Stalin and Yezhov: An Extra-Paradigmatic View - by Philip E. Panaggio
Chapter 3: Lysenkoism as Paradigm War
When a paradigm blinkers vision and exerts an iron embrace on thought, a communication gap exists between parties who do not share the same paradigms, as if communication and a meeting of the minds between them is impaired. An example of such a "gap" was the international furor that erupted during the Stalin era when an extraordinarily gifted Ukrainian botanist and agriculturalist named Trofim D. Lysenko (b. Sept. 29, 1898) battled the advocates of a new paradigm for heredity, which he called the Mendel-Weismann-Morganist theory. The latter theory stated - in Lysenko’s time - that the whole of a species’ heredity is exclusively contained in the chromosomes of its cells, and that the rest of the cell consists merely of the structural material and humors of metabolism traditionally known as protoplasm (known today as the extra-nucleic contents of the cytoplasm). Lysenko argued that a correct, complete, and useful theory of heredity could only be based on the operation of the whole of the cell and all of its parts in their bodily, developmental, and environmental context - a theory unrealized to this day. He argued that the environment in particular influenced heredity in ways unacknowledged by the new genetic paradigmists, who recognized random gene mutation and natural selection as the sole modifiers of heredity. Lysenko’s theory is often referred to as "Lysenkoism," not to give credit to Lysenko as one might think - but to discredit Lysenko. (Lysenko himself called it "Michurinism," in honor of I. V. Michurin; see below.)
The details and an evaluation of the scientific debate between Lysenko and the Morganists, and the remarkable, ignored, and original insights by Lysenko that have since turned out to be true in botany, soil science, and other fields, will be examined in Part II of this essay for readers more interested in the scientific merits of Lysenkoism. The important suggestion here is that it is much more enlightening and productive to view the "Lysenko affair" as a clash of representatives of different paradigms of heredity, rather than to see it in conventional ways which flourish under the auspices of totalitarian paradigms of Stalinist society. Conventional views are shared as much by many European Marxists, such as the Khrushchevite Dominique LeCourt, as by outright enemies of Stalin, Lysenko, and the former Soviet Union. These views generally share the belief that the Lysenko controversy was a conflict between Lysenko, who upheld an "archaic Lamarckian" theory of evolution (which he did not), vs. the first geneticists, who were "modern Darwinian geneticists" (which they were not). The mainstream view incorrectly says that Lysenko attempted to make his paradigm of heredity - which he called "Michurinist" theory - fit into the grander Marxist paradigm of history and philosophical thought as a kind of "Stalinist science."
Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin (b. Oct. 27 [date uncertain], 1855) was a Russian horticulturalist whose hybrid plants brought him praise from the new Soviet government and invitations by the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture to visit the United States. Lysenko considered himself an heir of what he called the "Michurinist trend" in plant sciences. Whatever the value of Michurin’s actual achievements as a creator of new flower and fruit varieties (accomplishments belittled by Western writers like David Joravsky and others as much as former Soviet authorities lauded them), Michurin spoke to the world scientific community from a very marginal position. To the Western scientific world, his was a small, weak voice from somewhere in remote Western Asia. Then suddenly, with the rise of the Soviet Union, there was the voice of Lysenko - sharp, intense, powerful. This single difference between Lysenko and Michurin had an important consequence:
In 1939, due to the rise of Lysenko’s prestige and influence in the Soviet Union’s learned academies, a group of important professors in genetics and biology from Leningrad University and Leningrad pedagogical institutes, who had been losing a number of open academic debates with Lysenko and his fellow scientists, petitioned Communist Party officials to intervene in their academic controversy with Lysenko. In an eight page letter submitted to Andrei Zhdanov, the head of Agitprop (the Administration of Agitation and Propaganda of the Central Committee of the Communist Party), they claimed that Lysenko’s theories had no scientific merit and that he rose to prominence solely due to his "merits in the field of agriculture" (Krementsov, N., Stalinist Science, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1997, p. 66). Note that Lysenko’s achievements in agriculture were recognized by his learned opponents as completely obvious, despite assertions by David Joravsky, Valery Soyfer, Zhores Medvedev, and many others that Lysenko’s agricultural work was a bust or - worse - a fraud. By petitioning Party officials to intervene, the Leningraders thought to "leapfrog" the long process of organizing an open academic debate in a scientific congress on genetics. As Krementsov put it, the geneticists "themselves recognized the power of the Party bureaucracy to adjudicate their arguments" (ibid. p. 68) with the Lysenkoists. During the next decades, Party bosses did indeed intervene, much to the chagrin and regret of these scientists, who then cried out that Stalin, Zhdanov, Molotov and other mere Party functionaries - such as Mark Mitin and Marxist theoretician and jurist (and Lysenko’s personal friend) Isaac Prezent - were pretending to understand sophisticated cytological experiments and the chemical reactions of very large molecules. Western writers who have expressed disgust and outrage that such governmental interference with the course of science occurred in the Soviet Union are unaware, or ignore the fact, that the very Soviet scientists whom Joravsky mischaracterized as "repressed" requested an adjudication themselves! Neither Lysenko nor the Lysenkoists pleaded for such interference. It shall be seen in what follows that archival evidence, newly available to Western scholars since perestroika and glasnost’, shows that in many areas of life, the Moscow Party bureaucracy (contrary once again to the conventional view) was not in the habit of being a "thought police" - as one "Orwellian" form of the conventional totalitarian paradigms asserts - but was very responsive to petitions and complaints from all workers and professions in the Soviet Union - including the geneticists, who wanted the Politburo to be a "paradigm patrol" until they clearly saw that the Moscow Party bureaucracy and intellectuals did not completely share their new paradigm of heredity.
