This is the conclusion of chapter 4 of  from my book Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History (Humanities Press International 1985 and 1993).  Also online is the beginning of the chapter on the October Revolution and the section of the chapter on  Lysenko and Lysenkoism.   Other extracts are on the  Bernal  Haldane and Caudwell, as well as sections on the formation of the Comintern and its end.
 

Soviet intellectual life, "intensified class battles" and the great purge

Philosophy and the natural sciences came under the same pressures during this period as every other discipline did, and indeed as absolutely every other area of soviet life did.  The tension continued to mount.   The stupendous gains in achieving industrialisation and collectivisation had been won at a terrible cost and had left enormous bitterness and disillusionment in their wake.

Such pockets of discontent were seen as a persistent threat to the stability of the regime.
It was argued that there was an oppositional network organised around Trotsky's Bulletin of the Opposition, which was so remarkably well informed that it was obvious that the network was well entrenched within the country, and in crucial positions of power at that, and not just outside the country among a handful of exiles like Trotsky.

More genuinely menacing was the rise of fascism in western Europe and the ominous approach of war, which made political stability a matter of life or death, survival or destruction. The spectre of a nazi fifth column greatly intensified the growing paranoia.

As a matter of fact, there is little evidence of any organised internal opposition or foreign espionage on any significant scale. Nevertheless, the press pictured the country as full of spies and wreckers and agents of imperialist powers that were planning to disrupt every aspect of soviet life in every possible way. The population were urged to revolutionary vigilance, to root out the traitors all around them in order to save the revolution from its enemies.

The fact was that in 1934, at the end of the 1st 5 year plan, the Soviet Union stood at a crossroads. It could have taken the path of normalisation and democratisation or the path of continued coercion and terror. It not only chose the second, but intensified the coercion and terror. The assassination of Kirov at the end of 1934 was used to justify the most far reaching wave of repression.

The purges claimed victims from every stratum of the population. There was no corner in which the NKVD did not reach to unmask spies, wreckers, traitors, and double dealers. The losses were especially high among party members. Every day brought news of arrests of central committee members, commissars, army officers, trade union officials, komsomol leaders, old bolsheviks, foreign communists, writers, artists, doctors, philosophers, historians, physicists, geneticists, economists, engineers, agronomists, construction workers, railway signalmen, teachers and even children-and then finally members of the NKVD, of the courts and of the procurator's office, that is, the agents of the purge themselves.

The impression was created that the whole original nucleus of the party consisted of conspirators in the service of foreign powers. There was a series of spectacular, highly publicised political trials in Moscow, in which former party leaders were heard to confess to the most fantastic crimes: to conspiracy to assassinate party leaders, to espionage for foreign intelligence services, to sabotage of industry, to creation of conditions of famine in agriculture, to negotiations to cede soviet territories to foreign powers, to plots to restore capitalism, and on and on.

In August 1936, there was the trial of the "Trotskyite-Zinovievite United Centre" at which Zinoviev, Kamenev and others were sentenced to death. This was followed in January 1 937 by the trial of the "Parallel Center" in which defendants such as Radek, Pyatakov and Sokolnikov were sentenced to death or long terms of imprisonment.  The testimony at the first two trials was put together to form the scenario for the third trial that of the "Right-Trotskyite Center," which came in March 1938. The sentence of death was passed on Bukharin, Rykov, Krestinsky, and others, including Yagoda who had headed the NKVD and presided over the preparation of the first two trials.* Trotsky, who had long been in exile, was sentenced to death in absentia, a sentence executed in Mexico in 1940.

*At the All-Union Conference of Historians in December 1962, it was announced that a re-examination of. the materials relating to the Moscow trials had proven that the accusations were false.  Pospelov, a central committee member, stated unequivocally that Bukharin was no terrorist or spy. However, the verdicts were not formally annulled.  There is at the present time (1978) an international campaign for the rehabilitation of Bukharin.  To this day, such publications as the Large Soviet Encyclopedia and the Dictionary of Philosophy, carry no entries on Bukharin.  I once inquired about why there was no entry on Bukharin in the Dictionary of Philosophy at a meeting with soviet  philosophers at the Institute of Philosophy in Moscow.  The reply was, "He has not been rehabilitated." (1978)

The Short Course, which appeared shortly after the 3rd trial, presented the trials within the panorama of its brazenly fabricated version of soviet history, as a struggle between the powers of light and the powers of darkness, between white and black, between good and evil. On the one side stood Lenin, Stalin, and CPSU, the soviet people and the forces of progress.  Arrayed against them were Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and all the forces of world reaction.  These former party leaders, these "enemies of the people," "dregs of humanity," "whiteguard pigmies," "contemptible lackeys of the fascists," had been from the earliest days in conspiracy against Lenin, Stalin, the CPSU, and the soviet state. They had been responsible for the shot fired at Lenin, for the murder of Kirov*, and for the most unspeakable and innumerable crimes.

