Search the whole of this book — a hundred and thirty-nine thousand words on relativity, quantum mechanics, causality and measurement, written by a man who ran the department of philosophical problems of science at the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences — and the following words do not occur once: Lysenko. Stalin. Zhdanov. Prezent. Deborin. Mitin. The phrase "physical idealism" occurs exactly once, in scare quotes, borrowed from Paul Langevin, and it is pointed at Western physicists.
That last detail is the book in miniature. "Physical idealism" was the name of a campaign, and the campaign was Soviet. It ran from the 1930s into the early 1950s; its targets were the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics and, at its edges, the theory of relativity and Einstein himself. M. E. Omelyanovsky lived and worked inside it. In this book the term appears once, describing something that happened in Paris and Göttingen.
The English spine says 1979. The author says otherwise, in his first sentence: "This is an English translation of my monograph Dialectics in Modern Physics published in Russian by Nauka Publishers in 1973." He adds that "Its substance remains, for the most part, as in the Russian original, except for the addition of a short chapter 'In Lieu of a Conclusion'".
That is nearly right and worth checking, because the exception is larger than he says. Post-1973 citations appear in seven of the book's twelve chapters. Some are innocent — the translator swapping in the Progress editions of Anti-Dühring (1975), Dialectics of Nature (1976) and Capital volume I (1977) for the Russian ones. Others are the author's own hand: his article in Voprosy filosofii 1976 no. 10; Lenin and Modern Natural Science, the Progress collection he edited, published in 1978 and cited five times; and, at the very end of the new concluding chapter, a long quotation from a speech Brezhnev gave in the Kremlin Palace of Congresses on 7 October 1975. So: argue the body of the book from 1973, and the first chapter's closing pages and the whole of "In Lieu of a Conclusion" from 1976–78. The difference matters, because it is in the newer material that the book does both its best and its worst work.
The commission is legible. This is a détente-era export title aimed at Western physicists and philosophers of science — the same readership, and very nearly the same argument, as Philosophy in the USSR (Progress, 1977), already in this series. Omelyanovsky's own preface lists the international venues where he had presented parts of it: the world philosophy congresses at Vienna (1968) and Varna (1973), Foundations of Physics in 1972, a colloquium of the Belgian Academy of Sciences in Brussels in 1975. He wanted to be read abroad as a colleague. The book was written to make that possible.
And it was written under difficulty. "I had to finish the book while seriously ill," he says in the Russian preface, "and therefore had to omit many interesting, important topics." (The scanned text reads "man?"; the sense is not in doubt.) The same paragraph thanks V. A. Fock — the physicist who did more than anyone to keep quantum mechanics defensible in Soviet conditions — as "an outstanding physicist, man of principle, and kind friend of everyone who takes the philosophical issues of science as his basic field of research." In a book that will not name a single episode of the coercion of Soviet science, "man of principle" is a phrase doing quiet work.
Chapter I gives the official account of Soviet physics and philosophy, and it is one long sentence of falsification:
From the very beginning Soviet physicists resolutely opposed the idealistic and positivist interpretations of quantum and relativist theories that were fashionable in the West.
Around it, the picture is of harmony: in the 1920s "the young Soviet country's science developed at an accelerated pace", and physicists — "S. I. Vavilov, D. S. Rozhdestvensky, A. F. Ioffe, I. E. Tamm, and others" — met the strangeness of the new physics with dialectical materialism in hand. (The scan renders Ioffe as "loffe" throughout, an l-for-I substitution; it is corrected here and wherever else the extracted text is obviously damaged.) There was, on this telling, never a conflict between Soviet philosophy and Soviet physics. There was only a united Soviet front against Western idealism.
Chapter I then closes by denying the charge outright:
Bourgeois ideologists ascribe rejection of the theory of relativity and other leading theories of modern science to Marxists as allegedly idealistic constructions, ascribe an ignoring of modern formal logic to them, and so on and so forth.
The trouble is that the ascription is accurate, and the evidence for it is partly in this book's own footnotes.
Omelyanovsky cites, without comment and as an ordinary scientific reference, D. I. Blokhintsev's paper "A Critique of the Idealist Understanding of Quantum Theory", Uspekhi fizicheskikh nauk, 1951. A paper with that title, in that journal, in that year, was not a contribution to a seminar. He also cites, twice, a volume he co-edited with I. V. Kuznetsov, Filosofskie voprosy sovremennoi fiziki — Philosophical Questions of Modern Physics — from the late 1950s, in which Fock published a piece called "A Critique of Bohr's Views on Quantum Mechanics." The apparatus of this book is, in places, a bibliography of the campaign it declines to describe.
