Stalin and the Defence of Science
Ethan
Pollock wrote Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars in 2006. This review
of the book shows how the Soviet archives provided evidence of the widespread
debates and knowledge concerning science which took place throughout the Soviet
Union during the period under consideration, namely 1945 to 1953, to which even
this bourgeois academic had to attest.
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The
continuing plunder of Soviet archives by Western academia is having some
unexpected, and for imperialism unwelcome, consequences. The lavish grants and
bursaries made available to send scholars out to Moscow to dig up
anti-communist dirt are, in some cases, having quite the reverse effect to that
intended, facilitating the rediscovery of documents that add fresh life and
colour to what is already known of the great Soviet achievements in every
sphere of social development.
When
Ethan Pollock sat down to write the sensationally titled Stalin and the
Soviet Science Wars, we need not doubt that his intentions were
unimpeachably anti-communist. Yet page after page of his book cannot help but
reveal fresh evidence of the extraordinary vitality, creativity and scientific
seriousness which continued to characterise Soviet existence in the period
under consideration, between the end of the Great Patriotic War and the death
of Stalin.
This
period, which saw the intensification of anti-colonial struggle, the extension
of socialism across Eastern Europe, the founding of the DPRK and the triumphant
arrival of the People’s Republic of China, saw also the new danger to peace and
progress in the world posed by US imperialism, armed to the teeth with nuclear
weapons and the sworn enemy of communism. Having weathered so many storms –
battling against fourteen imperialist armies in the civil war period, building
up socialist industry and making gains for socialism in the countryside,
enduring and finally defeating invasion by the Nazi hordes – the Soviet Union now required the utmost unity and strength to resist the new menace posed by
imperialism. That strength was not to be measured by economic indices and
military inventories alone. What was required above all was the unity and
strength that springs from the unremitting battle for Marxism-Leninism, fought
out on the widest possible social basis.
It
was natural then that this period, which saw the Soviet leadership fully
occupied with major developments in the international field, also witnessed the
most intense ideological struggle in the Soviet Union, ranging across every
branch of science. And right in the thick of all these ideological struggles,
to Pollock’s evident amazement, was that same Soviet leadership.
During
that period, we are told, Stalin “intervened in scientific debates in fields
ranging from philosophy to physics. In 1946, when Stalin was sixty-seven years
old and exhausted from the war, he schooled the USSR’s most prominent
philosopher on Hegel’s role in the history of Marxism. In 1948, while the
Berlin crisis threatened an irreparable rift between the United States and the
USSR,” he was busy with the genetics debate. In 1950, halfway through
negotiating a pact with the newly victorious People’s Republic of China, he was “also writing a combative articled on linguistics, carefully orchestrating
a coup in Soviet physiology [= defending the materialist basis of Pavlovian
science!] and meeting with economists three times to discuss a textbook on
political economy… [He] consistently spent time on the details of
scholarly disputes.”
It turns
out that records of all these ideological struggles are sitting in the Archive
of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In interpreting these primary sources,
Pollock naturally does his best to find the most cynical anti-communist angle.
Bolshevik efforts to repulse the debilitating ideological influences seeping in
from the imperialist West are written off as a bone-headed attachment to Great
Russian chauvinism, or as driven by anti-semitism. Where scientific debates
conclude with some questions still left pending, they are sneered at for
failing to answer all questions; when those debates are thorough in
organisation and decisive in outcome, they are damned as stage-managed. Where
Stalin or other influential leaders wade in with their own views, this is
presented as intellectual bullying; where they hang back the better to let the
discussion develop, this in turn is characterised as sinister manipulation from
the wings. In short, Bolshevism cannot be allowed to win!
Yet
Pollock’s own exposure to the first hand archive evidence has clearly had an
unsettling effect on his view of Stalin’s role. Again and again, the author is
brought up short by the deadly seriousness with which the communist leadership
approached the struggle for correct theory – in all fields.
“He
took ideology seriously. He was not simply [!] a megalomaniac and
reclusive old man who used scholarly debates to settle political problems… He
consistently spent time on the details of scholarly disputes… Thousands of
newly accessible and previously unexplored documents from [Russian] archives
reveal that he was determined… to show the scientific basis of Soviet Marxism.”
