Tibor Szamuely:
Soviet censorship
The Medvedev Papers Zhores A. Medvedev translated by Vera Rich (Macmillan. £4.95) Ten years ago a young Soviet scientist, Zhores Medvedev, began writing a book about the reign of Lysenko in Soviet biology. In calm, dispassionate tone, with a wealth of previously unknown factual detail, Medvedev described the ghastly dictatorship established over Russian science by a half-crazed ignorant charlatan. World-famous scientists were carted off to gaol and killed; hundreds of others — the more fortunate ones — were deprived of their posts and ended their days in poverty-stricken exile. A whole branch of science, genetics, was officially abolished. Quacks were installed as academicians and police spies took the place of professors.
Medvedev proved a trifle over-optimistic: he thought that with Stalin's death the rule of unreason had come to an end. It had not — nor, to this day, has it shown any signs of doing so.
In his concluding chapter Dr Medvedev sought an explanation for the grisly events he described. Lysenko's theory, as Medvedev rightly stated, was but one of those false doctrines that constantly crop up in the course of scientific research, only to be rejected when put to the test and proved wrong. Why then did it come instead to be elevated to the position of Holy Writ? The lesson Medvedev drew, though formulated with proper caution, was self-evident: such things are bound to happen in a society where a monolithic ideological party is in total control of all means of communication and lays down the law in all fields of thbught. Lysenkoism was the biological mirror-image of Marxism-Leninism itself.
All this is quite comprehensible, if rather frightening. What really passes the understanding is why so many people, including so many scientists, continue to maintain a fanatical faith in false doctrines long after these have been exploded by every possible test of empirical evidence — when, moreover, they are not even compelled to do so by an omnipotent party-state and the fear of harsh reprisals.
Dr Medvedev has now produced an exhaustive study of a limited though vitally important aspect of everyday Soviet life: the rules and regulations governing the foreign travel and foreign correspondence of Soviet citizens. He has pursued his research in this field with the admirable thoroughness and perseverence one has come to expect of him. (So far he has got off extremely lightly by Soviet standards: only losing his job and spending a month in a lunatic asylum — the minimum price for speaking out of turn.) In minute detail, using every scrap of information he could unearth and carefully describing each stage of his experiments, Dr Medvedev has told us all there is to know on the subject.
Here is a partial list of the facts he has so painstakingly established. Every single foreign visit of a Soviet citizen, even a simple tourist trip, must be approved by the Exit Commission of the Central Committee of the Communist Party — something more difficult than getting a security clearance for secret work. All correspondence with abroad is censored, and offending letters are not allowed through (and their authors sometimes punished). Travel to the satellites is almost as difficult as to the 'capitalist West.' Nobody is allowed to enter the 100-miledeep security zone along the border with Finland. All foreign publications coming to the USSR, including the most abstruse scientific journals, are censored, and any items of a remotely political nature cut out (ironically, these are usually letters to the editor from progressive British and American scientists protesting against the iniquities of their governments). Every scrap of waste paper in which foreign goods have been wrapped is ceremoniously burned in the presence of official representatives. And so on and so forth.
Medvedev is not merely an imperturbable chronicler of the brutality and folly of the Soviet regime: he is deeply concerned for the future of his long-suffering nation. He has very definite views on how these problems are to be solved. And here, for all one's sympathy, one must express some reservations. "Political dictatorship," Medvedev believes, "must gradually be replaced by particular forms of the scientific organization of ruling society, based on a profound intellectual analysis of the prospects of the world." But why should this solution be any better than Lenin's or Stalin's or Mao's? For is not the communist system a form of organization based on " scientific socialism," and Marxism — a profound intellectual analysis of human society? Heaven preserve us from yet another scientific model of the ideal polity.
Scientists and scholars the world over, proclaims Medvedev, constitute a group which is "the standard-bearer and motive force" of the progress of mankind. That, I am afraid, is where he is greatly mistaken. (Medvedev himself must have realised this by now : in an addendum he describes how, of the seven ' honest ' scientific colleagues to whom he had confided his problems, five instantly denounced him to the authorities.) The reception of The Medvedev Papers in this country also shows that, whatever scientists may think of one thing or another, many of them hold highly idiosyncratic views on the nature of freedom and the free society.
All the journalistic reviewers, simple souls that they are, expressed their horror at the state of affairs recorded by Medvedev. Not so the three scientific contributors to the discussion of The Medvedev Papers. Dr Alex Comfort advises " embittered enemies of the Soviet Union" (in the slipshod way in which many scientists write of politics, he really means the Soviet regime) to "keep quiet about this book" — which means I shouldn't be reviewing it either. As for the friends of the Soviet Union: why, they should keep quiet too, and "stay out of what is in form an internal Soviet problem." Only in form, you see, because in reality the evils described by Medvedev appear in an even more dangerous form in the " Friworld," as Comfort contemptuously calls the world in which he is free to write such rubbish. The rulers of Russia, he explains further, are no more than "a prissy collection of ideological Lord Longfords." Anyone who is incapable of distinguishing between Lord Longford and his committee and Brezhnev and his KGB had better see his oculist, urgently.
Another scientific reviewer, Avrion Mitchison, after giving a fair summary of the book, poses the question, " Is there a moral for us?" — and suddenly ends his article with a wild diatribe against President Nixon, his "tough-minded administrators" and all he is doing, especially his plans for developing cancer research. Amazing.
The prize exhibit is provided by Dr Ralph Cooper, a British friend of Medvedev's (favourably mentioned in the book). Dr Cooper informs us, first, that Medvedev is "a convinced Communist." This is, quite simply, untrue: Medvedev, specifically states that he is not, and has never been, a member of the Communist party — which is what " Communist " means. Second, Dr Cooper explains that we have nothing to be proud about: Britain is "not immune from bureaucratic interference not so very different from the restrictions described by Zhores." What an interesting observation! How many times, I wonder, has Dr Cooper been refused a passport? Or had his letters stopped? Or his books confiscated?
Above all, Dr Cooper worries about the book being "used as an instrument of general anti-Soviet comment by Western journalists." Anti-Soviet comment, I assume, means comment hostile to the Soviet regime. Why, I wonder, should Western journalists be restrained from commenting unfavourably on the barbaric and inhuman practices of the Soviet government, as described by Dr Cooper's friend, Zhores Medvedev? This special dispensation, needless to say, applies only to the most tyrannical regime in the world — the democracies are fair prey for every trendy crackpot. And what is the definition of "anti-Soviet "? In the USSR Medvedev's books, like those of Solzhenitsyn, Sin yavsky and others, are regarded as antiSoviet. But this is not the USSR, and Dr Cooper, thank goodness, is in no position to make us accept the rulings of the Soviet censorship.
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