The last fifty years have compassed more scientific progress than the preceding five centuries. Man's capacity to absorb the crowding new has been strained by the flood of discoveries and inventions in physics and chemistry, electronics and aeronautics, psychology and medicine, in every other department of knowledge and inquiry.

       In this burgeoning world of science, Soviet Russia's share has been lamentably meager . The country has made worthwhile contributions on the, fringes—such as equipment for suturing severed arteries, to mention one of many—but not one of the truly epoch-making discoveries and inventions of the half-century. Its citizens have been awarded a number of Nobel Prizes, but none of them represented a historic breakthrough in its field.

       Illusions on this score have been bred by the launching of the Sputnik and Lunik before the United States orbited a satellite. These feats will long and deservedly remain a source of Russian national pride. They involved important engineering work—in the build-up of engine thrust, in. particular. But on the whole, they reflected an early and speeded-up concentration of effort, an act of political will, rather than any new scientific principles or inventions unknown to the- outside world.*

       The Soviets drew on the common reservoir of knowledge in other advanced countries. (316) Moreover, no outsider can estimate how much their space spectaculars owed (1) to the harvest of massive espionage in the United States, Canada, and Britain, and (2) to German scientific and technical brains; hundreds of German specialists, along with installations and prototypes, had been brought to Russia after the war.

       One of these German scientists, Professor H. Harwich, worked on the development of Soviet atomic science for a full decade, from 1945 to 1955, and drew a Stalin Prize for his contributions. Writing in a German magazine in 1965, he declared that the espionage activities of Klaus Fuchs alone saved the Soviets two years of research, "quite possibly it was more." The Kremlin, he said, captured the entire German groundwork in rocket, power unit, and radar knowledge, together with the equipment and key personnel.

       The Russians are naturally creative people. On the basis of their record before the advent of Bolshevism, the world had every reason to look to them for seminal thought in science, for pacesetting in mathematics, biology, medicine, and other disciplines in which they had shown special aptitudes in the nineteenth and. early twentieth centuries.

       These expectations have been largely disappointed. One can attest this without the slightest disparagement of Russian abilities. On the contrary, given the oppressive anti-intellectual atmosphere under communism, even the marginal contributions speak volumes for the inherent genius of the people.

       There is little, if anything, in the area of science that the West has obtained from Soviet Russia. (317) It has not been hampered or impoverished by Soviet refusal to permit access to its accomplishments. Moscow, by contrast, has been so avid for Western science and technology that it has engaged in economic espionage abroad on a scale without precedent anywhere anytime, determined to steal what it could not buy.

       Despite itself, in dread of possible consequences, the Kremlin is being driven by the imperatives of technology to tolerate more rationality in science and research. A point was reached in the 1950's when the economic penalties of dogmatic ignorance were becoming too alarming. While holding steadfastly to its absolute supremacy in decision-making, the regime gradually authorized more sensible approaches to science and a larger degree of autonomy in research.

       In the exact sciences, the new freedom is extensive, but the more directly a discipline affects politics and ideology —philosophy, psychology, jurisprudence, history especially —the greater the remaining restrictions.

       And in some fields distortion and falsehoods are as mandatory as ever. Political science is out of bounds for obvious reasons—uninhibited study of open societies is inconceivable. Facts about the non-communist world are twisted or invented in line with Marxist-Leninist preconceptions.

       A brochure by one E. Kolman, titled Is There a God? and published three years after Stalin's death, said at one point: "In the capitalist states even today scientists who1 do not believe in God are persecuted . . . . They persecute and starve lecturers who teach the truth about the origin of the earth, of life and man. It often happens that scientific books are publicly burned." This kind of cynical nonsense about the infidel democracies, and it is one quotation out of thousands, scarcely jibes with a genuine scientific spirit. In the clinches, propaganda and indoctrination still have the right of way over ascertainable truth.

       Even the partial retreat from obscurantism has been made slow and difficult because of a heritage of monstrous persecution of science and learning in the recent past, including the physical destruction of thousands of first-rate Russian minds. (318) Every major purge, it should be remembered, took a larger toll from the educated minority than from the population as a whole. In the 1930's, climaxed by the blood-purges, the best brains were removed from the national, republic, and affiliated Academies of Science, the universities and research institutions.

       It is doubtful that "the greatest scientist of our epoch, Comrade Stalin," as Pravda called him, and his cohorts knew specifically why they were so frightened of these men and women. It was a conditioned reflex against knowledge and reason, as sources of possible doubt about communism and its works. As for the victims, most of them could only surmise what "crimes" were imputed to them from the fantastic "confessions" they were tortured into signing. No scientific field was exempt from police depredations. "Saboteurs" by the hundred were turned up in medicine, anthropology, and linguistics. "Diversionist wrecking" was exposed in astronomy; a normal mind finds it difficult to imagine why an all-powerful regime should be wracked by fears in the astronomic heavens.

