Divine Fury (46 page)

Conceived partly on the example of the French Panthéon, the Pantheon of Brains was intended as a resting place for the genius of
grands hommes
. Lenin’s brain was the chief attraction—a complement to his body, which was preserved not far away on Red Square—even if only half of it was displayed. The left side, which was severely damaged by the strokes that preceded his death, was hardly presentable as a model of Bolshevik perfection. Still, onlookers would doubtless have been able to detect what Vogt himself, in a preliminary report of 1929, claimed to have seen. “Our anatomical results,” he affirmed, “show Lenin to have been a mental athlete (
Assoziationsathlet
).” Long before the examination was complete, its findings were clear.
²²

In light of the extraordinary cult of genius that had grown up around Lenin even before his death, Vogt’s verdict is hardly surprising. It was in perfect harmony with popular sentiment and the party line. Grigory Evdokimov, deputy chair of the Leningrad Soviet, declared in his eulogy in 1924, “The world’s greatest genius has left us, this giant of thought, of will, of work, has died.” The chief mourner of the state funeral, Grigory Zinoviev, went so far as to claim that the “genius of Lenin” flew “with wings” over his own interment. Lenin was a “prophet of genius,” others maintained, whose insight had long foreseen the coming of the Revolution of 1917, and whose superhuman powers had achieved it. Peasants wrote in spontaneously, declaring their departed leader “the great genius of mankind, such as is hardly born once in a thousand years.” Artists
and intellectuals also did their part. The modernist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky outdid his comrades in drawing an extended, if unlikely, parallel between Lenin and Christ. “Lenin lived! Lenin lives! Lenin will live!” Mayakovsky wrote, in imitation of the memorial acclamation of the Eucharistic prayer, “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” The lines were purposely blasphemous, but they articulated nicely what was (and what still is) plainly visible in the mausoleum on Red Square: a once deeply Christian culture would find its redeemers and saints even in the midst of a materialist revolution. In Russia, as elsewhere, the genius served a religious role.
²³

Some made this role explicit. In his first book,
The Meaning of the Creative Act
(1916), the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev explained how the “cult of genius” would complement “the cult of saints” in the kingdom of tomorrow. “Genius is another kind of sainthood,” Berdyaev insisted, a sainthood of daring rather than obedience. But make no mistake. In his sacrifice and perfection, in his universality and appeal to a better world, the “genius is religious in nature,” Berdyaev noted, the harbinger of a more perfect human being and a more perfect world. Berdyaev, who was sympathetic to Marxism in his youth, later turned in the direction of an idiosyncratic Christianity pleasing neither to church nor state. The Russian Orthodox Church banished him, and then, in 1922, the Bolsheviks expelled him from the country. Both parties made their point. The worship of genius may be akin to a religious act, but such things should not be said aloud.
²⁴

Indeed, the question of religion in a state without religion was a delicate one for the Soviets, as it had been for previous revolutionary regimes and the theorists who imagined them. The French Revolution altered its calendar to culminate in festivals of genius, and bowed down before its Panthéon of great men. But its fledgling efforts to establish a civil religion to replace the one it swept away never took hold, leaving visionaries to ponder the question in the nineteenth century. The attempt by the French sociologist and founder of positivism Auguste Comte to sketch the outlines of a “Religion of Humanity” is the best known of these musings, and is altogether revealing of the role of genius in a world without God. In place of the
deus creator omnium
, Comte’s religion worshipped
homo creator
, or rather, the great creative geniuses and discoverers who had furthered human progress throughout history. The thirteen months of Comte’s liturgical calendar were named after pioneering individuals—Homer, Aristotle, Archimedes, Shakespeare, Gutenberg, Descartes—as were the days of the week. And so in the month of Shakespeare, one might say a prayer on Voltaire day, or perform a good deed on the day
of Lessing, Beethoven, Mozart, or Schiller. Genius would be worshipped throughout the year.
²⁵