For what the campaign actually did, we have to go outside. In Intercontinental Press of 16 April 1973 — the same year as this book's Russian edition — George Novack reviewed Robert Havemann's Questions Answers Questions under the title "Havemann's Stand Against Stalinism", and recorded this in passing:
In June 1948, during the Zhdanov cultural terrorism, Kedrov had been dismissed as editor of Problems of Philosophy, the leading Soviet organ, for his positive evaluation of Bohr's contributions to quantum mechanics.
(The scan breaks "dismissed" and "contributions" across columns; the words are whole in the original.) Problems of Philosophy is Voprosy filosofii — the journal in which Omelyanovsky published throughout his career, and in which he published in 1976, in a footnote of this very book. Its editor was removed for saying about Bohr something close to what Omelyanovsky says about Bohr here.
Three years later, in the issue of 23 February 1976, Novack put the whole pattern on the record in a talk called "In Defense of Engels":
The advances made in relativity physics, genetics, the resonance theory in chemistry, and cybernetics were rejected on the false ground that they failed to conform to the arbitrary specifications of all-powerful arbiters of Soviet thought like Zhdanov. Under the guise of defending materialist dialectics these discoveries were castigated and banned as idealistic aberrations.
And on 19 April 1976 the same paper carried an interview with the Ukrainian mathematician Leonid Plyushch, newly released from a Soviet psychiatric prison, conducted by George Saunders on 2 April. Asked what motivates the dissident intelligentsia, Plyushch answered that even the natural sciences need freedom of publication, and gave his examples:
Everyone knows the fate of genetics in the Soviet Union, and the fate of cybernetics. The same type of thing happened at one time, under Stalin, in regard to relativity theory: For a time relativity theory was called a "bourgeois science."
That is the sentence Omelyanovsky's Chapter I says bourgeois ideologists made up.
The introduction to Philosophy in the USSR in this series found that Fedoseyev's honour roll of Soviet natural scientists was substantially a list of survivors of campaigns the book would not name. The pattern recurs here, in a sharper form.
S. I. Vavilov is cited six times in this book — on Newton's atomism, on Lenin and modern physics, on the development of the idea of matter — always as a physicist and an authority, which is what he was. He became President of the Academy of Sciences in 1945. His elder brother Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, the greatest geneticist Russia produced and the head of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences, was arrested in 1940 and died in Saratov prison in January 1943, having been destroyed by Lysenko. He is not in this book. He could not be: the word genetics occurs exactly once in it, in a neutral list of twentieth-century achievements.
The two Vavilovs must not be confused, and this book gives no occasion to confuse them — it simply prints the one who survived and omits the one who did not. That omission is the argument of the whole volume compressed into a bibliography.
A note on our own tradition's record here, since this series does not get to hold Progress to a standard it will not meet itself. R. H. Monroe and Joseph Hansen's two-part "The Lysenko Case", in Fourth International vol. XII nos. 1 and 2 (whole nos. 108 and 109, January–February and March–April 1951), is the best contemporaneous account in our archives and it opens with a sentence that has held up: "The Stalinist outlawing of genetics in the Soviet Union in 1948 profoundly stirred the scientific world." But it states that Nikolai Vavilov "died in northeast Sibera in 1942". The place and the year are both wrong; he died at Saratov, on the Volga, in January 1943. Correcting it here is cheaper than pretending we never printed it.
A reader given only the above would be badly served, because the philosophy of physics in this book is often first-rate, and in one respect it is braver than it looks.
The best chapter is the second, "The Problem of Objective Reality in Quantum Theory", and its third section, "The Philosophical Evolution of the Copenhagen School", is a serious close reading of Bohr. Omelyanovsky's move is to prise apart two things usually run together: Heisenberg's "uncontrollability in principle" — the claim that the disturbance of the object by the measurement cannot even in principle be accounted for — and Bohr's complementarity. He argues they are not equivalent, that Bohr leaned on the language of "uncontrollable interaction" in the 1930s and 1940s, and that he abandoned it in his late essay "Quantum Physics and Philosophy". His verdict on the uncontrollability doctrine is sharp and, as physics, defensible: "The term 'uncontrollable interaction', taken in its literal sense, is wrong: all phenomena of nature are cognisable and hence controllable in principle." His verdict on the late Bohr is this:
Thus, one can find explicit expression in Bohr's essay Quantum Physics and Philosophy of a position that is basically materialist and dialectical.
