Six hundred stone giants stand, or once stood, on a treeless speck of the South Pacific smaller than many airfields, some of them twenty metres tall, crowned with cylinders of red rock weighing thirty tons, carved and hauled and raised by a people who had no metal, no draught animals and no hoists. Nobody can read the wooden tablets they left behind. This is the sort of fact that opens The Riddles of Three Oceans, and the question Alexander Kondratov builds his book around is the one Easter Island has always provoked: how did so much civilisation come to rest on so little land? Could there have been more land once — a Pacific continent, now on the ocean floor, of which Easter Island is a surviving crumb? From that question the book fans out across all three great oceans and every science that might bear on it: geology, oceanography, archaeology, comparative linguistics, the study of where animals and plants are found and how they got there. It is, at bottom, a book about lost continents — Atlantis, Lemuria, a sunken Pacific land — written by a man determined to treat them as scientific problems rather than romances. That determination is what makes it worth reissuing, and worth reading with some care about where and when it was made.
Begin with the date, because in this series the date on the spine is rarely the date of the book. Progress Publishers put the English edition out in 1974, in Leonard Stoklitsky's translation, from the Russian Tayny tryokh okeanov. But the text itself belongs to the turn of the 1970s: the most recent work it cites — Louis Leakey's redating of early man, a 1968 monograph, references to underwater expeditions of the late sixties — runs out around 1968–69, and nothing later intrudes. So this is a book conceived at the close of the Khrushchev thaw and printed for the English-reading world half a decade on, in the détente years, when Moscow was keen to show the West a Soviet Union of laboratories and research fleets rather than tank divisions. It reached that world with the endorsement of the establishment: the foreword is signed by Academician S. Kalesnik — Stanislav Kalesnik, one of the country's most eminent geographers and long the president of the Geographical Society of the USSR — and the Russian edition carried a panel of scientific consultants in geology, history, geography, philology and chemistry. One of them repays a second look. The consultant in chemistry, N. F. Zhirov, was himself the Soviet Union's leading "Atlantologist," author of a fat scientific defence of Atlantis; a book that weighs the lost-continent hypotheses and mostly finds them wanting had, sitting on its own advisory board, the country's most committed believer. That is a fair emblem of the book's temper. It is a work of the Soviet popular-science machine at close to its best — and the popularisation of science for a mass readership was one of the things the Soviet state genuinely did well, turning out cheap, handsome, serious books on everything from cosmology to cuneiform for readers who were expected to be interested and treated as though they were intelligent.
Kondratov was a good instrument for that machine. A Leningrad linguist and biologist by training, he was one of the most productive popular-science writers of his generation, and he had a real specialism behind the breadth: he had worked on the computer-assisted decipherment of ancient scripts, including the proto-Indian writing of the Indus Valley, and the book's long central section on the Dravidian problem and the fall of Mohenjo-Daro is written from inside that work, not cribbed from it. This matters for how one reads him. The temptation with a book like this — a tour of Atlantises — is to expect a showman. Kondratov is closer to the opposite. Kalesnik's foreword makes the promise and the book keeps it: the author "does not try to impose any of the hypotheses on the reader," and "the conclusions he draws are extremely cautious, and in cases where there is insufficient data the question is left open." "This highly interesting book is intended for the general reader," Kalesnik adds — and it is, but a general reader who is trusted to follow an argument to a genuinely inconclusive end.
The genuine science is the body of the book, and it holds up remarkably well for its age. Kondratov's method is to let one discipline check another and to believe a conclusion only where they converge. The strongest single strand is zoogeography — the study of how animals come to be distributed as they are. Why is the Galaxias, a fish that cannot survive in salt water, found in the rivers of New Zealand and on scattered Pacific islands hundreds of kilometres from any continent? How did iguanas, poor swimmers, reach the Galápagos and Fiji? The old lost-continent theorists answered: land bridges, since sunk. Kondratov lays the argument out fairly, and then does the thing that separates science from folklore — he asks whether the newer earth sciences, plate tectonics and ocean-floor mapping among them, still need the bridge, and mostly finds they do not. He is equally good on the reverse move, where the sciences of the earth borrow a date from the sciences of man. His best worked example is close to home: on the Soviet Pacific coast, Neolithic shell-heaps are found not only along the present shore but kilometres inland and ten metres up, and from their matching contents the Soviet archaeologist A. Okladnikov and the geologist G. Ganeshin between them reconstructed how fast the coastline had risen — the spade dating the sea, the sea dating the spade. Passages like this are the book's real subject: not the lost continents, but the young discipline Kondratov is arguing into existence at the seam where geology and archaeology meet, the reading of "submarine outer space."