However outlandish Comte’s Religion of Humanity might now seem, its readiness to replace the Creator God with the creative genius as an object of veneration was symptomatic of a wider tendency in European culture. But in the Marxist context, there was a problem with this type of transmutation, and Lenin himself addressed it explicitly. When the news that the good leader had miraculously survived a second assassination attempt in 1918 provoked an outpouring of acclaim for the people’s “dear father,” “savior,” and “enlightened genius,” Lenin was reportedly indignant. “It is shameful to read,” he said from his hospital bed. “They exaggerate everything, call me a genius, some kind of special person. . . . All our lives we have waged an ideological struggle against the glorification of the personality of the individual; long ago we settled the problem of heroes.” The comments were reported secondhand, and Lenin may never actually have said them. But they were in perfect keeping with the right principles of Marxist doctrine. Marx himself ridiculed the practice of “bowing to nature’s noble and wise: the cult of genius,” as he described it in a scathing review of the writings of Thomas Carlyle. And although it might be possible to talk of “social genius”—the creative strength that arose from collective endeavor—to idealize the individual as a being apart was to slip into a reactionary bourgeois rhetoric. Classes made history, not great men, and social forces shaped the ideas and events of any given epoch, not heroic individuals.
²⁶

If Marxist doctrine was thus in inherent tension with the cult of genius, this was even more the case with respect to the eugenically inflected brain science promoted by the circle around Vogt. For, in effect, such men sought to reduce human ability to innate biological difference, separating geniuses from all others on the basis of qualities that were inborn. The fact that even those sympathetic to Marxism could continue to sustain such claims testifies to the power and prevalence of the belief in original genius—a belief that since the eighteenth century had militated against explanations that placed a greater emphasis on human conditioning and environment. But the contradiction with basic Marxist tenets of human equality and the primacy of the social was too great to sustain. Increasingly the eugenics movement in Russia came under attack. Had not conservatives always explained human differences on the basis of biology in order to avoid addressing social conditions? It was a question raised by a critic in the main Bolshevik journal of Marxist theory in 1925. The article, entitled “Human Heredity and Selection: On the Theoretical Premises of Eugenics,” made clear that these
premises were not at all consistent with the teachings of Marx, who held that “people are the product of conditions and education.” Such voices steadily grew bolder, and although some Russian eugenicists sought refuge in a form of Lamarckian environmentalism, arguing that social conditions shaped acquired characteristics that were then passed on through the genes, the science was already dated outside the USSR. Rather than compromise their core beliefs, most eugenicists simply ceded, in the end, to public and party pressure.
²⁷

Those who didn’t risked disfavor. When the American eugenicist Hermann J. Muller suggested to Stalin in 1936 that “it would be possible within only a few generations to bestow the gift even of so-called ‘genius’ upon practically every individual in the population,” Stalin ordered an attack on his work. Muller, resident at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow as a communist sympathizer since 1933, was lucky to escape with his life. He had spent a year at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of the Brain in Berlin prior to his arrival in the Soviet Union. But he returned now to Columbia University in the United States, where, improbably, he was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1946. The fate of genius in the USSR, however, was different. By 1930, the eugenics movement there was all but finished, ceding its place to the Neo-Lamarckian theories favored by the notorious Trofim Lysenko, who would emerge as Stalin’s most influential biologist. The
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
wrote the epitaph of the movement the following year. Eugenics, it noted damningly, was a “bourgeois doctrine.”
²⁸

As with eugenics, so with Dr. Vogt and the Pantheon of Brains, which closed to the public in 1930. Vogt’s Moscow Brain Institute was taken over by the Communist Academy in March of that year, depriving the German scientist of any further influence over its direction. Although Vogt himself continued to counsel his Russian colleagues from abroad, he no longer traveled to the Soviet Union, and with Hitler’s rise, he was barred from doing so. Stripped of his directorship of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in 1935 on account of his political sympathies, he was forced to join the German Army as a private in his sixties.