The facts just adduced are in glaring contradiction with views generated by the totalitarian paradigm. The latter presents the Stalin era as one in which a monolithic, centralized scientific community run by Lysenko (with Stalin’s blessing), dictated to - and persecuted - geneticists and other scientists. According to Krementsov and others who have examined the new Soviet archival evidence, there is no factual support for this view. Instead, the evidence coheres into a picture of fierce competition between Lysenko vs. N. Vavilov, Zhebrak, and others (like the Leningraders mentioned above) for favors and funds dispensed by the Party apparatus. According to Krementsov, "the black-and-white picture... - the oppressive state versus the victimized scientific community," does not fit "the archival documents I was unearthing" (ibid., p. xi).
A parallel exists between the above-mentioned efforts of Reilly, Lockhart, and others to sabotage and overthrow the new Bolshevik regime, with the repeated efforts made a generation later (ca. 1939 - 1948) to end Lysenko’s vehement resistance to the new Mendelian paradigm of heredity and to unseat the rising dominance of his followers in the Soviet academies of higher learning. Winston Churchill, Prime Minister Lloyd George, Admiral "Blinker" Hall, M. P. (Member of Parliament), and the British Foreign Office had seen to it that the greatest part of the British Intelligence Service’s budget in the 1920’s and 1930’s was spent on spies and saboteurs in Moscow and Petrograd. The latter were given free hands - and deep pockets to put them in - to destroy the Revolution. They established and organized hydra-like networks of saboteurs and "wreckers," incorporating into their networks such diverse types as common Muscovite thieves and vandals, intellectual anarchists, various anti-Lenin socialist counter-revolutionaries who disliked Lenin’s refusal to fight Germany or have Russia participate in any more Western wars, former Okrana members (former members of the Tsar’s secret police), and master spies like Reilly and Paul Dukes - one and all seeking to crush the infant "Bolshevik menace." In similar fashion, little more than a generation later (ca. 1944 - 1948), a number of British and American geneticists, biologists, and physiologists, including Sir Julian Huxley, C. D. Darlington, Sir Henry Dale, H. J. Muller, L. Dunn, and others, including M. Demerec and Theodosius Dobzhansky, organized a broad publishing campaign against Lysenkoism: they established a parallel "high brow" international printing press network of scholars, scientists, and publishers in the West who ridiculed and misrepresented Lysenko’s ideas. As with the foreign interventionists and saboteurs in the Revolution’s aftermath, this new bookish conspiracy, consisting (as in the Lockhart conspiracy) primarily of British subjects and American citizens, had native contacts inside the Soviet Union with whom they networked, in this case scientists such as A. Zhebrak, Serebrovsky, Dubinin, and other students and former colleagues of the (by then) deceased N. Vavilov who "personally and confidentially ask[ed] for support" (Krementsov, op. cit., p. 121). Their purpose, as Huxley said in a letter to Dunn, was "weakening Lysenko" (ibid.).
The immediate reason for organizing this plot was that the "judgement" of the Politburo requested by the geneticists in 1939, once delivered, was not satisfactory to them. According to Krementsov, a report on the controversy, probably written by Party functionary Kolbanovsky and edited by Mitin, was sent to the Politburo. The substance of this report became the official determination of the case. It characterized Lysenko’s work, as "advanced, progressive, and innovative," while the geneticists, it said, were "conservative and acting against innovation in science." The "judges" pointed out also that "much in academician Lysenko’s work needs to be corrected and examined." They lauded the "practicality" and lack of dogmatism in Lysenko’s theories. The report stated that the geneticists were a very "self-enclosed group that...reacts to...criticism in a very negative way." At the same time, the report condemned the "simplistic style" of the Lysenkoists’ criticisms of genetics, and the fact that the Lysenkoists often ignored the achievements of genetics and cytology, including "the scientific meaning of the laws of heredity as discovered by Mendel," and Morgan’s chromosomal theory, which the Party authors characterized as "one of the greatest achievements of modern science" (Krementsov, op. cit., pp. 74 - 76). This was not satisfactory to the geneticists, inasmuch as the report contained no proposals for any sanctions against the Lysenkoists or for radical institutional or "police" measures (against either side). Unassuaged, the geneticists then launched the aforesaid international protest and publishing campaign against Lysenko to cajole prestigious foreign authorities to "turn screws" on Soviet leaders and institutions, such as threatening to force esteemed and valuable foreign members of the USSR Academy of Sciences to resign. In light of the foregoing outline of the Lockhart conspiracy, the Zinoviev letter, etc., the geneticists’ involvement of foreign powers and influences, especially from the English-speaking world - was clearly one of the most inept - even self-destructive - ploys they could have conceived, aside from its underhandedness and the fact that it bespeaks their inherent distaste for having strong professional and theoretical competitors in their own country. (It shall be shown in Part II that with few exceptions, the early, turn-of-the-century geneticists, especially Bateson, Vavilov’s teacher and the foremost English-speaking proponent of Mendel, were abrasive, aggressive, and acted fanatically, as if delirious and intoxicated by a new dogma.)
Lysenko was then "tried" in numerous Western books, journals, and newspapers in a manner similar to that imagined by the totalitarian paradigmists to have prevailed at the Moscow Show Trials. A group of American geneticists approached J. B. S. Haldane, one of the Twentieth Century’s greatest scientists, a co-founder of modern mathematical and population genetics. At that time, Haldane was a member of the British Communist Party and one of the select foreign members of the USSR Academy of Sciences. The conspirators hoped to enlist his aid because, as several of them wrote in a joint letter to Haldane, he "could not easily be attacked by Lysenko as a political enemy of Soviet Russia." They suggested in this letter that Haldane would not be suspected of using his prestige "for the purpose of either a personal attack on Lysenko or of a campaign to defame Soviet science" (letter quoted by Krementsov, op. cit., p. 123). Muller, Dunn, Demerec, and Dobzhansky were among the signatories of this barefaced, ignominious request. Haldane returned the letter to Muller, dignifiedly refusing to participate. This shocked the American geneticists. Muller, who had suffered a nervous breakdown, was "outraged" (ibid.). After Haldane’s refusal, Dale (President of the Royal Society) and Huxley wrote, promoted, and otherwise participated in the production of articles and books (see Bibliography) containing multitudes of snide, defamatory personal remarks about Lysenko and his fellow scientists personally and about Soviet science in general. These were the very kinds of smears and this was the very kind of campaign that Huxley and his allies, through careful planning, plotting, and the (failed) enlistment of Haldane, claimed they wished to avoid being under suspicion of making! According to Krementsov, "the geneticists adopted the same style of ‘name-calling’ and ‘labeling’" (op. cit., p. 66) that Conway Zirkle, David Joravsky, and other anti-Soviet Western writers and historians have alarmingly declared to be a "new," dangerous, and pathological hallmark of the manner in which this new breed of Marxist biologists called Lysenkoists conduct political and ideological polemics under the guise of "scientific debate." The most sarcastic and misinformed of the lot of these publications is Russia Puts the Clock Back by John Landgon-Davies, for which Dale wrote a Forward. This book discharges spleen directly at Haldane, casting numerous aspersions on his honesty, integrity, and forthrightness. The only real differences between the smears, slurs, innuendo, and other maledictions practiced by both sides is that those coming from the geneticists, who had been rebuffed by a Politburo unwilling to end competition with the Lysenkoists and serve as the geneticists’ "thought police," were more bitter and self-destructive.
