theother Politburo members in evening and night ses-sions in Stalin’s office.

Zhdanov, despite his anti-Western ideology, wasnevertheless not an advocate of Lysenko and hispromises. This is why he was unsuitable for organiz-ing the LAAAS conference. Almost immediatelyafter the last session of the conference, Malenkov

was returned to the group in charge of running thecountry and on August 19th he became once againeligible to see and receive secret memos and reportsfrom the MVD. Meanwhile, on July 10th Zhdanovwas crossed off the distribution list; this was animmediate consequence of the decision to hold theLAAAS conference and not to convene before theCentral Committee of the All-Union CommunistParty. The latter choice would unquestionably haveprovided good cover for Lysenko from his critics.However, the LAAAS conference with Lysenko’sown report, approved by the Central Committee aswell as by Stalin, made Lysenko the unlimited dicta-tor of science. The LAAAS became an even moreinfluential center of the natural sciences than theUSSR Academy of Sciences itself.

Late in August, A.A. Zhdanov took a vacation atthe Central Committee’s resort in Valdai. Once there,he suffered two heart attacks and died. In 4 years,during the Fall of 1952, it was precisely Zhdanov’sheart attacks which initiated the infamous case of theKremlin physicians which Stalin had conceived as ameans of removing Beria and Malenkov from theinner ruling circle.

2. Stalin’s corrections

Lysenko kept his report with Stalin’s own hand-written suggestions on it in his office and would attimes show it to visitors. After Stalin’s death Ly-senko turned over the original paper with Stalin’scorrections to the Party’s central archives, keepingonly a copy for himself. In 1993 K.O. Rossianov, aresearcher from the Institute of Natural Science His-tory and Technology of the Russian Academy ofSciences, was studying the proceedings of the Au-gust session of the LAAAS and found in the Party’sarchive the original document and was thus able tobe the first to comment on the nature of those

w xchanges and corrections which Stalin had added 7 .Stalin, contrary to expectations, did not use his

usual heavy hand but took it easy on Lysenko. Forinstance he removed all mention of ‘‘bourgeois biol-ogy’’ from the report. Stalin crossed out the sectionentitled ‘‘The false basis of bourgeois biology.’’ Inthe margin next to Lysenko’s statement that ‘‘anyscience is based on class’’ Stalin wrote, ‘‘Ha-ha-ha!!

( )Z.A. MedÕedeÕrMutation Research 462 2000 3–116

and what about mathematics? Or Darwinism?’’ Inanother section Stalin added an entire paragraphwhich bore witness to the fact that Stalin had pre-served the neo-Lamarckian convictions of his youthŽwhich one sees in his essay ‘‘Anarchism or social-

.ism’’ of 1906 : ‘‘One cannot deny,’’ adds Stalin,‘‘that in the debate which heated up in the firstquarter of the 20th century between the Weisman-nists and the Lamarckians, the latter were closer tothe truth for they upheld the interests of sciencewhereas the Weismannists abandoned science andbecame addicted to mysticism.’’

Stalin’s remarks showed a decisive departure fromthe theme of the class nature of science in the 1920sand ’30s. Stalin’s world view was clearly influencedby the large advances made in the U.S. and GreatBritain in nuclear physics and in the subsequentcreation of the atomic bomb. By the end of the warStalin had come to realize that progress in scienceand technology was less a matter of ideology thanone of healthy financial support for the scientists.Not everyone recognized this even after the speechthat Stalin gave on February 9, 1946, at a meeting ofMoscow’s Stalin District Electorate at the Bolshoi

w xTheatre. In particular, Stalin said that day 8 , ‘‘ . . . Iam confident that if we give our scientists the helpthey need, they will in the very near future not onlycatch up with but go beyond the achievements ofscience in other parts of the world.’’ This statementwas not just an empty declaration. By March of1946, the allocation for science in the national bud-get had tripled. Scientists and technicians in allbranches of scientific activity received very healthypay increases. However, rejection of the obsoletetheme on the class nature of all sciences, includingthe natural sciences, was not to be taken as Stalin’srecognition of a world science community. Still pre-served was the division of scientific direction andtheory into ‘‘materialistic’’ and ‘‘idealistic’’ camps.The notion of ‘‘Soviet science’’ came now to mean‘‘science of the fatherland’’ in order to emphasizethe succession between the Soviet and the Russian,pre-revolutionary, periods. This broadened the rangeof activities subject to criticism and punishment. Notonly acts which could be classified as ‘‘anti-Soviet’’but also those which would be called ‘‘anti-patriotic’’were now lumped together. Scientists were strictlyforbidden to publish the results of their work abroad.

