The 1936-1937 Purge of Soviet Astronomers (1991) | Hacker News Reader

The 1936-1937 Purge of Soviet Astronomers (1991)

jstor.org

101 pointsfreemint72 comments

Note that in the USSR, political questions and false accusations were often used to torpedo career competitors or to have vengeance at those who were more successful. Almost nobody in this story or in other cases were political dissidents. They didn't go out to protest or speak up on the political freedoms or other matters.

Glad we live in a era were accusations and rumors are not used as political weapons against individuals.

I don’t recall anyone being sent to work camps for criticizing government policy in the US recently.

McCarthyism? (it is not 30s like in the article but it is 40s-50s)

Weird definition of "recently".

"Recently" ends upon uprootal.

70-80 years is not any reasonable definition of "recently," particularly when discussing politics.

I honestly have no idea what you are trying to say

No prob, I'll be clearer. Phenomena may be indicated which, in form of episodes, very defined events, may be part of a "past", but the direction, inclination, patterns behind those events may still be lurking much later. (For instance, an expression of fascism ended in the forties, yet fascism may linger, emerge etc.) So, thin latency and occasionalities aside - minor traits and occurrences that just confirm exceptionality -, for the phenomenon to be over it must be uprooted. Unexpressed but latent is "not over": it remains of concern, it may express differently, it may re-explode.

Work camps are just the extreme of the policies that we have yet to implement. We seem to be lubing the slippery slope towards it though, with political correctness and cancel culture.

> Work camps are just the extreme of the policies that we have yet to implement.

Yet to? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penal_labor_in_the_United_Stat...

> We seem to be lubing the slippery slope towards it though, with political correctness and cancel culture.

No we are not.

When do you think cancel culture started?

Probably it started thousands of years ago, but recently it has certainly changed and become a new and terrible thing with social media.

They weren't necessary sent to work camps. Some were just fired and couldn't get hired. Later, in 1950's & 60's, you would be effectively banned from career. Sometimes librarians would paint black their name if they were in references section. Since 1960's victims of these political battles could go to other institutions, probably at less important position.

This practice continued all the way till the collapse of the USSR, I heard of such stories in Moscow universities, and in the Academy of Science.

I would not compare anything that happened in the West to what happened in the USSR. I don't recall anyone in the West being sent to a work camp or shot because someone accused them of something they were not.

Along with what would happen to your family. In the USSR it was often not just yourself, they'd also target your family and its well-being just the same in the name of collective guilt.

Did I talk about forced labor in this comment above? I said: in later times, such clashes with bureacracy made people lose their entire career.

most people reading this have never missed a meal in their lives; a good number of people reading this have never been in a grown-up out-of-money situation where you face deadlines and have no source of money; probably a few people reading this have had to work doing low-skill work, but personal computers have changed access stories. The new version of "labor camp" is a phone that costs you little to nothing but is restricted, tracked and required, and work that is low-skill or away from a center of decision making somehow. Parts of this are happening in the USA out of sight, and elsewhere, and it may be increasing under new economics regarding income and housing. Smug dismissal among those that have never really had parts of it yet, can be expected IMHO

They literally shot politicals in GULAG for stepping out of a line. Nothing in the US even compared.

You're the first person in the thread to bring up work camps. How easily one can defeat a specter of one's own construction.

That’s 100% what happened to political offenders in the USSR even after GULAG officially closed. Theses scientists may have gotten article 58, but I didn’t dig that deeply. There is no US parallel.

This is low effort and specious. One person losing a job or appointment isn't the same as people being forced out of careers entirely or (literally) sentenced to years in a gulag because someone didn't like them.

There is surely space for reasoned discussion about "cancel culture" and its effects on public discourse that doesn't involve likening a bunch of hippies on Twitter to the Soviet repression machine. Can we please start being better about this?

You come with unduly assumptions with the contexts you throw in. «Political questions and false accusations» are still «used to torpedo careers» - just that.

In one place and time some excuses are more effective than others - if the counterpart is intentionally malicious they may just exploit that, irregardless the content.

>One person losing a job or appointment isn't the same as people being forced out of careers entirely

Try speculating publicly about

1. Heritability of intelligence/behavior

2. Genetic differences among ethnicities

Of course neither points go against scientific "consensus" individually, it's only discussing them simultaneously that risks your scientific career.

Now try publishing something critical of covid vaccines. Or the modern approach to diagnosis/treatment of gender dysphoria. There are relatively few examples of such cancellations because the threat is implicit but well known, and that's sufficient to suppress dissent and give the illusion of consensus, but I digress.

> Try speculating publicly about [...]

You just did! Let me know when you're canceled.

This argument is circular. You're saying the purported suppression can't be detected because its effect is already so widespread. And it's widespread because of the threat of cancellation. Which didn't happen. See the problem? The only way to get to your conclusion is to assume as a prior that this research doesn't exist because it's being suppressed, and not merely because it's wrong.