       Another devastating wave of purge washed over the country from 1946 forward and continued unabated as long as Stalin lived. It is known as the Zhdanov period, after Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin's ideological and cultural Czar, who initiated the horror for his boss. The havoc it worked among intellectuals was as tragic as in the thirties. Along with the standard charges of heresy and sabotage, the persecutions were now directed with special cruelty against newly minted crimes like "rootless cosmopolitanism" and "kow-towing to the West."

       Stalin was determined to wipe out the memories of his pact with Hitler and the role of the capitalist West in winning the war and saving his regime. He was haunted by the knowledge that millions of his subjects, soldiers and civilians, had caught a glimpse of life without communism in Eastern and Central Europe. He became psychotically dedicated to isolating his country, especially intellectually, from the rest of humanity. (319)

       As proclaimed by Zhdanov and thousands of lesser Zhdanovs, the USSR, "the world's most advanced country," had nothing to learn from the jungle of ignorance, religion, "reaction" and lust for war beyond the Soviet frontiers. Any sign of interest in the culture or science of other nations became prima facie evidence of treason. Correspondence, let alone personal contacts, with American or European universities and learned societies, even in the distant past, meant arrest, concentration camp, sometimes execution as a spy.

       The xenophobia was not new—distrust of foreign thought was deep through all the Soviet years—but it was now intensified. The Kremlin eagerly reached out for technology. What it called "Fordism" became in the time of forced-tempo industrialization almost an object of worship. But paradoxically the rulers shied away in horror from Western abstract ideas and discoveries in pure science in which that technology was rooted.

       Thus the theories of Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, and Norbert Wiener, the American father of cybernetics, were denounced out of hand as capitalist frauds. In more recent years, they have been grudgingly "rehabilitated" but they are still handled with care as anti-Marxist booby-traps.

       Relativity was arbitrarily denounced by Lenin; not until the mid-fifties did it become entirely safe for physicists to treat Einstein seriously. As recently as 1963, a book on philosophy issued by the Academy of Science began its chapter on Freud with these words: "Freudianism is one of the most widespread and reactionary movements in contemporary capitalist double-talk."

       For years cybernetics was fiercely assailed as a bourgeois black art. A Philosophical Dictionary, published in 1954, still stated: "Cybernetics is a reactionary pseudo-science, emerging in the United States after the war and spreading widely to other capitalist countries as well." Belatedly, the USSR developed what amounted to a mania of faith in cybernetics, but the time-lag could not be made up. Soviet technology was utterly unprepared for the computer age and continues to pay for the folly in backwardness. (320)

• The Reign of Lysenko

       Perhaps the best way to convey the appalling tragedy of men of learning is to tell briefly the incredible story of Trofim D. Lysenko, who for some thirty years dominated Soviet biological sciences and related fields, such as genetics, histology, embryology, zoology. It is by all odds the greatest scandal in the scientific domain in our century. Already there is a substantial literature on the fantastic business—none of it in Soviet libraries—and doubtless it will be examined in the future by students of the pathology of communism.

       Whether Lysenko is a fraud or a fanatic ignoramus is open to debate. Practically that is of little importance. What is important is that his reign of terror over a vital scientific area lasted, with one brief eclipse from 1955 to 1958, from the early thirties until Khrushchev was ousted in 1964. In this period the police-state imposed his theories on the entire country, inflicting damage on the nation's agriculture, forestry, and science as a whole.

       Lysenko first appeared on the national scene as a disciple of Michurin, sometimes called "the Russian Burbank." Unlike both Michurin and Burbank, he was not content merely to develop new species of plants and fruits. He preached his own system of genetics, according to which the whole civilized world was mistaken in accepting the laws of heredity and mutations established by the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel in the previous century and confirmed by thousands of biologists thereafter.

       Lysenko denied the existence of genes. He renounced theoretical experimentation in favor of "practical" hit-and-miss tests. He insisted that acquired characteristics would be transmitted to new generations in both plant and animal breeding. Eugenics, being tied to Mendelian findings, he ruled out entirely.

       Two outstanding Western geneticists visited Lysenko in his early years of notoriety. Dr. S. C. Harland, a Briton, reported: "I found him completely ignorant of the elementary principles of genetics and plant physiology." (321) An American colleague, the late Dr. H. J. Muller, a winner of the Nobel Prize in biology, declared: "Lysenko's writings on theoretical lines are the merest drivel. He obviously fails to comprehend either what a controlled experiment is, or the established principles of genetics." On another occasion, Dr. Muller wrote: "In the light of modern scientific knowledge, Lysenkoism must be termed a superstition, as much a superstition as belief that the earth is flat." Nearly all reputable Russian biologists, including Professor Nikolai Vavilov, one of the world's most respected authorities, were amazed that this half-educated amateur was being listened to seriously.