3. Stalin as a Lamarckian

In many articles about Lysenko in both the Sovietand Western press, the opinion was expressed that hepossessed the special psychological or hypnotic pow-ers of Grigory Rasputin and was thus able to thrustupon Soviet leaders, first Stalin and then Khrushchev,his completely unfounded and false ideas. In factLysenko had no such ‘‘Rasputin-like’’ talents. Hedid not really try to persuade the leaders by over-powering them with his own views. Rather, he gotcaught up in the game of trying to make sense of thesometimes absurd ideas expressed by Stalin and laterby Khrushchev and then creating from thempseudo-scientific assertions. Stalin and Khrushchevwere essentially Lamarckians, which was only natu-ral for the Bolsheviks who were convinced thatanything could be re-made by establishing the rightconditions. ‘‘Existence defines consciousness’’ wasa formula which could be extended to apply to otherqualities and characteristics.

Many people still remember how Khrushchev triedto promote the idea of growing corn in theArchangelsk and Leningrad regions and even‘‘adapting’’ it for Siberia. However, very few peopleremember that the genetics debate which ultimatelyled to the 1948 LAAAS conference did not begin asa scientific quarrel between Lysenko and NikolaiVavilov. Rather, it was the result of decisions madeby Party and government leaders in August of 1931w x9 . The conclusion drawn by these leaders was thatthe nature of agricultural crops could be redesignedin a time frame so short as to contradict everyprinciple of genetic selection. With the intention ofsupporting the collectivization process by introduc-ing new high yield seed varieties, the Soviet govern-ment in the guise of the Central Control Commissionof the Communist Party and the Workers and Peas-ants Inspection Commissariat issued a resolution ‘‘On

w xselection and seed growing’’ 9 . According to thisresolution, the full range of cultivated low-yieldcrops was to be replaced by high-yield varieties overthe entire country in the course of 2 years. Theresolution demanded that new varieties of wheat becreated which could replace rye in the northern andeastern parts of the country. The southern regionswere to get newly created varieties of the potato.Simultaneously, the resolution called for reducing

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the time for producing new varieties from 10 or 12years to 4 or 5 years. It was expected that after 4 or 5years Soviet wheat could be high-yield, resilient,with high protein content, non-shedding, cold resis-tant, drought resistant, pest resistant and blight resis-tant. Nikolai Vavilov and the majority of Sovietgeneticists and selection specialists found these goalsto be the products of wishful thinking and quiteunrealistic. Lysenko and his still small group offollowers promised that they would meet these goals.When they were subsequently unable to meet theirpromises, Lysenko et al. explained away their failureby blaming it on the lack of cooperation from thosewho sided with ‘‘bourgeois’’ genetics. The latterwere gradually liquidated during the Terror of the1930s.

Even after the war, Stalin continued to believethat the problems of Soviet agriculture could only besolved by ‘‘re-makes’’ and ‘‘miracle varieties’’ ofone kind or another. In 1947, Lysenko began boast-ing about the unusual prospects of a so-called‘‘branched wheat,’’ seed samples of which he hadreceived from Stalin during their brief meeting on

Ž .December 30, 1946 Fig. 1 . Spikes of wheat hadŽ .been sent to Stalin from Soviet Georgia Gruzia .

However, despite the large spikes that could beproduced, but only by severely thinning out thesowing, this particular variety of wheat — alreadyknown in ancient Egypt — was not only low-yieldbut showed poor resistance to disease and producedflour with a low protein content. The very fact thatLysenko promoted this wheat so widely in 1947already proved that he, worried about the stability ofhis position, used the promotion as a means ofstressing his close relations with Stalin. In fact, therewas no real closeness between Stalin and Lysenko.They were never together in any circumstances otherthan official.

Stalin repeatedly revealed his own initiatives rela-tive to plant ‘‘re-makes.’’ Plants, especially flowersand fruits, were one of Stalin’s hobbies. Stalin’ssummer homes near Moscow and in the south hadgreenhouses which were so situated that he couldenter them alone directly from the house both dayand night. He attempted to grow exotic plants anddid his own pruning.