>You just did! Let me know when you're canceled

On an anonymous account. Meanwhile our org's job postings are "gendered" because they contain words like "strong", "independent", "analysis", and if I dare to pushback on the insanity I'm liable to lose my job. If I wrote publicly about it and gained any notoriety I'd risk being publicly shamed by the woke mob and effectively blacklisted a la James Damore.

>You're saying the purported suppression can't be detected because its effect is already so widespread. And it's widespread because of the threat of cancellation. Which didn't happen. See the problem

Your argument is dishonest. It does happen and these is evidence, I'm saying it's harder to detect. Look at the unwarranted treatment of James Watson for daring to suggest the relationship between genes, race, and intelligence.

>that this research doesn't exist because it's being suppressed, and not merely because it's wrong

See above. It doesn't take more than a few public examples to deter people from asking certain questions or even participating in a system when asking the wrong questions regarding certain topics becomes career and social suicide.

Probably should focus on implementing strong labor protections and encouraging union participation (which would blunt the effect this sort of weapon has), instead of eliminating them.

> in an era

Era? Read some history books

Twitter?

The loss of humanity in Russia and Eastern Europe surrounding (not just during) WWII is astounding.

If you weren’t persecuted by your own country you might be by an invading nation… and then again by a second invasion…

It seems like if you were at all prominent or notably educated someone would be suspicious of you.

And if you weren’t you still had a risk of random events.

Something interesting is that historically this area seems to have been under significant conflict in various times in history. For example, The massive movements of the Goths across northern Europe due to the Huns movement into Eastern Europe in the late 300's. This came towards the end of the Western Roman Empire, with some blaming these massive population movements (100's of thousands of Goths) into the grain producing regions of Rome in Spain and Northern Africa. That eroded the tax base and grain production for Rome.

What is it about astronomers and blind spots for heresy risk. Is there a tradition starting with Archimedes through Copernicus and Galileo where they are just disagreeable?

Reading about the soviet purges, it's almost as if they had a simple idea that implied a few consequent beliefs that allowed parties to signal alignment to each other, and then encouraged coordinated aggression against anyone not sufficiently on side.

It rewarded a certain kind of opportunist who wanted to use it to push out competition, and the logic was given there was no such thing as truth or meaning, does it matter whether you are doing valuable work if the credit and proceeds go to someone not aligned to the revolution? Just call them enemies and take their stuff, or be an enemy and have your stuff taken. Convince some people they're in a zero sum game with no higher consequences and they'll do the rest themselves. By most accounts, it sounded like just cultural banditry with a zombie virus ideology and the populace were too meek to do much about it.

Surprised we don't learn more about it in the west just to innoculate people against poor thinking, as it seems like something so obvious and dumb, yet something that could also happen anywhere. Maybe astronomers seeing the vastness of creation and the universe just wouldn't believe other people could be that stupid and evil until it was too late.

It's happening in the West right now!

Yikes. Surely you cannot say that resisting and reconciling our shared history of colonialism is related to the obscure eurasian politics of over 100 years ago unless you harbored some pre-existing hatred and paranoia about losing privileges or were even radicalized by extremists. No reason to drill down on it and we can let it slide here, but out of curiosity, where did you say you worked again?

Found the astronomer.

Reminds me of Lysenkoism where one mans delusions of science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism set back the discourse as it was enforced as state policy.

Cybernetics was also deemed a bourgeoisie science for a while. This changed later.

I wonder where we are now. Long shadows of Hitler and eugenics do certainly have a chilling effect on research of intelligence etc.

This article published last year in the New Yorker goes into details.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/09/13/can-progressiv...

I get the political unease that surrounds such topics, but with things like CRISPR making gene editing possible, we could improve inborn traits in living humans one day - provided that we actually know what we are doing.

Gene therapy and eugenics are different things. CRISPR falls under the former.

They overlap, though. Or, more precisely, gene therapy can be used as a means to achieve certain eugenic ends.

If, in 2030 or 2050, it will be possible to use CRISPR or another newer technology to edit out detrimental alleles out of someone's DNA safely, the end effect on the genetic pool of humanity is going to be very similar to the one that eugenicists tried to achieve via more primitive means.

If all that eugenics was or is concerned with was the removal of some harmful alleles by consensual methods, and it was not a pile of often racist bullshit falsely claiming to be based on what is actually solid science, it would not have a bad name.

There is a lot of stuff in between.

For example, Down syndrome can be practically eradicated by selectively aborting aneuploid embryos. Of course, the embryo cannot consent, and while the parents can, institutional pressures can be put on them to make them change their mind.

Countries like Iceland and Denmark abort almost all Down syndrome embryos. This article in The Atlantic does not seem to be completely OK with that, and The Atlantic is pretty representative for East Coast liberal viewpoints.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/the-las...

> institutional pressures can be put on them to make them change their mind.

