Lysenko, Enemy of Soviet Science, and a Dissertation Left on a Windowsill. Memoir by Nina Kossman

Lysenko, Enemy of Soviet Science, and a Dissertation Left on a Windowsill

In memory of my mother, Maya Borisovna Shternberg

Back in the seventies, people emigrating from the Soviet Union were not allowed to take with them certain things, such as books published before 1917 (the year of the Bolshevik revolution), manuscripts, typescripts, works of art, and so on. Since the Soviet Union did not have diplomatic relations with Israel, and 99% of hopeful emigrants were going to Israel, the only country to which it was possible to apply for permission to emigrate in those years, the way to take forbidden items out of the USSR was to give them to a Dutch Consul, who would return the items to their owners once they were outside the Soviet Union—i.e., in Israel. There was, however, a limit to how many items prospective emigrants were allowed to give to the Dutch Consul.

            My parents wanted to give my mother’s academic dissertation to the Consul, but I said I would not leave without my watercolors, and since even children’s pictures had been classified as “art” by the state apparatus, my parents had to choose between my watercolors and my mother’s dissertation. They were loving parents, and they decided in favor of my watercolors. This was how, and why, on the day we left the Soviet Union forever, a cardboard box with my mother’s dissertation remained on a windowsill of our empty apartment, next to a smaller cardboard box with my father’s WWII medals. It doesn’t take much imagination to visualize the contents of both boxes—the dissertation and the medals. These were treated like garbage by those who moved into our apartment after we had left. I know for a fact that my father never regretted leaving his war medals on that window sill. He had never shown them to us anyway, except once, when I asked him to, and he took them out of the box for just a second, saying that it’s nothing to be proud of, and that being a soldier in the war that had killed millions, including most of his family, was not a matter of pride or wearing medals, like so many believe, but of grim necessity. As for my mother’s dissertation, this was a different matter; I have no doubt that my mother regretted leaving it.

            The dissertation that we left on that windowsill on our last day in the Soviet Union was the only copy of a document whose significance I would understand many years later. In fact, I came understand it only a few months ago, when I opened an email from a Russian physicist, one whose research interests—in addition to his research in physics—included biographies of scientists who had been victims of Lysenkoism. Among other things, he asked me about my mother’s dissertation: whether it was lost, or whether I had a copy of it?

            All I could tell him was that my parents had left it on the windowsill of our empty Moscow apartment when we were emigrating. It was from this Russian physicist that I learned that while in the last forty-some years duplicate copies of all dissertations were kept in Leninka (Moscow’s main library named after V.I. Lenin), in the long-ago days of Mother’s dissertation, such duplication wasn’t yet being done. No copies of any dissertation were brought to the library in those days, which means that the copy of the dissertation my parents had left on our windowsill when we emigrated in 1972 was the only one. It was the only copy. And because I, the stubborn fool that I was at that age, had insisted on taking my silly watercolor pictures, my Mama was forced to leave her dissertation on the windowsill, next to my father’s war medals. My pictures were given to the Dutch Consul, and I still have them, although I never look at them and never take them out of a large manila envelope which gathers dust in my basement. The only copy of Mother’s dissertation is gone forever.

            Four long decades later, I would learn the whole story surrounding my mother’s work, although now and then I did hear bits and pieces of it during her lifetime. Mama hardly ever spoke about herself, probably because she thought that none of it was important or interesting to us, and because the events of her youth taught her reticence and humility. Only now do I understand this period of her life, one I had never bothered to inquire about. During this period, she was a young biologist. Unfortunately for her, it coincided with the worst phase in the history of Soviet science.
            Here’s what I’ve learned. I will intersperse my findings with excerpts from Yudif Tselniker’s memoir. Tselniker was a biologist who studied and worked with Mama, and although Mama appears in Yudif’s memoir in random episodes, this memoir is the only record of her life in that period; and it’s not simply a record of her life, but of her work in science.

            There was one name that I did hear from Mama, despite her reticence. That name was Dmitry  Anatolyevich Sabinin.

From Yudif’s memoir:
“His first lecture on plant physiology, our main specialty, amazed us. A short man with a mop of thick, disheveled hair and a pile of books under his arm, rushed into the auditorium and began the lecture on the run. It was Dmitry Anatolyevich Sabinin. His manner of lecturing was very different from what we were used to. Lectures on all other subjects were read to us in an “academic” manner: we were given ready-made knowledge on this or that subject in a lifeless, static way. The task set by Dmitry Anatolyevich was different: he wanted to show us how this or that knowledge was produced so that we would learn to think and analyze facts independently. He drew tables, on the blackboard, with results by various authors and explained how these scientists interpreted the results, what were their mistakes in setting up experiments and interpreting the results, and whether their conclusions were wrong. At such lectures, one could not miss a single word; otherwise, one would lose the thread of reasoning and evidence, and all the time one had to follow the lecturer’s logic intensely and think.”^[i]

~~~

            The few times Mama mentioned the name of her mentor, Dmitry Anatolyevich Sabinin, her recollections were brief and low-key. That was simply because that’s how she was by the time I was born. When I was a child, she mentioned the expedition to Georgia (Gruzia). I have photos of Mama studying leaves at a tea plantation in Georgia. But I did not know any of the details—none whatsoever. I did not even know what the expedition was about, what research was she involved in, or who the other people were in the photos. I never asked. I never thought about it. It never occurred to me that someday I would have a reason to regret her silence, or the fact that I made no attempt to break through it. Had I asked, she would have told me. I am sure of it. But I never asked.

            Yudif Tselniker writes in her memoir:        

“When I came to the Kafedra^[ii] in early January 1944, I met Galya Shocklender. She asked me if I wanted to go on an expedition to Georgia. It turned out that Dmitry Anatolyevich Sabinin (D.A.)^[iii] had signed a contract with the Glavchaya Committee to do research work on tea, citrus, and tung tree by the Kafedra. D.A. agreed to take me on if I would write my thesis in a short time before departure and pass the mandatory exams.

Soon we left for Georgia. There were five of us: D.A., N.G. Potapov, Galya Shoklender, my classmate Maya Shternberg,^[iv] and myself. The trip took a very long time.  The train to Tbilisi took seven days by detour route, through Stalingrad, because there were still Germans in Kharkiv. For a full day’s journey to Stalingrad, and a little after, everywhere the eye could see broken tanks in the steppe. In Stalingrad itself, which we passed without stopping, we could see empty boxes of broken buildings with broken windows.

Everything in West Georgia seemed new and surprising to us – the subtropical vegetation and the red soil and weather. D.A., who had been there many times, introduced us to the peculiarities of the climate as well as to the plants. It seemed very strange to us that at this time of year, with temperatures of 10-15 degrees Celsius, it was very humid all the time. In the morning, getting dressed, we discovered our clothes and shoes were soaking wet. [….]
       Soon Maya fell ill with rozha, probably contracted in a sulfur bath where she slipped, fell, and lightly scraped her leg. She was admitted to a hospital in Batumi. To visit her, we had to take the local train.”
~~~

            Mama never even told me that she had gotten sick with something called “rozha” during the Georgia expedition, and that her condition was so severe that she had to be hospitalized in Batumi. Mama, why didn’t you tell me? You did not want to burden me with your past, is that why? Of course, I heard this word “rozha” before, but it was its fraternal twin, a homonym, I knew. It had the same sound, but a totally different meaning: “rozha” is a crude word for face (mug). It has nothing to do with the clinical “rozha,” which, as I know now, comes from the Polish word róża, and is related to the old Slavic root for red or pink. The original name for the disease is Erysipelas, and according to Wikipedia, “Symptoms may include redness and pain at the affected site, fevers, and chills. Erysipelas requires treatment with antibiotics to prevent the spread of infection.”

 You did not tell me about it, Мama, because you thought these details of your youth were so unimportant that they simply did not matter, and that your life did not interest me. Now it matters. Now every detail matters. And now I don’t have any details because you were too shy to talk about yourself. You are gone, and people who study the history of Soviet science want me to write about you. They tell me: “Write about your mother! Write everything you know about her past, her life in biology! Who were her friends? Her colleagues? Every detail, every little thing you can remember is important!” When I tell them that I know next to nothing, they think that I’m being reticent. Reticent, like you, Mama. Of course, there is no way for them to know that you were the reticent one; only I know that. That’s one of the things about you that I know very well. But unlike you, I’m not reticent. I simply don’t know. I know too little, next to nothing.    

~~~
“Soon Maya Shternberg and I left for Tsikhisdziri. We didn’t even know how to research trees. We decided to start just by sketching large branches and smaller shoots. After our long and quite fruitless attempts to sketch the trees, it suddenly dawned on us that, according to the nature of development, shoots are divided into several types, and there is a regularity in their arrangement on the tree. From that point on began our systematic study of tree crown structure. A long and tedious counting of the number of shoots of various types.”
~~~

            Mama, remember that time, when I was in my 20s, and you said you didn’t want me to write about you, ever! And I said, vaguely, okay. And then you added: “But then, if you do, you will write only good things (‘tol’ko khoroshee”) about me, right?” To this I responded with “Of course!” Remember? Actually, you didn’t say “about me.” You said “about us,” meaning you and Papa (“o nas s papoi”). But I omitted “Papa” here, and I’m sure you know why. The answer is simple: Papa spoke and wrote about his life himself, so when I write about him, I don’t feel as though I’m trespassing or doing something against his will. Yet when I try to write about your life—as I was urged to, more than once, by people who are convinced that certain events of your life have significance beyond the personal, I feel that I’m going against your wishes. In a nutshell, Mama, it is very hard, almost impossible for me to go against your request to not write about you. I hope you will understand and forgive me.  I write about you only because there are voices of other people urging me to write about you. They insist on the importance of events about which you were silent precisely because they affected you so deeply. But these voices fade into irrelevance when I’m confronted with your words “Don’t write about me.”

~~~

“At the end of May, Maya and I went to Moscow to take our state exams. This time the trip was shorter: the train went through Voronezh instead of Stalingrad.”

~~~

            I wish I could see you, Mama, or at least imagine you looking out of a train window as it passed Voronezh, a beautiful medieval Russian town, half-destroyed by the war.  But the young woman looking out of a train window at Voronezh is the same young woman—my future mother—looking out of that same train window at Stalingrad, completely destroyed by the war. This young woman does not know me yet, just as I don’t know her.

~~~

“Maya and I were assigned to work permanently at the VNIIChPiSK.^[v] But D.A. wanted to keep us at the Kafedra. He had positions for us in the graduate school, but he was told by the university rector’s office that Jews could not be enrolled in the graduate school. So instead, he decided to enroll us at the Kafedra as freelance lab assistants. 

Two third-year students, Vera Smirnova and Rita Tyurina, came to help Maya and me. Maya and I did our research, Maya on the tung tree, and I on citrus, and the younger students helped us. We worked, first, in Anaseuli, then in Tsikhisdziri, and we were surveying yields in other kolkhozy (state farms) as well.”
~~~

          I want to go on writing, but my hand, the one I write with, freezes in mid-air. I feel paralyzed. I can’t write. You were a small woman, Mama. You were physically small, and by the time I was born, you were a shy woman, but to me, your word was law, and even though I went against it in my youth, it was still law, and I knew that by going against your word, I went against you, as this law, this rule, was set by you. I went against it not only when I was a teenager, as teenagers do to separate from their mothers, but also later, yes, later, too, I went against it, not once, and not twice, but many times.

            I don’t know why I rebelled against you, even when you were very old and sick, and I was taking care of you, I still went against your law, which was so deeply ingrained in me that it felt more like a religion than your law. And although, in reality there was no law whatsoever, and you never set any law, still I had to trespass it, to break it, to feel free. Do you know that it was much harder for your daughter to rebel against you than it was for most young people to rebel against their parents? Not only because your “law” did not really exist, and because it was nowhere except in your daughter’s mind, but mainly because you were never harsh or threatening, but kind, defenseless, and soft. Maybe that’s why my going against what I perceived as your “law” made me feel crude and heartless.

            It must have seemed awful to you, Mama, so awful as to have been almost unbearable. And now I must break your law once again: I must write about you. I must write about you because it’s important. And yes, mama, I remember your words, and I will write about you tol’ko khoroshee (only good things), because even if I wanted to, I would not be able to find any “bad” things to write about you. Surely, you never really thought that I would write anything “bad.” Was it that you simply feared the loss of privacy? This is understandable: you did not want your life to be made into a public story. Fear not, Mama. You were so reticent, so silent about the effect of the 20^th century on your life, that I find it very hard to write anything about you at all.

            Less than two months after Mama had defended her dissertation on growth processes of the tung tree, there was the so-called VASKhNIL, an infamous August session of the All-Union Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences, at which Trofim Lysenko, an anti-scientist backed by Stalin, attacked geneticists and biologists who had “betrayed” the Soviet motherland by following in the footsteps of bourgeois science. Just as the whole Western world was the enemy of our Soviet world, he said, the fake science of so-called genetics was the enemy of our Soviet “Michurin agrobiology,” as well as of everything our glorious Soviet science has achieved and would achieve. My young mother and Yudif Tselniker, her colleague and the future author of reminiscences quoted here, had been planning to start working on an exciting new project led by Dmitry Anatolyevich Sabinin. But when my mother and Yudif came to the Kafedra, they learned that their positions no longer existed, and that Professor Sabinin himself was no longer head of the Department of Plant Physiology at MGU. There was a price to pay for standing up to Lysenko, and included in that price was not only Sabinin’s own life but the lives of his young assistants, Maya Shternberg (my mother) and Yudif Tselniker.

~~~

“On June 15, 1948, Maya and I defended our Ph.D. dissertations. Dmitry Anatolyevich wanted to invite Prof. M. Kh. Chaylakhyan, who was one of our opponents, but Chaylakhyan received a call “from the authorities” and was advised not to oppose the thesis. He complied. He was replaced by Prof. A.V. Blagoveshchensky. The chairman of the Scientific Council was Lev Ivanovich Kursanov.

Much has been written about the session and what began after it in biology. Therefore, I will not dwell on this here. I will only write about what happened at the university and what I witnessed.

 On August 12, 1948, a general assembly of the Department of Biology was held in a large Zoology auditorium on Herzen St. The meeting was opened by the then Rector of the University, Academician A. N. Nesmeyanov. He said approximately the following: “You know that Academician Lysenko is supported by the party and the government. The staff of the biology department has made several mistakes in the past, for which Dean S. D. Yudintsev has been removed from his position. I present to you the new dean, I.I. Prezent (Lysenko’s closest assistant and ideologist). You should carefully consider your future behavior and if you make the right conclusions from everything that happened, I will try to keep the staff of the Department of Biology intact. I do not require that you speak now, everyone needs to think and determine their line of conduct, and in a week we will meet again. After him, Yudintsev spoke, reading in a monotone voice from a piece of paper, admitting that he had made a mistake by assembling a meeting on intraspecies struggle and by supporting Lysenko’s opponents and that he considers his punishment fair. Nesmeyanov wanted to close the meeting, but suddenly Dmitry Anatolyevich asked to speak. He began to speak, while still running down the stairs in the rostrum: “I believe that the whole so-called Lysenko doctrine is sheer nonsense and I will prove it to you all now.”

He was interrupted by Nesmeyanov: “Dmitry Anatolyevich, stop, do not get excited, think about the risk of it all!,” but D.A. continued: “I have been teaching plant physiology for 40 years and have been thinking about these questions for many years. There’s nothing that I need to think over. I know what I’m risking by speaking out, but I would not consider myself a decent man and a real scientist if I did not honestly say everything that I think.” Nesmeyanov did not give Dmitry Anatolyevich a chance to speak further and urgently closed the meeting.
      His staff dejectedly gathered in the department. When Dmitry Anatolyevich got there, I went up to him and said, “Why did you do that? If you did not pity yourself, you should have felt sorry for the department, which you had put together yourself, with so much effort. After all this, they will get rid of all of us!”
     To this D.A. replied, “My children, understand, I could not do otherwise! And anyway, my views are well known, and I will not change them. After all, this scoundrel (i.e., Prezent) drank tea with me!”

At this time two female students from another department came into our Kafedra. They cried profusely and muttered, through tears, “Let me shake your hand, you are the only real man among all these cowards!”

~~~

            The Department of Plant Physiology (Kafedra) was emptied of its people, once its heart, Dmitry Anatolyevich, aka Professor Sabinin, had been forcibly removed.  When Mama arrived at the Kafedra after the VASKHNIL session, she found a lock on Professor Sabinin’s office. She read in a postanovlenie^[vi] that the department members had been stripped of their positions as punishment for betraying principles of socialist science, and realized that her life in science was over. Two years later, far away from Moscow, in the resort town Golubaya Bukhta, Sabinin would shoot himself. He had been exiled there, and ordered to head the Black Sea Station of the Institute of Oceanology of the USSR Academy of Sciences. This assignment was as much a taunt as anything; oceanology was a crumb thrown to him in place of his true love and profession, plant physiology.
            I wish I knew more, but due to Mama’s reticence, this is all I know.

ENDNOTES

^[i]All the quotes are from the memoir by Yudif Tselniker, my mother’s colleague in those years.
 Yudif Lvovna Tselniker: Reminiscences. (“Юдифь Львовна Цельникер. Воспоминания”)

^[ii]Kafedra—i.e., department (in this case, the Department of Plant Physiology at MGU, Moscow             State University)

^[iii]D.A., Dmitry Anatolyevich or Dmitry Anatolyevich Sabinin, aka Professor Sabinin, (1889–1951) – Soviet botanist, plant physiologist, Vice-Rector (1923-1924), Head of the Department of Plant Physiology of Moscow State University (1932-1948), an original thinker in the field of plant physiology who made many discoveries and inspired a generation of students.

^[iv] Maya Shternberg  (or, Maya Borisovna Shternberg) – my Mama

^[v]VNIIChPiSK or All-Russian Research Institute of Breeding Fruit Crops

^[vi]Postanovlenie  – decree.

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Moscow born, Nina Kossman is a bilingual writer, poet, translator of Russian poetry, painter, and playwright. Her English short stories and poems have been published in US, Canadian and British journals. Her Russian poems and short stories have been published in major Russian literary journals. Among her published works are two books of poems in Russian and English, two volumes of translations of Marina Tsvetaeva’s poems, two collections of short stories, an anthology, Gods and Mortals: Modern Poems on Classical Myth, published by Oxford University Press, and a novel. Her new book of poems and translations has just been published. Her work has been translated into Greek, Japanese, Dutch, Russian, and Spanish. She received a UNESCO/PEN Short Story Award, an NEA fellowship, and grants from Foundation for Hellenic Culture, the Onassis Public Benefit Foundation, and Fundacion Valparaiso. She lives in New York.

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