In his novel, Happiness, the well known Sovietwriter Peter Pavlenko, who lived in Yalta and was

invited to see Stalin whenever Stalin visited theCrimea, put together a dialogue between Stalin and agardener. This conversation was not entirely fic-tional; it reflected Stalin’s actual musings uttered atvarious times. The novel reflects the events of 1945in the Crimea when Stalin went there in the winter toparticipate in the Yalta conference of the leaders ofthe three powers. One of the novel’s heroes, a formersoldier in the frontlines, Voropaev, was invited toStalin’s home. In a light-colored spring tunic and ina light-colored service cap, Stalin stood next to theold gardener by the gravevines. Glancing atVoropaev, he was finishing up showing the gardenersomething in which obviously they both had a seri-ous interest. ‘‘Go ahead and try this method, don’tbe afraid,’’ said Stalin, ‘‘I have checked it myself; itwon’t let you down.’’ But the gardener, confusedlyand at the same time with childlike admiration,glanced at his conversational partner and made ahelpless gesture: ‘‘It’s a little scary to go againstscience, Iosif Vissarionovich. In the days of the tsarthere were some specialists here, but they didn’t sayanything.’’ ‘‘They had plenty of reason to keepquiet,’’ — replied Stalin. ‘‘Under the tsar peoplegrew up in ignorance, but what’s that got to do withus today. Experiment away! We need grapes andlemons in other regions besides here.’’ ‘‘The cli-mate, Iosif Vissarionovich, puts a halt to everything.Look how fragile, how delicate they are — how canthey survive a frost?’’ the gardener pointed to thegrapevines. ‘‘Train them to accept harsh conditions,don’t be afraid! You and I are southerners yet wehave learned how to handle the north,’’ Stalin fin-ished speaking and took several steps towardVoropaev; ‘‘Here is a gardener . . . he’s been at itforty-five years but it still afraid of science. This, hesays, won’t work, and that, he says, won’t either. InPushkin’s time eggplants were imported to Odessafrom Greece as a rarity, and now only fifteen yearsago we started growing tomatoes in Murmansk. Ifwe wanted it to work — it did. Grapes, lemons, figsneed to be taught to grow in the north. We were toldthat cotton wouldn’t grow in the Kuban region, inthe Ukraine, but now it does. If you want somethingbadly enough, you can achieve it — that’s the main

w xpoint.’’ 10 .Attempts to grow cotton in the Ukraine and in the

Northern Caucasus were made in fact during the

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Fig. 1. Bronze monument of Stalin and Lysenko. Stalin is holding a sheaf of branched wheat.

1930s. However, these efforts were subsequentlyabandoned. More successful was the introduction oftea in Georgia, Azerbaijan, and the Krasnodar re-gion, and likewise the introduction of peanuts in thesouthern part of the Ukraine. All of these were

initiated by Stalin. However, Stalin’s plan to turnTurkmenia into a country of olive plantations wasunsuccessful. The attempt to cultivate wild field

Ž .rubber plants kok-sagyz ended in failure. Not farfrom Stalin’s summer complex near Ritza Lake,

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Fig. 2. A 1949 poster: And We Shall Defeat Drought. Using forest belts to alleviate the persistent problem of wind erosion in the prairieŽ .steppe regions of the Northern Caucasus, in the Rostov and Voronezh regions, and in the Ukraine was a method that could give positiveresults; however, state efforts to create broad forest belts from the North to the Caspian Sea ended in futility. Here, all the plants andseedlings died in the course of 1 or 2 years.

greenhouses had been built where scientists tried to‘‘re-make’’ cacao and coffee trees. That was notsuccessful nor was the attempt to grow lemons in theCrimea.

Stalin was a firm believer in the principle thatacquired traits could be inherited. He viewed theconnection between heredity and some kind of genesor another to be sheer mysticism. Based also onStalin’s Lamarckian convictions was the famous‘‘Nature Transformation Plan’’ announced in 1948.The confidence that forest zones of oak, pine andother central belt cultures could flourish in the dryZavolga steppes and in the salty, semi-arid areas nearthe Caspian Sea was not based on any experimentaldata but rather on the expectation that the newlyintroduced trees and plants would adapt to their new

environment. Lysenko had no direct involvement inŽ .the details of this plan Fig. 2 .