Which is a weird and arbitrary location to draw the line considering how those institutions tend to lean on other issues, or even the same issue in a slightly different context.

I wasn't trying to draw any line anywhere. It is notoriously hard to draw any lines when it comes to disabilities.

I'm saying it's a weird spot for them to draw a line.

If CRISPR enabled a way to achieve the same outcome while avoiding these concerns (to be clear, I have no idea whether this is a possibility), that would seem to be a desirable outcome from all points of view.

> Of course, the embryo cannot consent,

I mean, technically the person born with Down Syndrome would be incapable of consenting on their own life decisions after they were born, right?

While a D.S. sufferer has intellectual disability, its severity may vary a lot, with some cases mild enough that the capability of giving consent might be there.

Then there are mosaic cases, which are in the middle between a full Down Syndrome and normalcy. In mosaic cases, only a certain percentage of cells is afflicted. People with mosaic aneuploidies can often lead fairly normal lives.

> Long shadows of Hitler and eugenics do certainly have a chilling effect on research of intelligence etc.

Speaking solely about eugenics: it wasn't Hitler, eugenics were largely considered progressive at the time and the Right Thing To Do. Most of the Nordic countries today that Western countries admire have eugenics programs to some degree or another, they just don't use the word eugenics.

You could argue that the US for example has one of the most "successful" eugenics programs in the world - just look up the demographics of the abortions funded by tax-payer money.

You could also argue that many of the global NGOs that are popular among Western leaders today have a strong eugenics focus, but again, nobody uses that word. It's much easier to suggest that a population shouldn't reproduce by calling it feminism, empowerment, or simply making child-raising a luxury good.

Here's a fun game: search "Margaret Sanger quotes" and then count how many blue-pills you need to dose yourself to remain ideologically comfortable.

He was vindicated by modern science.

His "delusions" were that epigenetics exist and are heritable. (His opponents took a polar, more hardline stance that only genetic information is relevant for phenotype expression.)

See more here: https://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=heritable%20epigene...

If only he did not resort to using political means instead of science to push his views, he could have been considered a visionary (like Vernadsky or Oparin).

Instead, he's just a criminal and a fraud.

Yes, it was a story of political conflict, not a story about science.

>He was vindicated by modern science.

He denied that genetic heritability existed and that all characteristics were propagated epigenetically. That's hardly been vindicated. In practice his theories and practical policies were utterly disastrous.

It is true that since then we have found some mechanisms by which some traits can propagate epigenetically, but characterising that as vindicating Lysenkoism is absurd.

I believe he denied existence of genes, not heretability of traits.

His theories were mostly pseudoscientific nonsense - but that alone is not particularly harmful. What was evil about him is that he literally destroyed other people’s lives, his most prominent victim being Vavilov.

DNA wasn't yet discovered when he was alive, and "genes" were an abstract philosophical concept.

That’s why I said genetic heritability.

thats the difference between science and other realms of human knowledge: it doesn’t matter how you can spin his words, because his theory made inaccurate predictions.

Anti-intellectualism seems an almost inevitable destination for authoritarian regimes. In a thread yesterday [1] the subject of Mao's purges and the Khmer Rouge came up. Why kill all the engineers, doctors and lawyers? Because people who build and maintain civilisation can build alternative ones. They are a threat to that kind of power.

Heed this warning, all of you comfortable building systems of control and surveillance while thinking that you are "on the inside" and will be treated well because you are "needed".

Once the "new order" has it's cybernetic governance machine, who do you think will be the first to get a visit?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31042304

>Once the "new order" has it's cybernetic governance machine, who do you think will be the first to get a visit?

In the Kornbluth novel Not This August (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_This_August>), the first thing the Soviets and Chinese do after conquering the United States is shoot the fifth columnists who had aided them by sabotaging the American war effort.

This reminds me of the purge of professors who did not support World War I in the US, as well as the US purge of scientists who did not support the Korean War 15 years after this.

Purging people that is found inconvenient is perfectly normal for the morals of the soviet mindset. They only need it to do it hush hush to protect party's image and propaganda narratives.

They went by космономер.

Who did?

He/she means the Soviet astronomers called themselves cosmonomers. Like astronauts and cosmonauts, har har.

> He/she

Use "they" when you do not know the subjects gender/sex/whatever. Much cleaner to look at and read.

I considered "they" but worried that it could be parsed as coreferential with matrix12's "they," so I used he/she which, because it is singular, refers unambiguously to the previous speaker, matrix12 himself/herself.

I don't think that's an actual word. Perhaps a mistranslation?

https://yandex.ru/search/?text=%22%D0%BA%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BC%D...

Paywalled

doi + scihub:

https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.2307/2500602

is there a way to read this article on an iphone? sorry for my device with very limited abilities, i didn't choose it for myself.

the original article has some kind of banner over the content, and this link only shows the cover page for me.

https://moscow.sci-hub.se/2912/e557ad01807ac82351e1cec98b2b9...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com