Comrade Corn Cob

Until his death in 1952, Joseph Stalin was practically God in the Soviet Union. Everything that was believed and everything that was done had to conform to his wishes, even, as I described in another essay, music.

Stalin considered himself the ultimate authority in science, as well. He even had his own theory of genetics that was strikingly different from genetics as understood in the western world, and everywhere (even Russia) today. He copied his theory (Lysenkoism) from Comrade Trofim Lysenko. In this theory, things that happen to a plant or an animal during its life get passed on to the offspring. This would include the ability of crops, such as wheat, to endure cold temperatures if the seeds were frozen in cold temperatures. That is, you can create cold-hardy wheat by freezing the seeds. Millions of Russians and Ukrainians died in famines because of this stupid theory: when they planted frozen wheat seeds, the wheat simply died over the winter. (Wheat is often planted in the fall, then it produces seeds in the late spring.)

Lysenko was a fake scientist if there ever was one anywhere.

Another Soviet scientist, Nikolai Vavilov, was a real scientist. He studied genetics extensively and traveled the world to find seeds that carried the genetic basis of adaptation. He knew you had to breed cold-hardy wheat, not just freeze the seeds. Vavilov was a geneticist in the modern sense. In return for his scientific beliefs, he was imprisoned, where he died.

As soon as Stalin died, the Communists felt free, at last, to admit that they had created a “cult of personality” around Stalin, a cult that nearly destroyed the Soviet Union. The new leader, Nikita Kruschchev, was an enthusiastic promoter of agricultural research, after the pattern of Vavilov, not Lysenko. His enthusiasm was so great that he was called “Corn Cob.” When he visited America about 1968, one of his main interests was how Americans grew corn.

Once freed from the Stalin personality cult, conditions in the Soviet Union began to improve a lot, but not enough. The Soviet Union collapsed, and Russia began to enter the modern world of prosperity.

That is, until it entered another period of personality cult, this time centered on Vladimir Putin. Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is, as nearly as most of us can tell, just a personal whim of Putin. Maybe in the future Russia will see Putin as an evil dictator, and as destructive to Russia as was Stalin. A lot of pain and suffering remains ahead before that can happen.

 

Who Remembers the Threat of Nuclear Holocaust?

 

 

Back in 1984, many of us were worried that the election of Ronald Reagan would usher in an era of nuclear conflict. He rattled his sabers and was cheered as a war hero by the conservatives. Then it didn’t happen. Instead, he was open to the overtures of peace from a Soviet Empire that was, we now know, rapidly crumbling.

But back in and before 1984, there was no shortage of books that addressed the existential challenge of nuclear annihilation. One such book was The Caveman and the Bomb, which drew a comparison between the human desire for war and a Neanderthal mentality. It was quite a long and detailed book, but is perhaps best remembered for its cartoons, of which I provide four:

The authors tried to sound upbeat and, in so doing, addressed some fundamental issues. “We can say no to our Neanderthal mentality, to our genes. We are the only creatures on earth who can do this. We have this opportunity because our genes whisper to us, they do not shout…We can be greater than the sum of our genes. If that is our decision, evolution can’t do a thing about it. Making that decision is the supreme test of our humanity…”

It turned out to not be the supreme test of our humanity. As it happened, the Soviet Union simply could not keep up its military expenditures and needed a way to emerge from the arms race without losing too much face. I do not believe that either they or we have become better people as a result.

Today, we may not face an imminent nuclear threat, but the weapons are still there. And Trump, unlike Reagan, is a man who is just unstable, egotistical, and hateful enough that he might goad the other nuclear powers into new confrontations.