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From Partiinost' to Nauchnost' and Not Quite Back Again: Revisiting the Lessons of the Lysenko Affair

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Ethan Pollock
Ethan Pollock*
Affiliation:
Department of History at Brown University
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Abstract

Stalin's support for Trofim Lysenko in the late 1940s has come to exemplify Stalinist science and the deleterious effects of gross political intervention in scientific affairs. In this article, Ethan Pollock turns our attention to the harsh criticism of Lysenko that occurred in the Central Committee in the last years of Stalin's life and situates that criticism within a broader move in Soviet ideology toward nauchnost' or scientific truthfulness. In the later 1950s nauchnost' grew even stronger in nearly every other field of science. Still, Lysenko prolonged his hold on power in Soviet agricultural science as Nikita Khrushchev attempted to reassert the importance of partiinost’ or partymindedness. Lysenko's promises of great agricultural rewards and plans to radically transform nature were only fully rejected by the party when Khrushchev himself was removed from office.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 68 , Issue 1 , Spring 2009 , pp. 95 - 115
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2009

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References

I would like to thank Stephen Bittner, David Engerman, Mark Swislocki, and Slavic Review's editors and anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank the organizers and participants of the conference “Relaunch of the Soviet Project, 1945-1964” at the University College London School of Slavonic and East European Studies for their feedback on an earlier version of this paper.

1. O polozhenii v biologicheskoi nauke: Stenograficheskii otchet sessii vsesoiuznoi akademii sel'skokhoziaistvennykh nauk imeni V. I. Lenina, 31 iiulia-7 avgusta 1948 g. (Moscow, 1948), 7-40. Lysenko's characterization of the field, of course, was highly contested. There are many accounts of this speech and the context in which it was given, beginning with contemporaries like Conrad Zirkle, ed., Death of a Science in Russia (Philadelphia, 1949), and Huxley, Julian, Soviet Genetics and World Science: Lysenko and the Meaning of Heredity (London, 1949)Google Scholar. Highlights from the extensive historiography include: Medvedev, Zhores, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko (New York, 1969)Google Scholar; Joravsky, David, The Lysenko Affair (London, 1970)Google Scholar; Lecourt, Dominique, Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko (Oxford, 1977)Google Scholar; Valerii Soifer, Vlast’ i nauka: Istoriia razgroma genetiki v SSSR (Tenafly, N.J., 1989) and Valery N. Soyfer, Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science (New Brunswick, 1994); V Esakov, S. Ivanova, and E. Levina, “Iz istorii bor'by s lysenkovshchinoi,” Izvestiia TsKKPSS, 1991, no. 4:125-41, no. 6: 157-73, and no. 7: 109-21; Kirill O. Rossianov, “Editing Nature: Joseph Stalin and the ‘New’ Soviet Biology,” Isis 84, no. 4 (December 1993): 728-45; Krementsov, Nikolai, Stalinist Science (Princeton, 1997)Google Scholar; and Roll-Hansen, Nils, The Lysenko Effect: The Politics of Science (New York, 2005)Google Scholar.

2. Rossianov, “Editing Nature,” 728-45.

3. Opolozhenii, 512; Krementsov, , Stalinist Science, 172-74Google Scholar; Pollock, Ethan, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton, 2006), 65–68 Google Scholar.

4. In his recent book, Roll-Hansen ends his analysis of Lysenkoism abruptly in 1948. Medvedev mentions only in passing the publication of anti-Lysenkoist articles at the end of the Stalin period. Krementsov's book discusses at length the impact of the Lysenko affair on other fields of science but offers few thoughts on how debates in those other fields may have altered Lysenko's position. See Roll-Hansen, Lysenko Effect; Medvedev, Rise and Fall, 136-37; Krementsov, Stalinist Science, pt., 3. Similarly, a pathbreaking study on Lysenko during the Khrushchev years points to 1948 but pays little attention to the situation during the last four years of Stalin's life. See Mark Adams, “Biology after Stalin: A Case Study,” Survey: A Journal of East and West Studies 23, no. 1 (Winter 1977-78): 53-55.

5. For more on the tension between the rising prestige of science and the party's attention to scientific debates, see Joravsky, David, Russian Psychology: A Critical History (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar; Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); and Kojevnikov, Alexei B., Stalin's Great Science: The Times and Adventures of Soviet Physicists (London, 2004), 214-15, 291-95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8. Ibid., 44-47. Yuri Slezkine has also pointed to the degree to which Stalin's articles challenged the primacy of “party-mindedness.” As Slezkine notes: “Now he [Stalin] was saying that no ‘closed group of infallible leaders’ could substitute itself for the contentious and apparently self-contained process of the scientific quest for knowledge. He was infallible all right, but his decision-making power, he now claimed, depended on the disciplinary ‘struggles’ waged by professional scholars.” See Slezkine, Yuri, “N. la. Marr and the National Origins of Soviet Ethnogenetics,” Slavic Review 55, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 859 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. See Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, chaps. 5 and 7.

