Hitler's and Stalin's Misuse of Science: When Science Fiction was Turned into Science Fact by the Nazis and the Soviets

By S.D. Tucker

S.D. Tucker delves into the Nazi and Soviet historical hijacking of science by extreme ideologies, revealing the dangerous consequences of pseudoscientific narratives in today's world.

In today’s world, science itself, which we are constantly being told is a neutral vehicle for wholly objective ideas and theories, is increasingly being hijacked and abused by the toxic modern cult of identity politics, of both left and right. But should we be too surprised by any of this? No, because this exact same sorry process has happened time and again before, under the rule of totalitarian political cults like the Nazis and the Soviets, both of which vigorously promoted various pseudoscientific theories of ‘Aryan Science’ and ‘Marxist Science’ on the sole grounds that they were ideologically correct as opposed to being factually so.

Nazi racial pseudoscience and belief in nonsense like the ‘World Ice Theory’, which claimed that stars did not really exist and were actually just reflections of the sun off giant floating space-icebergs, were widely encouraged in the Third Reich, and used for long-term military weather-forecasting purposes. Likewise, the ideas of the renegade biologist Trofim Lysenko, who developed a deluded ‘anti-capitalist’ theory of genetics opposed to Darwin’s, were responsible for widespread famine in the USSR when Stalin allowed him to apply them practically towards the nation’s crop-harvests. Those academics and functionaries who disputed these clearly false pseudoscientific notions often found themselves in deep trouble – or, ultimately, dead.

In this incisive and challenging study, author S.D. Tucker explores the often weird and fanciful theories that were proposed and took hold under these extreme regimes – and in doing so sends a word of warning to the modern world of the internet and social media where similar bizarre ideas are expounded and consumed with frightening gullibility.

Everywhere from Western universities, schools and hospitals to Vladimir Putin’s Russia, absurd stories of sexist glaciers, racist gravity, socialist trees and NATO-backed mutant extra-terrestrial potatoes are being promoted as items of politically mandated scientific fact by compliant collaborators and credulous social media followers. Pseudoscientific narratives are even now used to justify the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, much as they were once used to justify the Nazi conquest of Europe or the spread of Communist revolution across the globe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Dec 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781399073165

Book preview

Introduction

Blinded by the Science

‘History repeats itself – the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ [Karl Marx]

‘All is inside the State, and nothing human exists or has value outside the State.’ [Benito Mussolini]

‘In its endeavour, science is Communism.’ [J.D. Bernal]

When you hear the terms ‘Nazi Science’ and ‘Soviet Science’, what do you think of? For some, images of genuine technological achievements will spring to mind: the Nazi V-2 rocket or the Soviet Sputnik satellite, the first manmade objects to successfully penetrate the Earth’s atmosphere. Absolute dictatorships they may have been, but the Third Reich and the USSR beat their democratic, capitalist foes to the conquest of the heavens by several clear years. Many of the key men who later helped NASA put men on the moon were captured ex-Nazi scientists, exported abroad after Berlin’s defeat; without German industrial know-how, Moscow may well have won the Space-Race, not Washington. The Nazis also built the first true programmable digital computer, the Zuse Z-3, and deployed the first military jet-planes, whilst the names of several of Soviet Russia’s greatest minds are for ever immortalised in eponymous scientific terminology like ‘Pavlovian conditioning’. Whatever other ills the Politburo unleashed out upon the world, we should never forget the Kremlin also accidentally gave us Tetris.

Yet the Nazis and Soviets are also indelibly associated with all kinds of often rather unpleasant forms of pseudoscience, from bogus fascist concepts about human genetics which led to the mechanised murder of 6 million people, to equally fake Marxist notions about plant genetics whose misguided agricultural application starved millions more. But there were also far, far weirder such ideas abroad in the twentieth century’s twin worst dictatorships too, albeit much less well known. Was homosexuality a transmissible disease? Were stars a fake concept? Was chemistry inherently Communist? The answer to these questions was of course ‘no’. But under totalitarian rule this fact was frequently irrelevant. What really mattered was what the answer to these questions was politically, not factually: and the official answer to each of the above was often thought to be ‘yes’. To disagree could easily be considered a crime not only against science, but also against the State.

