Together with Academician Lysenko, he [Nuzhdin] is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudoscientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists. I urge you to vote against Nuzhdin.27
In his short speech, another prominent physicist, Academician Igor Tamm, supported Sakharov.28 In vain, Lysenko tried to defend his protégé. The third physicist, Academician Yakov Zeldovich, openly announced that he would vote against Nuzhdin. Nuzhdin’s career was over. After Sakharov’s statement, he was not elected. This was quite an unusual event at the academy: According to Soviet practice, all candidates were approved by the Science Department of the Communist Party Central Committee before elections.29 This practice started in 1927, when a Special Commission of the Sovnarkom (Council of People’s Commissars) was formed to control Academy of Sciences activity and election of academicians.30 All materials of this commission were “top secret.” After the academy meeting, Sakharov wrote two letters about Lysenkoism and Lysenko’s attempt to nominate Nuzhdin to Izvestiya and to Nikita Khrushchev personally.31 As a punishment for voting against Nuzhdin, Nikita Khrushchev wanted to disband the academy, but he was dismissed from his post as first secretary of the Party during a bloodless coup and was replaced by Leonid Brezhnev before he could act against the academy.32
Lysenko, who was seated at the meeting near Sakharov, was furious: “People like Sakharov should be locked up and put on trial!”33 As we now know, Lysenko’s wish became a reality in 1980, when Sakharov was exiled to Gorky (Nizhnii Novgorod) without a trial, under heavy KGB guard. It would have been a triumphant victory for Lysenko, had he not died four years before.
But all these events happened much later than the tragic days of 1939. On January 23, 1939, Trofim Lysenko and his crony Nikolai Tsitsin were elected to the Academy of Sciences instead of Koltsov and Berg. This was the second time Koltsov had not been elected because of Party disapproval. Tsitsin’s career started in the early 1930s.34 In 1935, with Stalin’s personal support, Tsitsin became director of the West Siberian Experimental Station in Omsk, and the station was promoted to the Siberian Institute of Grain Culture. In 1938, he was appointed director of the Academy Botanical Garden in Moscow. From the late 1940s to early 1950s, during the time of Lysenko’s greatest power, Tsitsin was chairman of the “Court of Honor” of the Academy of Sciences. These “courts,” which existed within the ministries and the central state committees, were created in the late 1940s to try scientists who refused to follow Lysenko’s pseudoscience or for officials who did not follow the instructions of Communist Party leaders.35 In November 1947, the “Court of Honor” of the Academy of Sciences condemned anti-Lysenkoist geneticist Anton Zhebrak (1901–1965). The “court trial” was supervised by the Politburo main ideologist, Mikhail Suslov. As a result, Zhebrak was dismissed from his post as president of the Belorussian Academy of Sciences. The MGB tried to arrest him at his apartment in Minsk, but Zhebrak’s friends hid him and the MGB did not find him.36 But it seems Lysenko did not inspire loyalty. In February 1948, Tsitsin wrote a letter to Stalin criticizing Lysenko,37 and in the late 1950s, he became Lysenko’s rival as the leader of Michurin’s biology.
In 1939, after the elections, the president of the Academy of Sciences, botanist Vladimir Komarov, welcomed Lysenko and Tsitsin as “the most deserving scientists” joining the academy. Stalin himself, as well as Chief Prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky, were also “elected” as honored full members. The chairman of the Council of Ministers and Politburo member Vyacheslav Molotov was “elected” an academy full member later, in 1946. Stalin himself sent him a telegram (Molotov was in New York): “19.9.46. The academicians ask you not to object to your election to honorary membership in the Academy of Sciences. Please do agree. Druzhkov [i.e., With friendship].”38 Understanding that the situation with the elections was “a death sentence” for his institute, Koltsov wrote an appeal to Stalin,39 to no avail. The article in Pravda against Koltsov and Berg meant that the highest Soviet and Party authorities, including Stalin himself, approved Lysenko’s and Tsitsin’s election.
Koltsov was also attacked by Communist Party members in his own institute. At an institute meeting on January 15, 1939, one of his most talented pupils, Nikolai Dubinin, accused Koltsov of supposedly racist and Fascist views because in the 1920s, Koltsov had been an enthusiastic supporter of eugenics (which meant simply human genetics in Russia in the 1920s). As Dubinin recalled later, Koltsov responded that “he did not take back a single word he had ever spoken about genetics.”40 However, the resolution of the meeting was in support of Koltsov, and it said that the article in Pravda signed by Academician Bach and others “gave a wrong image of N. K. Koltsov as a scientist and a citizen.”41 This was almost an uprising against “the Party line”! Of course, the problem was not Koltsov’s scientific opinions but his independence and the impossibility of controlling him and his institute ideologically.
A special commission was sent to Koltsov’s institute. It included Academician Lysenko, newly elected, as well as Academician Bach and one of Mairanovsky’s supporters, Academician Grashchenkov. As a result of the commission’s “inspection,” Koltsov lost his institute. On June 3, 1939, Koltsov, one of the best biologists of the twentieth century, begged his colleague and old friend, Secretary Academician Leon Orbeli:
It seems that I will not be pushed out from my apartment and my small laboratory room (both are completely separated from the other rooms of the same building of the Institute)…. Do I still have a salary? Will my wife, M. P. Koltsova (Doctor of Biological Sciences), and my personal technician, E. P. Kumakova, be allowed to continue to work with me? How will we be paid and funded (I need very small sums for experiments which I can cover from my salary)? I would prefer to receive this money from the Academy, but if this is not possible, you can attach my small laboratory (three persons) to any institute within the Academy…42
Koltsov died of a heart attack on December 2, 1940, in Leningrad, where he arrived with his wife, Maria Sadovnikova-Koltsova, to give a lecture. The same night, his wife (who was also his research assistant) committed suicide.43 She left a letter to colleagues at the Institute of Experimental Biology. In it, she cited the last words of Koltsov. Before he died, Koltsov suddenly opened his eyes and said: “I would like everything and everybody to wake up.” He definitely meant the nightmare with his institute, Lysenko, and the whole regime. Koltsov and his wife were buried together in the same grave at Vvedenskoe Cemetery in Moscow.
In 1940, Koltsov’s institute was transferred from the Commissariat of Health to the Academy of Sciences and renamed the Institute of Histology, Cytology, and Embryology (now Severtsov Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences). The histologist Georgii Khrushchov, quite loyal to Lysenko, was appointed director of the renamed institute. Only in 1967, one of Koltsov’s devoted pupils, Boris Astaurov, managed to create the Koltsov Institute of Developmental Biology within the academy, which to some extent continued Koltsov’s tradition in science.