The Lysenko Affair

474 Pages·1970·9.87 MB·English

by  David Joravsky

THE LYSENKO AFFAIR

TheLlseoko
Allair
David]o ravsky
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago & London
For Esther
1923-1962
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London
©1970 by David Joravsky
All rights reserved. Published 1970
University of Chicago Press edition 1986
Printed in the United States of America
95 94 93 92 91 90 89 88 87 86 54321
Originally published by Harvard University Press
in their Russian Research Center Studies series.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Joravsky, David.
The Lysenko affair.
Reprint. Originally published: Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1970 (Russian Research Center
studies; 61)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Agriculture and state-Soviet Union. 2. Science
and state-Soviet Union. 3. Lysenko, Trofim
Denisovich, 1898-1976. I. Title.
HDl993.J67 1986 338.1'847 86-11303
ISBN 0-226-41031-5 (pbk.)
Contents
PREFACE vii
1 SOVIET IDEOLOGY AS A PROBLEM 1
2 A CRISIS OF FAITH IN SCIENCE 18
3 HARMLESS CRANKS 39
Michunn 40
Lysenko and Other Peasant Scientists 54
4 RAISING STALIN'S HAND 63
The First Clashes 63
Systematic Conflict 76
5 STALINIST SELF-DEFEAT, 1936-1950 97
''Discussion'' 97
Terror 112
The Final "Discussion" 130
6 SELF-CONQUEST, 1950-1965 144
Under Stalin 145
Under Khrushchev 157
Against Khrushchev 173
7 ACADEMIC ISSUES: SCIENCE 187
Plant Physiology 187
Genetics 202
The Autonomy of Scientists 217
8 ACADEMIC ISSUES: MARXISM 228
Philosophy 229
The Human Animal 253
9 THE CRITERION OF PRACTICE 271
Potatoes 271
Com 282
Land 293
v
Contents
10 IDEOLOGIES AND REALITIES 306
APPENDIX A. REPRESSED SPECIALISTS 317
APPENDIX B. FOR THE KREMLINOLOGISTS 329
BIBLIOGRAPHY 337
NOTES 357
INDEX 441
vi
Preface
Mean motives will probably be ascribed to me, for I am presenting
a history of scandal. I am even dispelling the romantic myth of the
scandal, which has been common in the West ever since T. D. Ly
senko won the highest Communist support for an effort to abolish
the science of genetics. The Marxist theoretical heritage has usually
been pictured as the cause. According to this myth genetics was de
nounced because it subverted faith in the malleability of human
nature, and the dying Lamarckist tradition in biology was revived
to prove that new conditions will create new men. Thus the Lysenko
affair has been pictured as a latter-day version of Galileo versus the
Church, or Darwin versus the churches: new science denounced to
save old theology. The historical reality was far less high-minded,
far more serious. Lysenko's school did not derive from a moribund
tradition in science; it rebelled against science altogether. Farming
was the basic problem, not theoretical ideology. Not only genetics
but all the sciences that impinge on agriculture were tyranically
abused by quacks and time-servers for about thirty-five years. The
basic motivation was not a dream of human perfectibility but a self
deceiving arrogance among political bosses, a conviction that they
knew better than scientists how to increase farm yields. The Lysenko
affair, in short, was thirty-five years of brutal irrationality in the cam
paign for improved farming, with severe convulsions resulting in the
academic disciplines that touch on agriculture.
A Soviet historian of this protracted disorder may reasonably ex
pect widespread understanding of his 'motives: he is bravely trying to
set his own house in order. An American historian will be suspected
of Schadenfreude, and no doubt people who derive satisfaction from
tales of Soviet woe will take up this book with expectation of per-
vii
Preface
verse pleasure. At the least I will be suspected of trying to bolster
the American self-esteem that rests on disdain for the Soviet Union.
My conscious motives have been quite different. I began with the as
sumption that Lysenko's school must have boosted farm yields
why else would commissars of agriculture repeatedly say so? And I
was inclined to make the corollary assumption: however crude, the
Lysenkoites must have grasped some truth invisible to academic
science.
Even now that I have discovered both assumptions to be wrong,
I feel embarrassed sympathy with enthusiasm for a willful leap out
of agricultural backwardness, the enthusiasm that Bertolt Brecht cap
tured in his paean to Lysenkoism:1
Lasst uns so mit immer neuen Kiinsten
Andern dieser Erde Wirkung and Gestalt
Frolich messend tausend jahrige Weisheit
J
An der neuen Weisheit, ein ahr alt.
Traumel Goldnes Wenn!
Lass die schOne Flut der Ahren steigen!
Saer, nenn
Was du morgen schaffst, schon heut dein Eigenl ~
Of course my chief sympathies have been with the scientists who
suffered persecution because their analysis of the real world sub
verted the dream of a great leap forward. But the instinctive con
tempt that their persecutors arouse in me is diluted by the realiza
tion that most of the persecutors were ignorant brutes; they only
dimly understood the world they were trying to beat into modernity.
Indeed, the reader who is quite innocent of biological and agricul
tural knowledge may share the Soviet leaders' incomprehension as
he follows them from faith in autonomous science to authoritarian
pseudoscience and back again to faith in science. (If such a reader
wishes to replace faith by understanding, he will find in Chapters
.. In pedestrian, literal English:
Let us thus with ever newer arts
Change this earth's form and operation,
Gladly measure thousand-year-old wisdom
By new wisdom one year old.
Dreams! Golden If!
Let the lovely flood of grain rise higher!
Sower, what
You will create tomorrow, call it yours today!
viii
Preface
7 and 9 simplified explanations of the scientific and technical issues
that the Soviet leaders stumbled over.)
I hope the reader will move with me beyond idle sympathies to
serious engagement with two difficult problems. By what mechanisms
of institutional development was the Soviet campaign for modem
farming plunged into tyrannical irrationality and then extricated
from it? Can this process be objectively analyzed by a foreigner, or
is he merely capable of pitting one ideology against another, con
trasting "their" wicked blundering with "our" good sense? A sensible
first response is to imagine oneself discussing these problems with
Soviet scholars, hoping to provoke illuminating disagreement, anxious
to avoid rancorous quarrels. In fact imagination can sometimes pro
duce reality. One of the encouragements that kept me at my task
was the achievement of such discussions, in 1962 and again in 1965,
with a number of Soviet scholars who are gratefully named at the
end of this Preface. They differed strongly among themselves, and
none of them agreed with all of my interpretations, but we could and
did discuss acutely sensitive issues without strife. We argued our
cases as scholars should, by constant reference to an abundant stock
of factual material.
Many American scholars are surprised to hear that there is
abundant factual material presently available for the study of Soviet
history. They know that high politics has been effectively screened
from public view, except for the first five or at most ten years of the
Soviet regime. Since then the locked archives seem to preclude
serious inquiry. That is a mistake. I had no access to Soviet archives,
and I have concentrated on the years from 1929 to 1965, which in
clude the most secretive period of Stalinist politics and twelve dimly
lit years of the spasmodic "return to Leninist norms." I have never
theless found much factual material bearing on important questions,
because I have postponed the conventional first question of historical
inquiry: Exactly which high-placed men got together with which
others to effect this and that policy? That traditional method of be
ginning historical inquiry must wait for the opening of the archives,
which may not happen until the state begins to wither away. In the
meantime we can learn a great deal about the history of the Soviet
Union, if we will concern ourselves with other processes than
maneuverings at the apex of the political hierarchy. High politics is
hidden, but the public record contains much evidence of changing
policies, and of the realities they have been designed to master and
ix