Stalin and the Scientists

The Germans, fighting from house to house and from staircase to staircase, joked bitterly that they had seized the kitchen but were still fighting for the living room. And at last, in January 1944 – a moment of huge psychological importance – Leningrad was freed

Under the aegis of such men, it was impossible to push the debate into specialist territory, or even ask hard factual questions. All the geneticists could do was argue for the ‘practicality’ of their own research, while their opponents the Lysenkoites barracked them for studying a useless fly, Drosophila, while they, the Lysenkoites, busied themselves with tomatoes, potatoes and other useful plants and animals.

1957 another nuclear accident – a massive explosion at the nuclear waste dump in Kyshtym, close to Sungul – contaminated the area with radioactive waste. The plume rose about a kilometre into the air, exposed about 100,000 people to measurably harmful levels of radiation, and created a dead zone of several hundred square kilometres. The ‘East Ural Radioactive Trace’ became a unique testing area for radio-ecological studies but cleaning up the mess was a real headache,

Once past your babbling infant stage, the point of you was to be the responsible young man or woman on the poster.

Alexander Bogdanov was one of those people who win every battle on the way to losing the war. At Gorky’s villa on Capri, he had thrashed Lenin at chess but failed to heal the rift that had opened up between him and his friend – if indeed he really tried. Shortly after, his became by far the most dominant faction of the Party, but he lost interest in politics, even as control came within his grasp, because he wanted more time for his science-fiction writing.

Never mind all that: the truly hideous thing about immortality is the way it erodes life at both ends. It banishes senescence and death, yes, but at the same stroke it erases birth, and renders youth so fleeting as to be irrelevant – a sort of pupa stage. There was, for many years, no youth culture in Soviet Russia.

Timofeev-Ressovsky classified nature into four nested ‘levels of organisation’ – the cell, the organism, the population, and the ecology – and Liapunov, in turn, interpreted these systems as cybernetic ‘control systems’, each with its own mechanisms of information exchange. According to Liapunov, they were well on their way to modelling life as information.
Genetics was, therefore, an information science:

Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich complained that the atomic cities were like ‘health resorts’.

Timofeev-Ressovsky’s freedom turned out to be rather restricted. Denied the opportunity to live and work in the capital, he returned to the Urals and worked in Sverdlovsk, where he organised a biophysics lab at the Ural Division of the Academy of Sciences. He also founded an experimental station and summer school at nearby Lake Miassovo in the Ilmen National Park with an agenda ranging ‘from astronomy to gastronomy’.

On 20 October 1948, Stalin made his grandest cinematic gesture yet, signing off the Stalin Plan for the Great Transformation of Nature.