Stalin’s Library by Geoffrey Roberts – a resumé and review – Part 8
Science and society
Under Zhdanov’s leadership, the campaign against Western capitalist cultural influences was initiated in the summer of 1946. Stalin was determined to expand Soviet influence in eastern and central Europe as a barrier against future German aggression against the Soviet Union. Instead of understanding Soviet concerns after such a costly war, Anglo-American imperialism launched the Cold War, with Churchill declaring in his notorious Fulton speech that an “iron curtain” had “descended on Europe from the Baltic to the Adriatic. Behind the screen, all the ‘ancient states’ of central and eastern Europe were succumbing to communist totalitarian control” [Note that Churchill borrowed the expression ‘Iron Curtain’ as a propaganda device straight from Goebbels].
A year later, US President Harry Truman called for a global defence of the ‘free world’ by the US and requested funding from the Congress ‘to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressures’.
It was in this context that the Soviet campaign against Western cultural penetration was launched.
In a speech in 1946, Zhdanov bluntly stated that: “Some of our literary people have come to see themselves not as teachers but as pupils [and] have slipped into a tone of servility before philistine foreign literature. Is such servility becoming of us Soviet patriots, who are building the Soviet system, which is a hundred times higher and better than any bourgeois system? Is it becoming of our vanguard Soviet literature … to cringe before the narrow-minded and philistine bourgeois literature of the West?” (p.143).
When officials from the Soviet Writers’ Union met Stalin in May 1947, they found him preoccupied with the intelligentsia’s inadequate patriotic education. “They engage in an unjustified admiration of foreign culture … This backward tradition began with Peter … there was much grovelling before foreigners, before shits” (p.143).
In 1947 there was a public discussion of a book on the history of Western philosophy by Gregory Alexandrov – head of the party’s propaganda department. He was criticised for underestimating the Russian contribution to philosophy and for failing to emphasise Marxism’s break with Western tradition.
The campaign extended to the field of natural sciences. The first to be criticised were a biologist and a microbiologist who had developed a new method of cancer therapy using a single-celled micro-organism. They gave a copy of the manuscript on treatment methods to American medical scientists. “On Stalin’s initiative, the government passed a resolution on the form of honour courts to judge whether such actions were anti-patriotic. No criminal sanctions were imposed on the two scientists, but their trial in June 1947 was attended by the cream of the Soviet medical establishment as well as hundreds of other onlookers. A year later, the central committee sent a secret circular to party members that recounted the affair and criticised the ‘slavishness and servility before all things foreign’, and warned against ‘kowtowing and servility before the bourgeois culture of the West’” (p.144).
Patriotic imperative was also evident in the Lysenko affair. Stalin supported Lysenko’s position, especially his belief that the natural world could be transformed by human intervention. Lysenko was of the view that acquired characteristics could be inherited and were hence influenced by environmental changes. This went against Soviet geneticists who held that inheritance was strictly a function of genes and nothing to do with environmental influences or scientific manipulation of nature. In support of Lysenko, Pravda, in an editorial, stated that “capitalism is incapable not only of the planned transformation of nature but of preventing the predatory use of its riches”.
The international status of Russian science was of great concern to Stalin following the war. In a 1946 book about the role of Russian scientists in the development of world science he marked their contributions to fields ranging from electronic communications to atomic physics, seismology and magnetism.
When the centenary of Ivan Pavlov was marked in September 1949, in a front-page editorial with the headline “A great son of the Russian people”, Pravda honoured the scientist as someone who was immortalised by his research on conditioned reflexes that gave rise to the concept of a Pavlovian response. The physiologist-cum-psychologist Ivan P Pavlov (1849-1936), went on Pravda, was in his time the Soviet Union’s most famous scientist. He was the first Russian awarded a Nobel Prize for medicine in 1904, and, unlike many Tsarist-era scientists, he chose to stay in the country after the October Revolution. Although not a Bolshevik, his materialist scientific research methods were deemed far preferable and compatible with Marxism compared with the introspection and subjectivism of Freudianism.
Stalin had a copy of Pavlov’s book Twenty years of experience of the objective study of the higher nervous activities of animals.
He fully supported the discussion jointly organised by the Academy of Sciences on the theme of the physiological teachings of Academician IP Pavlov in June 1950. More than a thousand people attended. Leading doubters of the teaching of Pavlov were subsequently demoted. A couple of years after Stalin’s death the status quo ante was restored. The Central Committee’s Science Council was done away with and Party interference in matters scientific came to be frowned upon (p.148).
