Originally published 30 October 1989
Glasnost! Perestroika! Solidarity governs Poland! The Hungarian Communist Party dissolves itself! These stunning political events will change the landscape of international science as Soviet and Eastern Bloc scientists begin to interact more freely with their Western counterparts.
Since the late 1920s, Soviet science has been constrained by politics and philosophy. The effect of politics was often devastating. The effect of Soviet Marxist ideology is more difficult to gauge.
In the West, scientists pretend to be free of political influence and philosophical bias; by examining the Soviet experience we may learn something about ourselves.
The grim calculus of politics and science in the Soviet Union is most dramatically illustrated by the famous Lysenko affair. Trofim D. Lysenko, part scientist, part charlatan, rose to prominence in Soviet biology during the 1930s and 40s under the patronage of Stalin. Lysenko turned his back on modern genetics. He promised to invigorate Soviet agriculture with a half-baked version of Lamarckian biology, the long-discredited idea that organisms can pass on to their offspring environmental adaptations acquired during their own lifetimes.
Played into the hands of politicians
By emphasizing the role of environment over genes in the success of farm plants and animals, Lysenko played into the hands of politicians who possessed the raw power to change the conditions of agriculture. Peasants could be forcibly (and brutally) collectivized, and the Central Committee could dictate the time and mode of planting or breeding. Genes, on the other hand, were rather more resistant to party control.
Lysenko’s opponents in biology and agricultural management were suppressed. The laws of genetics and the role of chromosomes in heredity were stricken from textbooks. By the time of Lysenko’s downfall in 1965, grievous damage had been done to agriculture and biology.
Other Soviet sciences also felt the cold hand of political intervention. For example, during the Great Purges of 1936 – 37 approximately one-eighth of all Soviet astronomers were arrested, tortured, exiled to the Gulag, or executed. The police often carried out their arrests according to a quota system, and the charges used for arrest and conviction were almost always fictitious. Scientists were especially vulnerable; independent thinkers are the natural enemies of any totalitarian state, and foreign contacts between scientists were considered a dangerous source of counter-revolutionary ideas.
In the West, scientists have been safe from the midnight knock on the door, but massive government funding of research is a pervasive (and sometimes pernicious) political influence, all the more dangerous in that the nature of the influence frequently goes unexamined. In the Soviet Union, at least, the political manipulation of science has been explicit.
The full story of the savaging of Soviet science during and after the Stalin years is only now coming to light — in the age of perestroika. The police were not the only threat to the integrity of science. Official Soviet Marxist philosophy — called dialectical materialism—was sometimes imposed upon research with dogmatic and crippling force. Western scientists almost never preface their work with philosophical rationalizations; when we encounter the “party line” in Soviet science it almost always smacks of cant and jargon.
In his important study of Soviet science and philosophy, Professor Loren Graham of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology argues that things are not that simple. Yes, some Soviet scientists cloaked their research in the trappings of party doctrine merely to survive. But many others were — and remain — sincerely committed to dialectical materialism as a useful foundation for science.
A material world
What are the principles of dialectical materialism as they apply to science? That the world is material, and composed of matter and energy only. That the world is an interconnected, constantly changing whole. That change in the world is to be explained by internal factors, with no reference to external deities. That life and mind arise from more basic forms of matter, but have their own irreducible laws of development. That our knowledge derives from an objectively-existing reality, and grows through the accumulation of relative — not absolute — truths.
There is nothing particularly “Soviet” or “Marxist” about these ideas. They are widely held in the West, even if western scientists are unlikely to call themselves dialectical materialists. The assumption of materialism, for example, has served science well since the 17th century. So has the idea that nature — including life and mind — is to be explained by internal factors only. Most Western scientists are probably relativists and realists in the dialectical materialist sense.
According to Loren Graham, Soviet scientists face more openly the implications of their philosophical assumptions than scientists in the West, where the fashion is to maintain that philosophy has nothing to do with science. He is hopeful that out of a meeting of Soviet and Western scientists a way can be found to admit that philosophy does indeed influence science, and vice versa, without allowing philosophy to intrude itself restrictively into day-to-day research.
Soviet scientists are more likely than their Western counterparts to make their philosophy explicit, but they are not necessarily parroting a party line. The nasty bogeyman of dialectical materialism, so often vilified in the capitalist West, is in many of its guises a respected silent partner of Western science.