Most
astonishing of all to the bourgeois academic mindset, taking for granted a
universal disconnect between “high-minded” theory and cynical practice,
must be Pollock’s discovery that Stalin’s “memos and top secret documents
are saturated with the same Marxist-Leninist language… that appeared in the
public discourse. He did not keep two sets of books.”
Pollock
further reminds us that “Under Stalin’s guidance the USSR went further than any previous state in placing the support of science at the centre
of its stated purpose”. And if science was at the heart of Soviet
civilisation, then Bolshevism was at the heart of science. Even in Pollock’s
jaundiced summary, this basic reality shines through: “The Party’s
political authority relied on the perceived rationality and scientific basis of
its actions… Stalin and the Central Committee insisted on the scientific
discussions. Scholars, in the course of debates that were closely observed
(but never totally controlled) by the Party, were supposed to forge an
understanding of their disciplines that was in harmony with ideology.”
In
following Pollock’s whirlwind tour of the great public debates on science which
unfolded in this period, it is no ambition of this review to give a proper
analysis of the issues raised. To do so would require a library, not a book
review, and somebody much cleverer than the present author. What can be grasped,
however, even from such a cursory overview, is the huge revolutionary
confidence and high sense of social duty with which the Bolsheviks, the Soviet
scientists and the Soviet masses embraced the struggle for correct theory.
The Philosophy Debate
The
first branch of science to become an arena of ideological struggle was that of
philosophy. In 1946, the then-leader of Agitprop (the Bolshevik agitation and
propaganda organisation) came under criticism for giving insufficient emphasis
to the reactionary side of Hegelian philosophy. Pollock is at a loss to
understand Stalin’s approach to this issue. After all, Stalin “could easily
have instructed Zhdanov to draft a decree denouncing Aleksandrov… He could have
signed a Politburo decree criticising the book… But despite his clear distaste
for the book, Stalin did not make his views known to the public or restructure
Agitprop.” Such an approach would perhaps have sat more easily with the
routine slander of Stalin as a bureaucrat and despot, imposing his will by
administrative measures!
The
reality proved to be very different. Stalin recommended that the Institute of Philosophy should organise an open discussion of Aleksandrov’s book. Acting
on this advice, the Central Committee ordered a meeting that would, in the CC’s
own words, “ensure complete freedom of criticism and exchange of opinions”.
Arrangements were made for three different journals to publish the proceedings
and for the audience to include communist leaders as well as academics and
journalists. Nearly 400 people attended this meeting in January 1947. An even
more ambitious discussion series was run in June, with an average of 300 people
attending each of the eight sessions, including representatives from the Red
Army and the Union of Soviet Writers. After the conference, all the
speeches were put in front of the Soviet public, even including the speeches of
many who could not be squeezed in to speak at the conference itself. This
ensured that the fullest possible account of this philosophical debate could be
heard by all.
Previous
philosophers have interpreted the world, noted Marx, adding famously that the
point however is to change it. Only a society that took
philosophy with deadly seriousness as a key front in the revolutionary war to overthrow
imperialism could take such great pains to have the argument out properly. At
the penultimate session, Zhdanov (senior) talked about the “philosophical
front” of the class struggle, which required a “detachment of military
philosophers, fighting for the perfection of Marxist theory, leading the
decisive blow against hostile ideologies abroad”. In his view some
contemporary philosophy looked more like a “quiet factory or an encampment
somewhere far away from the field of battle”! Other speakers demanded that
more attention be paid to Russia’s own pre-communist revolutionary tradition,
as represented by figures like Belinsky, Herzen and Chernyshevsky. Pollock’s
feeble effort on this evidence to denigrate the conference as pandering to
Great Russian chauvinism hardly holds up when, on the same page, he cites a
speaker from Tashkent who demanded closer analysis of the Arab philosophical
tradition, and another from Erevan who wanted the scholars to have a proper
look at Byzantine thought.
