One can, however, argue against this view. If things did not go too well as regards innovations in art, in science Stalin’s favourites ‘revealed’ a great deal which later had to be quietly ‘covered up’. ‘Pseudoscientific approaches became dominant,’ writes Zhores Medvedev, ‘or at least prominent, in soil science, silviculture, zoology, botany, evolution, agrochemistry and many other areas.’137 It was characteristic that theories which ran counter not only to scientific facts but even to simple logic became especially firmly established in just those branches of knowledge that were connected with agriculture, where they could do the greatest practical damage. There reigned in biology in those days the woefully renowned T. Lysenko, who was personally responsible for the persecution and death of a number of scientists and became notorious for the falsifying of experiments and other similar ‘exploits’.138 Towards the end of his career Lysenko was even intending to undertake, in the spirit of Zamyatin’s sombre prophecy, the improvement of the human race on the basis of scientific humanity.
What most interests L. Graham, in analysing ‘the Lysenko affair’, is the fact that this orgy enjoyed state approvaclass="underline" ‘The support that Lysenko won from Stalin was doubtless very important in his continued rise. But it is difficult to find the reason for this sympathy in Stalin’s theoretical writings.’139 The explanation, however, seems to be discoverable not in theory but in the psychology of the ruling circle in Stalin’s time. The attitude of the statocracy to art largely explains its attitude to science also. The logic is the same in both cases. The essence of policy in science and the arts at the end of the 1930s and in the 1940s was this: it was necessary to bring the creative thinking of the intellectual — whether scientist, scholar or artist — down to the level of ordinary bureaucratic thinking, as this would make total control of them possible and effective. Fortunately the need to develop industrial, and especially military, technology checked this tendency towards the bureaucratization of science. The physicists could, on the whole, consider themselves lucky. The social sciences and biology suffered immeasurable harm.
To explain the Lysenko affair it is not enough to talk about Stalin, since Khrushchev, the exposer of Stalin, was an admirer of Lysenko too. What was involved here was not any sympathies or antipathies but the type of consciousness that was predominant in the ruling statocracy of those years. The fact, mentioned by Graham, that Lysenko’s ideas were essentially anti-Marxist and even anti-materialist is far from accidental. It was quite natural for the ruling circles of the Stalin era to give their approval to such ideas. Lysenko’s notion that acquired characteristics are inherited was fully consonant with Stalin’s slogan: There are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot overcome.’ If ‘socialist realism’ was ‘an art of great promises’, Lysenko tried to create ‘a science of great promises’. The absolute power of the statocracy created the illusion of absolute possibility, unrestricted by any laws — and that meant that the laws of nature could not withstand Lysenko’s work in selection, ‘approved by the Party and the Government’. A similar situation arose in economics, where doubt was cast on the very idea that objective economic laws applied in the Soviet ‘planned economy’. In this sphere retreat was sounded, though, and Stalin himself produced his famous Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, in which he acknowledged the objective character of economic laws under socialism.140 To be sure, the ‘laws’ designated by him were in fact no more than ideological slogans and had no scientific meaning. Regardless, however, of this unimportant ‘side effect’ of Stalin’s work, on the whole it meant a step forward for Soviet economic science, since this science can exist only if the objective character of economic laws is recognized. The catastrophic experience of some ‘lawless’ experiments by the Stalinist statocracy in the period of the first ‘Five Year Plan’ had taught somebody something. Economic ‘laws’ received permission to exist, if only formally.
The Lysenko affair was thus not accidental but a logical outcome of bureaucratic voluntarism, no less than ‘socialist realism’ in aesthetics. ‘The situation in the arts in these years’, writes Graham, ‘was only indirectly related to that of the sciences, but it was none the less a significant aspect of the general environment of the Soviet intellectual.’141 The standardization of art deepened the psychological hopelessness of the scientist — affected his or her consciousness — while the crisis in science, in its turn, could not but have its effect upon art. And processes of a crisis nature undoubtedly developed in several fields of scientific knowledge, albeit with varying intensity.
All critical thinking died away, and the spiritual life of the Stalinist state increasingly offered ‘a suggestive resemblance to the classic church-state’ of the Byzantine type.142 Such were the first results of the bureaucrats’ onslaught upon culture and the intelligentsia.
4
The Thaw
The growth of the new intelligentsia during the 1940s, in both quantity and quality, was bound to worry Stalin. In the 1930s members of the old intelligentsia and the revolutionary intelligentsia had suffered from his repressive measures, but those same years saw the formation of the nucleus of a new intellectual stratum. A considerable proportion of these people belonged to national minorities, especially the Jews, to whom exodus from the Pale of Settlement had given access to the intellectual professions, which from the nineteenth century onwards enjoyed particular prestige in that community. The thirties were not only the period when the old intelligentsia was crushed, but also the period of the formation on a mass scale of a new intelligentsia which was partly Jewish. During the twenties a certain cultural potential had accumulated in Jewish families and they had turned 100 per cent towards Russian culture. The Jews who joined the intelligentsia in the 1930s took up the banner of the Russian Westernizers of the nineteenth century. Had the Jews remained within the ambience of their own ‘national culture’ and not become assimilated, they would have given the rulers no great cause for alarm. However, instead, they reinforced to a certain degree the most progressive wing of the Russian intelligentsia and Russian culture.
It is therefore not surprising that the campaign launched by Stalin against the new intelligentsia was at the same time an anti-Semitic campaign. I. Kon wrote later that for the anti-Semite ‘the Jew symbolizes the intellectual in general.’1 The hatred of ‘Yids, students and intellectuals’ which was a traditional characteristic of the Russian bureaucracy was revived, so to speak, at a new level. ‘Stalin’, observes Roy Medvedev,
showed clear signs of anti-Semitism even before the war, when many centres of Jewish culture were eliminated and a great number of Jewish organizations suppressed. Hitler watched his harassment of Jews with considerable satisfaction. After the war, persecution and repressive measures against Jews were resumed with mounting intensity and brutality, until Stalin came up with his plan for a ‘final solution’ of the Jewish question, which envisaged the deportation of all Soviet Jews to the northern regions of Kazakhstan.2