In 1920, when Koltsov was arrested, the VCheKa was as yet inexperienced in the details of show trials and treated the defendants during the trial rather mildly. On March 8, 1920, Koltsov’s colleagues and pupils wrote a letter to the VCheKa in Koltsov’s defense.9 Because of this letter, Koltsov was not arrested and from August 16 to 20, he attended the court trial as a defendant. He was accused of keeping money to help families of arrested members of the nonexistent Tactical Center.10 He also supposedly allowed his apartment and office at the institute to be used for meetings of members of the Moscow branch of the Tactical Center, the National Center.11 After the trial, Koltsov published a scientific paper that included a detailed description of the physiological changes to a defendant’s body caused by the stress of a death sentence:
During the first days of the trial I slept at home and every morning checked my weight. It was the same until the morning of August 19. In the evening of that day, after the Prosecutor demanded the death penalty for four defendants and different prison terms for the others, I was arrested and spent a night in the VCheKa Special Department custody. On August 20, after four hours of waiting, the verdict was announced. According to the verdict, 24 of the accused must be shot. However, another verdict, with lighter punishment, replacing this one, was immediately announced. Half of the accused were released immediately. I was among the released. After coming back home at midnight, I checked my weight again and found out that… during the last 38 hours I lost 5 pounds…. During the next three days of rest I slept a lot and moved a lot (I walked for about 15 km with a weight of 20–30 lb.) and ate 2,500 calories a day. On the morning of August 24, my weight increased by 4 lb., i.e., I gained 7 lb. in three days.12
Koltsov’s scientific study on changes in his own body during this terrifying time was a remarkable response to the violence of the state. But the courageous response from Koltsov’s colleagues and pupils, who defended him despite the danger of bringing on their own deaths by doing so, is far more remarkable.
In the 1920s, Koltsov’s institute (which was within the Commissariat of Health, the Narkomzdrav) became one of the leading genetic institutions of its time.13 In 1927, Koltsov described the duplicate structure of genetic material (the “double helix,” although he didn’t call it that) for the first time.14 But the OGPU-NKVD did not leave Koltsov and his institute alone. In 1929, the head of the Genetics Laboratory, the outstanding geneticist Sergei Chetverikov, was arrested by the OGPU and sent into exile without a trial.15 In 1932, Vladimir Efroimson, who had been both Koltsov’s and Chetverikov’s pupil, was arrested. The investigator demanded that Efroimson testify in the investigation against Koltsov.16 Efroimson managed to withstand the pressure of the interrogation and refused to comply. He was then condemned to three years’ imprisonment in a labor camp. This was his first term in the camps. Efroimson’s second term of seven years started in 1949, after he protested publicly against Lysenko.
In 1937, the Lysenkoists published a series of articles against Koltsov.17 On May 20, 1937, in his speech at the Annual Session of the Academy, the Secretary Academician Nikolai Gorbunov connected Koltsov with Nikolai Vavilov and called them Fascists: “The Institute of Genetics [headed by Vavilov] of the Academy of Sciences not only did not criticize Professor Koltsov’s fascistic nonsense, but even did not dissociate itself from his ‘theories’ which support the racial theories of the fascists.”18
On June 29, 1937, a month after this session, Gorbunov, who was Lenin’s former secretary, was arrested by the NKVD and shot on September 7, 1938, immediately following the “trial.”19 The same year the Medical Genetics Institute was disbanded. This institute had been modeled after the laboratory of medical genetics at Koltsov’s institute. A medical doctor, Solomon Levit (1884–1934) joined the Bolshevik (Communist) Party in 1919.20 From 1926 until 1930, he was a high-ranking bureaucrat at the Communist Academy. This academy (at first the Socialist Academy of the Social Sciences) was founded in 1919 as a competitor to the Academy of Sciences but was incorporated in 1936 into the Academy of Sciences.21 From 1928, Levit worked at the Medical Genetics Institute and in 1930 was appointed its director. During 1931, Levit and another Party member, the geneticist Isaac Agol, worked in the United States at the laboratory of the prominent geneticist (and later a Nobel laureate) Hermann J. Muller. In 1938, both Levit and Agol were arrested by the NKVD and shot.22
In January 1939, Koltsov and another outstanding biologist, Lev Berg,23 were nominated by the biology branch of the Academy of Sciences to become full members of the academy (both were corresponding members). But the day before the election, the official Communist newspaper, Pravda, published an article against both scientists entitled “Pseudo-Scientists Should Not Be Members of the Academy of Sciences.”24 In this article, Koltsov was described as “a counterrevolutionary” and “a fascist,” and Berg was called “an idealist” who sympathized with Hitlerism. The article was signed by Academicians Aleksei Bach and Boris Keller; Professor Khachatur Koshtoyanst; and Candidates of Biological Sciences A. Shcherbakov, R. Dozortseva, Ye. Polikarpova, N. Nuzhdin, S. Kraevoi, and K. Kosikov. I have already described the role of Academician Bach in the Sovietization of the academy. Boris Keller (1874–1945), a member of the Agricultural Academy (VASKhNIL), was one of only six VASKhNIL Academicians (there were forty-seven full members of VASKhNIL in the 1930s) who had strongly supported Lysenko since 1935. Keller’s devotion to Lysenko was rewarded in 1938, when the Academy Presidium issued an order to establish a Laboratory of Evolutionary Ecology for him within the Institute of Genetics.25
Two of the signers, Dozortseva and her husband, Nuzhdin, had begun their careers as geneticists and coworkers of Vavilov. Obviously, there were plenty of careerists in the scientific community who were ready to follow any order of the Bolshevik (Communist) Party. Dozortseva was awarded almost instantly for her deed. In March 1939, she was appointed scientific secretary of the academy’s biological branch. Her husband, Nikolai Nuzhdin (1904–1972), was elected a corresponding member of the academy in 1953, after he had published many articles supporting Lysenko. Still, he never became a full member. In 1964, when Nuzhdin’s name was suggested for nomination at the Academy General Assembly, at first the molecular biologist Academician Vladimir Engelhardt spoke against his candidacy.26 But the words of Academician Andrei Sakharov, who informed the assembly about the destructive role Nuzhdin had played as one of Lysenko’s closest cronies, were the most important: