Zhores Medvedev died last week, one day after his 93rd birthday. Although not tremendously well known in the West, Zhores (a biochemist) and his twin brother Roy (a historian), who is still alive, were major dissidents in the days of the Soviet Union. Both men paid heavily for their intellectual resistance to Soviet orthodoxy (it did not help that their mother was Jewish).
Zhores took the lead in discrediting the theories of Trofim Lysenko, who was for many years the director of genetics at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. More importantly, Lysenko was Stalin’s main adviser on science and agriculture, primarily because he believed that Marxism -- that is, dialectical materialism -- held the key to crop productivity. According to Lysenko, it was the material world, rather than Mendelian genetics, that most influenced yields. Thus, Lysenko denied the existence of genes and argued, with Stalin’s support, that seeds could be “vernalized” by keeping them damp and cold and that this quality would be passed along to subsequent generations of seed stock. He held a number of other non-scientific theories, all based more or less on Marxism, which were imposed on Soviet farmers with disastrous results. Even after Stalin’s death in 1953, Lysenko continued to hold sway under Khrushchev until the mid-1960s.
Zhores began is attack on Lysenkoism in the early 1960s, later joined by Andrei Sakharov, in which he condemned the demagoguery and scientific bankruptcy of Soviet agricultural policy. He wrote two books about Lysenkoism that could not be published in the Soviet Union, which he circulated as samizdat (one was later published in the U.S.). It took some years, but Lysenko eventually fell from power, much to the benefit of scientific integrity and agricultural productivity.
The Soviet power structure, however, could not forgive Medvedev’s deviation, even after he was proven right. He was persecuted relentlessly, at one point kidnapped and held incommunicado in a psychiatric facility. He was declared insane and released only after weeks of international protests. Even after his release, Medvedev was not allowed to leave the Soviet Union and therefore could not attend international scientific conferences, nor were his works published in Russian.
Finally, in 1973, Medvedev was allowed to accept a one year fellowship in London, but it proved to be a poison pill. Once in London, Zhores was informed that his Soviet citizenship had been revoked and his passport was canceled. He was not allowed to return to Moscow until 1989, when Mikhail Gorbachev invited him to participate in the investigation of the nuclear power accident at Chernobyl.
Roy Medvedev was also a noted dissident, most famous for his critique of Stalin’s purges, Let History Judge, which of course had to be circulated as samizdat in the Soviet Union. It was first published in English in 1969, which led to Roy’s expulsion from the Communist Party (an essential membership for anyone pursuing an academic career) and fired from his job. For years, there was a KGB guard stationed at his door.
The great lesson from the career of Zhores Medvedev is the danger inherent in the politicization of science. It took decades to free Soviet agriculture from the disastrous effects of Lysenkoism, which owed far more to Stalin’s ideological preferences than to the scientific method. Lysenkoism held sway in the Soviet Union long after the scientific consensus in the rest of the world had firmly accepted Mendelian genetics. The contemporary analogy is obvious. We ignore scientific consensus at our peril. Lysenkoism was strictly a Soviet phenomenon, with no impact beyond its borders. The consequences of climate change denial will be felt world-wide.
The New York Times obituary of Zhores Medvedev is here. The Washington Post obit is here. David Remnick's 1989 article about the brothers is here.
Note on orthography: Zhores Medvedev was named after the French socialist Jean Jaures, which was transliterated into Cyrillic as Жорес. It has then been transliterated back into the Latin alphabet as Zhores, rather than Jaures, which is phonetically consistent with the Russian, but completely obscures the French origin of the name.
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