This book focuses not upon Nazi and Soviet science’s finest victories, like Sputnik and the V-2, but on its worst and most bizarre missteps. Much perfectly good science went on, on a day-to-day basis, within each regime; otherwise, how could either ever have enjoyed the genuine technological triumphs they did? Every bit as often as the unwanted intrusion of ideology into irrelevant fields like chemistry or physics occurred, there were occasions where it did not. Equally regularly, dogma may have invaded the laboratory only in a superficial way, demanding lip-service ritual pronouncements from compliant experimenters, who then went away and did some proper work anyway, but quietly. If you needed to use the equations of a capitalist New York Jewish physicist to build an atom-bomb, then neither the Bolsheviks nor the Nazis were quite mad enough to prevent you from doing so – just from openly advertising the fact. This book is therefore not intended to stand as a definitive, accurate depiction of what Communist and fascist science once looked like in its entirety. It provides testimony instead of some of science’s most egregious abuses under these regimes, the most damaging, absurd or comical of its enforced political perversions.

The Misappliance of Science

Neither the German nor Russian languages have specific separate words for ‘science’ as such in quite the way English does. The German equivalent is Wissenschaft, or ‘enquiry’, from the verb wissen, ‘to know’, whilst Russians use the term nauka, or ‘knowledge’, neither of which makes a fully explicit distinction between the properly scientific realm and other spheres of human understanding such as the humanities or the ‘soft’ social-sciences, like politics, sociology and economics.¹ The very vocabulary speaks of an inherently unified world-view in which the various realms of human experience are not fully separated from one another, one in which the centralised, rational planning of all aspects of human experience becomes theoretically possible. Authoritarian modes of government often pretend to be objectively determined by the very laws of Nature themselves, rather than by the subjective political choices of the ruling-class, making the hyper-regimented and controlled life of their citizen-slaves into a kind of applied science in human form. In the true totalitarian regime, the official picture of science projected to the general public reinforces the official picture of culture and society simultaneously broadcast by the State’s propagandists, the two elements reinforcing each other in a circular fashion. To interweave your ideology into your science is to make your political system itself impossible to unpick intellectually without concurrently also unpicking the (alleged) laws of Nature themselves – to go against Communism or fascism thus becomes subtly redefined as to go against reality, rather than merely to rebel politically. If Jews are ‘scientifically’ defined as subhuman, and you dispute this view on moral grounds, then you are able to be condemned as ill-informed by Nazi biologists; your view suddenly becomes objectively incorrect, not simply a matter of subjective opinion. Dissent is rebranded as delusion.

In power, the Nazi Party employed an all-encompassing means of social control termed Gleichschaltung, which can be taken in a military sense as ‘marching in step’, or more literally as ‘synchronisation’ or ‘co-ordination’, terminology stolen direct from the realm of electrical engineering. In a scientific context, Gleichschaltung is the counterpart of the English words ‘rectification’ or ‘phasing’, indicating the transformation of electrical current from AC to DC form, a forcible rewiring of the human soul. Those who resisted were subjected to Ausschaltung, or ‘switching off’; the Soviet equivalent was becoming a ‘non-person’, what Westerners today know as ‘being cancelled’. Taking their cue from technology, Nazi social-engineers saw society as a gigantic machine, every individual component of which had to work together like the individual components of an engine; if they did not, the engine inevitably became kaput. Over time, all so-called ‘islands of separateness’ – churches, businesses, schools, laboratories, sports clubs, the media and entertainment industries, artists, writers, individual families – had to fall into line and help power the engine, each as one of its many tiny cogs. In this way, people became spiritually mechanised, mere robots, a word tellingly derived from the Czech robota, meaning ‘slave’.²