* Not until the 20th party congress was it revealed that Kirov, and not Stalin, had been elected general secretary at the 17th party congress. Before the end of the decade. not only Kirov, but the majority of delegates to that congress had paid with their lives.

With justification has the book been described as "a monstrous blend of whitewashing and mudslinging, of panegyrics and slander." 107

At the same time as history was being so blatantly falsified and reduced to a primitive and simplistic schematisation, Stalin was making public denunciations of attempts to falsify, vulgarise or oversimplify history.  It may have been black humour or it may have been genuine ambivalence. More probably it was crass and manipulative cynicism.  In any case, there was wholesale distortion of historical events.

Certain names disappeared from the pages of soviet history with all books making reference to such person's historical contributions removed from library shelves.  Photographs in the museums and the new books were doctored. Documents relating to them in archives were destroyed.  In 1935, V.1. Nevsky, the director of the Lenin Library, was arrested for refusing to discard specified holdings, even though he received a written order from Stalin to do so.  In 1938, all major archives came under NKVD administration.

It was not only political history that was falsified. So were the history of philosophy and the history of science.  In philosophy, Plekhanov was slighted, and so at times were even Marx and Engels, and Stalin's role was greatly exaggerated. Mitin and the others even credited Stalin with having been the one to lead the criticism of both mechanism and "menshevising idealism," thus denying the historical role played by the Deborinites in the 1920s and even by themselves in the early 1930s.  In science, Russian scientists were credited with virtually every important scientific discovery, while the real discoverers were deemed unworthy of mention. For this, the Polish physicist, Leopold Infeld, called Rosenthal and Yudin's dictionary of philosophy "a publication that will remain a monument of shame of the past period." He looked in vain for an article on Einstein, but found the formula E=mc2 attributed to Lebyedyev and S.I. Vavilov. In the article on space and time, Einstein was not mentioned, but instead Butlerov and Fyodorov.108

Within every academic discipline, there were "intensified class battles" to be fought.  In philosophy, mechanism and "menshevising idealism" were condemned anew and this time the condemnation had a new edge to it. This time proponents of mechanism and menshevising idealism disappeared.  Some had past records of political opposition and some had not. Mechanists such as Varjas and Tymyansky disappeared. Deborinites such as Luppol disappeared. They most likely died in prison. Karev and Sten were confronted with their oppositional past as part of the round-up of ex-oppositionists that was taking place everywhere. Karev seems to have come to trial and to have been shot. Sten was arrested in his place of remote exile and shot.

However, orthodox dialectical materialists such as Razumovsky seem to have perished as well. At the same time, leading figures associated with the discredited trends, such as Deborin and Axelrod, survived. The pattern was a somewhat elusive one. While the charges brought against philosophers were not philosophical but political,* one followed rather easily from the other in a situation in which philosophical tendencies were so directly linked to political deviations. Nevertheless, there was a certain arbitrariness about it that made the arrests of some alongside the survival of others difficult to explain.

*Mitin told me that, although there were repressions, they were not along philosophical lines, but with philosophy tied so directly to politics, this point loses much of its force. Bearing on this question, an interesting story was told to me by Y.P. Sitkovsky, a contemporary of Mitin's at the Institute of Red Professors, who related an incident in which Mitin, when in Stalin's study and upon noticing on his desk books on philosophy written by Razumovsky and Raltsevich, remarked on the fact that Razumovsky and Raltsevjch were both in prison. Stalin is said to have drily replied: "well, it is not because of their philosophy." (3rd interview with Professor Y.P. Sitkovsky, Moscow, 4 April 1978). Still one wonders why. As it happened, Sitkovsky was himself a victim. A member of the editorial board of Pod znamenem marksisma, and orthodox both in philosophical and political terms, he was arrested and sent to a labour camp,  because of an editorial mistake made in the production of the journal. He was subsequently released. In those days, the smallest miscalculation by a technician or the slightest misprint in a publication could result in arrests.