Notice what that sentence is actually doing. In a system where "idealist" was a charge with career-ending and sometimes life-ending consequences, declaring the founder of the Copenhagen interpretation a materialist was not a concession — it was a rescue. Omelyanovsky performs the same operation on Einstein, quoting his 1948 paper in Dialectica at length and concluding: "There is no doubt that he adopted a materialist standpoint of recognising the objective reality of the external world cognised by physicists, although he did not always express it clearly and distinctly enough." The mild condescension of that last clause is the price of admission. Having paid it, he can teach Einstein.
This is worth stating plainly, because it is the most interesting thing about the book. The standard account of why Soviet physics escaped what Soviet biology suffered is that the physicists were shielded by the bomb project — agriculture had no equivalent, and so Lysenko was able to destroy genetics while relativity survived. That account is an argument from circumstance and it is probably right as far as it goes. But this book is evidence of a second mechanism working alongside the first, one that operated in the texts rather than in the corridors: a philosophical technique for declaring the new physics to be dialectical materialism already, so that no purge was needed. The physicists did not have to be defended against the doctrine if the doctrine could be shown to have arrived at the same conclusions independently. Omelyanovsky and Fock spent their careers doing exactly that, and it worked. It is not a heroic story and it is not a shameful one. It is what accommodation looks like from the inside.
The quality holds elsewhere. Chapter VI on determinism in quantum theory is careful, unpolemical analysis. Omelyanovsky separates causality from determinism, and both from mere lawful simultaneity — a charge is the source of an electromagnetic field, but that is not a causal relation — and states the general point with real economy: "a causal connection is only a tiny part of the world connection between phenomena." He runs Aristotle's four causes against modern usage and corrects Engels's employment of causa finalis in Dialectics of Nature, gently but in public. Chapter I contains the sentence "theoretical ideas and theories should not be converted into dogmas", and in context it is meant.
And "In Lieu of a Conclusion" — the chapter written for this English edition — turns to Popper, Lakatos and Kuhn, and reads them accurately before dismissing them. Omelyanovsky sees exactly what is new in post-positivist philosophy of science: that "the most recent trends in the bourgeois philosophy of science aim at identifying the forms and methods that make it possible to bring out the developing content of scientific knowledge", where positivism had only ever analysed knowledge already established. His objections are compressed to the point of curtness — "Kuhn denied regularities in the transition between 'paradigms'" — but he has read the books. In 1979, that was not nothing.
And then, on the last page of that same new chapter, the book destroys itself.
Omelyanovsky quotes Heisenberg twice from his late writings. The second quotation is the charge, put by one of the founders of quantum mechanics, in print, in 1973:
it is difficult for Soviet philosophy to come to terms with the theory of relativity and quantum theory
Here is the reply, in full:
There is no need here for a polemic against Heisenberg on these issues. The development of Marxist-Leninist philosophy and modern physics has adequately refuted him and other voluntary or involuntary opponents of dialectical materialism. The philosophy of dialectical materialism is the only true philosophy of modern physics and of all contemporary science.
There is no need here for a polemic. Two hundred pages of the most patient argument about measurement, causality and complementarity — argument that repeatedly grants Heisenberg his physics and disputes only his philosophy — and at the one point where the question turns on the author's own institution and his own life, the argument stops. The charge is not answered. It is declared already refuted, by history.
And then, immediately, the book's final substantive paragraph quotes Brezhnev on the Party commitment of Soviet science:
The Soviet scientist (if, certainly, it is a truly Soviet scientist) bases his whole scientific activity on the scientific ideology of Marxism-Leninism, is an active champion of communism, fights any reactionary and obscurantist forces.
The parenthesis is the whole apparatus in six words. There are scientists, and there are truly Soviet scientists, and somebody decides which. Nikolai Vavilov was found not to be one. Kedrov was found not to be one in June 1948, for having praised Bohr as Omelyanovsky praises Bohr in Chapter II. Omelyanovsky prints that criterion, approvingly, as the last word of a book whose entire method depends on it never having been applied to him.
The anti-Stalinist left never reviewed this book, and no purpose is served by pretending otherwise. A search of the complete English Trotsky, the Bulletin of the Opposition, the run of Fourth International from 1940 to 1956, all 763 issues of Intercontinental Press, the International Viewpoint database and the collected George Novack returns not one mention of Omelyanovsky, of Blokhintsev, of Fock the physicist, of "physical idealism", or of the Copenhagen debate in any form. Heisenberg is named once in some thirty thousand documents; Bohr twice. The tradition tracked Lysenko, and later it tracked Sakharov, and it did not track the philosophy of physics. That absence is a fact about our own archive and should be said before anything else.