Consider the Nazis’ initially reasonable-sounding ‘War on Cancer’, the Party accurately having realised, decades before most complacent democrats did, that smoking could cause lung tumours. Compliant scientists produced more and more studies showing it was bad for you, newspapers reported these findings, businesses banned smoking on their premises, schools taught children how it would rot their lungs, ad campaigns discouraged the filthy habit, doctors promoted regular check-ups, which workers then had to undergo as a condition of employment, whilst misleading images of ultra-healthy cigarette-puffing sportsmen and actresses vanished from adverts, all overseen by Party bureaucrats in the ideologically-captured Civil Service. Businesses, schools, hospitals, universities, the transport system and the media all became co-opted as vessels to transmit official ideology of a quasi-scientific, quasi-political kind. ‘No Smoking’ signs appeared in trains and public spaces, anti-smoking lessons were launched in schools and cigarettes were literally snatched from people’s mouths by busybodies: the Nazis invented the modern ‘Nanny State’ public-health regimes we now endure or enjoy in today’s West, where many of these very same anti-smoking measures are also now enacted. The German doctors who performed the original studies demonstrating links between cancer and tobacco use were not necessarily Nazis themselves, but under Gleichschaltung their findings were inevitably adopted and warped for ideological purposes, the new official line being that smoking was nothing but a form of ruinous ‘lung masturbation’.

Discouraging smoking is a medically rational aim, but when a less rational outcome is also intended to be produced as an equal element of the very same propaganda campaign, the inherent dangers of this kind of co-ordinated medico-social-engineering become rather clearer. Soon, Germany’s Jews were being compared to cancerous cells within the otherwise healthy national body-politic, whilst purgative x-rays were depicted as Brownshirt stormtroopers, forcibly cutting such tumours out of society’s flesh at bayonetpoint. Jews, physicians now said, were disproportionately prone to cancer, dangerous ‘carriers’ of the disease, as if it were transmissible from person to person, like flu. The next step was to link Jews to the tobacco-trade, implying they were murdering innocent Aryan lungs by deliberately peddling carcinogenic substances to German children in a silent genocide. As x-rays played a vital part in eradicating cancerous cells via radiotherapy, so perhaps they could also be used to eugenically eradicate Jews from society by forcibly exposing their genitals to radiation, rendering them infertile. It was necessary for Germany to maintain a healthy body of men to serve as a future fightingforce, so medical posters declared that ‘Nutrition is not a private matter!’ or, even worse, ‘Your body belongs to the Führer!’ the logical conclusion of Gleichschaltung doctrine.³

Although supposedly the Far-Right Nazis’ direct Far-Left political opposites, the ruling Communists of the Soviet Union had their own native form of Gleichschaltung too, operating under the name of partiinost’, or ‘Partyness’.* The concept was devised by the Bolsheviks in 1895, two full decades before they seized power in 1917, and used to argue that, because true political neutrality on any given issue was in practice an impossibility, the widespread Western democratic belief that the business of ostensibly non-political pursuits like art, literature, sport and education should be conducted in as non-ideological a fashion as possible was actually a self-serving means by which the forces of the capitalist status quo subliminally reinforced their oppressive rule. For example, Western schoolteachers may instruct their pupils that theft of private property is ethically wrong as a simple common-sense moral fact of life, but this actually acts to invisibly counter the opposing Marxist belief that the very existence of private property in the first place is the true form of robbery. Thus, a type of unseen capitalist partiinost’ was already in place across society, and had to be replaced with a new, more acceptably Marxist one – in Nazi terms, DC current would be Gleichschaltung-ed into AC current via an enforced project of systematic, totalitarian re-education and thought-control. Literature, for instance, would no longer be allowed to exist for its own sake, as the very notion only acted to imperceptibly reinforce the capitalist concept of human beings as free, autonomous, individual mental units, beyond Party control. Instead, all novels, poetry and plays must be transformed into Stateserving agitprop, whose tractor-loving characters’ actions served as politically acceptable models for the proletariat to imitate.

