Physics, Genetics and the Zhdanovshchina

Abstract

THE PURPOSE OF THIS ARTICLE is to clarify the process whereby the campaign which became known as the Zhdanovshchina proceeded to enmesh the natural and life sciences, having initially focused primarily on literature and the arts. The victory of Lysenko's Michurinist biology over 'formal' genetics following the August 1948 session of the Lenin All-union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL) has generally been seen as marking the extension of the Zhdanovshchina to the natural and life sciences which hitherto had not been subjected to direct intrusions of the kind experienced in other spheres of cultural and academic life. In the aftermath of the August session, conferences or meetings designed to assess the ideological credentials of most scientific disciplines were organised; however, the physics conference scheduled for early 1949 did not take place. This has been attributed to the personal intervention of Stalin, who, it is claimed, was alerted to the damaging consequences such a conference might have for the then well-advanced atomic bomb project. Physics has thus been widely seen as having been saved by the bomb from a process involving the imposition of the Lysenko model on other scientific disciplines. It is on the questions raised by the preparations for this conference concerning the impact and coherence of the ideological campaign in science that this article will initially concentrate. Physics and genetics will then be compared to assess the relative significance of disciplinary and policy differences in explaining the divergent experiences of physicists and geneticists during the late Stalin period. This comparison will also be used to clarify the process whereby the Zhdanovshchina encompassed science more generally at this time.