He is at his most bracing on the pseudoscience, and here the light critical history is worth a word, because the debunking is not neutral. The most seductive of the lost-continent systems in the West was Hanns Hörbiger's Welteislehre, or World Ice Theory — a cosmic doctrine in which the Moon was a late and catastrophic capture that drowned earlier civilisations — dressed up for a mass audience by the writer who called himself Bellamy. Kondratov's verdict is flat: "Bellamy's hypothesis is farfetched, to put it mildly," a fabric spun "only" from a calendar that has "not been authentically deciphered" and running "counter to fundamental findings of oceanography, geology, astronomy, archeology." He is just as dry about the Soviet science-fiction writer Alexander Kazantsev, who had the Tiahuanaco calendar left as a souvenir by visitors from Venus. This tidy-mindedness had a history the book does not dwell on but that a modern reader should hold in view: the Welteislehre Kondratov dismisses had been patronised in Nazi Germany at the highest levels, and the dream of a drowned Aryan homeland — Atlantis, Lemuria, Thule — had been thoroughly worked over by occultists and race-mystics before it reached the paperback racks. A Soviet materialist planting his feet against that whole tradition, and doing so without hysteria, is doing something more valuable than tidying a bibliography.
What keeps this from tipping into mere skepticism is that Kondratov refuses the easy sceptic's posture as firmly as the enthusiast's. His chapter on Atlantis sets the "Atlantophiles" against the "Atlantophobes" and finds both guilty of the same sin — certainty. The believers treat Plato's Timaeus and Critias as scripture: "Plato is their prophet." But the scoffers, who declare the question closed, speak "with as much confidence as though they themselves had witnessed events taking place 12,000 years ago." His own governing principle is that a legend may carry a "rational kernel" — that "even myths and legends can help because many have some foundation in fact" — and that the historian's job is to correct for the "prism of myths" through which real events reach us refracted. This is a thoroughly materialist reading of myth, and it is the intellectual spine of the book: not that the old stories are true, and not that they are lies, but that they are evidence, to be cross-examined like any other. The epilogue makes the discipline explicit, grading every claim by its probability in small capitals — it is INDISPUTABLE that sunken towns lie in coastal shallows; PROBABLE that land bridges helped early man disperse; "HIGHLY IMPROBABLE that big land masses, inhabited by large numbers of people who created ancient civilisations, ever existed in the Indian, Pacific or Atlantic oceans." And then the honest coda, refusing to slam even the improbable door: "Let us wait and see what underwater exploration brings to light." A popular book that ends on a calibrated maybe, rather than a revelation, is a rarer and better thing than the genre usually delivers.
So it must be said plainly, against the habit of this series: on the recurring charges — the falsified history, the silences around 1917 or the Terror or 1968, the ritual counterposing of socialist virtue to bourgeois vice — this book is essentially clean. It is popular science, and it is honest popular science. There is no roll-call of Party congresses, no obligatory Lenin at the head of each chapter, no claim that Soviet oceanography is peaceful where the West's is predatory. Kondratov cites foreign scientists as warmly as Soviet ones — Darwin, Huxley, Haeckel, Wallace, Leakey, and Jacques Cousteau, whose oceanauts he salutes with an internationalist's ease: "We are as proud of oceanauts as we are of astronauts." Where a faint national tint shows through it is mild and almost endearing — the Volga-delta Khazars offered up as a "Russian Atlantis," Soviet scholars naturally to the fore in the citations, an unshaken confidence that science marches forward and the blank spaces will all be filled. That last is the book's real period signature, more than any politics: the serene faith, so characteristic of its moment, that knowledge is cumulative and the future will simply know more. It is not a falsification. It is the optimism of an age, and one can read it now with affection and a little melancholy.