Obviously, science could not be allowed to escape the embrace of partiinost’ unscathed. Within the 1979 edition of The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia, the Kremlin’s ambitious attempt at creating Wikipedia before any Internet, it was explained with distaste how ‘many bourgeois scholars cultivate the idea of objectivism in science, equating objectivism with the scientific method’. Yet the Party knew better, it being a key dogma that Marxism itself was not only a form of actual science, but the ruling form of science through which comprehensive prism all other, lesser, forms of knowledge had to be viewed. ‘Partiinost’ in philosophy, as well as in the social-sciences, is associated with the cognition of a true picture of the world,’ the Encyclopaedia explained, with Marxism ‘providing a methodological basis for the revolutionary transformation of reality and for scientific investigation’:

In Marxist-Leninist doctrine, the principle of Communist partiinost’ organically combines a genuinely scientific analysis of reality with a consistent defence of the interests of the proletariat. This fusion of science with the interests of a social class becomes possible only in the epoch of the Communist transformation of the world. The proletariat, which has an interest in the knowledge of realistic ways of carrying out this transformation, needs a scientific and objective disclosure of the world, of the laws and paths by which society moves from capitalism to Communism … For this reason, there is no real foundation for all the speculative attempts by the enemies of socialism to juxtapose true scientific method to the proletarian partiinost’ of Marxist-Leninist theory.⁴

Or, in rather less turgid prose: ‘Reality is whatever we say it is, OK, Comrade?’ So, Marxism is objective reality, and thus by definition science. Yet the Encyclopaedia simultaneously complains about how ‘many bourgeois scholars cultivate the idea of objectivism in science, equating objectivism with the scientific method’, an apparent contradiction. It seems scientific objectivity is a capitalist delusion … except when the scientific objectivity in question is being espoused by a good Communist, in which case it is an absolute truth of Nature. Yet a danger then arises: if scientific reality is to be defined primarily by whether or not it is politically correct rather than whether or not it is factually so, then perhaps Soviet science, through the pursuit of vain ideological chimeras, may end up falling behind Western science, militarily and technologically? To combat this possibility, in 1950 the Kremlin officially decreed that the realm of science, and of science alone, unlike art, literature, sport, music or cinema, was to be surgically removed from the realm of partiinost’ and governed instead by a competing philosophy of nauchnost’, or ‘scienceness’. But in practice, in several fields the battle between partiinost’ and nauchnost’ kept swinging back and forth as different factions vied for Party favour, sometimes leading to great achievements, sometimes to complete disaster.⁵ This book mostly focuses upon examples of the latter.

The Political Climate

Yet the book also functions as something else: a warning. We complacent Westerners tend to think such abuses of science in the name of politics are either a thing of the past or else confined to the realms of closed, autocratic dictatorships. Yes, maybe such things could still go on in today’s China, Russia or Iran (and indeed they do), but not here in our open, liberal, rational-minded democracies of Europe, the US and elsewhere, we idly suppose. If so, we suppose wrongly. When Ronald Reagan (1911–2004) became US President in 1981, he considered doing without the services of any qualified science advisers at all as, in the reported words of one aide, ‘We [already] know what we want to do, and they’ll only give us contrary advice.’ Whilst Republican Governor of California from 1967 to 1975, Reagan, chasing the large Christian vote still then existing there, had pushed an openly Creationist agenda, criticising what he later called the ‘great flaws’ within Darwinism and pressuring school-boards to include teaching of the biblical view of Creation in science classes too as a valid and plausible alternative. Whether or not Reagan actually believed any of this, he knew large numbers of his potential voters did, and so wilfully began inserting politics and religion into a realm where, by rights, neither truly belonged – to good electoral benefit.⁶ A narrative has therefore since developed that, whenever the Republican Party gets into power, it deliberately stuffs supposedly independent and impartial scientific bodies nationwide with partisan appointments who will make compliantly conservative-minded judgements on controversial issues such as climate-change, abortion, vaccination and stem-cell research less in accordance with neutral fact and more in line with biased electoral necessity, rather like the Nazis and the Soviets once did before them.