Among specialists in the history and philosophy of science, Uranovsky and Hessen perished. Uranovsky had been identified by Prezent as "following the wrecking line in the field of scientific politics." He seems to have played some role in obstructing Prezent's biology course at Leningrad University. Hessen was accused of trotskyism, a standard charge for anyone arrested at that time. Both Uranovsky and Hessen were outspoken defenders of the new physics, as was Semkovsky who also seems to have disappeared at this time.

The new physics came ever more sharply under attack, as idealism that was tantamount to subversion. Physicists such as Tamm and Fok were accused of smuggling in enemy ideas.  A number of other such physicists were arrested. Some, such as Bronshtein, were shot. Others, such as Berg and Landau, were sent to prison and later released.  Still others, foreign communists, such as Weissberg and Houtermanns, who had come generously out of commitment to the cause of socialist construction, were handed over to the Gestapo. Eminent physicists from abroad, such as Irene and Frederic Joliot-Curie and even Einstein, wrote letters to Stalin on behalf of their imprisoned colleagues, but their letters went unanswered. It is said, however, that the intervention of the soviet physicist Kapitsa, who approached Stalin on the matter, secured the release of Landau.

Other sciences were purged as well, though it was biology that suffered the worst.  But not even such abstract disciplines as mathematics escaped the net.  Certain mathematical theories were identified with "wrecking on the mathematical front," resulting in the arrests of mathematicians.

Discussions that began in the pages of learned journals were often taken up in the interrogation rooms of the NKVD and ended in long, dark corridors late at night when a shot was fired from the back.

The accusations and arrests brought a frantic turmoil into the institutions from which the victims had come.  After the exposure of an "enemy of the people," the remaining staff would be summoned to discuss "the liquidation of the consequences of wrecking." They were expected to denounce the accused person and to criticise themselves and/or others for lack of vigilance and for not having unmasked the traitor sooner. This often resulted in further accusations. Some jumped on the bandwagon and used the situation to settle old scores, to win acceptance for their ideas by eliminating the opposition, or to gain control of institutions and journals.

Aside from motives of spite, jealousy and lust for power, there was also fear.  Some must have believed it to be a matter of accuse or be accused.  Slander and intrigue became a way of life in universities and research institutes.  Eminent scholars and scientists often had their academic work and their political loyalty publicly called into question by students and undistinguished junior colleagues.  In some faculties and institutes, liars, informers, incompetents and opportunists came to power, while the most honest and serious and able elements perished or went to prison or into other areas of work.

In other faculties and institutes, an extremely intricate and delicate equilibrium was maintained, in which colleagues managed to continue to work seriously and somehow to protect one another.  But this was usually almost impossibly difficult. Through unbearable pressure, even torture, false confessions were extracted and close and esteemed colleagues implicated.  Few could hold out against it and they named their best friends as recruiters or accomplices in the most fantastic conspiracies.

Condemnation resulted in a ban on all works written by the condemned person.  Even books making reference to such authors were seized from bookshops and libraries. There were cases with large collective works, like that of the Large Soviet Encyclopedia, in which the arrest of Sten resulted in his article appearing under the name of Mitin, in order to save a whole printing from being destroyed. The names of the condemned became unspeakable and sometimes the most elaborate circumlocutions had to be employed when referring to work for which they were responsible or with which they were in any way associated.

There can be no doubt that soviet science was seriously set back by the repressions of these years. It was sharply cut off from the whole international context within which it had previously functioned, with severe restrictions on travel abroad and on access to foreign publications and with great fear and suspicion attending any attempts even to correspond with foreign colleagues.  Not only was it denied knowledge of the progress made by scientists elsewhere, but it was deprived of some of its own best minds. As war approached, it became painfully apparent that technological advance had been hindered in areas crucial to the soviet war effort. Labour camps and prisons throughout the Soviet Union were combed for experts in such crucial areas as aircraft design, and special prison research centers were established in which research necessary to soviet military technology was carried out by imprisoned experts.

