Chapter 76:
Chapter 76
In fact, apart from being ignorant and stupid, what did Khrushchev do so wrong?
His problem was his simplicity.
The real culprit was Lysenko, that bastard.
“You said you planted corn on that vast land, right? What would have happened then? The people would have starved to death without producing enough food, and we would have wasted a lot of resources, time and labor. If you really did that, you would be executed, executed.”
“Uh…”
“I won’t execute you this time. Don’t go near agriculture from now on. You seem to be corrupt. You’re like a bald Ukrainian… Do you want to make the land bald too because you have no hair? Get out of here!”
“Yes! Yes! Comrade Secretary!”
Khrushchev had to run back to his seat without even shaking off the hot ash.
He had switched places with someone who was farthest from the head seat and barely visible in the corner.
It was humiliating for him who had been on the rise, but…
It was rather a kindness from his colleagues.
Why? Because I would get angry every time I saw him.
“Dr. Lysenko.”
“Yes! Comrade Secretary!”
He seemed to have a hunch that something big had happened.
He looked at me with a tearful face like a cow being dragged to the slaughterhouse, but I didn’t feel like showing him any mercy.
Actually, Lysenko could be considered a victim too.
All regimes, regardless of left or right, tried to fit natural science into ideology.
The fascists who believed in eugenics or phrenology, the imperialists who compared the survival of the fittest principle to liberalism, and the Soviet scientists who brought in unverified theories like the use-disuse principle to create a ‘Soviet human’.
The Soviet leadership may have sacrificed him to cover up their failures in pursuing their ambitious projects.
But this guy – of course, Stalin did the purge – slandered geneticists like Pavlov as spies of the West and drove them out, and manipulated the scientific community with his pseudoscience.
Now I had to show them something shocking.
To those scoundrels who tried to deceive people with manipulation and deception…
“Take him out.”
“Comrade Secre… ugh! Ugh!”
He struggled too.
He wanted to live.
That was the instinct of living things.
But who asked for it?
Bang! Bang! Bang!
A few shots were heard outside.
They would clean up the mess themselves.
It was clear that something had happened, but it was more terrifying that there was no trace of it.
It implied that there was something more horrible and gigantic.
I filled my pipe with tobacco again and lit it up.
“Hoo…”
The time for purge was over.
Now it was time for education.
I knew too many things that were unimaginable at this time in the future.
It would not be discovered until after the war that DNA was the medium that transmitted genes of living things, and the double helix would be discovered in the 60s.
Breeding?
It was still very primitive.
Even if I only had high school biology knowledge, it was still unknown and mysterious here.
The structure of DNA double helix, plant polyploid reproduction by colchicine treatment, Calvin cycle structure in photosynthesis, these are things that can be learned in high school biology 2, but many of them have not been discovered yet.
Of course, I don’t know how to do the experiments to find out these things, and I only know them superficially, but I can just leave them to the scientists.
It was enough to make them gape if I asked them if it was important.
“That guy, Trofim Lysenko, turned out to be a fraud. He has been deceiving us with his nice-sounding words of ‘Soviet science’… but I received a report that his research is unverified, irreproducible and completely wrong.”
There is no report. But I had to say that to convince them.
It’s better to say that there is some ‘objective’ evidence than to say that he is a fraud because I compared him with the information in my head.
Someone might say that I trust too much information from America or foreign countries, but what would they do if they said that and became the next executioner?
I wouldn’t execute them that much, but ‘I’ must look like Stalin to them now.
“Don’t lie to me. I hate being lied to the most. Lysenko reported false information and made us think that investing in him would bring good results. His claim of vernalization? Where is the evidence that it works for all grains? Bring me the evidence. Evidence.”
They would still bring me fabricated evidence and try to take care of their own interests by avoiding the eyes of the powerful authorities.
This chronic corruption, where the local party bureaucrats and public enterprises became one, plagued the communist countries to the end.
Even though Stalin purged the local party corruption in Volga, Ivanovo and other places, by the end of his reign, the bureaucrats in the Ural Federal District were bold enough to bribe and bring in wrong large-scale infrastructure investments.
In the late Soviet era, they became nomenklatura and tore apart the Soviet Union for their own greed.
In China?
Are the words like Great Leap Forward, Shanghai Gang not enough to explain?
Corruption had to be punished.
I could see that those who had been close to Lysenko were trembling.
Yeah, I don’t know what you got and what you did, but Lysenko is gone now.
“Pavlov’s gene theory has been verified. Pavlov will be rehabilitated. His background may be bourgeois, and his theory may be too.