This, I think, is all quite true, and ought to be condemned. Fortunately, whenever it does happen, it is indeed condemned, quite loudly, by the West’s overwhelmingly left-leaning scientific, political, bureaucratic and media establishments. But what is also quite true, yet strangely remains somewhat less remarked upon by that very same permanent commentariat, is that whenever left-wingers like those of the US Democrat Party come to power, they do precisely the same thing too. The West has clearly taken a severe leftwards turn since the days of Ronald Reagan, and shifting demographics mean any candidate for Governor of a state like California will not get very far today by advancing pseudoscientific notions about drilling Christian Creationism into young minds in local schools. Instead, desiring such areas’ now much larger liberal vote, left-wingers push equally pseudoscientific nostrums which will appeal to their own likely caucus. In a state now run by Democrats, not Republicans, today’s California Education Panel currently purports to believe that mathematics itself is inherently racist, for example, proposing in 2021 that schoolchildren being taught the illogical notion that simple sums have a correct answer to them represents a form of numerical white supremacy, a ‘scientific’ concept every bit as false and politically loaded as Reagan’s old campaign-lines about Creationism. Apparently, students’ racial ‘mathematics identities’ are shaped by ‘a culture of societal and institutionalised racism’; the idea that 2+2 has a correct answer merely ‘perpetuates objectivity as well as fear of open conflict’ between white kids who think the answer is ‘4’ and black ones who think it might be ‘5’, for example. So that non-white pupils may ‘reclaim their mathematical ancestry’, alternative, more ‘equitable’ approaches to such difficult questions are now deemed necessary.⁷ By comparison, the Reagan-approved idea that God made Eve from Adam’s rib now seems positively sensible. To those with a realistic view of human nature, it should be no surprise that, whenever they win power, left-wingers stuff so-called ‘disinterested’ public bodies chock-full of left-leaning appointments, just as right-wingers do whenever they win elections. Climate-change deniers do well under one administration, whilst climate-change exaggerators do equally well under another, a game of scientific swings-and-roundabouts.

A classic example came in January 2022 when Britain’s own Met Office turned away from its usual task of inaccurately forecasting the weather to release a rather unlikely report purporting to predict what lay ahead for the nation’s future if its government failed to deal with climate-change properly. Four potential dystopias – and one oh-so-Green utopia – were outlined as possible. In scenario one, a growth in ‘nationalistic public attitudes’ (i.e. controlling mass immigration and funding the military properly) results in the election of right-wing populists who ruin our trading relations with other countries, leading Westminster to pursue a policy of borderline economic autarky or total self-sufficiency. As domestic agriculture and manufacturing would need a giant boost, politicians then suspend animal welfare and environmental regulations to cut corners. So nationalistic would Brits become that, by 2040, ruthlessly policed internal borders will have appeared between England, Wales and Scotland. By the 2050s, due to economic and environmental collapse, the NHS, public transport system and university network will all have been destroyed, whilst child labour and subsistence farming make a return and people barter goods rather than using our now-worthless currency. By 2070 the government itself will have collapsed, with armed militias ruling a series of feudal micro-states nationwide, a kind of compulsory Good Life at gunpoint, in which Tom and Barbara may be murdered amongst the marrows in their allotment at any coming moment. So, that’s what will happen if UK citizens keep on voting for parties like UKIP – and that, says the Met Office, is an actual scientific fact.