There is, though, one genuinely ideological thread, and it is worth following because it is honest rather than imposed. At the heart of the Indian Ocean section Kondratov reaches for a classic of his own tradition. Discussing Lemuria as the possible cradle of humanity, he quotes Friedrich Engels — from the essay known in English as "The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man" — placing the decisive evolutionary leap "probably on a great continent that has now sunk to the bottom of the Indian Ocean," and rightly notes that Engels was following Darwin and Huxley, that he "closely followed the latest findings in all the sciences." This is not ornament and it is not distortion: Engels really did write it, really was abreast of the paleoanthropology of his day, and the passage sits comfortably beside Huxley's and Haeckel's Lemuria without any strain. It is the one place where the book's Marxism surfaces, and it surfaces as what it ought to be — a nineteenth-century materialist keeping up with natural science, quoted by a twentieth-century one doing the same.
And that quiet continuity is the doorway to the only serious historical reflection this clean book demands, which is not about what Kondratov says but about the science he is free to say it with. Look at what the book leans on: Darwin and evolution, the descent of man, Haeckel's pithecanthropus, and — twice, and without apology — genetics, invoked as a settled and reliable guide to the origins of peoples. A Western reader in 1974 would think nothing of it. A Soviet reader would have known exactly what it cost. For genetics had been outlawed in the Soviet Union. From 1948 the plant-breeder T. D. Lysenko, with the personal backing of Stalin, had genetics condemned as a "bourgeois," "foreign" science; its practitioners were purged, its institutes dissolved, its greatest figure, the geneticist N. I. Vavilov, arrested and dead in a prison camp in 1943. For a generation, Soviet biology was made to march to Lysenko's "Michurin" doctrine on pain of a career or a life. Only after Khrushchev's fall did that reign end — Lysenko was stripped of his authority in 1965 — and genetics was rehabilitated. Kondratov's book, written a few years later, is quite literally a product of that liberation. Its easy reliance on Darwinian evolution and modern genetics, its whole undogmatic, probability-weighing manner, is what Soviet natural science looks like once the ideological boot has been lifted off it. The book does not mention any of this. It does not need to. The freedom is in every page.
This is where the tradition from which the present series is written can speak, not as a scold but as a witness, because it was watching at the time. In the winter of 1951, as the Lysenko affair was still reverberating through the world's laboratories, the American Trotskyist journal Fourth International ran a two-part study, "The Lysenko Case," by R. H. Monroe and Joseph Hansen (vol. XII, no. 1, whole no. 108, January–February 1951, and no. 2, whole no. 109, March–April 1951). It set out, coolly and in detail, the outlawing of genetics, the purge of Vavilov and his colleagues, the machinery by which a scientific question was settled by decree of the Central Committee. And it made the one point that matters here: that the geneticists Lysenko destroyed were "men who had come into prominence in the days of Lenin and Trotsky, when science was free in the Soviet Union." The disaster, on this account, was not socialism's quarrel with science but the bureaucracy's — a caste that could not tolerate a domain of truth it did not command, and so commanded it, with catastrophic results for Soviet biology and for the men who practised it. The revolutionary Marxist tradition never held that science should bow to the Party; it held, with Engels, quite the reverse — that a workers' state had every reason to want its science as free and undogmatic as the natural world it studied. Kondratov's book is the vindication of that older confidence over the Stalinist perversion of it: proof, in the form of a charming volume about sunken islands, that when the dogma recedes, real Soviet science stands up straight, cites Darwin without flinching, and tells the reader honestly what it does not know.
None of which should be allowed to make The Riddles of Three Oceans sound like an exhibit. It is, first and last, a delight — one of those books that leave a reader knowing a hundred things they did not know that morning, about the fish of New Zealand and the tablets of Easter Island, the tin islands of the ancient Atlantic and the shell-heaps of the Ussuri coast, and knowing them inside a habit of mind that weighs its evidence and admits its limits. Kondratov set out to write about lost continents and ended by writing something more durable: a small, generous demonstration of how a careful materialist thinks about the deep past — cross-examining the myths, respecting the data, and content to wait for the sea to give up what it will. Half a century on, the oceanography has moved past him and most of his sunken lands have stayed sunk. What has aged best is exactly the thing that was never his subject: the mind at work in the margins, patient and unfrightened, showing a mass readership what it looks like to hold a question open. That is worth having back in print.