Yet research on Lenin’s brain continued, and in 1936, the committee of scientists, now headed by Vogt’s onetime Russian assistant Semion Aleksandrovich Sarkisov, delivered its final report. Lenin’s brain had been studied in comparison with those of other prominent Soviet citizens collected by the Moscow Brain Institute, including the great novelist Maxim Gorky, the physiologist and Nobel Prize winner Ivan Petrovich Pavlov, and Mayakovsky. Mayakovsky, disillusioned by the course of the revolution, shot himself in April 1930, before Lenin could rise from
the dead and come again. Not surprisingly, Lenin’s brain bested them all, showing extremely “high organization” and topping the charts on a number of indices associated with “speech, recognition, action,” and other “processes requiring great diversity and richness of cognitive powers,” including an “exceptionally high functioning of the higher nervous system.” Lenin, party officials could rest assured, was a genius.
²⁹

But what really had been revealed? When Vogt and Semashko had begun their venture in 1924, they had hoped, as Semashko had declared in an article published in Berlin’s Communist Party newspaper, the
Red Flag
, that their research would hasten the victory of materialism “in the area where metaphysics and dualism are still strong,” the study of genius. But their research in fact yielded a strikingly different conclusion, one highlighted by Stalin’s decision not to publicize any of the study’s findings, and to shroud both the study and the work of the Moscow Brain Institute in total secrecy. At first glance, the decision is puzzling. Why not proclaim Lenin’s genius as a “scientific” fact? It is true that the science could be contested—if not in the Soviet Union, then by researchers working abroad—and that was an eventuality that secrecy foreclosed. Secrecy, by this stage, moreover, had become an end in itself. But even more dangerously, the study made plain what the Pantheon of Brains had also (briefly) exposed: at the very highest levels of the Communist Party, apparatchiks harbored the belief that not all men were alike, that some were constitutionally better than others, that geniuses were a breed apart. Whatever Marx’s strictures regarding the “cult of genius,” a good many Bolsheviks shared that “bourgeois” faith. As Trotsky revealed to the party in a speech delivered in 1923 as Lenin lay on death’s door, “Lenin was a genius, a genius is born once in a century, and the history of the world knows only two geniuses as leaders of the working class: Marx and Lenin. No genius can be created even by the decree of the strongest and most disciplined party, but the party can try as far as possible to make up for the genius as long as he is missing, by doubling its collective exertions.”
³⁰

Trotsky, in the end, underestimated the power of the party. But he correctly identified the belief in genius that helped to sustain it, a belief that, however contradictory to Marx’s principles, was evident from the very moment of Marx’s death. Marx himself, in this respect, as in others, constituted the best refutation of his own beliefs. For just as the spectacular influence of his doctrines gave the lie to his assertion that social forces, not ideas, were the true movers of humanity, his own vast creative output summoned a label that few in the nineteenth century could refuse. “Marx was a genius; we others were at best talented,” Friedrich
Engels confessed, in downplaying the importance of his own efforts in their mutual labors. “What I contributed, Marx could very well have done without me.” Or, as Engels observed famously in delivering the funeral oration at Marx’s burial at London’s Highgate Cemetery on March 17, 1883, Marx was “to the laws of Human history what Darwin was to organic nature.” He had been “the greatest living thinker.” Even to a man who had spurned the cult, the title of genius could not be denied.
³¹

Nor was it. In a wave of encomia and hagiographic literature, Marx’s genius was affirmed again and again, and Lenin was the direct heir to that praise. If Marx was the genius of theory, Lenin was the genius of praxis, the “genius of revolution,” as Stalin affirmed in
Pravda
following the Russian leader’s death. It was to that title that Stalin himself lay claim. Marx’s devoted servant, Lenin’s watchful keeper, Stalin, too, would be a creator of history, “the wisest man of the century,” the “genius of the age.” As the Kazakh poet Dzhambul Dzhabaev declared, “the genius of Lenin burns on in Stalin.”
³²

Stalin’s success in keeping that flame alive had nothing to do with the materialist science of the brain. But the Moscow Brain Institute continued to do its work in secrecy, nonetheless, and in fact long outlived the supreme leader and the genius of the age. It was collecting notable specimens into the 1980s, when it acquired the brain of A. D. Sakharov, the once-loyal nuclear physicist who later became a dissident and human rights activist and who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975. Even today, the work of the Moscow Brain Institute remains a closely kept secret. Access to its collections is denied to Western researchers, including the author of this book. But then, as Zilsel aptly perceived, the cult of genius, whatever its pretensions to the contrary, was never about science, but rather about filling the emotional needs of the people in ways that religion had long supplied. Rather than draw the people’s gaze to a place in the brain that reminded them of what they could never be, far better to raise their eyes aloft to a living genius who was their perfect expression and keeper. Where neither God nor kings nor democratic mandate could confer legitimacy, genius would take its place.