\n(Trofim Lysenko. Geneticist and Loon.)<\/p>\n
\n(Trofim Lysenko. Geneticist and Loon.)<\/p>\n
I am going to tell you a story this morning. It is about history, and it is real. It is also true, if that means anything these days.<\/p>\n
Oddly, I come to the same conclusions as one of the Moon Bats who populate the groves of academe. I mentioned Dr. Kari Marie Norgaard yesterday in passing, and she will be back in the narrative tomorrow.<\/p>\n
It is worth talking about her fable, presented at the Planet Under Pressure Conference in London this week. She is not a scientist, though she does read about it as many of us do. She is a self-described specialist in gender issues and tribal environmental issues. She roams the outer limits of fuzzy social issues and applies them to scenarios of doom.<\/p>\n
The Conference where she presented her paper was attended by people who have a fervent desire to save the world.<\/p>\n
We talked the other day about how perfectly normal people with decent souls came to believe that the world was on the brink of disaster after the Great War, and that radical change had to be implemented to avoid catastrophe. Alger Hiss was one of them- a likeable, handsome young man who decided, without apparent malice aforethought, to join the Communist Party of the United States and then to betray his country.<\/p>\n
There were many good people of his ilk. In no way do I assert that he was stupid or even ill intentioned. It is entirely possible that he considered himself and his comrades to be the vanguard of a brave new world that would eliminate injustice, inequality and the despoliation of rampant and voracious nationalism.<\/p>\n
That is not to say that I do not consider him a traitorous fool. There are plenty of smart fools. Look around you.<\/p>\n
\n(Harold Ware in his days at the Agriculture Department.)<\/p>\n
One of my favorites of the smart, arrogant and desperately wrong-headed was a fellow named Harold Ware. Among other things, he ran a communist cell in the Department of Agriculture in the early 1930s, and at least for a time was the handler of Alger Hiss. That was before the Party determined that Hiss was a smart man on the rise, and that his connections to the espionage ring should be minimized to prevent his valuable career to be jeopardized. Ditto for Harry Hopkins in FDR\u2019s White House, and Harry Dexter White at Treasury.<\/p>\n
It was a slick operation conducted by smart people who harbored the belief that they could make a better world. I am not Red Baiting here- I am just telling the story the way it happened.<\/p>\n
That was back in the day when association with radical progressivism was considered a negative career move. We have got beyond that. I mean, Communism is on the ash heap of history, right? The Cold War is done, we have all moved on.<\/p>\n
This is a case study of how a smart, likeable guy wound up in bed with a Soviet Theorist. Not that there is anything wrong with that, mind you. I am a progressive myself. It was the Soviet who pioneered the idea that disagreement with the Party Line was an indication of mental instability, and the recommended course of treatment was confinement in a mental institution.<\/p>\n
His name was Trofim Lysenko. He was a smart guy, too, like all these people. His specialty was biology, and specifically its application to agronomy. He was a visionary and mystical thinker who managed the scientific component of the famous Five Year Plans of the USSR.<\/p>\n
With the passing of Lenin, Stalin assumed ever increasing central power through his position as the Party\u2019s General Secretary. In the later 1920s, the Leninist New Economic Plan, as modified by War Communism necessitated by the civil war, contained some elements of a market economy. This was the topic of intense discussion between old Bolshies Bukharin, Tomsky and Rykov (who would take Lenin\u2019s job), who favored the NEP, and the more radical Trotsky, Zinoviev and Kamenev. The former considered the existing construct to provide sufficient state control of the economy. The latter group believed that a great leap forward was necessary to wrest the Union out of poverty and industrialize at all costs.<\/p>\n
The land of the former nobles has been confiscated by the Decree on Land, and nationalized under the 1922 Land Code. Collectivization of agriculture was established as the long-term goal, though due to the exigencies of the war against the revanchist Whites, peasants had been allowed to work the land with surplus production to basic needs being bought by the state at decreed prices.<\/p>\n
The passing of the Land Code was a watershed in the advancement of the New Socialist State. A Bacon-and-Eggs American named Hal Ware was inspired to contribute his expertise to collectivization, and the improvement of Russian traditional agricultural methods. Hal came from a family of energetic and smart progressive people. His mother was a life-long community organizer and Socialist. He joined the Communist party in 1919 at its founding as a thirty-year old former professional farmer.<\/p>\n
In his book \u201cWitness,\u201d Whittaker Chambers described him \u201cas indistinguishable as everybody else. He stood about five feet nine, trim\u2026with a plain face, masked by a quiet earnestness of expression wholly reassuring to people whom quickness of mind makes uncomfortable. Nevertheless, his mind was extremely quick….\u201d<\/p>\n
Ware might have been a progressive country agent or a professor of ecology at an agricultural college. And yet there was something jaunty about the flip of his hat brim and his springy stride. In 1921, Ware took a six-month trip around the United States to examine the plight of migrant workers, following the harvest from trail for six months through the South to the Midwest to the Northwest and then back east again through the Upper Midwestern states.<\/p>\n
This experience, combined with his previous agricultural experience, cemented Ware’s place as the Party’s leading agricultural expert.