       But the greatest scientist of all, Comrade Stalin, was thoroughly captivated by Lysenko's half-baked and flamboyant claims. The newly collectivized agriculture was then in grievous trouble, famine was mowing down millions. The worried politicians proved easy targets for wonder-working horticultural nostrums.

       In Lysenko they hailed a "practical agronomist" in contrast to the fancy theorists with their genes and laws of heredity. He promised great leaps forward, to use a later Chinese slogan. He refused to be frustrated by the slowness of nature and would bend it to his will—revolution instead of slowpoke evolution! Besides, the established laws of heredity seemed a kind of eternal predestination and vaguely un-Marxist, though Marx had never written a line on the subject. Lysenko's award of priority to environment, again vaguely, seemed to offer greater hope of engineering the "new Soviet man" of the Marxist-Leninist theology.

       Stalin latched on to Lysenko, threw the whole weight of the dictatorship behind him. This he adhered to until the end of his life, after which Khrushchev became Lysenko's chief patron. By 1938, the upstart displaced Vavilov as head of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences, and the Central Committee of the party ordered all Marxists to embrace the Lysenko magic, like it or not. By 1940, he was director of the Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Science.

       He was not only the undisputed Tsar of the entire empire of research and education in agronomy and biology, but had emerged as a political power in the land. (322) Mendelian principles of heredity were "abolished." Genes were turned into a counterrevolutionary word, erased from all science textbooks.

       Unable to convert Vavilov and other serious specialists, Lysenko, supported by the party, equated disagreement with treason and increasingly resorted to purges. Opponents were castigated as "rotten liberals," stooges for the West waging a struggle against Soviet progress. Because the great Mendel had been a monk, the charge of "clerical reaction" was added to the catalog of sins.

Professor Albert Parry wrote in 1960:

       Lysenko's power reached its peak in the postwar Zhdanov period. His hatred of Western science fitted neatly into the Russian chauvinism of that time. The incredible part of the affair is that Lysenko accomplished nothing except to extend the botanical work pioneered by Michurin and Burbank. He had a green thumb, a way with growing things, the persuasiveness of a fanatic or a charlatan, but not a trace of the scientific mentality. (323)

       During his brief eclipse, the Soviet Botanical Journal in 1955 wrote of his work: "It has now been conclusively demonstrated that the entire concept is factually unsound and theoretically and methodically erroneous and that it is not of practical value." Reputable Russian scientists charged in print that he had falsified reports to bamboozle the party. Nevertheless, Khrushchev restored him to favor.

       Why did Stalin and his successors cling to Lysenkoism through all the years in the face of overwhelming scientific opinion against him? Was it sheer stubbornness? Or a godlike feeling that they could dictate to nature as ruthlessly as to man? No one, in the nature of the case, can give full answers to such questions. '

       "Laws of heredity," Bertram D. Wolfe has written, were "passed by the Politburo." In the view of Dr. David Joravsky of the Harvard University Research Center (Problems of Communism, November-December 1965), Lysenkoism "simply carried [the] anti-intellectual attitude to its ultimate absurdity." He quoted an old botanist to whom he spoke in Russia as exclaiming: "Lysenko is the Rasputin of Soviet biology!"

       "It was science which paid the most immediate and heaviest price for the authorities' support of Lysenkoism," Dr. Joravsky declared. "Genetics, cystology and evolutionary theory were driven out of educational and research institutions, first from those concerned with agricultural applications, then from secondary schools and ultimately, from 1948 to 1953, from the universities and research laboratories."

       By this time it is generally conceded in the USSR that Lysenkoism was without any validity—precisely as all non-Soviet biologists had known from the outset. The gene is being "rehabilitated"; millions of textbooks are being junked and a hundred thousand biology teachers are being retrained. Intelligent Soviet people are frankly ashamed and embarrassed. Lysenko himself apparently has not been punished and many of his disciples are still entrenched in some scientific institutions—presumably they still enjoy the patronage of powerful Kremlin caliphs. (324)

       The thirty-year Lysenko saga tells us nearly all we need to know about the fate of science and intellect under an ideological autocracy. It reduces to self-evident absurdity the pretense that communism has helped science to flourish. Such a gross imposture sustained by police force would not have been possible in a free society. Even if Lysenko were right in his revolt against reason, the suppression of dissenting voices would have indicted the USSR as an enemy of intellect. There can be no genuine science without freedom of thought and inquiry, without autonomy for the searching mind. (325)