«К Вам одному я и обращаюсь со своей болью»: борьба в биологической и сельскохозяйственной науке в СССР в письмах ученых к советским лидерам в 1950-е годы

Abstract

The struggle in Soviet biological and agricultural science is examined through the prism of letters of scientists to Soviet leaders in the 1950s. Scientists’ “letters to power” were an important form of struggle of the scientific community to normalize the situation in the agrarian and scientific sphere under conditions of total party-state control. Considering science to be the most important element of the USSR’s international prestige, scientists who advocated classical genetics considered it necessary to rid biological and agricultural science of external "imperious" influences on the sphere of scientific knowledge. Moreover, some suggested the active use of party-state structures, not excluding law enforcement agencies, against their scientific opponents. Others believed that the shortcomings of the organization of Soviet science could only be eradicated by the scientists themselves, provided that the scientific community was widely involved in identifying the most important scientific areas through free creative discussions. With all the disagreements, the appeals of scientists to Soviet leaders, the author concludes, contributed to a change in public sentiment in favor of genetics. On the contrary, the supporters of Trofim Lysenko by their “letters to power” pursued the goal of maintaining his dominant position in science. Transferring scientific problems to the political plane, they called on Soviet leaders to resolve the contradictions accumulated in the agrarian-scientific sphere by the methods of party-state influence. The rejection of each other's arguments by the scientific opponents did not allow them to reduce the severity of confrontation in biological and agricultural science and did not contribute to scientific research. The appeal of geneticists to the authority of world science in the context of the Cold War further aggravated the situation in the scientific community, since in the opposite camp, this phenomenon was assessed as ideological sabotage. The inertia of such traditions of scientific communication persisted for a long time.