10. A. S. Chikobava, “Kogda i kak eto bylo,” Ezhegodnik iberiisko-kavkazskogo iazykoznaniia, 1985, no. 12: 148.

11. Priestland, David, “Stalin as Bolshevik Romantic: Ideology and Mobilization, 1917-1939,” in Davies, Sarah and Harris, James, eds., Stalin: A New History (Cambridge, Eng., 2005), 184 Google Scholar.

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13. For the ascendancy of science in the 1950s, see Alexander Vucinich, The Empire of Knowledge: The Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1917-1970) (Berkeley, 1984), chap. 5; Fortescue, Stephen, The Communist Party and Soviet Science (Baltimore, 1986)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak; and Paul Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited: Akademgorodok, the Siberian City of Science (Princeton, 1997).

14. In this article I emphasize die evolution of the relationship between politics, ideology, and Lysenkoism from the point of view of the highest reaches of the party apparatus between 1948 and 1964.1 do not attempt to describe the development of Soviet biology or the formation of scientific policy at the institutional level.

15. Rossianov, “Editing Nature,” 728-45.

16. Soyfer, , Lysenko and the Tragedy, 8–20 Google Scholar.

17. Joravsky, , Lysenko Affair, 39–62 Google Scholar. See also, Soyfer, Lysenko and the Tragedy, chap. 1. and Roll-Hansen, Lysenko Effect, chap. 3.

18. Zvorykin, A. A., ed., Biograficheskii slovar' deiatelei estestvoznaniia i tekhniki (Moscow, 1958), 543 Google Scholar; Ivkin, V. I., ed., Gosudarstvennaia vlast’ SSSR vysshie organy vlasti i upravleniia i ikh rukovoditeli, 1923-1991 (Moscow, 1999), 397 Google Scholar.

19. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 9396, op. 1, d. 245, 11. 59-60 (Stenogramma zasedaniia orgkomiteta vsesoiuznogo soveshchaniia fizikov).

20. Filin, F. P., “O dvukh napravleniiakh v iazykovedenii,” Izvestiia Akademii Nauk SSSR: Otdelenie literatury i iazyka, 1948, no. 6: 473-74Google Scholar.

21. Holloway, David, Stalin and the Bomb: The Soviet Union and Atomic Energy, 1939-1956 (New Haven, 1994), 209-12Google Scholar; Gorelik, G. E. and Kozhevnikov, A. B., “Chto spaslo sovetskuiu fiziku ot lysenkovaniia? Dialog,” Priroda (1999): 95–104 Google Scholar; Kneen, Peter, “Physics, Genetics and the Zhdanovshchina,” Europe-Asia Studies 50, no. 7 (November 1998): 1183–1202 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kojevnikov, “Rituals of Stalinist Culture.“

22. Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars, 107-12.

23. For more on Malenkov's rise in the summer of 1948, see Gorlizki, Yoram and Khlevniuk, Oleg, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945-1953 (Oxford, 2004), 71–74, 103CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. Pravda, 20 June 1950, 3-4, translated in John V. Murra, Robert M. Haskin, and Frank Holling, trans., The Soviet Linguistic Controversy (New York, 1951), 70-76.

25. Pravda, 2 August 1950, 2, translated in Murra, Haskin, and Holling, trans., Soviet Linguistic Controversy, 97.

26. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial'no-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI), f. 17, op. 132, d. 336 (Informatsii i spravki otdela i sektora nauki), d. 337 and d. 338 (Otliki na vystupleniia i stat'i I. V Stalina po voprosam iazykoznaniia torn 1 i torn 2).

27. Soyfer, Lysenko and the Tragedy, 226. David Joravsky has also noted that published material in Botanicheskii zhurnal suggested that support for Lysenko may have been waning in the early 1950s. Joravsky, , Lysenko Affair, 153-57Google Scholar. See also Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge, 252-54.

28. Many of these letters were later gathered into a single folder and were designated as material for the meeting of the Secretariat on 16 August 1952. See RGASPI, f. 17, op. 119, d. 1038, 11. 1-245 (Materialy k protokolu #645 zasedaniia Sekretariata TsK VKP [b] ot 16 avgusta 1952 g.).

29. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 118, d. 727, 11. 1-9 (Predlozheniia MVO [Ministry of Higher Education] ob osvobozhdenii t. Prezenta I. I. ot obiazannostei dekana biologicheskogo fakul'teta i zaveduiushchego kafedroi darvinizma MGU [Moscow State University]). Obviously, Prezent's demotion was not a total revision of 1948 but more likely a salvo in the “anti-cosmopolitan” campaign. Prezent and many of the people he promoted were Jewish.

30. Joravsky, , Lysenko Affair, 294-99Google Scholar.

31. Ibid., 146-50.

32. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 138, d. 203, 11. 37-88 (Proekt postanovleniia TsK VKP [b] tezisy, zapiski, i pis'ma Otdela, AN SSSR [Academy of Sciences], MSKh [Ministry of Agriculture] i dr. ob uchenii akademika V R. Vil'iamsa).

33. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 138, d. 204, 11. 1-127 (Varianty proekta gazetnoi stat'i T. D. Lysenko ob agronomichskom uchenii V. R. Vil'iamsa).

34. T. D. Lysenko, Pravda, 15 July 1950.

35. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 119, d. 13, 11. 57-117 (Materialy k protokolu #524 zasedaniia Sekretariata TsK VKP [b] ot 18 avgusta 1950 g.); RGASPI, f. 17, op. 138, d. 215, 11. 1-67 (Zapiski i pis'ma po stat'e T. D. Lysenko ob agronomicheskom uchenii V R. Vil'iamsa, opublikovannoi v tsentral'noi pechati).

36. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 138, d. 451,11. 1-6 (Zapiski akademika V. N. Sukacheva i N. L. Timofeevoi-Sakharovoi o nedostatkakh v teoreticheskikh rabotakh T. D. Lysenko i sisteme ego prakticheskoi deiatel'nosti); Weiner, Douglas R., A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (Berkeley, 1999), 216-17Google Scholar.

37. V. N. Sukachev, “O vnutrividovykh i mezhvidovykh vzaimootnosheniiakh,” Botanicheskii zhurnal, 1953, no. 1: 57-96. See also Vucinich, Empire of Knoxvledge, 253-54.

38. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 133, d. 233, 11. 1, 121-216 (Pis'ma i stat'i nauchnykh sotrudnikov N. D. Ivanova i P. N. Golinevicha po problemam biologicheskoi nauki, s kritikoi ucheniia akademika T. D. Lysenko).

39. N. D. Ivanov, “O novom uchenii T. D. Lysenko o vide,” Botanicheskii zhurnal, 1952, no. 6: 819-42. And, in the same number of this journal, N. V. Turbin leveled similar attacks: “Darvinizm i novoe uchenie o vide,” 798-818. Seejoravsky, Lysenko Affair, 156, and Vucinich, Empire of Knowledge, 252-53.

40. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 119, d. 817, 1. 77 (Materialy k protokolu #620 zasedaniia Sekretariata TsK VKP [b] ot 8 aprelia 1952 g.).

41. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 119, d. 851, 11. 6-8 (Materialy k protokolu #625 zasedaniia Sekretariata TsK VKP [b] ot 24 aprelia 1952 g.).

42. Ibid.

43. Ibid., 11. 8-9.

44. Ibid., 11. 13-14.

45. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 119, d. 1037,11. 1,161-73 (Materialy k protokolu #645 zasedaniia Sekretariata TsK VKP [b] ot 16 avgusta 1952 g., Tom 1).

46. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 119, d. 1036,1. 85 (Materialy k protokolu #645 zasedaniia Sekretariata TsK VKP [b] ot 16 avgusta 1952 g., Tom 2).

47. Ibid., 1. 69.

48. Ibid., 1. 70.

49. Ibid., 11. 70-76.

50. For Stalin's editorial comments on Malenkov's speech, see RGASPI, f. 592, op. 1, d. 6, 67-68 (XIX S“ezd VKP [b], Proekt doklada Malenkova). For the published version, see Malenkov, G. M., Otchetnyi doklad XIX s“ezdu partii o rabote tsentral'nogo komiteta VKP (b) (Moscow, 1952)Google Scholar.

51. Historians have noticed similar evolutions of policy in a number of areas in the late 1940s and early 1950s. See Zubkova, Elena Iu., Obshchestvo i reformy, 1945-1964 (Moscow, 1993)Google Scholar; Zubkova, , Poslevoennoe sovetskoe obshchestvo: Politika i povsednevnost', 1945-1953 (Moscow, 2000)Google Scholar; Julie Hessler, “A Postwar Perestroika? Toward a History of Private Enterprise in the USSR,” Slavic Review 57', no. 3 (Fall 1998): 516-41; Gorlizki and Khlevniuk, Cold Peace.

52. Taubman, William, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York, 2003), 260-63Google Scholar. Joravsky, Lysenko Affair, 171.