Stalin had mastered dialectical materialism – the Marxist methodology for understanding all aspects of human existence, including the natural world. In 1950 he intervened in a debate on linguistics, which was focused on the views of the Anglo-Georgian language historian and theorist Nikolai Marr (1865-1934). One of the weird theories Marr promoted was that all languages were class based and changed in accordance with the economic transformation of the economic bases of societies. All aspects of the superstructure, he maintained in a crude application of Marx’s theory of base and superstructure, including language, were shaped and developed by class relations and dynamics of the economic base. Different classes spoke different languages, and the language of similar classes in different countries had more in common with each other than with their compatriots who belonged to different classes. Language thus, according to Marr, was a class question, not a national or ethnic one.
Marr’s followers were strongly entrenched in the Soviet linguistics establishment, but he had his critics as well. Some of Marr’s books were in Stalin’s library. One of Marr’s critics was the Georgian Arnold Chikibava who, accompanied by the Georgian communist leaders Kandid Cherkviani (both of whom had criticised Marr) travelled to Moscow in April 1950, where they met Stalin and had a long conversation about Marr. Stalin asked Chikibava to write an article for Pravda on Soviet linguistics, which was published on 9 May. This article, extensively edited by Stalin who did his usual editorial job of sharpening and polishing prose, inserting a few sentences of his own. In a section on the origins of language, Stalin added that Marr had rejected the idea that language “originated as means of communication by people, as an implement which arose from a persistent need for communication. Academician Marr forgets that people in the most ancient times lived and supported themselves in hordes, in groups and not individually. Academician Marr does not take into consideration the fact that it was just this circumstance that brought about the need for communicating, their need to have a common means of communication such as language” (p.150).
Inserted into a section criticising Marr’s artificial methods to quicken the formation of a world language, were the following: “Marxists understand this matter differently. They hold that the process of withering away of national languages and the formation of a single common world language will take place gradually, without any ‘artificial means’ invoked to ‘accelerate’ this process. The application of such ‘artificial means’ would mean the use of coercion against nations, and this Marxism cannot permit” (ibid.).
“At the end of the article Stalin added this paragraph: ‘Marr’s theoretical formulation of a general linguistics contains serious mistakes. Without overcoming these mistakes, the growth and strengthening of a materialist linguistics is impossible. If ever criticism and self-criticism were needed, it is in just this area”.
After furnishing the above information, Roberts writes: “Stalin’s interpolations presaged his own contribution to the linguistics debate, WHICH PROVED A MASTER CLASS IN CLEAR THINKING AND COMMON SENSE” (p.150 – emphasis added).
As was his habit, before weighting into the debate, Stalin had studied a lot of books on linguistics. He was a fast reader and, almost daily, there was a new heap of books on linguistics in his study at Kuntsevo.
Stalin argued that language was created by the whole of society and developed by hundreds of generations of people: “Language exists, language has been created precisely in order to serve society as a whole, as a means of intercourse between people … serving members of society equally irrespective of class status”.
He attacked the idea that languages were class based: “Culture may be bourgeois or socialist”, he said, “but language, as a means of intercourse, is always a language common to the whole people and can serve both bourgeois and socialist culture” (p.151).
The characteristic feature of languages, Stalin pointed out, was that they derive their use and power from grammar as well as a shared vocabulary. “Grammar is the outcome of a process of abstraction performed by human mind over a long period of time, it is the indication of tremendous achievement of thought” (ibid.).
In a subsequent interview with Pravda, Stalin criticised Marr’s view that thinking could be divorced from language. Whatever thoughts that may arise in man’s mind, they arise and exist only on the basis of the language material, on the basis of language terminology and phrases. Marr, said Stalin, was “a simplifier and vulgariser of Marxism”, who had “introduced into linguistics an immodest, boastful and arrogant tone” and discussed the comparative-historical study of language as ‘idealistic’.
Stalin published five contributions in Pravda on this matter. In his final pronouncement, he reiterated his view that all languages would merge into a single common language eventually, but that process would only come about after the worldwide victory of socialism. In the meantime hundreds of languages would continue to co-exist and there was no question of suppressing any of them or of asserting the superiority of any of them. Stalin’s articles on Marxism and linguistics were published in all Soviet newspapers. They were read over the radio and reprinted as pamphlets with print runs in the millions. Linguistic programmes were revamped to include new courses on Stalin’s teaching about language. Stalin’s short text truly engendered oceans of literature.
TO BE CONTINUED