But what benefits the Soviet Union, the homeland of the world proletariat, is Marxist-Leninist and proletarian, and what doesn’t is reactionary. Pavlov is a scientist of the proletariat and Lysenko is a reactionary. It’s a simple principle.”
Pavlov, who could be called the father of Soviet biology, had a background that was perfect for being accused of being a bourgeois, as he had studied in Western Europe.
He praised Lysenko’s discovery of vernalization and recommended him to the authorities, but Lysenko stabbed him in the back and denounced his gene theory as ‘bourgeois’ because it admitted the innate limitations.
So he was purged and… now an NKVD agent was on his way to the gulag where he was imprisoned.
Fortunately, the seed bank that Pavlov had built in Leningrad before his purge was intact, and with this, the Soviet Union would be able to improve its agricultural problems that had plagued it from its birth to its demise. And…
“Beria.”
“Yes? Comrade Secretary?”
“There are… local varieties of dwarf wheat that are short and have thick ears in Korea and Japan. You must get them at all costs. I heard that the Fascist Italians bred a similar variety and increased their wheat production tremendously.”
“Yes! Comrade Secretary!”
The Green Revolution, which led to a huge increase in grain production in the real history of the 1960s, was based on hybridization with dwarf wheat varieties.
Dwarf wheat had the effect of increasing production by concentrating all the nutrients on the ears instead of growing long stems, and it could also confer disease resistance by hybridizing with different varieties.
A wheat variety called Sonora 64, created by an agronomist named Norman Borlaug, doubled the grain production in Mexico and South Asia, and the Soviet Union had to do the same.
I just had to tell them the direction and where to find what and what to do, and they would bring me the results by grinding the agronomists.
“And we also need to produce chemical fertilizers. This is possible by changing some equipment in the gunpowder factory, but… if you want to produce corn that the bald Ukrainian likes, you need a lot of, a lot of fertilizer.”
Khrushchev flinched. He must have sensed that he wouldn’t die from the way I said it jokingly. But his future didn’t look bright either.
“We are materialists. We should know that we can’t increase production dramatically by just putting more labor into it.
Of course, there are heroic workers everywhere… but if we supply them with more fertilizers, more tractors and agricultural machines, more materials, even those who are not heroic can achieve heroic results.
Now we have to think about investing in agriculture.
The collective farms have had some effect in transforming the petty-bourgeois peasants into ‘Soviets’.
But if collective farms make Soviets lazy and inefficient, then they are clearly reactionary devices. Each society should have its own distribution form of means of production that suits it, and collective farms… need evaluation.”
The old Bolsheviks who wished for Stalin had been arguing about collective farms since before Lenin’s death.
The right-wing party members like Bukharin wanted to go in the direction of acknowledging rich peasants and increasing productivity through the New Economic Policy.
Stalin?
As everyone knows, he smashed the rich peasant class and forced all the peasants into collective farms, using agriculture as a convenient wallet.
This certainly helped industrialization.
The grains that were exported at a cheap price were a good source of food for the urban workers, and many people left the hopeless countryside and came to the city.
But the chronic low efficiency and low productivity of agriculture hampered the Soviet Union’s progress.
The crops that were secretly grown in gardens accounted for almost a quarter of the total production, and the vast and fertile land was turned into useless land by those who worked sloppily just to avoid punishment.
Could I dismantle the collective farms that had caused this disaster with my own hands, who had fervently supported them?
I don’t know. But eventually many real socialist countries gave up collective farms.
‘My’ enemy Trotsky criticized the rapid collectivization of the Soviet Union and argued that collectivization should be carried out only after sufficient agricultural machinery and fertilizers were supplied.
He might be right.
It was useless to collectivize small-scale farms where production was influenced by individual efforts ‘or something’.
It only reduced their motivation to work.
But if enough machinery and fertilizers were supplied and it was much more advantageous to cooperate with many people, then agriculture could be industrialized and peasants could become specialized ‘agricultural workers’.
“I want you all to remember this. What helps the Soviet Union is proletarian, and what doesn’t is bourgeois. Not the other way around. Khrushchev!”
“Yes! Comrade Secretary!”
“Which cat is better, a white cat or a black cat?”
“Huh?”
Khrushchev seemed confused by the sudden question.
I took another puff of my pipe.
The bodyguard quickly lit it up again and the fragrant tobacco smell tickled my nose.
Hoo… stupid bastard. He couldn’t understand even though I told him like that.
“Of course, a cat that catches mice well is a good cat. You’re like a bald Ukrainian.”
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