The times were dark. The future would bring better times for philosophy, for the natural sciences and indeed for all else. But nothing can ever excuse the crimes against science and against humanity that occurred during this period. Nothing can ever annul the tragedy that befell its victims. Nothing can ever compensate for the splendid human material that was so flagrantly wasted, the intelligence that was so carelessly squandered, the commitment that was so callously abused. It may be that, as Victor Hugo said, history has no dustbin, despite NKVD destruction of archives. It may be that the longer run is bringing the perspective denied to it in the short run, and that the martyrs of science are faring better than their accusers, bringing Vavilov to triumph at least posthumously over Lysenko.  But things have not yet been set right and it is an episode that is far from over.

But why did it happen? A detailed answer must await the future and the opening of archives still closed, but there are certain things that can and must be said. On the one hand, it would seem that the overwhelmingly hostile forces surrounding the still endangered soviet state made a certain defensiveness and suspiciousness inevitable. It would also seem that the cultural backwardness, sometimes so incongruous with such highly advanced goals, made a certain clumsiness in dealing with complex questions inevitable.

But, on the other hand, the whole tragic cycle, which gave such an edge to the most ruthless and ignorant elements over the healthier and more enlightened ones, does not seem to have been inevitable. There is every reason to believe that socialism could have been built and could have defended itself against its enemies without such terrible destruction and waste that deprived socialism of so much of the knowledge and commitment it needed most. There is no reason to think that all revolutions necessarily devour their own children, though this one surely in large measure did.

It cannot be explained away by the phrase "cult of personality," despite Stalin's crucial part in it all. Others too had blood on their hands when they need not have. At the same time, it cannot be denied that things would have gone very differently had Lenin survived or had he been succeeded by Trotsky or Bukharin (particularly Bukharin).  Stalin's personality is obviously a central factor to take into account.

It is a cruel fact of life that unscrupulousness confers a decided advantage in struggles for power.  Having achieved power through ruthlessness rather than through reason, Stalin exercised it in the same way. Because personal rule came to predominate over policies, power was more jealously and more arbitrarily guarded.  In any case, he was exceedingly vainglorious and hungry for power, indeed to the point of absolutism, to the point of aspiring to eliminate all possible contenders, not only in the present but in the past.  Jealous of the whole tradition of pre-stalinist or non-stalinist bolshevism, he sought to create a memory hole, to obliterate the real past and to substitute a fabricated one, to destroy all those who could remember.

And it was not only a matter of destroying the basis of the past in terms of the record of events and the historical role of others, but in terms of all standards of rationality and morality, all norms independent of administrative fiat, that had prevailed in the past and could prevail in the present. This required not only the murder of the dead, but the corruption of the living.  And it was not enough to physically destroy, to implicate in guilt, to terrorise.  It was necessary in all cases to break their character, to eliminate all operative factors but the single will.

The physicist Weissberg has shed light on the mechanism at work in his account of his arrest and three-year imprisonment at the height of the terror. He describes his conversations with a fellow prisoner whom he subsequently discovered had been pressurised by the NKVD to persuade him to submit to making a false confession.  Rozhansky spoke of the confessions as "political necessities."  It was necessary for a communist, he argued, to abandon all "bourgeois concepts such as truth and lies," to abandon all old ideas of honour, and to subordinate all to the final aim.  When asked about what was the final aim, he replied:
 

Those who filled the jails, bewildered, disoriented and demoralised, struggled desperately to understand what had befallen them.  Many argued that somehow, in some unknown way, it was all somehow necessary and that it was necessary to submit, for the sake of some higher laws, some higher processes, beyond their ken, that even if things were somehow going wrong and they must suffer, there was a higher justification.

Those in prison groped for a theory to explain it all, but every new theory was soon invalidated by subsequent happenings. For those arrested included not only old revolutionaries, oppositionists, and former oppositionists, but loyal stalinists. Even when NKVD interrogators joined those they had interrogated in the cells, they had no theory to explain what they had done and why they had done it.  Many since have also struggled to understand.  The range of explanatory theses have been very wide indeed: from "you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs" to the "cult of the individual" to the 'thermidorian negation" of the revolution.

One thing at least must become clear to anyone serious about understanding it all: it was a massive and extraordinarily complex social process that took on a life of its own and assumed a form that no one had quite planned for it.  No simple formula will do.  It did not develop according to some necessary law of history, but neither did it happen out of sheer wilfullness.