While evidence of "Red subversion" in Britain has always been flimsy, it shall be shown in what follows that "White subversion" in the Soviet Union, masterminded from abroad, sometimes even by Soviet exiles (like Trotsky), successfully poisoned what Lockhart himself called the early Bolsheviks’ "surprising [!] tolerance" and created a "Terror." Anyone in Great Britain at the time who tried to keep a cool head and adhere to facts was summarily branded a "traitor" (as Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, said of the British Prime Minister). Dinner clubs were formed to liquidate the "Red Menace." Rumors believed as fact circulated, saying that Britain’s Labor Party was in possession of Tsarist diamonds handed over to them by Bolshevik looters so they could be used to finance their newspaper, the Daily Herald. If the full extent of these machinations, slanders, and frauds (such as the above-mentioned "Zinoviev letter") had been appreciated, there would be wonder about Stalin’s rationality if he had not leaned toward isolationism and suspicion of Western intentions.
Lockhart’s wife "had to warn him from London that his career was in jeopardy" (Knightley, op. cit., p. 70). Why? Because of all the foreign spies and saboteurs that first and second generation Communists (such as Stalin and Yezhov, respectively) learned to despise, Lockhart, who knew Trotsky and shook hands with Stalin, was the only one who had an overall poor opinion of the "intelligence" the British were receiving from their agents in Russia. He found reports by Reilly particularly unreliable and warned of their danger. In Lockhart’s view, Reilly’s fanatical anti-Bolshevism "clouded his vision, distorted his judgement and made him unduly optimistic about the chances of a counter-revolution" (Knightley, op. cit., p. 60). Reilly deluded himself into the thinking the Soviets were about to be overthrown every autumn.
For the following decades, misinformation like Reilly’s became typical of espionage reports received and promulgated in the West about the Soviet Union. Around 1920, for example, the British SIS forwarded a series of documents to Lord Curzon, the Foreign Secretary, and to the British Foreign Office, claiming it had stolen them from offices of a Soviet representative in Berlin. These documents purportedly showed Bolshevik subversion on India’s borders. According to Knightley, Curzon "was furious at what he took to be evidence of Soviet duplicity, and sent a strong note to Moscow. But his indignation quickly turned to ignominy" (op. cit., p. 74) because the documents turned out to be forgeries concocted from disinformation originally contained in Ostenformation, an anonymously published anti-Soviet news-sheet from Germany that was distributed to counter-revolutionary groups! This pattern of Western leaders being duped by anti-Bolshevik and anti-Soviet agents continued right into the early days of the Cold War. Many sources of disinformation were fanatical ideological Nazis who were undaunted by Hitler’s defeat, sharing pathological and even sexually perverted (as well as unscientific) ideas about race, Jews, and Slavs. While "Tail-gunner" Joe McCarthy was spending American taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars hunting for Communists in the U.S. State Department and among Jewish actors, writers, directors, and producers in Hollywood, the United States’ CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) was infested with former Nazis who were providing the CIA with disinformation about the Soviet foe that had just defeated them and would have hanged them had they not escaped into the protective arms of the awaiting U.S. Office of Strategic Services. In 1946, the OSS, which was the CIA’s predecessor organization, recruited the former head of Nazi intelligence operations for the Eastern Front, Reinhard Gehlen. With funding from the OSS and U.S. protection, Gehlen virtually rebuilt the vanquished Nazi intelligence apparatus in the new "Eastern bloc" countries of the Soviet Union. He staffed it with former SD (Nazi Secret Police), Abwehr, and Gestapo officers. By 1949, Gehlen’s renascent organization became a principal part of the newly formed CIA. As had happened before with Reilly and other rabid anti-Communists, Gehlen created a myth that the Soviets planned to overrun Western Europe and that war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was inevitable. Gehlen’s group was the U. S.’s only official source of information on the inner workings of the Soviet Union’s Eastern bloc countries. Indeed, as a source for the CIA, his "information" was considered outside the CIA as authoritative and "from the inside." According to Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, "from 1946 to 1954, virtually all U.S. intelligence on the Eastern bloc countries was filtered through Gehlen’s organization and slanted accordingly. This was, in all probability, the major contributing factor to the genesis of the Cold War." (Agents of Repression by Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, South End Press, Boston, MA, 1988, p. 391, n. 70. For even more details on this, see Higham, Charles, American Swastika, Doubleday and Co., Garden City, N. Y., 1985, pp. 241-301.)
© Copyright by Philip E. Panaggio P. O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA
