In his masterpiece Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman explains the torturous process of the Baconian method it affects the life and work of his protagonist, the Soviet physicist Viktor Shtrum.
The laboratory experiments had been intended to confirm the predictions of the theory. They had failed to do this. The contradiction between the experimental results and the theory naturally led him to doubt the accuracy of the experiments. A theory that had been elaborated on the basis of decades of work by many researchers, a theory that had then explained many things in subsequent experimental results, seemed quite unshakeable. Repetition of the experiments had shown again and again that the deflections of charged particles in interaction with the nucleus still failed to correspond with what the theory predicted. Even the most generous allowance for the inaccuracy of the experiments, for the imperfection of the measuring apparatus and the emulsions used to photograph the fission of the nuclei, could in no way account for such large discrepancies.
Realizing that there could be no doubt as to the accuracy of the results, Viktor had then attempted to patch up the theory. He had postulated various arbitrary hypotheses that would reconcile the new experimental data with the theory. Everything he had done had been based on one fundamental belief: that, since the theory was itself deduced from experimental data, it was impossible for an experiment to contradict it.
An enormous amount of labour was expended in an attempt to reconcile the new data with the theory. Nevertheless, the patched-up theory still failed to account for new contradictions in the results form the laboratory. The theory remained as powerless as ever, though it still seemed unthinkable to reject it.
Although he doesn't go into much detail, it's clear Grossman's hero is helping to speed along the development of the Soviet atom bomb. (At one decisive point, when it looks as if the black marias are en route to haul him away to jail, Shtrum is saved by the personal intervention of Stalin himself. Even as a Jew, this doctor was too indispensable to a more exigent "plot" to be purged under the spate of postwar anti-Semitic hysteria.)
However, notice how craftily in the above paragraphs Grossman metaphorically anatomizes the mentality of Communism! The contradiction between the experimental results and the theory naturally led him to doubt the accuracy of the experiments. All the improvisational skill in the world can't save a debased theory.
Had this extraordinary Russian novelist been less brave in other parts of Life and Fate (probably the only book ever to get "arrested" for its "individualism" — read "excellence"), he might have well smuggled in this coded criticism of ideology and gotten away with it. At the very least, Czeslaw Milosz and Milan Kundera would have been proud.
If the absurdities of the Marxist-Leninist interpretation of science hadn't been so harmful and blood-soaked, they'd have been hilarious. Stalin ruled as a kind of armchair white-coat over a vast matrix of scholarship and laboratory research that might otherwise have yielded a few lasting monuments to a particularly dark era in Russian history. Instead, he celebrated crackpots, killed the real talent, and then — because such is the caprice of despots everywhere — "rehabilitated" the slain victims and proceeded to lock up all the old crackpots. Stalin took this tack with linguistics, believe it or not. (Hold your cheap Chomsky jokes, please.) Having bought into the charlatan N. Marr's theory that the totality of the Russian language emanated from exactly four sounds — “rosh,” “sal, ” “ber,” and “yon" — Stalin eventually decided that, no, that probably wasn't right after all. (His epiphany did not coincide with lending credence or stays of execution to Marr's sane antagonists, who'd gone out of their way to debunk such patent nonsense in the 30's.) Then Stalin wrote a book on "Marxist" linguistics, showed Marr to be the fool everyone knew he was, and all was right again with the dialectical Force.
A new book's come out about the Georgian monster's intellectual depredations on the scientific community. Although Communism is dead, we really must continue to hear about such totalitarian manipulations of falsifiable data, since creationism and "Intelligent Design" are still very much en vogue; the former apparently now influences paleontology.
Much has already been written about some of the most egregious cases of ideology run amok. Among the most famous is the "biological war" that was waged by pseudo-biologist Trofim Lysenko just after World War II. His condemnation of the "bourgeois" nature of the chromosome had a devastating impact not only on this science but on Soviet agriculture more broadly. So what was Stalin's motivation in supporting this semi-literate homegrown agronomist who tried to kill contemporary genetics? It would be too easy to attribute it to the conceptual contradiction between Marxism's unspecified environmental, evolutionary beliefs and Western-oriented genetics, which was based on the fundamentals of molecular biology. Stalin, Pollock shows us, never bought Lysenko's arguments on the "class nature" of this science. In the margins of a draft speech by the biologist, Stalin scoffed: "Ha-Ha-Ha!!! And what about Mathematics? And Darwinism?" Rather, Stalin and the Party's support for Lysenko was the outgrowth of the desperation that had set in once it was clear that collectivization had failed to transform Soviet agriculture. Stalin counted on Lysenko to provide practical, indeed miraculous, results for the food supply. This gamble, however, assured that vast armies of serious scientists would perish and that Soviet biology would be damaged for generations.
Interesting about that note, though I dare say it's doesn't prove Stalin was any more astute about distinguishing between ideological claptrap and empiricism. Rather, it shows the coarse and derisive schoolboy mind that laughed its way through everything — politics, industry, war, central planning, terror, mass murder. I wasn't a fan of Robert Service's biography of the Kremlin mountaineer, but one passage from that volume is worth reprinting to underscore the preceding point:
“Having recently re-read Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism, [Stalin] was convinced that space and time were absolute, unchallengeable concepts in all human endeavours…. Einsteinian physics were therefore to be regarded as a bourgeois mystification. The problem was that such physics were crucial to the completion of the A-bomb project. Beria, caught between wanting to appear as Stalin’s ideological apostle and wishing to produce an A-bomb for him, decided he needed clearance from the Boss for Soviet physicists to use Einstein’s equations. Stalin, ever the pragmatist in matters of power, gave his jovial assent: ‘Leave them in peace. We can always shoot them later.’”
So. Stalin considers Einsteinian physics "bourgeois mystification," but he's also in a hurry to impress Truman with Soviet atom-splitting. It's a nervous roll of the dice. Heads, we get a bomb. Tails, bourgeois mystification, and we shoot the scientists.
And you thought Steven Pinker had it rough defending Larry Summers.
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