ERECTING A WALL AGAINST WESTERN INFLUENCES
Comrade “scientist” Stalin also delved into more abstruse academic matters. He set the ideological “line” or decided on the “proper approach” in branches of learning as diverse as physics, genetics, physiology, economics, philosophy, and linguistics. Scholars could settle none of the major controversies in these disciplines, some of them highly technical, without reference to his statements or demands. He was convinced that he knew best, even when confronted by serious questioners humbly suggesting he might be wrong.26
An example of how the strident anti-Western tone crept into science concerns the cancer research of Nina Kliueva and Grigorii Roskin, a husband-and-wife team. They attracted the attention of American cancer patients, who in early 1946 wrote for information to the new U.S. ambassador in Moscow, Walter Bedell Smith. He contacted the minister of Soviet public health, Georgi Miterev, who arranged for Smith to visit with the Kliueva-Roskin team in late June. Smith was impressed, offered support, and was pleased to hear that Dr. Vasily Parin, head of the Soviet Academy of Medical Sciences, would be traveling to the United States and would report there on the cancer project. Smith’s visit in turn encouraged the Soviet authorities to fund the K-R project more generously.
Parin traveled to New York in October. He took a sample of the K-R serum and a manuscript of the couple’s book that they wanted translated and published. Parin continued to fret about security and was reluctant to give the materials to the Americans without complete clearance from the Kremlin. He asked for Molotov’s opinion on November 7, when their paths crossed on separate missions in the United States. The foreign minister, being no risk taker, asked officials in Moscow to check with Stalin. The messages did not reach the Soviet leader, who was in the south; a junior official finally approved the exchange. Dr. Parin returned to New York later still, heard the news, and on November 24 gave the cancer serum and book manuscript to the Americans. Alas two days later another telegram arrived from Moscow, this time from the “Seven”—that is, the Politburo—telling him not to hand over anything.27
The K-R case ran along two tracks, one of reward and the other of punishment. Zhdanov was concerned about the willingness of the cancer researchers to share their ideas with foreigners. True, the health authorities had cleared them. Nonetheless, in late November he consulted with others in the Politburo and organized an investigative commission. If Zhdanov pressed hard down this line, the doctors would almost certainly be punished.
However, at the same time, the Soviet bureaucracy continued to push in the direction already sanctified by Stalin himself, and so officials supported the two researchers by offering still more generous funding. Crowning those efforts on December 26, the dictator personally signed a resolution “to assist” their work. Indeed, with his blessing, Nina Kliueva was “nominated” to be elected to the Supreme Soviet and won her seat. Fatefully, on February 17, 1947, the two tracks in the patronage system (reward/punish) seemed to cross when the happy medical couple was invited to the Kremlin to meet the Master. He spoke with them and posed a few questions. He gave no hint of a threat. In fact, he praised their book. They were then nominated for a Stalin Prize, something that could happen only with his approval. On May 1 the honors kept rolling in, and the two scientists found themselves atop the Lenin Mausoleum to witness the ceremonial parade.
All the while Zhdanov pursued his investigation. On January 28, the day after his return from vacation, he called in Kliueva for a less-than-friendly talk. He and others also questioned the officials involved and forwarded these materials to Stalin. By February 17, the Boss was sufficiently troubled to bring the Politburo together, the only time for the entire year, specifically to discuss the K-R business. Ill winds were blowing, for that very same day the Voice of America just happened to broadcast its first anti-Communist program to the USSR.
Kliueva and Roskin were invited to the Politburo meeting. They arrived, no doubt thinking they were to be praised, and to some extent they were. However, matters were more complicated, for immediately following the meeting, the officials in the public health ministry were dismissed, and the unfortunate Dr. Parin was arrested for passing over those materials in New York. Stalin remained surprisingly ambivalent about whether to reward or punish the medical duo. They were still in good graces and on the patronage track, and less than a week afterward they reached the lofty heights on the Lenin Mausoleum. Then came the tipping point, as Zhdanov finally had enough evidence to accuse them of “anti-state and anti-patriotic acts abusive of their honor and integrity as Soviet scientists and citizens.”28
Zhdanov had Stalin’s backing to hold Kliueva and Roskin to account before a Court of Honor. These institutions harked back to an earlier time, but on March 28, 1947, on the orders of the Politburo, they were established in the ministries of health, trade, and finance. In order “to educate employees,” the courts, composed of five to seven persons, were to judge those accused of “anti-patriotic, anti-government and anti-social” behavior.29 In June the accused K-R couple went on trial in front of eight hundred colleagues, and as was expected, they confessed. Insofar as the three-day ordeal was scripted by Zhdanov, with a nod and a wink from the Kremlin, the event was reminiscent of the 1930s show trials.30 This time the dictator was satisfied to let the guilty be “reprimanded” and shamed, rather than demanding their execution or banishment. Maybe he was thinking that something might still come of their research. An interesting new touch was that the Communist Party sent out a twenty-five-page brochure detailing the “K-R affair.” It went to party committees all over the country to bring their attention to the regrettable “slavishness and servility to the West” that existed among the intelligentsia in general and scientists in particular.31
Ambassador Smith recalled the K-R case as an example “of the jealousy with which the Soviet Union guards the accomplishments of its scientists and the extent to which it eschews collaboration with the West, even in those fields which have no military or industrial implication, but which, on the contrary, would only be for the benefit of mankind.”32
More than jealousy was involved in the K-R case, because Stalin was in the midst of erecting a wall against the outside world. He pushed the antiforeign attitude to the point that on February 15, 1947, the Supreme Soviet outlawed marriage with foreign aliens, even if the prospective spouse was from another socialist country.33 This measure was simply announced in the press, without explanation. The few Russians who married foreigners had been allowed exit visas from time to time, and that practice was now stopped as well. Robert Tucker, an American historian living in Moscow, was unable to leave with his Russian wife until after Stalin’s death, when the rule was repealed. Professor Tucker went on to write a classic biography of the leader that pointed to the dictator’s psychological problems. According to Tucker, Stalin coped with the knowledge that there existed “anti-Stalin feelings,” even in the party, by suspecting that no matter how much critics pretended to be loyal, they were in his view “enemies of the party’s cause.” Yet it was he who wore a mask and was “two-faced.” While “always telling people to be modest,” and deporting himself “in public as simple and unassuming,” the Soviet dictator “concealed an arrogant inner picture of himself as a paragon of revolutionary statesmanship.”34
In any event, Stalin’s antiforeign campaign continued on June 9, 1947, when the Supreme Soviet decreed that in future anyone disclosing state secrets would be sent to a Gulag concentration camp for ten to fifteen years. This measure dealt with information conveyed by a slip of the tongue or through negligence and covered practically all fields of human endeavor. It did not replace the laws against intentionally passing information to the enemy, which was still treated as treason or espionage and punished accordingly.35 After it became law, Glavlit, the official literary censorship board, wrote editors repeatedly to tighten vigilance of scientific, technical, and economic issues.36