But how to balance the historical accounts?  How to weigh these events vis-a-vis what went before and what went after?  The major question is that of continuity or discontinuity in assessing the relationship between bolshevism and stalinism.  At the one end of the spectrum is the continuity thesis, which has constituted the academic orthodoxy of the western sovietologists for many years and has been the dominant view among anti-communist authors.  Ironically close to this is the CPSU position, expressed in the reply of the soviet journal Kommunist to the French communist authors of L'URSS el nous dealing with the purges.  The soviet authors declare:
 

The present purge draws between bolshevism and stalinism . . . a whole river of blood.111

A somewhat intermediate position is that of Victor Serge:
 

The discontinuity was enormous, for the most fundamental principles of revolution had been flagrantly violated and overcome by arbitrariness, ignorance and incomparable baseness. Those who made the revolution had been cruelly and cynically swept away and replaced by a newer element without traditions, without principles, without standards, without scruples.

So much had been built and so much destroyed.

The revolution had triumphed and brought equality and enlightenment on a vast scale, where previously there was none. The revolution had not only pursued higher knowledge, but had drawn into the pursuit the masses that had heretofore been excluded.

Perhaps they did not in every instance pursue it wisely. Perhaps some among their number were charlatans. Still in all, they created out of backwardness an experiment in the most advanced social forms that had yet been conceived in human history until that time.

The experiment may have floundered and gone off the rails, but those who initially undertook it did so for the highest of goals and in the name of a cosmological vision that sought to harness the best possible science toward the highest of social and philosophical purposes. They sought to bring into being a new type of convergence of science, philosophy, and politics.

At the same time, there were aspects of bolshevik revolutionary traditions that spelled danger. An insurrectionist mentality, an intolerance towards those who opposed them in good faith, a tendency to subordinate means to ends. Early on there were mistakes made that prepared the way for the crimes that would come later.

To a degree, perhaps, it was the enormity of their efforts that dictated the enormity of their mistakes. Those who dare little make fewer mistakes and those who dare much make many. In the case of the Soviet Union, those in the grip of a revolutionary vision set themselves the task of expounding and living by a philosophical worldview that was both in harmony with the class interests of the proletariat and in accordance with the discoveries of the natural sciences.

Along the way, there were many differences of opinion as to how to achieve this, but they were grappling with real and important issues and did so in a way that could still be instructive to later marxists wrestling with many of the same issues. As to the differences and their somewhat distinctive ways of resolving them, it was to some extent because philosophy was taken so seriously and was considered to be so socially important that there was such a sense of urgency about arriving at a philosophical consensus. The truth of things mattered to them and so they pressed hard to discover what it was and to come to social agreement on it.

In so doing, ironically, they instituted procedures that could not but be obstacles to the search for truth and to any meaningful consensus. In the end, socialism can only be built upon consent. In failing to appreciate the creative role of clash of opinions, in short-circuiting the process of discovery, debate and consensus, in employing inappropriate criteria in making judgements, in allowing only one position on any question marxist legitimacy and associating all others with political treachery, they set the stage for the tragedy that would engulf them.

And tragedy really did engulf them, all the more so for the brave and decent men and women who were rendered powerless to stand against it. For it was carried on in the name of the revolution and many felt they could not oppose it without turning their backs upon the revolution.

Even when they began to suspect the worst, they still felt they were faced with the choice: Stalin or Hitler. They chose Stalin.  All during this time, the fascists were aggressively on the march. They had their own philosophy, one that looked backwards and one that threatened to plunge the masses again into darkness and subservience. Their appeal to the masses was irrationalist in the extreme, yet they sought to use advanced science towards their own reactionary ends, while at the same time repudiating the reasoning underlying that science. They left as their legacy the memory of incalculable devastation and desolation.  What great minds, with so much to contribute to science and philosophy and other areas of human thought, were incinerated at Auschwitz or fired upon at Stalingrad, no one will ever know.

When in 1941 the armies of Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, those that survived, including many philosophers and scientists, went off to the front. The soviet people, despite all that had torn them asunder, rose as one and fought heroically. Because they did, the future, with as many complexities as the past, was nevertheless to be far more favourable for the philosophy of science than it would have been otherwise.

But nothing in the soviet war effort and its victorious outcome changed the nature of the regime under which it was achieved. It did not, as has been so often implied or asserted, vindicate its marxist credentials. Science, philosophy, and human life were still in danger.

It remained to be seen whether it would be possible to bridge the revolution and its future across such an era of destruction and desolation.