53. On the restructuring of physics, see A. V. Andreev, “Sotsial'naia istoriia NIIF MGU (1922-1994)” (PhD diss., Institute for the History of Science and Technology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, 1994); on conservationists, see Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom; on cybernetics, see Gerovitch, From Newspeak to Cyberspeak; on Akademgorodok, see Josephson, New Atlantis Revisited; on the Soviet rocketry program, see Siddiqi, Asif, Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge (Gainesville, 2000)Google Scholar.

54. Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Akademii Nauk (ARAN), f. 2, op. 1-1953, d. 49-a, 11. 1-5 (Pis'mo sekretar'iu TsK KPSS tovarishchu M. A. Suslovu ob akademike T. D. Lysenko s prilozheniem kopi pisem akademika T. D. Lysenko akademiku A. I. Oparinu); Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv noveishei istorii (RGANI), f. 5, op. 17, d. 418,11. 201-4 (O polozhenii v biologicheskoi nauke 3/1953-6/1954).

55. RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 515 (O polozhenii v biologicheskoi i sel'skokhoziaistvennoi nauke).

56. Joravsky, , Lysenko Affair, 157-60Google Scholar.

57. RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 419,11. 139-55 (Doklada i pis'ma kandidata biologicheskoi nauke A. M. Emme, s zakliucheniem sektora).

58. RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 464,11. 1-9 (Pis'mairukopis'professoraA. A. Liubishcheva, s zakliucheniem sektora).

59. Adams, “Biology after Stalin,” 58-64.

60. Soyfer, Lysenko and the Tragedy, 255-58. The quotation is from Judson, Horace Freeland, Eighth Day of Creation (New York, 1979), 468 Google Scholar.

61. Taubman, Khrushchev, 617; Adams, “Biology after Stalin,” 65.

62. Taubman, Khrushchev, 616. On the modification of the relationship between science and politics that became solidified under Khrushchev, see Konstantin Ivanov, “Science after Stalin: Forging a New Image of Soviet Science,” Science in Context 15, no. 2 (June 2002): 317-38.

63. N. S. Khrushchev, Pravda, 1 April 1957, 2.

64. Pravda, 14 December 1958, 3-4.

65. Soyfer, Lysenko and the Tragedy, 260-61.

66. Fortescue, Communist Party and Soviet Science, 19-20.

67. A. N Artizov et al., eds., Nikita Khrushchev, 1964: Stennogrammy plenuma TSKKPSS i drugie dokumenty (Moscow, 2007) 19, 32; Taubman, Khrushchev, 481, 608.

68. Sakharov, Andrei, Memoirs (New York, 1990), 233-34Google Scholar; Richard Lourie, Sakharov, A Biography (Hanover, N.H., 2002), 179-81; Gennady Gorelik with Antonina W. Bouis, The World of Andrei Sakharov: A Russian Physicist's Path to Freedom (Oxford, 2005), 231-32.

69. V Iu. Afiani and S. S. Ilizarov, ‘“My razgonim k chertovoi materi akademiiu nauk,'—zaiavil 11 iulia 1964 g. pervyi sekretar’ TsK KPSS N. S. Khrushchev,” Voprosy istorii estestvoznaniia i tekhniki, 1999, no. 1: 167-73.

70. Taubman, Khrushchev, 616.

71. Artizov et al., eds., Nikita Khrushchev, 208-9, “Doklad prezidiuma TsK KPSS na oktiabr'skom plenume TsK KPSS (Variant).“

72. “Kak znimali N. S. Khrushcheva: Materialy plenuma TsK KPSS. Oktiabr' 1964 g.,” Istoricheskii arkhiv, 1993, no. 1: 8. Suslov's words were clearly based on the report quoted above, which he most likely wrote.

73. This post-1964 settlement is described in Kojevnikov, Stalin's Great Science, 298-99.

74. Graham, Loren R., What Have We Learned about Science and Technology from the Russian Experience? (Stanford, 1998), chap. 4.Google Scholar

75. For more on the contradictory nature of Khrushchev's policies, see Filtzer, Donald A., The Khrushchev Era: De-Stalinisation and the Limits of Reform in the USSR, 1953-1964 (Basingstoke, Eng., 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom, chap. 13; Stephen V. Bittner, The Many Lives of Khrushchev's Thaw: Experience and Memory in Moscow's Arbat (Ithaca, 2008); Jones, Polly, ed., The Dilemmas of De-Stalinizaiton: Negotiating Cultural and Social Change in the Khrushchev Era (London, 2006)Google Scholar.

76. See, for instance, Evangelista, Matthew, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (Ithaca, 1999)Google Scholar.