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The Liberal Gene: Sociobiology as Emancipatory Discourse in the Late Soviet Union

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Yvonne Howell
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Abstract

Sociobiology investigates all manifestations of human nature—including our moral, aesthetic, and intellectual strivings—from the perspective of evolutionary biology. In this article, Yvonne Howell examines V. P. Efroimson's controversial 1971 Novyi mir article, “The Genealogy of Altruism: Ethics from the Perspective of Human Evolutionary Genetics,” in order to point out one of the paradoxes embedded in late Soviet culture: namely, the potentially reductive and reactionary discourse of sociobiology was used instead to make a compelling argument for social pluralism, intellectual freedom, and individual moral responsibility. Howell compares the initial rejection of sociobiology by liberals in the west with the valorization of Efroimson's evolutionary ethics among a broad spectrum of the liberal, educated public in late USSR. She shows how Efroimson updated the “evolutionary humanism” championed by Soviet geneticists in the 1920s to challenge enduring Brezhnev-era dogma about the malleability of human nature. This account indicates a trajectory from earlier tensions between disciplining scripts for selfhood typical of Soviet modernism and alternative narratives (both humanistic and biological) for an ethics based on autonomous individual self-scripting.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 69 , Issue 2 , Summer 2010 , pp. 356 - 376
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2010

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References

1. Efroimson, Vladimir, “Rodoslovnaia al'truizma: Etika s pozitsii evoliutsionnoi genetiki cheloveka,” Novyi mir, 1971, no. 10: 193–213.Google Scholar

2. Ibid., 193.

3. Ibid., 202.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., 194.

6. Hamilton, William, “The Genetical Evolution of Social Behavior” I and II, Journal of Theoretical Biology 7, no. 1 (1964): 10–16 and 17–32Google Scholar; and Trivers, Robert, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” Quarterly Review of Biology 46, no. 1 (March 1971): 35–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Triver's article extended Hamilton's mathematical conceptualization of kinship selection to the problem of seemingly disadvantageous (but morally “good“) reciprocal behavior in humans. It vaulted Trivers to the position of most reviled target of criticism from the academic left (a position enhanced by the irony that Trivers considered himself a crusader for political justice and a close friend of Huey P. Newton, the founder of the Black Panthers). The details of western debates over sociobiolog)’ are covered in Ullica Segerstrale, Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Science in the Sociology Debate and Beyond (Oxford, 2000).

7. Wilson, E. O., Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass., 1975).Google Scholar

8. Sahlins, Marshall, The Use and Abuse of Biology: An Anthropological Critique of Sociobiology (Ann Arbor, 1979), xii Google Scholar

9. Dobzhansky, Theodosius, “On Genetics and Politics,” Social Education 32, no. 1 (February 1968): 142-46.Google Scholar

10. This position is elaborated in Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More (Princeton, 2006).

11. See, for example, A. O. Zalenskii's depiction of the ethos of the cell biology institute in Leningrad, “Laboratoriia: Vospominaniia aspiranta,” Tsitologiia 51, no. 3 (2009): 279–85. A panel at the national convention of the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (“Countercultures vs. Subcultures: Then and Now“) in Philadelphia, 20–23 November 2008 included new research on literary and rock music subcultures.

12. Piotr Kropotkin (1842–1921) was born into the Russian nobility. His exploratory travels in the Siberian Far East led to valuable geographical contributions and fueled his later ideas on natural history and evolution. His book Mutual Aid (New York, 1916) emphasized the importance of cooperation for the survival of individuals and whole populations. Matt Ridley uses Kropotkin's story to introduce his popular account of late twentieth-century evolutionary psychology. Ridley, The Origins of Virtue (New York, 1996). A more revealing portrait of Kropotkin's unorthodox views on society and nature can be found in the collection of his letters to fellow anarchist Marie Goldsmith in Anarchistes en exit: Correspondance inédite de Pierre Kropotkine a Marie Goldsmith 1897–1917, ed. Michael Confino (Paris, 1995).

13. Efroimson, “Rodoslovnaia al'truizma,” 194.

14. Ibid., 213.

15. This passage did not appear in the original 1971 publication. Variations of this passage show up in other drafts and posthumously published manuscripts. It appears as quoted above in the 1998 publication of “Rodoslovnaia al'truizma,” reprinted in full in Efroimson, V. P., Genial'nost i genetika, ed. Dubovsky, D. I. and Keshman, E. A. (Moscow, 1998), 465.Google Scholar

16. Efroimson, “Rodoslovnaia al'truizma,” 213.

17. Ibid.

18. During his lifetime, but in the post-Lysenko years, Efroimson published several specialized scientific articles and two seminal Soviet textbooks, Introduction to Medical Gaieties (Moscow, 1964, 1968) and Immunogenetics (Moscow, 1971). His books on sociobiology, intended for a wider audience, were finally published posthumously, in repeated editions: Cenial'nost i genetika (Moscow, 1998, 2002), Genetika etiki i estetiki (Moscow, 2004, 2008).