What
started with criticism of one man’s book ended up as a profound examination of
the proper role and future of philosophy in socialist society. Aleksandrov
made some self-criticism, and urged his fellow philosophers to struggle for the
“elevation of philosophical work in the country and for the organisation of
the wide propaganda of Marxism-Leninism”. In July he transferred from his
post at Agitprop to the post of director at the Institute of Philosophy, the better to contribute to this task.
The Biology Debate
The
controversy within Soviet biology which erupted in 1948 was handled with no
less seriousness. The struggle to advance agronomic science and put an end once
and for all to the history of sporadic famine which had blighted peasant
existence for long centuries was no less vital to the continued growth of
socialism than had been to keep Soviet philosophy firmly rooted in consistent
dialectical materialism. Further, whatever may be the final judgement on the
question of the heritability of acquired characteristics, the philosophical
question underlying the conference (which began at the
Agricultural Academy in July 1948) was one of the greatest significance for
socialism: with what prospect of success one could hope, by transforming the economic
environment of production relations, to raise up future generations of new
Soviet men and women, qualitatively transformed by the experience of building
socialism.
Over
700 attended the opening session to hear and discuss the talk given by T.D.
Lysenko, the director of the Agricultural Academy, whose promotion and
development of the ideas and practice of the late peasant-innovator Ivan
Michurin had earned him enemies as well as friends. On the second day Lysenko
invited delegates up into the Lenin Hills to make their own assessment of the
practical work being done by the Institute. Then the floor was thrown open,
and 56 delegates had the chance to speak their minds. Every day for a week
extracts from the ongoing discussion were published in Pravda, so that everyone
could follow the twists and turns of the debate. The debate concluded with
endorsement of the direction in which Lysenko’s work was proceeding. On 12th
August Pravda publicised the outcome with a front page editorial, and all
through the autumn universities and academies ran workshops to explain the
significance of the conclusions reached. Even those who with the benefit of
hindsight would dismiss some or all of Lysenko’s assertions can hardly deny the
democratic thoroughness and high civic seriousness with which this whole public
exercise was organised – again demonstrating the very different status of
science in socialist society.
The Physics Debate
Soviet physicists of necessity acquainted
themselves with quantum theory, not least because the post war defence of the USSR against US imperialist reaction required the urgent development of nuclear deterrence. However,
these Western-led scientific developments arrived with a good deal of
accompanying idealist baggage. Physicists based at Moscow University expressed concern that their Academy-based colleagues were lax in regard to
unmasking some of the idealist nonsense riding on the coat tails of these
indisputably useful scientific breakthroughs. In return, some at the Academy
suggested that this concern was being overplayed, and there was a contrary
danger that the scientific baby might be thrown out along with the idealist
bathwater, to the detriment of Soviet physics.
To
restore unity and common goals in this vital branch of science, the Ministry of
Higher Education and the Academy of Sciences between them planned another
conference. Agitprop gave it the green light, and a 15-strong organising
committee began the most thorough preparation for the conference, meeting no
less than 42 times in a three month period. It is worth recording these
minutiae culled from the archive by Pollock. Such dry as dust records, tedious
in themselves, tellingly reveal the infinite pains that Bolshevism was prepared
to take in order to strengthen the ideological defence of Soviet socialism.
Pollock
would have us believe that the reason the conference never actually happened
was the fear that progress towards securing the Soviet atom bomb might be
impeded by too much controversy. However, whilst it is clear that the defence
and growth of socialism could only be achieved by accelerating scientific
progress in all fields, it is equally clear that such progress could not be
sustained on a diet of bourgeois idealism. As the philosopher Maksimov had
planned to say in his speech, “Physical idealism is a link that connects
scientists to the hearse of capitalism”. (Given the subsequent career of
one notorious ex-Soviet physicist, Andrei Sakharov – now firmly hitched to the
hearse of Zionism and hurtling with it towards a common and well-deserved
destruction – such timely warnings were scarcely alarmist.)