\nHe packed up the family in 1922 and traveled to Russia to implement his vision for the soil, tenant farmers and increased crop production for the new Soviet State. Things in the prospective worker\u2019s paradise were confused. Revanchists were still aboard in the land. Small farmers had yet to be consolidated. Elements of the old system had yet to be rooted out. Hal Ware was there to help.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin died in January of 1924, and the14th Party Congress in Moscow the next year was the first time the new leadership did not have his guidance. Stalin was in the background, his preferred position, preferring to move with indirection. At the time he sided with the \u201cmoderates\u201d of the Bukharin faction, but by 1927, had come around to the more aggressive statist stance of the Trotskyites.<\/p>\n
Under his direction, the first of the Five Year Plans was commissioned in 1928. The point was the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union. The smart people who wrote the plan recognized, however, that collectivization in agriculture was necessary to facilitate the creation of heavy industry. The creation of collective farms was the key initiative intended to leap-frog the old ways of small farms run by owner-operators.<\/p>\n
These petite bourgeois farmers were known as \u201ckulaks.\u201d Stalin, and his fellow travelers correctly believed them as a class to be hostile to the regime and oppressive, in turn, to the poorer peasants who did not own land. Of course, under the Land Code, no one owned anything. The theory, compounded by smart guys, was that collectivization would improve production and benefit the serfs.<\/p>\n
What actually happened was an exercise in the demonstration of unintended consequences. The terror inflicted on the working farmers, disruption of distribution, and lack of incentive made crop production collapse. All food and livestock were expropriated from the rural population.<\/p>\n
\u201cFamine was quite deliberately employed as an instrument of national policy, as the last means of breaking the resistance of the peasantry to the new system where they are divorced from personal ownership of the land and obligated to work on the conditions which the state may demand from them…\u201d William H. Chamberlin, British correspondent.<\/p>\n
Millions died, and the agriculture sector was in chaos. It was not in The Plan.<\/p>\n
Something needed to be done. Stalin knew that urgent and desperate measures were called for. The Revolution itself was at risk.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
(Hal Ware\u2019s donated tractors helped collectivization. Trofim Lysenko provided the doctrine and theory.)<\/p>\n
A smart Ukrainian scientist named Trofim Lysenko was just the man with the answer, and claimed he could radically increase production with dynamic new scientific methods. Stalin put him in charge of fixing the problem. The contributions of Harold Ware were useful to him, though they of course did not work. By the time of the famine, Hal was back in America, working at Agriculture. He was a smart guy, and people liked him.<\/p>\n
It was too bad about that tendency he had to drive too fast.<\/p>\n
I will have to tell you about that, and Dr. Lysenko\u2019s remarkable career tomorrow. The hot water is out this morning at Big Pink, and if I am going to be fresh for the office, I need to be moving along.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.vicsocotra.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/04\/041212-5.gif\" "\\"041212-5\\"")
\n(Uncle Joe looks on as Lysenko outlines The Plan.)<\/p>\n
Copyright 2012 Vic Socotra
\nwww.vicsocotra.com<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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