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A Blight on Soviet Science

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Vavilov dying of hunger in a prison :( Many of his friends persecuted. I like to print out articles like this and wonder what *led* to such extreme situations. Gradual slippery slope? Big bang bad decisions? All said, the big takeaway has been that science can't be subservient to politics. It's a tragic lesson on what happens if this becomes true.

> what led to such extreme situations

I think it's more plausibly a gradual slippery slope. the kind of slope you don't notice

How could you describe that part of russian history as anything like a gradual slippery slope? It start with a revolution followed by another more radical revolutions and went one from there. Nothing gradual about it.

The revolution was a reaction to the terrible leaders in Russia. The start wasn’t the revolution. Where do you pick as the beginning? I’m not sure, but the revolution was a reaction.

You need to drop your Communist Manifesto and actually read what has been really going on in Russia at the time.

Lenin and his cronies were revolutionaries well before the calamities of the Great War. The leaders of Russian revolutions were were mostly upper middle class intellectuals and were radicalized in relatively comfortable social circumstances at universities and in various intellectual circles. Lenin often bragged that he actively pushed people against one another so he could harness more revolutionary momentum, which led to even more calamities. And that's not even mentioning that he was implanted as an ideological virus to destroy the Russian Empire by the German agents.

The revolution wasn't some romantic reaction lead by the proletariat against the oppressor. It was led by power hungry fanatics who manipulated the people's grievances to remove those who were in their way and then installed themselves into power.

That is all true, as far as I know, but then the question is why did they succeed, if not by exploiting widespread discontent in the general population?

> if not by exploiting widespread discontent in the general population?

That wasn't the original point. Widespread discontent do not always lead to bloody revolution or communist regimes with despotic leaders.

Indeed, but widespread discontent seems to be an important risk factor for that outcome, isn’t it?

My understanding of history is limited, but this I know; History is always messy, and you can never identify just one single reason for the way things turned out.

The US hasn't seen total war, famine and disease yet the Marxists are openly pushing people against one another to ferment a revolution. Again we see the same pattern of upper middle class intellectuals radicalized in universities openly opposing incremental reforms in favor of violent uprisings. Just saying "History is messy" is intellectual laziness, the patterns are clear and happened many times before.

I’m a huge fan of Simon Sebag Montefiore. You couldn’t read his Russian histories and find much to like in any of Russia’s leaders.

The system overthrown by the revolution was brutal, but so were the revolutionaries. Where do you think they learned their policing tactics and techniques?

In terms of Lenin being a weapon, one of the greatest quotes on this is Churchill’s. Germany “turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland to Russia”

It’s a quote from a book that’s well worth a read if you haven’t already, ‘Lenin on the Train’ by Catherine Merridale.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/books/review/lenin-on-the...

Had that been so they would not have fallen.

Nicholas II was a weak leader and a ruthless Soviet style crackdown on the Communist insurrectionists could have saved the Czar.

Stolypin might have had some good ideas (eg have peasants own land), but mass executions of protesters and the use of terrorism against workers are not the actions of benevolent leaders. There were mass crackdowns.

The Lena goldfields massacre is an example of this.

The repeated combination of Nicholas II’s inaction/absense followed by a cack-handed crackdown was the ultimate fuel to the fire.

All of which had equivalents in other places and usually led to better reforms or suppression that are still bad but not as bad both in scale and violence than what the communists did.

There are lies, damned lies, statistics, and then there is history.

Look at the news: how trueful they are not. They don't become more trueful as the years pass.

There doesn't need to be a good side in a battle. The communists were evil. The czars were... at least, extremely incompetent; and their screw-ups also cost lives... at the end, including their own.

To simplify it a lot, for the last two or three centuries before the communist revolution, the czars couldn't make up their mind about what type of country they wanted to have, so they kept radically changing policies every generation. On one hand, they wanted absolute tyranny, Asia-style. On the other hand, they wanted material progress just like in the West. So, one day they opened many schools, allowed independent press, hoping that this will bring progress and wealth. Then, ten or twenty years later, they panicked, seeing that there was too much independent thought and heresy, so they closed all those schools and put all journalists in prison. Then again, ten or twenty years later, they decided they needed some progress and prosperity, so they opened the schools and allowed the press again... then banned everything again... then allowed everything again... then banned again... and so on, for centuries. If you keep giving people freedoms and then taking them away, they will be pissed off way more than someone who was consistently oppressed for generations. The pre-communist Russia had tons of potential revolutionaries, and strong oppressive secret police to keep control over everything.

The last czar deserves a Darwin award, because he was repeatedly warned about the danger of communists and asked for permission to crush them mercilessly (that is, to apply more than just the usual routine persecution of everyone), but instead he fired the boss of the secret police, accusing him of wasting resources on trivialities and ignoring the real danger -- the Jews. (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion were published in Russia in 1903.)