In a more middling scenario, instead of imposing centralised, State-mandated environmental laws, under a Thatcherite-style free-market government the UK instead decentralises responsibility for Greening the economy direct to private enterprise, with deregulated firms free to innovate as they see fit. However, the sinful capitalists who successfully develop their own anticlimate-change measures will grow so wealthy that the gap between rich and poor will become a yawning chasm, leading to disaster. By 2080 an ultra-rich elite will have privatised the NHS, abolished the welfare state and reintroduced military conscription to deal with all the poverty-stricken criminals rampaging throughout our ruined nation. Again, science proves this – destroying free-market capitalism is the only way forward, the data indisputably shows this is so.

However, thankfully the Met Office successfully identified a more ideal scenario in which Brexit Britain would rejoin a ‘progressive and expanded’ EU and make a centralised, State-controlled ‘societal shift toward more environmentally sustainable systems’, thereby creating a ‘fully-functional, circular economy’ of a radically egalitarian nature in which poverty will be ‘eliminated’. In a world of ‘more stable and fair international relations’, people would naturally also adopt ‘healthier lifestyles’ and experience ‘improved well-being’. So, if there’s ever another EU referendum, you know which way to vote – remember, this is not mere political opinion, it is actual science. It has to be: it is released under the auspices not of open pressuregroups like the Green Party, but of disguised ones, like the Met Office. The research itself was carried out by a highly-qualified consortium combining the consultancy firm Cambridge Econometrics, the UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology and the Universities of Edinburgh and Exeter, and was part-funded by a government quango-body named UK Research and Innovation – or, to put it more honestly, by you, the unknowing British tax-payer. As the Met Office explained, the entire exercise, which was vitally ‘important in order to understand climate risk and resilience’ was ‘just one project [undertaken] as part of a wider programme of science research funded by the government’s Strategic Priorities Fund on Climate Resilience’. Indeed, this ‘Shared Economic Pathways’ report is only the specific UK-based version of a far wider analytical framework for bypassing democracy being employed by climate-change scientists and economists worldwide – although not perhaps in countries like Russia and China, who should seriously consider funding these very same people further themselves in their own clear national economic and geopolitical self-interest.⁸

Whilst climate-change itself is real and potentially somewhat damaging, it appears clear the Met Office’s report, no matter how disingenuously presented, is pretty obviously not science at all, but partisan politics disguised as science; that way, disagreement with its self-evidently biased left-wing conclusions can be arbitrarily defined as being not a debatable but perfectly arguable right-wing viewpoint, but instead as being actively anti-scientific. The left thus becomes objectively correct, the right objectively wrong, which is just the way our current ruling-class, who desire to brook no discussion about their own way of seeing the world, wish things to become. The word ‘science’ is extremely useful to the proponent of partiinost’, Gleichschaltung or any other totalitarian flavour of enforced political correctness. After all, the science is telling us to do this, that or the other; to go against the science is thus not really to agree to disagree, and let both sides go their own way and live life as they choose, but to rebel against reality itself … or, at least, to rebel against reality as those who hold institutional power currently choose to falsely define it as being. Eventually, via constant imposition of such methods, the capacity of many persons for resistance atrophies and is ultimately lost. Wearily, although at first we all thought the idea was unbelievable, our brain-engines become converted from running on AC to running on DC and everyone at last begins to agree that voting for Nigel Farage will make Mad Max come true.