The
more probable explanation for the decision not to press on with the conference
is that the preparation had been so thorough that the conference itself was
effectively redundant. Maksimov noted in a memoir that “the conference was
cancelled precisely because of the Orgkom’s substantial work, since the Orgkom
heard all the speeches and even all the proposed contributions to the
conference”. And indeed the discussion continued in print. In 1951 some
of the speeches written for conference were put before the Soviet public in a
publication titled Philosophical Questions of Modern Physics, triggering
further lively debate.
The Linguistics Debate
The
next great scientific debate occurred in 1952, this time in the field of Soviet
linguistics. In their eagerness to promote a science of language that could
demonstrate clear roots in materialism, some argued that language itself formed
part of the superstructure determined by the production relations obtaining in
a given society. The foremost proponent of this approach, the late Nikolai
Marr, had great influence on the thinking of many linguists. Not all agreed,
however. The first secretary of the Georgian Central Committee, Kandid Charkviani,
forwarded a number of articles by the Georgian linguist Chikobava for Stalin’s
attention. In a covering letter, Charkviani identified a number of objections
to the Marr orthodoxy. If all languages were class-based, how should one
account for language-use during the pre-class, primitive communist phase of
development? And how did the notion of language evolving in line with the
dominant mode of production chime with the known facts about individual
national cultures? Getting muddled on these issues could lead to serious
political mistakes with regard to the national question.
Stalin
promptly invited both the linguist and the communist leader to come to Moscow to discuss the issues. At the end of their meeting, he urged Chikobava to sum up
his criticism in an article for Pravda. Stalin edited the resulting
article line by line before sending it off for publication on 9 May 1952. Pravda
then devoted two pages a week to, as the paper’s editor put it, “organise an
open discussion in Pravda in order, through criticism and self-criticism, to
overcome stagnation in the development of Soviet linguistics”. The debate
in Pravda raged on for week after week, with arguments for and against
the Marr approach to linguistics. Through all those weeks of heated debate,
Stalin and the Central Committee declined to declare a Party line on the issues
involved, preferring to let all the leading thinkers in Soviet linguistics have
it out in the public arena.
Finally
on 20 June, Stalin broke silence and added his contribution to the debate, in a
piece for Pravda entitled On Marxism in Linguistics. This
article backed up those who saw in Marr’s theories a vulgarisation of Marxism,
and contested the notion that language forms part of the ideological
superstructure. This decisive intervention was followed by one more week of
contributions in Pravda, including some self-criticism. In concluding
the discussion, Pravda noted with justifiable pride that “The great
and vital principle of the development of all Soviet science is contained in
J.V. Stalin’s words: ‘no science can develop and flourish without a battle of
opinions and without freedom of criticism’”.
The Physiology Debate
The
debate which erupted in the discipline of Physiology followed naturally from
the earlier struggle over genetics. As with some of the predestinarian claims
being advanced in the name of genetics (still around today in the present day
obsession with tracking the “gay” gene, the “criminal” gene, and
presumably soon the “terrorist” gene), some of the criticism being
directed at the Pavlovian science of conditioned reflexes also seemed to
reflect a fundamental pessimism about the degree to which human nature could
transform itself in the process of transforming human society.
In
1949, to celebrate the centenary of Pavlov’s birth, the Ministry of
Cinematography commissioned a film biography with the aim of showing “Pavlov’s
struggle with reactionary trends in physiology and his hatred for idealist
pseudo-science”, and Pravda published a birthday tribute to the
great scientist on its front cover. But some questioned whether Pavlov’s
legacy was being correctly developed in current Soviet practice. Yuri Zhdanov
(Andrei Zhdanov’s son) criticised a failure to translate theory into clinical
practice, and Stalin criticised those who paid lip service to the great man’s
memory whilst in practice undermining the work he had initiated.
Zhdanov proposed an “organised offensive
against the enemies and hypocritical ‘friends’ of Pavlovian science”, and
the Central Committee agreed. The Pavlov session was organised in the House of
Scientists, under the auspices of the academies dedicated to medicine and
biology. Over a hundred telegrams arrived daily from people desperate to take
part in the great debate, and when the session finally got going, it included
more than one thousand people from more than fifty cities and from the
scientific academies of every Soviet Republic. After thorough debate, the
Pavlovian scientist Bykov noted without exaggeration that the whole country had
followed proceedings, saying with pride that the Soviet people “love
science, are interested in it, and are as concerned about its fate just as we
are”.
