Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday: The Genius Who Spied for Stalin

by Gavan Tredoux

Overview

John Burdon Sanderson Haldane F.R.S. (1892–1964) was one of the leading scientists of the twentieth century, renowned for helping, through statistical wizardry, to reconcile Darwin’s theory of natural selection with Mendel’s discovery of genes. The product of a distinguished family of scientists and public figures, “JBS” trained and influenced a swathe of students and colleagues at Oxford, Cambridge, and University College London, many of whom, such as the evolutionary theorist John Maynard Smith, went on to distinction in their own right.

As a widely known left-wing “public intellectual,” Haldane gained fame as a popularizer of science and commentator on public affairs, broadcasting often on the BBC and publishing extensively in newspapers and magazines. His collections of popular scientific essays influenced a generation of upcoming scientists and remain in print today. On his death in 1964, he was accorded the rare tribute of a televised self-obituary on the BBC.

Celebrated for his ability to connect seemingly disparate subjects, during the Second World War Haldane was extensively involved in scientific research to aid the British war effort. Using evidence gathered from VENONA Signals Intelligence intercepts, MI5 files, and the Haldane papers, this book reveals that Haldane was also a Soviet spy—a member of the “X Group,” an espionage ring that was run out of the Soviet Embassy in London. His interlocking associations with other spies, such as Ivor Montagu and Hans Kahle; his role as a hardline Stalinist propagandist through the onset of the Cold War; his betrayal of his colleague and friend, the Soviet geneticist Nikolai Vavilov; his long-standing support for the charlatan Soviet “scientist” Trofim D. Lysenko; and his concealed stalemate with the Communist Party of Great Britain once his ability to finesse Lysenko was extinguished, are unraveled here for the first time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781594039836
Publisher:	Encounter Books
Publication date:	04/24/2018
Pages:	464
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.50(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Gavan Tredoux is a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute and a mathematician and statistician by training, with extensive interests in the history of science (galton.org, burtoniana.org). He was a Senior Scientist in Research and Development at Xerox PARC, and currently works in the field of data science.

Table of Contents

Abbreviations ix

Introduction 1

1 Early Days 9

2 With Vavilov in the Soviet Union 33

3 The Thirties 39

4 Stalindphilia 69

5 War on One Front 89

6 Ivor Montagu and the X Group 101

7 The Fate of Vavilov 121

8 Experiments in the Revival of Organisms 133

9 It is your party duty, Comrade! 143

10 Lysenko and Lamarxis 159

11 Social Biology 203

12 Animal Behavior from London to India 217

13 A Certain Amount of Murder 233

Appendices

Appendix 1 Why I am [a] Cooperator 245

Appendix 2 Haldane on the Nazi-Soviet Pact 299

Appendix 3 Self-Obituary 307

Appendix 4 Venona Intercepts 313

Appendix 5 In Support of Lysenko 331

Notes 339

Early Gulag Memoirs and Descriptions 365

Bibliography 369

Index 383

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Gavin Tredoux's devastating portrait of J.B.S. Haldane is a tour de force. It combines thorough research and clear writing to expose this famous scientist as a dishonest and disgusting ideologue, Stalinist, and spy.”

—Harvey Klehr


“Gavan Tredoux has produced a thoroughly documented, insightful, and authoritative examination of JBS Haldane’s life as a leading evolutionary geneticist of his generation, unwavering Stalinist, and Soviet spy. Tredoux provides a honest and (for Haldane) embarrassing account of Haldane’s apologizing and excuse-making for the genetic theories of Trofim Lysenko, the Stalin supported pseudoscience that set Soviet genetics back several generations. Tredoux’s account is an indispensable book for anyone interested in Haldane and a telling example of how ideological fanaticism can corrupt even a brilliant and talented scientist.”

—John Earl Haynes, coauthor of Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America and In Denial: Historians, Communism, and Espionage.


“In the 1970’s and 1980’s I experienced the attacks launched by Marxist oriented biologists, many quite brilliant scholars, against researchers who studied genetic influence on human behavior. Their venom, dishonesty and righteousness made it clear that they were engaged in much more than a “scientific debate”. They were engaged in ideological warfare. Fortunately their weapons were not lethal like those used by their fellow comrades in Russia 50-60 years earlier. The corruption of science and scholarship by ideology so exquisitely delineated in this book is a seriously understudied phenomenon. Nevan Sesardic has made a strong start with regard to philosophers (When Reason Goes on Holiday: Philopsophers in Politics). Gavan Tredoux has now added the brilliant and compromised evolutionary biologist Comrade JBS Haldane to that sorry group.

The intellectual cost created by obedient commitment to an ideology versus a commitment to science and the truth is nicely illustrated by the contrast between two men – Comrade Haldane and Vladimir Pavlovich Efroimson. Both men were distinguished evolutionary geneticists – each had solved the problem of estimating the human mutation rate. Haldane sold his soul, published prolifically, defended his ideology to his death and remains famous. Efroimson who repeatedly confronted authority with courage and integrity was sent to the Gulag. Even in the 1970’s his voluminous sociobiological writings were banned and his major books on the topic only appeared posthumously in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. He remains obscure. Perhaps Charlotte Haldane, who in the face of evidence overcame her own ideological blindness, was correct – The truth will out. Tredoux’s fascinating chronicle should hurry the truth along.”

—Professor Thomas Bouchard Jr.


“Political irrationality among great scientists is no longer news. But Gavan Tredoux tells the story of a uniquely egregious case in which a highly influential scientist did all of the following: (1) publicly supported a totalitarian regime that was responsible for the deaths of millions of its own people; (2) for years defended an obvious scientific crackpot in his own field of research; (3) opposed the efforts of many scholars who tried to raise the alarm about the politically motivated destruction of his own discipline in a foreign country; (4) helped conceal the reality of the massive persecution, arrests, torture and murder of his own colleagues; (5) received on trust the classified information from his own government and then shared it with the secret police of a foreign totalitarian power. If you want to learn more about this drastic example of the trahison des clercs, read Tredoux’s dark and gripping book.”

—Neven Sesardić