19. Elena Keshman, “Interview with V. P. Efroimson (October 1988),” in Efroimson, Genial'nost i genetika, 469.

20. Ibid., 507.

21. See Adams, Mark B., “The Founding of Population Genetics: Contributions of the Chetverikov School, 1924–1934,” Journal of the History of Biology 1, no. 1 (March 1968): 23–39.Google Scholar

22. What could be a chapter in a novel deserves at least a footnote: The official pretext for the second arrest was Efroimson's 1945 protest against the rape of German women by the victorious Red Army troops marching toward Berlin. Efroimson was aware that his protest on behalf of German civilians took his Russian superiors by surprise, since “with my unmistakably Jewish nose, why would I bother to stick out my Jewish neck as well?” he joked. He insisted that the underlying cause for his arrest was his vehement opposition to Lysenko. The sentence was harsh: ten years in the Dzhezkazgan labor camp (commuted in 1955).

23. Efroimson was a dinosaur in exacdy the same sense that Nikolai Timofeev-Ressovskii was called a “buffalo” in Daniil Granin's famous novel Zubr (Moscow, 1988). Granin recounts the life of Efroimson's friend and colleague Timofeev-Ressovskii, a towering figure in Soviet biogenetics who had spent the interwar years in Germany. Granin equates Timofeev-Ressovskii's difficult return and final years in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union with the fate of the European buffalo—a seemingly prehistoric beast that now survives only in nature reserves but once thundered freely across Eurasia.

24. For Diane Paul's analysis of western biosocial thought, see The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature-Nurture Debate (Albany, 1998). In Paul's analysis, the rise of radical environmentalism (Lysenkoism) and radical determinism (fascism) in the 1940s made it impossible to hold the “precarious middle ground,” which “simply collapsed” (29).

25. Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976) was an uneducated Soviet agronomist whose unscientific (and ultimately very damaging) ideas about crop selection and improvement found favor in the atmosphere of Stalinist politics in the 1930s. With his campaign for a “socialist“ agriculture, Lysenko was able to present himself as a true “man of the people” with practical ideas for the rapid amelioration of a desperate agricultural situation. Despite the principled opposition of the country's leading biologists and plant geneticists, Lysenko rose to a position of extraordinary academic and political power, effectively isolating the Soviet Union from international developments in practical agriculture as well as theoretical genetics. The Lysenko episode has been extensively analyzed by Zhores Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko (New York, 1969); Graham, Loren R., Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History (Cambridge, Mass., 1993)Google Scholar; Rossianov, Kirill O., “Editing Nature: Joseph Stalin and the New Soviet Biology,” Isis 84, no. 4 (December 1993): 728-45Google Scholar; Nikolai Ki'ementsov, Stalinist Science (Princeton, 1997); Alexei Kojevnikov, “Rituals of Stalinist Culture at Work: Science and the Games of Intraparty Democracy circa 1948,” Russian Review57, no. 1 (January 1998): 25–52; Nils Roll-Hansen, “Wishful Science: The Persistence of Lysenko's Agrobiology in the Politics of Science, Osiris 23, no. 1 (2008): 166–88; and most recently Ethan Pollack, “From Partiinost’ to Nauchnost’ and Not Quite Back Again: Revisiting the Lysenko Affair,” Slavic Review 68, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 95–115. Of these interpreters, of course, only Medvedev had his own sleeping bunk in a closet refitted for overnight guests in the Efroimsons’ small Moscow apartment. In other words, intellectual circles were small: a truism that fueled Efroimson's notion that the decimation (or emigration, or exile) of a whole circle could have a lasting impact on society.

26. Letter to T. L. Ferri, 2 November 1988. Private collection of Elena Keshman, Moscow.

27. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Odin den’ Ivana Denisovicha,” Novyi mir, 1962, no. 11: 8–71.

28. Vasilii Babkov, personal communication, Moscow, 12January 2006.

29. Elena Gaginskaia, director of Cytology Division, Petersburg Academy of Sciences, personal communication, Petersburg, 19January 2006.

30. Olga Bondarenko, director ofopenscience.ru, personal e-mail correspondence, 8 February 2006

31. Aleksandr Ianov explains Kosolapov's editorial approach in this way. Ianov was also seeking to place his work in Novyi mir at that time. Ianov, personal communication, Moscow, 14 October 2007.