What the Nazis did from 1933 to 1945, and the Soviets from 1917 to 1991, was only what every State-backed bureaucratic regime has always done, and always will do: to manipulate science for their own subjective political ends, sometimes deliberately, sometimes quite unconsciously, in the honest but mistaken belief their own subjective viewpoints represent actual, non-debatable scientific truths. Nazi and Soviet science merely represent more extreme and deadly developments of such trends, with shallow graves ready and waiting for dissenters, rather than mere sackings and cancellations as now. The Nazis thought there were such things as white, racist mathematical equations too, just like today’s US Democrats do; it’s just that they thought this was a good thing, not a bad one. Again and again, we shall be forced awkwardly to realise that today’s pseudoscientific Western ideologues are preaching diluted forms of the precise same hate-filled creeds as their totalitarian forebears once promoted, only turned upside-down; there was even an inverted Nazi school of climate-change extremism, but relating to global-cooling rather than global-warming. And don’t forget – none of these bizarre and demonstrably fallacious claims is merely an opinion. No, not at all. They are actual science, and being science automatically means they are true.

But does it really? According to John 8:32, ‘The truth shall set you free.’ But who, precisely, gets to determine what the truth is anyway? And at what exact point was it decided it should be Greta Thunberg?

* Although it has been plausibly argued that fascism was in itself originally a Far-Left movement and that both it and Soviet Communism were really just variant offshoots of earlier forms of socialism, I shall use the familiar ‘Far-Right’ label for the Nazis throughout to avoid unnecessary confusion.

Chapter One

Back in the USSR?

Fascist Physics, Communist Chemistry and

Their Contemporary Reincarnations

‘There is very likely a Nordic science.’ [Adolf Hitler]

‘There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science.’ [Anton Chekhov]

Which of the above statements is true? Two very different articles printed in the Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters in 2021 may be taken to indicate that, paradoxically, each estimation could in fact be both correct and false simultaneously, an ontological equivalent of Schrödinger’s Cat, the animal which existed as being both dead and alive at the same time in a famous old scientific parable. The initial piece, ‘The Peril of Politicising Science’, was written by a Ukraine-born quantum chemist named Anna I. Krylov, who fled the now happily defunct old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics for Israel in 1991, not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, before heading away to America in 1996, which back then she found to indeed have been the fabled Land of the Free – but, it would appear, a land which today is free no longer, not even in the ostensibly apolitical realm of science.

Krylov grew up in the eastern industrial city of Donetsk, founded in 1869 to serve a coal-mine complex established by the Welsh entrepreneur John Hughes, hence the place’s original name being Yuzovka – Ukrainian for ‘Hughes-Town’. But once the Communists commandeered the Tsar’s Empire following the Russian Revolution of 1917, it was no longer considered acceptable to have a settlement named after a leek-eating foreign plutocrat, and so it was renamed Stalino, after the altogether more upstanding and racially acceptable leading Party-figure of Josef Stalin (1878–1953), later to become ruling dictator of the USSR as a whole. ‘In modern terms,’ explained Krylov, ‘Hughes was cancelled.’ Eventually Russian Communism collapsed, though, and Stalin in his turn was cancelled too, the moustachioed mass-murderer’s name being literally wiped off the map with Donetsk being rechristened a third time, now after a nearby river, the Severskii Donets. Given recent events in the region, the city may soon be forcibly relabelled yet again, as Putingrad. But long before Stalin got a taste of his own Bolshevik medicine, wrote Krylov, ‘Cities and geographical landmarks were renamed, statues were torn down, books were burned, and many millions were jailed and murdered’, an apt illustration of the old maxim that ‘Where they begin by burning books, they end by burning people.’ The Kremlin’s Commissars had largely stopped lighting their literal human bonfires by the time Krylov began her scientific education, but still she was acutely aware that compulsory public displays of ideological conformity were inescapable if you wanted to get anywhere in life. ‘Mere compliance was not sufficient,’ she says: you had to appear enthusiastic about the obsolete creed of Marxism-Leninism or else suffer the consequences, even if you thought it damaging drivel. Once, Krylov says, she received an official reprimand from educational authorities for the appalling sin of ‘promoting an imperialistic agenda’ by wearing a pair of jeans.¹

