The Life of Permafrost by Pey-Yi Chu;

Author:Pey-Yi Chu;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Figure 2. Redozubov’s diagrams of temperature changes in the layer of vechnaia merzlota given a warming climate (above) and a cooling climate (below). Translated and reproduced from Trudy Instituta merzlotovedeniia (1946). Drawn by Kate Blackmer.

As Shvetsov, Kudryavtsev, and Kolesnikov’s article showed, in 1947, INMERO scientists were already engaging with Marxism-Leninism in their scientific thought. By 1948, the party had launched a campaign for “creative discussions” in the sciences as part of efforts to reassert control of Soviet intellectual life.65 Taking their cue from the Party leadership, INMERO scientists strove to fulfil the official mandate of fostering “criticism in science and the struggle of opinions.”66 They took issues of theory and terminology to the floor of increasingly contentious meetings at INMERO. Directives from above coincided with initiatives from below. The advent of the “creative discussions” campaign provided an opportunity to simultaneously comply with the regime’s demands and force a conversation about foundational concepts in their field. It simultaneously promoted and distorted scientific debate. Besides a battle of ideas, the pressure from above encouraged political posturing and dogmatism.

INMERO scientists’ terminology campaign tracked key moments in the Communist Party’s campaign for creative discussions. After August 1948, when Stalin endorsed the Michurinist biology of Trofim Lysenko, INMERO held a meeting that explicitly placed the issue of terminology on the agenda. The meeting got underway with a report by deputy director Nikolai Tsytovich. Deploying party jargon, Tsytovich denounced instances of “formalism,” “scholasticism,” and “naked empiricism” in frozen earth research. He drew particular attention to the appearance of faulty terms and concepts in the literature. Building on this criticism, Pavel Koloskov, chair of a department within the Obruchev Institute, asserted that the very expression vechnaia merzlota was part of the problem. Repeating Sergei Parkhomenko’s argument from a decade earlier – although without mentioning him explicitly – Koloskov pointed out that frozen earth was not in fact “eternal,” since “in a preceding geological epoch, under different climatic conditions,” it would not have existed, and “in the future, given a severe change in climate,” it could disappear. Koloskov also unwittingly echoed another critic of Sumgin, Elenevskii, by adding that, with its “idealistic undertone,” vechnaia merzlota gave the wrong impression of “tremendous stability.” The term therefore “exaggerates the difficulty of the far-reaching management” of frozen earth, a goal that carried great political significance given Soviet ambitions of industrializing the peripheries. As the discussion escalated, Tsytovich was moved to declare, “We need to expressly take up the question of terminology. What is vechnaia merzlota? What is the entire range of phenomena connected with vechnaia merzlota?”67

In March 1951, INMERO held another meeting concerning terminology, this time inspired by the “genius work of I.V. Stalin, ‘Marxism and Questions of Linguistics.’” During the previous year, Stalin had publicly intervened in an academic debate about the origins and development of language by publishing articles in Pravda. In his writings, he underlined the importance of “a battle of opinions” and “freedom of criticism” for scientific progress.68 His pronouncement precipitated a new wave of discussions among scientists.

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