Then, WW1 happened, and communists got the extremely intelligent and ruthless leader Lenin, who promised everyone whatever they wanted, made alliances, broke all promises, kept stabbing all his former allies in the back as he was making new allies, until he got to the top. Then he established his own version of secret police which, after many rebrandings, still remains one of the pillars of Russia, surviving even the fall of communism. And yes, it is a "coincidence" that many celebrities of the revolution were also upper middle class intellectuals of the previous regime. (Except for Stalin, I think.)

And in some sense this yes-then-no-then-yes-then-no style of government persisted during communism and later, as if it's inextricably a part of Russian politics no matter the regime. Peasants were considered the enemies of progress, then the driving force of progress; capitalism was evil, then good, then evil, then good, then evil again; etc.

As the French saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

So it was a slow slope, followed by a series of high cliffs.

This is not what people usually mean when they say “slippery slope”

Golodomor was not gradual and not slippery. The entire ideology of the Bolševik party relied on systemic eradication of classes they found hostile to their cause - intellectuals, land gentry, well-do peasants. You kill off the folks in the land that know, how to farm, you get famine. Nothing to do with “war and outdated farming methods”

The poor peasants knew how to farm as well, but they were forcibly rounded up into communal kolkhozes and had fixed quotas of grain brutally confiscated.

This is what led to the situation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_Revolution

That doesn’t seem right to me. Feels like the issue was Stalinism rather than pure soviet incompetence. Seems he did ok under Lenin and had received a pardon after Stalin was gone (though maybe that doesn’t mean much as it seems Lysenko also needed to be revealed as useless first)

There is a certain... willful blindness... that you can easily see also in socialists today. Not sure I can describe it well in a short comment, but it's a principled unwillingness or inability to distinguish between good intentions and good outcomes. (To keep this simple, let's ignore the question whether the intentions really qualify as good; just suppose they do.)

It's as if good intentions automatically lead to good strategies that automatically lead to good outcomes. Therefore, if you start a revolution with pure heart, a perfect future is guaranteed. And if it does not happen, it is only because someone with bad intentions prevented it -- you need to find the asshole and execute him, before he can cause more harm.

There is no such thing as legitimate criticism. You can't say e.g. "hey guys, I agree with your goal of feeding more people, but your methods are based on pseudoscience and are not going to work; how about trying some actual science instead?". What they hear is "he opposes our attempts to feed the people, he must want them to starve, what an asshole"; and if they have the power, that might mean prison time for you.

It is extremely frustrating to debate with a person who believes that if you don't 100% agree with them about something, the only possible explanation is that you are the bad guy who wants bad things to happen. But it becomes much worse when such person has the power to send you and your entire family to a death camp.

while the article is great - saying it as a Russian who finds many writings about USSR/Russia by foreign writers seriously lacking to say the least - it does miss important piece of the historical context - Michurin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Vladimirovich_Michurin. Michurin was great Russian agrobiologist of pre-Vavilov generation. He had great experimental success in selection/breeding of plants. It was the time when Lamarckism and genetics were actively developed, and Michurin was naturally developing a theories of his own which also bear a dose of Lamarckism in it. Lysenko exploited the great experimental success of Michurin while using the wrong side of his theories as a foundation for his own. One can say that Lysenko used Michurin as a rootstock on which he grafted himself as seedling. So going against Lysenko, one was looking like going against Michurin's proven success and legacy. It was framed as "Michurin teaching" vs. genetics. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4441886?seq=1

Btw, cybernetics was also a prohibited "bourgeois pseudoscience" in USSR at those times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Sov... - the "formal scientific" grounds were that it goes against teaching of another great Russian scientist - Ivan Pavlov (at pop-science level known for "Pavlov's dogs")

> cybernetics was also a prohibited "bourgeois pseudoscience" in USSR at those times

Huh! This surprised me, because the USSR made pretty major controbutions to cybernetics and control theory. I guess that happened after they changed their stance?

It was for relatively short period of a few years, and many of related work at that time was done just as applied math, like Pontryagin principle developed at the time. The country needed its missiles and planes after all - similarly to why the "Jewish Physics" mentioned by another commenter was allowed.

Instead of Mendelism, Lysenko adhered to Lamarck’s —now widely rejected —theory of the ‘inheritance of acquired characteristics’, which suggests that individuals have the ability to modify their features during their lifetime and bestow these features onto their offspring. If giraffes need to feed on tall trees, they would simply grow a longer neck and, rather conveniently, give birth to long-necked youngsters. According to Lamarckism, nurture, rather than nature, was the driving force for evolution.

- Giraffes use their neck to attack other giraffes.

- Epigenetics is a thing, but it is completely different from what Lamarck/Lysenko believed.