In
the wake of the discussion, some leading academic posts were reshuffled,
promoting those who had most convincingly demonstrated their commitment to
developing physiology along the materialist lines pioneered by Pavlov. Extra
encouragement was also given to the next wave of graduate students in Pavlovian
science.
Readers
may draw their own conclusions from the fact that many of these changes were
reversed in the years after Stalin’s death. Indeed, another raid on the
archives could yield some very important data on exactly how and when
Marxist-Leninist leadership of science and society was undermined by
Khrushchevite revisionism, chipping away at the ideological foundation and
preparing the way for the eventual capitalist restoration.
The Economics Debate
Of
the greatest interest in such a sequel will be the gradual undermining of the
Soviet planned economy by the influence of bourgeois economics. It is the
struggle for clarity in this scientific field that Pollock presents as the last
of the so-called Science Wars.
In
1937 the Central Committee charged Lev Leontiev with the task of editing an
introductory textbook on political economy to serve as the basis for educating,
not just Soviet cadres, but communists everywhere. Pollock tells us that
Leontiev started sending Stalin drafts in 1938. Stalin fed back regular
comments and revisions, and also “solicited other economists’ comments,
corrections and opinions on drafts”. In 1941 Leontiev was invited to a
meeting attended not only by fellow academics but also by important political
leaders like Yuri Zhdanov, Molotov and Voznesenskii (chairman of the State
Planning Commission). At this meeting Stalin unpacked his ideas on the law of
value under socialist state planning. By Pollock’s account, the archive
records Stalin as explaining that “The main task of planning is to ensure
the independence of the socialist system from capitalist encirclement,” and
counselled Leontiev: “You don’t need to praise our system too much and
describe accomplishments that don’t exist,” urging him to deal concretely
with the actual economic problems of building socialism. It was necessary to
get the socialist foundations built before mature communism could be attained.
Whilst
we may regard with caution this second or third hand account of Stalin’s
comments, the spirit of realism they breathe contrasts starkly with Khruschev’s
later empty bragging about the imminence of a fully classless communist society
led by a state of all the people. “We have yet to get socialism in the
flesh and blood” Pollock quotes Stalin saying, “and we still need to put
socialism right, still need to distribute according to labour as is necessary…
We have dirt in the factories and want to go directly to communism. And who
will let you in? They are buried in rubbish but desire communism.”
So
seriously did the Party take the task of educating its cadres in this field
that the struggle to perfect the planned textbook continued for seventeen
years, spurred on in 1952 by the publication of Stalin’s Economic Problems
of Socialism in the USSR. It was finally published in 1954. Pollock
comments that the textbook “was released into a world of political
uncertainty after Stalin’s death” in March 1953. In that new period of
Soviet existence, during which the corroding influence of bourgeois ideology
would begin to be felt even within the Party itself, there would never be a
greater need for that Bolshevik legacy of honest theoretical struggle.
Soviet
Science: property of the Soviet masses
Under socialism science applied to production was no longer an enemy to
the worker but a dear friend.
Marx
explains this very clearly in his chapter on the “General Law of Capitalist
Accumulation” in Volume I of Capital. Whereas under capitalism “all
the methods for increasing the social productivity of labour are carried out at
the cost of the individual worker”, making of him “a mere appurtenance
of the machine”, under socialism every scientific advance adds to the power
and authority of the working class. Whereas under capitalism every improved
technique of production “estrange(s) from him the intellectual potentialities
of the labour process in very proportion to the extent to which science is
incorporated into it as an independent power”, under socialism scientific
knowledge of all kinds is cherished by the working class as something belonging
to it in the new socialist world, as the proud achievement of the revolution.
This was the basis of the astounding
level of Soviet public interest in the scientific debates that erupted after
the war. Those who would dismiss the period of Stalin’s leadership as
characterised by meek submission to administrative diktat need to think again.
Oddly enough, this little anti-communist work by Ethan Pollock might just prove
helpful in this regard!