When Reason Goes on Holiday. Neven Sesardic
materialism” lacking “an honest, objective exposition of Soviet philosophy” because it hides from the reader “that those who remained obdurate in their convictions lost their jobs, were exiled to Siberia or a Labor camp, or even executed” (Gotesky 1947, 115).
Why didn’t any other member of the Philosophy of Science editorial board ever raise his voice to try to counter Somerville’s and Malisoff’s pro-Lysenko stance with a more realistic view? After all, at that point the journal’s board of editorial associates and advisors included, among others, leading biologists such as J. B. S. Haldane and H. J. Muller.
We do not know, of course, whether Haldane and Muller paid attention to what was being published in the philosophy journal on whose board they served. But if they did, or if someone drew their attention to the fact that sporadic defenses of Lysenko appeared there without a word of opposition, there are reasons to think that neither of them would have been inclined to make too much fuss about it.
Haldane had joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1942 and he publicly defended Lysenko at least until the end of 1949 (Harman 2003, 324). In a BBC broadcast at the end of 1948, Haldane was still unwilling to concede that Vavilov had died in prison, although he apparently knew the truth by that time (Paul 1983, 13).
Four years after Stalin’s public “Bravo” to Lysenko, Haldane wrote: “In view of the decreasing support given to this branch of biology in England, it is probable that, in spite of the dismissal of several Russian workers during the last year [1939], the prospects for genetical research are considerably better in the Soviet Union than in the British Empire” (Paul 1983, 10; emphasis added).
Moreover, Haldane said in a “self-obituary” recorded for the BBC in 1964 a few months before his death that “in my opinion, Lysenko is a very fine biologist and some of his ideas are right.”
The American geneticist H. J. Muller (who received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1946) also started as a Soviet sympathizer and even moved his lab to Leningrad and later to Moscow, conducting research there from 1934 till 1937. Disillusioned after Stalin ordered attacks on his work, he returned to the West. Muller knew very well how dire the situation of Soviet scientists was but he refused to talk about these matters in public. He explained the reasons for his reluctance in a letter to Julian Huxley in 1937. It is worth quoting at length:
I have been asked to write private letters to my geneticist friends abroad, telling them that things are going well again for genetics in U.S.S.R. & asking them to use their influence with the international committee, to have the congress held there. . . . While I will not do that, neither will I do the opposite—tell the truth to the world about the situation there. It would be too damaging to the opinion of scientists about the U.S.S.R.
I do not want to become an agent of anti-Soviet propaganda. While what I have told you are only facts, they cannot be appraised without taking them in connection with favorable facts concerning the U.S.S.R. and its system. I know you are familiar with these, & so I can tell you the above facts, but the mass of people can hardly see two facts at a time & so these facts might have a dangerous effect on them. When they are finally given out it must be in just the right setting (quoted in Paul 1983; emphasis added).
Given that many other members of the editorial board also had strong leftist leanings, it may well be that some of them reasoned the same way and concluded that the noble cause of socialism was a good reason to postpone telling the uncomfortable truth about the purge of Soviet scientists until some “appropriate” time in the indefinite future.
The final result is that the preeminent journal of the philosophy of science, which was supposed to explain the intricacies of the scientific method and advance good science, ended up with a major blemish on its record. During the entire critical period up to Lysenko’s total victory in 1948, while scientists in the Soviet Union were under attack by Stalinist pseudoscience and were literally fighting for their lives, the only views published in the pages of Philosophy of Science on this topic were formulated to whitewash the ongoing persecution and spread the message “Move on; nothing to see here.”
Around the same time, another top journal also opened its space to a paean to Stalinist assaults on academic freedom. In a rare case of a major philosophy journal publishing a piece devoted exclusively to the situation in Soviet philosophy, the Philosophical Review published a paper by John Somerville in which he praised Stalin’s “famous speech” that “played such a large role in the philosophical discussion.” Then he informed his American readers that, as far as he could judge, “the inner feelings of Soviet philosophers . . . are probably considerably different from what is frequently and hastily assumed from a distance.” He explained: “It does not seem to them that recommendations by the party constitute an inappropriate intervention or an unwelcome intrusion” (Somerville 1946, 262).
It is easy to imagine the “inner feelings” of those scholars in the Soviet Union who retained a genuine interest in philosophy if they read in Somerville’s article that they regarded the Party diktats as appropriate interventions and welcome intrusions in their discussions. And to think that this nonsense was published in a premier philosophy journal in the West!
Some logical positivists continued praising the Soviet approach to biology until so late that they could no longer claim they were uninformed about what was going on. Philipp Frank, a leading philosopher of the Vienna Circle and a member of the editorial board of Philosophy of Science, wrote that “the creative scientific work, particularly in chemistry, physics and biology . . . enjoys favorable conditions for development in the USSR” (Frank 1950, 205; emphasis added). Favorable conditions in the USSR for the creative scientific work, particularly in biology? Frank’s book containing that statement was published in 1950, at a time when it was public knowledge that Lysenkoism was imposed on all biologists by the state and that many of its opponents were fired, arrested, sent to labor camps, or executed. The publisher of the book was Harvard University Press.
Similarly, in his well-known biography of Einstein Frank writes: “By studying events in Russia since the seizure of power by Lenin, we can see that no attempt was ever made to exert political influences on physical theories proper” (Frank 1947, 257; emphasis added). It is hard to understand how Frank could have made this statement in good faith. He must have known how bad the situation was, as he had contacts both with physicists and philosophers in the Soviet Union.
Here is the flavor of these typical ideological outbursts against “incorrect” physical theories:
One of Einstein’s Soviet critics responded that deism was logically inherent in the concept of a four-dimensional space-time continuum and that therefore relativity must be rejected. He noted Hessen’s defence of relativity theory, a doctrine which he condemned as “a rotten swamp” (Graham 1985, 712).
Calling the theory of relativity “a rotten swamp” surely sounds like a crude political attack, especially since this characterization appeared in a widely read publication, tightly controlled by the Party. And of course being exposed to this kind of onslaught was usually just the ominous beginning. For example, the physicist attacked in the above quotation, Boris Hessen, was soon afterward dismissed from his post as deputy director of the Physics Institute in Moscow, then arrested, and finally, after being tried for “terrorism” by a military tribunal, condemned to death and executed the same day in December 1936.
This was the usual procedure: It started with physical theories’ coming under political attack, after which harsh measures were taken against the physicists themselves. Those whose understanding of physical theories was colored by their scientific specialization in the West were often treated as ideologically suspect just on that basis. The downfall of some of these top physicists began with political denunciations and ended with their losing their jobs and in some cases their lives as well (Kojevnikov 2004, 117–18). (For a partial list of physicists and philosophers of physics persecuted in the 1930s, see Joravsky 1970, 318–19.)
Judging by what Philipp Frank wrote, it would seem that no