4. Stalin, Lysenko and Sergei Vavilov

During the 1930s, genetics and geneticists in-volved in agriculture were almost completely liqui-dated. Nikolai Vavilov, arrested in August of 1940,was the last victim. Only his international fameallowed him to survive as long as he did. Indeed,there was no lack of denunciations against him; quitethe contrary, he had a multitude of detractors whohad denounced him. His arrest had to have beensanctioned at the very highest level because of hisinternational reputation. By 1940, the main surge ofthe terror had nearly played itself out. At the same

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time, however, the war engulfing Europe made theinternational reputation of any given scientist an itemof secondary interest. Nikolai Vavilov was arrestedon August 6, 1940, after a complicated processwhich included a business trip to the Western Ukrainewhich had been ceded to the Soviet Union under theterms of the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. His arresttook place out in the country away from witnesses. Agroup of NKVD agents who had arrived in hastefrom Moscow had as their mission to arrest Vavilovas if he had been caught in the act of crossing theborder from occupied Poland.

The complex arrangements were evidence thatVavilov’s arrest had been worked out in great detail.In the 1930s, only ordinary people were arrestedduring the night. Important people, generals andmarshalls, were arrested according to carefullyscripted scenarios in order to ward off publicity andthe possibility of resistance. Those who plannedVavilov’s arrest did a good job. The arrest washardly noted if at all, and there was no internationalreaction. A few scientists and scholars, mostly inEngland and the U.S., started asking questions aboutthe fate of Nicolai Vavilov, but that wasn’t until1944. In 1945, the number of inquiries about Vav-ilov’s fate increased abruptly. A particularly largenumber of letters to the USSR Academy of Sciencesand to various diplomatic channels came from theRoyal Society of Great Britain of which Vavilov hadbeen a member since being elected in 1942, bywhich time he was already dying in a Saratov prison.

In June of 1945, the Academy of Sciences of theUSSR triumphantly observed its 220th anniversaryand to commemorate the occasion more than a hun-dred scientists from abroad had been invited. Duringthe anniversary session, Vavilov’s foreign friendsfound out the basic facts about his fate. Present atthese meetings was Nikolai Vavilov’s youngerbrother, Sergei, who also had an international reputa-tion as a physicist who specialized in light, fluores-cence and optics. Lysenko did not attend the anniver-sary session. The president of the Academy of Sci-ences of the USSR was the botanist, V.L. Komarov.He was very old, and July 17, 1945, had beendesignated as the day on which to elect a newpresident. Sergei Vavilov, the younger brother of thedead geneticist, was chosen for that post. His elec-tion was received very enthusiastically. It was viewed

as a sign that persecution and repression directed atthe field of genetics was over. Vavilov’s electionwas a serious blow to Lysenko, whose influence hadalready previously been declining. His opponents inthe Academy and in the universities promoted a new,far-ranging discussion which would have an impacton several agricultural institutes. Yuri Zhdanov’sspeech in April of 1948 was part of that discussionwhich now threatened the existence of the entireschool of ‘‘Michurin biology.’’

Incidentally, the election of Sergei Vavilov wasmost certainly not an indication of the improvedstatus of genetics or of the end of repression. Every-body understood that the final choice from amongthe short list of candidates was Stalin’s alone. Thisfact is confirmed by recently published documents

w xfrom the archives 11 . By choosing S.I. Vavilovfrom a list of 22 candidates, Stalin was indicatingthat he had nothing to do with Nikolai Vavilov’sarrest.

Each of the candidates’ names on the list wasaccompanied by a brief biography put together bythe NKGB — the People’s Commissariat of StateSecurity. Stalin deflected from himself any blame forthe death of the great scientist whose enormousinternational prestige was only now becoming clearto him. The NKGB biography of Sergei Vavilovgave Stalin no grounds to deny Sergei the postexcept for the fact of a brother who was arrested andwho died in prison. The NKGB document stated thatSergei Vavilov was ‘‘politically loyal’’ and furthernoted his enormous authority in the sciences as wellas his organizational abilities. ‘‘His manner is sim-ple, his daily life modest,’’ added the authors ofSergei Vavilov’s brief which was signed by theChief of the Second Section of the NKGB, Lt.General N.V. Fedotov. Molotov and Malenkov alsoreceived copies of the candidates’ biographical pro-files. Other outstanding scientists on the list did notfare so well in the NKGB’s evaluation of theirpersonal characteristics. Ivan Bardin, the Vice Presi-dent of the Academy of Sciences ‘‘does not associate

Ž .with other scientists due to the extreme greedinessof his wife.’’ The academician Aleksander Zavarit-sky is ‘‘by nature cantankerous, and leads a closedlife.’’ The academician and mathematician IvanVinogradov is ‘‘unsociable and ignorant of otherfields of science . . . single, a heavy drinker.’’ Even

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Igor Kurchatov, a favorite of Stalin, was not withoutsin: ‘‘by nature reserved, cautious, sly and a realdiplomat.’’ But for secret atomic projects these de-fects were, of course, virtues.