32. Quoted as a section epigraph in Efroimson, “Rodoslovnaia al'truizma,” 198.

33. Ibid., 199.

34. An influential argument for new directions in genetic-epigenetic research is made by Evajablonka and Marion J. Lamb, Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (Cambridge, Mass., 2005).

35. This interpretation has been elaborated in many places, e.g., Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca, 1992), and Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh, 2000).

36. Efroimson, “Rodoslovnaia al'truizma,” 199.

37. Ibid.

38. Efroimson, Genetika etihi i estetiki, 26. Russian ethologists have described this model of “submitting to the tyrant” in primate groups as well. See Viktor Dol'nik, Neposhlushnoe ditia prirody (St. Petersburg, 2004), 105.

39. Keshman, “Interview with V. P. Efroimson,” 473–74.

40. Efroimson, letter to Mariia Grigorievna Tsubina, 8 February 1951. Private collection of Elena Keshman, Moscow.

41. Efroimson, “Rodoslovnaia al'truizma,” 208.

42. Interpretations of immunity as virtue are discussed in Arthur Silverstein, A History of Immunology (San Diego, 1989).

43. Ibid., 1.

44. Efroimson, “Rodoslovnaia al'truizma,” 208.

45. Serguei Oushakine, “The Flexible and the Pliant: Disturbed Organisms of Soviet Modernity,” Cultural Anthropology 19, no. 3 (August 2004): 392.

46. Ibid, 394.

47. The key discussion here can be found in Emerson, Caryl, “Keeping the Self Intact during the Culture Wars: A Centennial Essay for Mikhail Bakhtin,” New Literary History 27, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 107-26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

48. Ibid., 117. This quote is actually Emerson's formulation of Bakhtin's notion of autonomous agency as a “signature.“

49. The study of animal behavior in an evolutionary and ecological context (ethology) also follows a pattern of vigorous early development in Russia, followed by decades of isolation and repression. An intriguing preliminary overview of pre-1930 developments in Russian ethology is contained in the articles compiled for a special edition of the InternationalJournal of Comparative Psychology 6, no. 1 (1992). From about 1965 on, Russian animal psychologists and ornithologists began to enthusiastically reinvent and reinvigorate ethological studies, but their contributions remain mosdy unknown in the west. In other words, the history of late Soviet studies of the neurophysiological basis of animal and human psychology (prefiguring the contemporary rage for “evolutionary psychology“) has not yet been written. For a comprehensive history of ethology in the west, see Richard Burkhardt, Patterns of Behavior: Konrad Lorenz, Niko Tinbergen, and the Founding of Ethology (Chicago, 2005).

50. Aleksandr lanov, personal communication, Moscow, 14 October 2007.

51. Dubrovskii, D. I., Vospominaniia (Moscow, 2000), 251.Google Scholar

52. Nikolai Dubinin, “Sotsial'noe i biologicheskoe v sovremmenoi probleme cheloveka,“ Voprosy filosofii, 1972, no. 11: 21–29; Dubinin, “Biologicheskie i sotsial'nie faktory v razvitii cheloveka,” Voprosy filosofii, 1977, no. 2: 46–57; Dubinin, “Aktual'nie filosofskometodologicheskie problemy sovremennoi biologii,” Voprosy filosofii, 1978, no. 7: 46–56.

53. Dubinin, “Biologicheskie i sotsial'nie faktory,” 56; and Dubinin, “Sotsial'noe i biologicheskoe,“ 28.

54. Benjamin Nathans, “The Dictatorship of Reason: Aleksandr Vol'pin and the Idea of Rights under ‘Developed Socialism,'” Slavic Review 66, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 633.

55. Vladimir Efroimson quoted in Stenograma kruglogo stola v tsentral'nom dome literatuwv (Moscow, 3 July 1987), 92.

56. Efroimson, Genelika etiki i estetiki, 249.

57. Keshman, “Interview with V. P. Efroimson,” 493.

58. Efroimson seldom addressed the specific issues of private property or free markets, even in private. According to his biographer, Keshman, he read through the daily papers in Russian, English, and Italian each morning when he arrived at the Lenin Library but found explicit comparison of American and European governmental styles to be beside the point (“So far nobody has gotten it quite right“). Keshman, personal communication, Moscow, 22 November 2008.

59. Oushakine, “The Flexible and the Pliant,” 392–428.

60. The complete text of Ivanov's speech can be found at www.polit.ru/lectures/2007/09/17/ivanov.html (last accessed 1 March 2010).

61. Anonymous, personal communication, 12January 2006.