What the tradition did have was the argument, made without a state behind it — which is the only condition under which it can be tested.
George Novack delivered nine lectures on dialectical logic to members of the Socialist Workers Party in 1942, while the party was under Smith Act prosecution. In the third, "Once Again on the Limitations of Formal Logic", he sets out the fourth defect of the formal laws of thought:
They rule the world of thought in totalitarian fashion, exacting unquestionable obedience from all things, claiming unlimited authority for their sovereign sway.
He means formal logic. He would have been appalled to find the sentence fitting the dialectical laws as they were administered in Moscow, and it fits them exactly. The test he proposes in the same lecture is one Omelyanovsky would accept and his institution would not: "Absolute laws can no longer find any foothold in the physical world." In the first lecture he had already described what happens when they try, using Galileo and the Inquisition — "These servants of official authority sought to silence the arguments, ban the books, terrorise and even kill their scientific opponents." He is writing about the seventeenth century. The lectures are cited here from An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism, 5th ed. (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1971), the text as Novack revised it in 1963.
Twenty years later, in "Is Nature Dialectical?", Novack reported a debate held in Paris on 7 December 1961, before six thousand people, on the question: "Is the dialectic solely a law of history or is it also a law of nature?" Sartre and Jean Hyppolite argued no; Roger Garaudy and the physicist Jean-Pierre Vigier argued yes. Vigier's case, as Novack reports it, is startlingly close to Omelyanovsky's — that matter has no ultimate constituents, that "There are in principle no irreducible or immutable elements in nature", that each level of structure discloses further structure beneath it. Omelyanovsky devotes an entire chapter to that proposition, under the name Lenin gave it, the inexhaustibility of the electron.
The two men were arguing the same thing. One was doing it in an auditorium against opponents free to answer him. The other was doing it in a monograph whose final page quotes the General Secretary on what a truly Soviet scientist is. Novack, who had no illusions about which was which, named the cost in the same essay: the reputation of dialectics among scientists had been wrecked by "the arbitrary and ignorant interference of the Stalinist bureaucrats with scientific theory, along with their narrowly schematic, distorted, and dogmatic interpretation of Marxist method". In "In Defense of Engels" he put it more bluntly still: "In this way Stalinism has cast the same discredit on dialectics in nature as on the name of socialism."
Two things should be said about Novack's own conduct here, because they are to his credit and they sharpen the point. First, he did not use the record to write off Soviet philosophy. In the same 1976 talk he calls Kedrov "one of the most perceptive" of Soviet natural scientists, says his writings on the development of scientific thought "are superior in insight to most productions of the Western scholars on this subject", and acknowledges a debt to him — while recording, in the same breath, that Kedrov "under Stalin was removed in 1948 as editor of the chief Soviet philosophical journal". He also quotes at length Loren Graham's judgement that Soviet dialectical materialism "is an impressive intellectual achievement". An anti-Stalinist in New York could praise Soviet philosophy of science and name what had been done to Soviet philosophers of science, in one paragraph, without strain. Omelyanovsky in Moscow could do only the first half. (Novack's talk gives Kedrov's initials as "B.F."; they are B. M., and Novack himself had them right in 1973 — "Bonifati Kedrov".)
Second, the deepest objection to this book is not that it lies about 1948 but that its method is wrong, and the tradition made that objection in the right place. Closing "The Lysenko Case", Monroe and Hansen refuse to concede dialectical materialism to Lysenko — "The truth is that the findings in biology as in all other sciences speak for dialectical materialism and not against it" — and then quote Engels against the whole procedure of legislating for the sciences from philosophy:
The mistake lies in the fact that these laws (dialectics) are foisted on nature and history as laws of thought, and not deduced from them.
That is the charge against the tradition to which this book belongs, and it is Engels's. Omelyanovsky is at his best precisely where he deduces — where he reads Bohr's late essays closely enough to find the change in them, where he pulls causality apart from determinism, where he insists theories must not become dogmas. He is at his worst where he foists: where relativity and quantum mechanics are announced in advance to have arrived at dialectical materialism, where a philosophy is "the only true philosophy" of a science, where the Party's General Secretary certifies who is a real scientist.
Read this book for its second chapter and its sixth, which are the work of a fine mind on hard problems. Read its first chapter and its last page together, and you have the exact shape of what that mind was not allowed to think about — which was itself, its journal, its institute, and the men who had sat in its chairs before it.