If “reactionaries” were excluded from the pages of Philosophy of Science, were contributors at least permitted to be politically neutral? Malisoff argued against this kind of tolerance:
On the whole those who are “isolationists” with regard to science, tend to reactionary political views. In specific cases of some well-meaning individuals this is very unfortunate. They mean to be “neutral,” but neutrality invariably turns out in practice to be a tolerance of the supremacy of evil over the good. And that is itself evil (Malisoff 1939, 128).
This is a warning to “some well-meaning individuals”: If you try to be neutral and refuse to join in condemning reactionaries, your neutrality amounts in practice to a tolerance of the supremacy of evil over the good, and consequently your conduct is also evil. Ergo, if you want to avoid being evil, you must denounce reactionaries.
Turning science into a battleground between good and evil made it inevitable that ordinary scientific standards would be corrupted by politics. And indeed, history provides a striking example of an evidently pseudoscientific view being associated with “progressive” politics and therefore being defended in what was the only philosophy of science journal at the time.
I have in mind the infamous Lysenko controversy in the Soviet Union, which Andrei Sakharov with good reason called “probably the ugliest episode in the history of contemporary science” (quoted in Popovsky 1984, viii). Trofim Lysenko was a crackpot, uneducated plant breeder, but a skillful manipulator. He couched pseudoscientific ideas about biology and agriculture in the language of the official dogma of dialectical materialism and managed to get support from the Communist Party.3 Soon after his ascent began in the mid-1930s, some scientists who opposed his views were arrested and shot. As an illustration of his modus operandi, here is how Lysenko injected politics into scientific “discussion” in his speech at a conference in Moscow in 1935: “You know, comrades, wreckers and kulaks are located not only in your collective farms. . . . They are just as dangerous, just as resolute in science. . . . And whether he is in the academic world or not in the academic world, a class enemy is always a class enemy” (quoted in Graham 1993, 128).
It happened that Stalin himself attended this event. At one point he interrupted Lysenko’s speech, exclaiming “Bravo, comrade Lysenko, bravo!” (ibid.).
Lysenko got the full official endorsement of the Communist Party in 1948. By that time, a number of distinguished geneticists had been killed “either with or without pretreatment in a concentration camp” (Fisher 1948). Lysenko’s reign in Soviet biology lasted until the fall of Khrushchev in 1964. There is strong evidence that at least eighty-three experts in biology were repressed (Joravsky 1970, 320–28).4 The true number is probably much larger because there must have been cases of authentic repression for which no sufficiently strong evidence could be found and also because, as Joravsky explains, “I do not pretend to have searched the public record exhaustively. I searched the record until my patience was exhausted” (ibid., 317).
Looking at reactions of Western scientists to the plight of their colleagues in the USSR, 1948 was a watershed year. Even before 1948 most scholars in the West were already extremely worried about the rise of Lysenko, the support of the Communist Party for his strange ideas, and the massive persecution of biologists. But after any opposition to Lysenko was eliminated in 1948, it became impossible to deny that the Marxist ideology had destroyed any remnants of freedom of scientific investigation in biology in the USSR.
It is interesting to observe how Philosophy of Science reacted to this affair up to the crucial year of 1948, when the scales finally fell from almost everyone’s eyes. In 1945 the journal published an article, “Soviet Science and Dialectical Materialism,” by philosopher John Somerville, in which he mentioned the case of Nikolai Vavilov, the best-known Soviet biologist at the time and an opponent of Lysenko. Somerville cited stories about the persecution and even imprisonment of Vavilov, as well as many other examples of political interference in science, but he assured the reader that “you cannot believe all that you read in the newspapers” (Somerville 1945, 27).
Amazingly, in order to dispel these fears about the fate of Vavilov and other scientists that were expressed in many Western newspapers, Somerville referred to an article from . . . Pravda! The article, published on December 7, 1939, was authored by the philosopher M. B. Mitin, director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.5 Needless to say, the article claimed that scientists in the USSR were completely free in pursuing their research and were never subject to any political pressure.
According to Somerville, the “actual facts” reported by Mitin (in 1939) “bear upon the very problems we are discussing today” (in 1945). In other words, there was no reason at all to be concerned about Vavilov’s whereabouts or well-being.
When Somerville’s article was published, however, Vavilov had already been dead two years. He was arrested in 1940 and sentenced to death, which was commuted to twenty years’ imprisonment. He died in prison of starvation in January 1943.
Somerville could not have known all the details of Vavilov’s fate in 1945, but he must have known that most well-informed scientists were extremely alarmed about what might have happened to their missing colleague and that many of them suspected he was no longer alive.6 At the very same time, the great geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in a letter to his colleague L. C. Dunn: “Oh, Dunn, what an indescribable tragedy has overtaken almost every one of my old colleagues and friends [in the Soviet Union]! So many of them dead, and maybe after all this is the best for them” (quoted in DeJong-Lambert 2012, 62).
To have published Somerville’s article brushing off these worries and painting a rosy picture of Soviet science in the midst of one of the worst abuses of scientific freedom in history—and citing Pravda as one’s source—was certainly a low point for Philosophy of Science.
Even worse, not only did no one challenge Somerville’s strange claims, not a single critical comment on the Lysenko affair appeared in the pages of the journal until 1949, when the ugly truth could no longer be covered up. The pro-Soviet line was pushed by the editor Malisoff in 1947, in a short note he wrote about the book Science and the Planned State, by the Oxford biologist John R. Baker. In one chapter Baker raised the widely shared concerns about the destruction of Soviet science by Lysenko and his Party backers. Malisoff would have none of it. Here is what he said about Baker’s book:
A vicious and intellectually dishonest work, made all the more unpalatable by its tone of outraged virtue. The author makes much of the case of the genetics controversy, taken out of the huge context of Soviet investigations, to read any number of non-sequiturs. The fantastic word “totalitarianism” leads a long list of invectives (Malisoff 1947a, 171–72).
It is unclear how taking the “huge context” into account could have possibly changed the grim picture that Baker and many other Western scholars painted, drawing on many reliable reports.
While dismissing Baker’s truthful account as “a vicious and intellectually dishonest work,” Malisoff profusely praised John Somerville’s book Soviet Philosophy, which was an apology for Stalinism and which insisted that all was well with Soviet biology. Malisoff called Somerville’s book “scholarly, extraordinarily clear and leaning backward to be fair” and ended the note with the call, “Hurry, get this book!” (Malisoff 1947b).
Contrast this panegyric with another review in a non-philosophy