If jeans were a controversial matter in the old USSR, then so were genes. These allegedly fictional phenomena were condemned, with Stalin’s enthusiastic approval, as being a form of so-called ‘bourgeois pseudoscience’, a line pushed tirelessly by the Soviet Union’s most infamous ideologically motivated quack, the agronomist Trofim Lysenko (1898–1976), whose impeccably politically correct, yet equally practically erroneous, crop-growing methods helped facilitate mass-famine. Lysenko once defined his own experimental attitude as follows: ‘In order to obtain a certain result, you must want to obtain precisely that result; if you want to obtain a certain result, you will obtain it … I need only such people as will obtain the results I need.’² In other words, only shameless frauds or fans of magical thinking needed to bother to apply for positions within Lysenko’s own laboratory empire. Yet Anna I. Krylov’s own personal area of expertise lay not in agriculture but in quantum chemistry, so the particular instance of Lysenkoism – as the ideological perversion of science has since generically become known – she mentioned involved the lesser-known ‘Anti-Resonance Campaign’ of 1949–51, pursued against the American Nobel Prize-winner Linus Pauling (1901–94) and his innovative ideas about the structure of certain chemical isomers like benzene and its variants. Pauling’s thoughts about chemical structure, it seems, were so disturbingly alien and capitalistic in their nature as to threaten the very foundations of Marxism – indeed, said some ideologues, they acted to undercut the very basis of reality itself! Or they did if you felt the very basis of reality itself was solely defined by an extremely niche book of scientific philosophy published by Stalin’s dictatorial predecessor Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924) in 1908, anyway. To anyone else, Pauling’s theories just looked like some slightly difficult to grasp new ideas about the shape and pattern of bonding of benzene molecules. How could a series of novel suggestions about the true subatomic nature of aromatic hydrocarbons possibly act to bring down the entire Soviet Union?

Chorus of Disapproval

When Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they initially provided the already-extant Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences with increased funding and largely left its professors alone, deeming science a self-evident agent of political progress. However, following Stalin’s rise to absolute power after Lenin’s death in 1924, the tyrannous ‘Great Break’ of 1929–31 occurred, in which all areas of Soviet life were nationalised by the State and subjected to political purges. The Academy of Sciences had to be made more ‘proletarian’ and, just as State censors shaped the output of poets and painters, so they began monitoring the output of scientists for its ideological ‘correctness’, too. Stalin wanted the USSR to industrialise at breakneck speed under a series of Five-Year Plans and when, inevitably, things sometimes went wrong – trifling little errors like mass-famines in which parents were reduced to eating their own children, that kind of thing – then so-called ‘wreckers’ had to be identified as scapegoats, including scientific wreckers. Soviet science had to be publicly seen to be superior to Western, ‘bourgeois’ science, and so ideas which smacked of capitalist influence were condemned as a kind of secular heresy and their wrecker adherents sacked, suppressed, imprisoned, executed or sent off to perform slave-labour in the gulag prison-camp system.

At an agricultural conference in 1929 Stalin laid out his opinion – which, by mere virtue of being his opinion, now became iron law – that science was an activity with practical results as its sole aim, not some idealistic, disinterested study of the laws of Nature. All true science had one purpose: to serve the Communist State, promoting its ideology and material well-being; science and partiinost’ were inseparable. Soon, Stalin was proudly posing as Russia’s great ‘Corypheus of Science’, the leader of a choir in Greek drama. It now lay open to Stalin the choir-leader to literally dictate what the ‘true’ nature of reality itself was, as with his official support for Lysenko. In 1939 this new god established a prestigious USSR-wide award for the best scientific research, naturally naming it the Stalin Prize – all winners were really just himself, by proxy. To celebrate, the Soviet Academy of Sciences wisely elected their great patron-oppressor as an Honorary Member. Fortunately, Stalin was quite the all-knowing autodidact, able to inform the otherwise clueless Dmitri Shostakovich how best to arrange his composition for the new national anthem and to instruct the total amateur Sergei Eisenstein on how best to direct his great cinematic masterpiece