I found this story interesting, largely because of the parallels to today. Scott Atlas to me is clearly cut from the same clothe as Trofim Lysenko, and the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for Covid are the modern-day equivalent of Lysenkoism. I always wonder if these people are smart and know what they're spouting is bullshit, or just too stupid to realize it. In the end, it probably doesn't matter, the outcome is the same.

That is a mischaracterization. There are multiple clinical studies which indicate that Ivermectin may be somewhat helpful for treating COVID-19. Other studies have shown no effect. It's too early to declare a firm conclusion and research continues.

https://covid19criticalcare.com/medical-evidence/ivermectin/

Ok, I'll grant the evidence is not yet in on ivermectin, but that hasn't stopped many of the same folks as were advocating HCQ from pushing it.

The paper to be published in Frontiers of Pharmacology was pulled because it didn't meet the scientific standards of the journal. Or perhaps because the editorial board has an anti-ivermectin agenda and censored the maverick scientists.

https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/frontiers-removes...

Another story on this I found fairly credible: https://www.medpagetoday.com/infectiousdisease/covid19/90552

And here's an authoritative source (the NIH): https://www.covid19treatmentguidelines.nih.gov/antiviral-the...

They conclude that the evidence is not yet strong enough to recommend for or against the use of ivermectin. My accusation of Lysenkoism is for the people prescribing it without solid evidence. Obviously if the drug shows promise it should be investigated in real trials, as was done for HCQ.

I'm not going to edit my original post but I think it would have been stronger if I had stuck to HCQ and not gotten into the ivermectin controversy - there's definitely still a chance it will turn out to be useful.

This story is an example of the dangers of centralised power and cronyism and less to do with the individuals rights or wrongs.

Lysenko had the support of Stalin even when he was proven wrong time and again.

That's actually the point I'm trying to make here. The HCQ boosters have the support of a large faction of a major political party in the US, including a governor who recently hosted a roundtable featuring a number of prominent modern-day Lysenkoists including Dr. Atlas.

I personally saw Lysenkoism as essentially extreme political doctrine being indistinguishable from extreme religious fundamentalism. It looks very similiar towards US protestant reaction to evolution because it went against literalist dogma that itself ignored that there are two contradictory genesis accounts.

The idea of any difference from birth was anathema - never mind that theories themselves would have noted enviromental changes via mutation via outlier results at the very least. Never mind that selective breeding is older than /writing/ and ranchers would be aware that it isn't just a difference in feeding and training between riding and plough horses.

In both cases the very suggestion that their foundation could be wrong meant that those who disagreed couldn't be merely wrong but had to be actively and maliciously trying to keep "the truth" down. Of course the two explanations are perfectly compatible - Stalin and his cronies would see "acceptance of the Bourgeoisie pseudoscience of genetics" as a potentially deadly sign of weakness to allow within their domain which is why it would be unthinkable to accept.

> the use of hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin for Covid are the modern-day equivalent of Lysenkoism

I don't think HCQ is effective against Covid, but it's hardly an insane, biologically-impossible thing to be true. Lysenkoism is closer to thinking wearing a copper bracelet is protective against Covid.

Just like today’s political hacks are pushing legalized racial discrimination (affirmative action) in education and corporations despite many studies showing that mere racial diversity does not improve the performance of a company or institution. You could say modern DEI programs are also the modern day equivalent of Lysenkoism. Ineffective at best and actively detrimental to success at worst.

Is anyone else noticing an influx over the last few days of new-ish accounts posting things like this?

Yep. It’s disconcerting to be honest.

I don’t think that flagging a comment presenting a legitimate take on the article is really conducive to discussion. Above me there’s a commenter describing how anyone that opposed Lysenko was canceled. That is the same thing happening to critics of DEI today. You can draw similar parallels to the battle between the two scientific ideologies in the article - similarly today there is a battle between the merits of equality and equity.

Lysenko wasn't an outsider, he was representative of the institutional establishment views. Anyone who opposed him was canceled. In the Soviet Union under Stalin this meant death. I don't think HCQ curing Covid could ever claim to represent the institutional establishment view. Lysenkoism is what happens when there is an elimination of critics of scientific doctrine through terror.

Another instance of this in the Soviet Union was that Beria, the head of the NKVD had to directly appeal to Stalin to get him to stop a party conference to denounce relativity as "Jewish Physics", because it would completely derail the atomic bomb project if it became ideology as Lysenkoism had. Stalin was smart enough to put a stop to this particular ideological crusade.

"Soviet Science" is a contradiction in terms.

The scientific method was effectively illegal in the Soviet Union. If the science showed something the ruling party didn't agree with then the scientists would have the sense to cover it up or they'd find themselves in a gulag.

This is damn interesting but the podcast narration is damn boring. Great writing though.

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