Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

Medicine and biology in the USSR fared worse than physics. The Soviet medical profession was disgraced, not so much when Professor Dmitri Pletniov was sentenced to twenty-five years on the charge of having killed Gorky and his son, but when Pletniov’s pupils Drs. Vladimir Vinogradov and Meer Vovsi perjured themselves by testifying that Pletniov was indeed a murderer. Biology died with collectivization. Desperate to restore grain production after the murder of the kulaks, Stalin believed, or feigned belief, in miracles. There were ill-fated experiments to breed rabbits—the breeding stock was eaten by the peasants—and even kangaroos; at Askania-Nova in the Ukraine, zoologists tried to domesticate African eland; in the north they harnessed moose to plow. The maddest solution of all captured Stalin’s imagination: Trofim Lysenko, a Ukrainian peasant with a horticultural diploma, claimed to have discovered the secret of training cereals to adapt to poorer soils and climates. Lysenko, unwittingly, had resurrected the evolutionary theory of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who had held that evolution occurs by changes in behavior passed on to progeny. If cosmologists had announced that the earth was a disc resting on the back of a giant tortoise, they could hardly have been more obscurantist than this. Lysenko incarnated Jonathan Swift’s Academician of Lagado who promised:

All the fruits of the earth shall come to maturity at whatever season we think fit to choose, and increase an hundred fold more than they do at present, with innumerable other happy proposals. The only inconvenience is, that none of these projects are yet brought to perfection, and in the mean time, the whole country lies miserably waste, the houses in ruins, and the people without food or clothes.

Modern genetics was discarded and declared counterrevolutionary. Lysenko was awarded a doctorate and made an academician, although to judge by his mocking comments scribbled on Lysenko’s articles, Stalin knew he was a charlatan. His influence outlasted Stalin and completed the ruin of Soviet agriculture.

The few biologists who dared denounce Lysenko as a charlatan were arrested as saboteurs. The internationally acclaimed geneticist Nikolai Vavilov prepared microscope slides of the chromosomes whose existence Lysenko denied; Lysenko would not even look. Genetics was by 1939 a Jewish-bourgeois heresy called “Weissman-Morganism.” In June 1939, Lysenko’s henchman Isai Prezent wrote to Molotov—Lysenko had poor spelling and grammar; he appended his signature to Prezent’s letter. Ostensibly the letter was about the seventh international genetics congress, held in Edinburgh in 1939, with the honorary president’s chair, for Vavilov, left empty. Lysenko wanted Vavilov arrested.

Recently our own Morganists have begun adding their voice to the choir of capitalist yapping dogs. In a series of public speeches Vavilov has been declaring that “we shall go to the stake,” representing the situation as if Galileo’s times had been resurrected in our country. . . . The behavior of Vavilov and his group has recently taken on an intolerable nature. Vavilov and the Vavilovites have really taken their gloves off, and the conclusion is inescapable that they are trying to use the international genetics congress to strengthen their positions. . . . Vavilov has recently been doing everything he can to portray our country as one where science is being persecuted. . . . The congress could become a means for struggling against the turn our Soviet science is taking toward pragmatism, to the needs of socialist production. . . .³⁴

Using this letter, on July 16 Beria asked Molotov for permission to arrest Vavilov as “the leader of the bourgeois school of ‘formal genetics.’ ”