The Thinking Reed

What most interests L. Graham, in analysing ‘the Lysenko affair’, is the fact that this orgy enjoyed state approval: ‘The support that Lysenko won from Stalin was doubtless very important in his continued rise. But it is difficult to find the reason for this sympathy in Stalin’s theoretical writings.’139 The explanation, however, seems to be discoverable not in theory but in the psychology of the ruling circle in Stalin’s time. The attitude of the statocracy to art largely explains its attitude to science also. The logic is the same in both cases. The essence of policy in science and the arts at the end of the 1930s and in the 1940s was this: it was necessary to bring the creative thinking of the intellectual — whether scientist, scholar or artist — down to the level of ordinary bureaucratic thinking, as this would make total control of them possible and effective. Fortunately the need to develop industrial, and especially military, technology checked this tendency towards the bureaucratization of science. The physicists could, on the whole, consider themselves lucky. The social sciences and biology suffered immeasurable harm.

To explain the Lysenko affair it is not enough to talk about Stalin, since Khrushchev, the exposer of Stalin, was an admirer of Lysenko too. What was involved here was not any sympathies or antipathies but the type of consciousness that was predominant in the ruling statocracy of those years. The fact, mentioned by Graham, that Lysenko’s ideas were essentially anti-Marxist and even anti-materialist is far from accidental. It was quite natural for the ruling circles of the Stalin era to give their approval to such ideas. Lysenko’s notion that acquired characteristics are inherited was fully consonant with Stalin’s slogan: There are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot overcome.’ If ‘socialist realism’ was ‘an art of great promises’, Lysenko tried to create ‘a science of great promises’. The absolute power of the statocracy created the illusion of absolute possibility, unrestricted by any laws — and that meant that the laws of nature could not withstand Lysenko’s work in selection, ‘approved by the Party and the Government’. A similar situation arose in economics, where doubt was cast on the very idea that objective economic laws applied in the Soviet ‘planned economy’. In this sphere retreat was sounded, though, and Stalin himself produced his famous Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, in which he acknowledged the objective character of economic laws under socialism.140 To be sure, the ‘laws’ designated by him were in fact no more than ideological slogans and had no scientific meaning. Regardless, however, of this unimportant ‘side effect’ of Stalin’s work, on the whole it meant a step forward for Soviet economic science, since this science can exist only if the objective character of economic laws is recognized. The catastrophic experience of some ‘lawless’ experiments by the Stalinist statocracy in the period of the first ‘Five Year Plan’ had taught somebody something. Economic ‘laws’ received permission to exist, if only formally.

The Lysenko affair was thus not accidental but a logical outcome of bureaucratic voluntarism, no less than ‘socialist realism’ in aesthetics. ‘The situation in the arts in these years’, writes Graham, ‘was only indirectly related to that of the sciences, but it was none the less a significant aspect of the general environment of the Soviet intellectual.’141 The standardization of art deepened the psychological hopelessness of the scientist — affected his or her consciousness — while the crisis in science, in its turn, could not but have its effect upon art. And processes of a crisis nature undoubtedly developed in several fields of scientific knowledge, albeit with varying intensity.

All critical thinking died away, and the spiritual life of the Stalinist state increasingly offered ‘a suggestive resemblance to the classic church-state’ of the Byzantine type.142 Such were the first results of the bureaucrats’ onslaught upon culture and the intelligentsia.

Notes

4 The Thaw

The Late Stalin Period: Anti-Intellectualism and Russian Nationalism