The Great Terror

Another aircraft designer, Chaikovsky, was also arrested. His wife, arrested too, was one day given her clothes, taken to a manicurist and hairdresser, and told she was to meet her husband, but must not let him know that she, too, was in jail. He was reassured, and told her that he could now do the technical work they were giving him in the Lubyanka with an easy mind. However, he seems to have been shot later,²⁴ as were most of the leading figures in the aircraft industry.²⁵

Generally speaking, the sciences in some way connected with policy or ideology fared worst. Sciences impinging on agriculture fared badly on both counts. The Meteorological Office was violently purged as early as 1933, for failing to predict weather harmful to the crops.²⁶ In part on similar grounds, astronomers connected with sunspot research fared badly. The Solar Service had in fact been set up in 1931 to help predict long-range weather patterns, with the usual imperfect results, though there were also charges of un-Marxist theories of sunspot development.²⁷ But astronomy in general suffered a devastating purge, conducted by the Stalinist pseudo-astronomer Ter-Oganezov. This started in early 1936, and soon the press was attacking the great Pul’kovo Observatory, which had in its earlier days been known as “the astronomical capital of the world.” The distinguished astronomer B. V. Numerov, arrested in November, admitted after severe beatings that he had organized a counter-revolutionary astronomers’ group for espionage, terror, and wrecking. It had “drawn a significant number of scientific workers into its orbit.”

In all, about twenty-seven astronomers, mostly leading figures, disappeared between 1936 and 1938. Work at Pul’kovo almost ceased, and the observatories at Tashkent and elsewhere also suffered severely. Russian astronomy, which had led the world, was devastated.²⁸

It is curious to recall that Stalin’s own first job was at an observatory.

Biology was, of course, a particularly sensitive field. With the rise of Lysenko in the early 1930s, a fierce “ideological” struggle commenced. Already in 1932, G. A. Levitsky and N. P. Avdoulov, cytologists, were arrested, but were later released. Other biologists were arrested about the same time.

In December 1936, the more prominent Professor I. J. Agol was arrested on charges of Trotskyism and was executed. Professor S. G. Levit, Head of the Medico-Genetic Institute, was expelled from the Party on the grounds that his biological views were pro-Nazi. (The People’s Commissar for Health, G. M. Kaminsky, was also criticized for defending him.)²⁹ Levit was arrested in about May 1937 and died in prison. A number of other prominent biologists, such as Levitsky, Karpechenko, and Govorov, also perished, as did the celebrated N. M. Tulaikov, Director of the Cereals Institute, who was arrested in 1937 and died in 1938 in one of the White Sea labor camps. The botanist A. Yanata was shot, on 8 June 1938, for having proposed chemicals to destroy weeds, contrary to the urging of Lysenkoites.

³⁰ Max Levin, former head of the 1919 Bavarian Soviet Republic, seems also to have perished in his biological rather than his political capacity³¹

In this field, as in the political, the lesser figures were arrested first, and the net thus closed round their superiors. The biggest game was Academician N. I. Vavilov, the great geneticist, Lenin’s favorite. He had given up his position as head of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in 1935 to A. I. Muralov, until then Deputy Commissar for Agriculture. Muralov was arrested on 4 July 1937 and succeeded by Professor G. K. Meister. Meister was, in turn, arrested at the beginning of 1938, and Lysenko took the job after a squalid and deadly intrigue.

Vavilov himself was in trouble early in 1940 for some argument about the right agricultural policy to pursue in the parts annexed from Finland. An open quarrel with Lysenko followed. In August, he was touring the Ukraine. While in Cernauti, he was suddenly recalled to Moscow, and arrested on 6 August. The files on his case (to which leading biologists were given access after the fall of Lysenko in 1964) contain a letter from Beria to Molotov as Politburo member in charge of science, requesting permission for this arrest. Vavilov was under interrogation for eleven months and was questioned over a hundred times. He was tried on 9 July 1941 by the Military Collegium on charges of Rightist conspiracy, espionage for England, and other matters. He was sentenced to death.

The veteran biologist D. N. Pryanishnikov, together with Vavilov’s physicist brother, had interviews with Beria and Molotov to try to have him released, but without success. Pryanishnikov also seems to have intervened through Beria’s wife to try to get better prison conditions for his old colleague, and he even had the extraordinary temerity to nominate Vavilov for a Stalin Prize in 1941.