5. State pseudoscience

In the summer of 1948, I was still a student atTAA. I spent that summer in the Crimea and workedin the Nikitsky Botanical Garden near Yalta complet-ing a scientific project as part of my degree require-ments. I followed the proceedings at the LAAASconference by reading about it in PraÕda. I was gladto see that my scientific advisor, Petr MikhailovichZhukovsky, an academician at LAAAS and Chair ofthe Botany Department at TAA, gave a very strongand ironic speech on August 3rd in which he criti-cized Lysenko’s basic theories. But at the final meet-ing of the conference after Lysenko let it be knownthat his paper had been approved by the CentralCommittee of the Communist Party of the USSR,Zhukovsky’s address was filled with apologies andself-criticism. The organizers of the conferenceneeded participants who had not only been defeated,but who also admitted the error of their ways. P.M.Zhukovsky arrived at the Nikitsky Botanical Gardenin mid-August. There he ran a few projects in orderto recuperate from everything that had gone on at theconference. ‘‘I concluded a Brest–Litovsk peace withLysenko,’’ he told me as soon as we were alone. PetrPavlenko arrived at Zhukovsky’s place that eveningas a guest. Zhukovsky and Pavlenko had becomegood friends in Tiflis before the revolution. In earlySeptember, having buried Zhdanov, Stalin arrived inthe Crimea for a vacation. Stalin usually took thefirst part of his long vacation in the Crimea and thensailed along the coast of the Caucasus in October onone of the cruisers under the Black Sea Naval Com-mand.

When I returned to Moscow in early October, thewar being waged successfully throughout the countryagainst genetics had already been completed. Ly-senko and his principal cohorts who had been given

emergency powers, worked relentlessly. A chain re-action began in October. Acting upon the example ofthe LAAAS conference, pseudoscientific conceptsand tendencies gained preeminence in other spheresof knowledge as well. Physiology, microbiology,chemistry and cybernetics were all pushed decadesbackwards. The ‘‘Brest–Litovsk peace’’ with Ly-senko continued too long, until 1965 and into 1966.

The negative consequences of this long reign ofpseudoscience in the USSR spread for an even longerperiod. A full ‘‘recovery from these consequences’’has yet to be achieved even today. Indeed, thereduced authority of Soviet science, the delayeddevelopment of biotechnology and the hypertrophyof far too expensive and complex projects in thefields of atomic physics and space — all madeSoviet science too dependent on government cofferswhich are now almost empty. Science in the USSRhas not become the primary mover of technologicaland economic progress. Science was continually re-vitalizing itself, but the development of technologyand the economy were basically copies of whateverhad already been done in other countries.

References

w x Ž .1 Guests of Stalin’s Kremlin Office 1947–49 , Historicalarchive, No. 5r6, 1996, p. 41.

w x2 Pravda, March 8, 1953.w x Ž .3 V. Soifer, Bitter fruit, OGONEK 1r2 1988 .w x4 Archive of the President of the RF. FZ, op. 62, D. 131, p.

2–94. Manuscript. In 1997, V. Malyshev’s diary was pub-lished in the journal Istochnik.

w x5 K.O. Rossijanov, Stalin as Lysenko’s editor, Voprosy filosofiiŽ .2 1993 56–69.

w x Ž .6 V.A. Kozlov, S.V. Mironenko Eds. , Archive of the RecentHistory of Russia, Vol. I, ‘‘Special file’’ of I.V. Stalin,Catalog of documents, Blagovest, Moscow, 1994.

w x7 K.O. Rossijanov, Stalin as Lysenko’s editor, Voprosy filosofiiŽ .2 1993 56–69.

w x8 Pravda, Feb. 10, 1946.w x9 Pravda, Aug. 3, 1931.

w x10 P. Pavlenko. Happiness, Sovetski Pisatel, Moscow, 1947, pp.164–165 and 167.

w x11 Elected or selected? More on the story of the election of thePresident of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, July,

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