Vladimir Voinovich wrote The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin from 1963 - 1969. Subsequently, Voinovich published two sequels, Pretender to the Throne and A Displaced Person making The Life the first book of a trilogy. The Life was originally published via samizdat, the underground system developed to avoid government censorship. Readers would often copy manuscripts manually and pass them along to other dissidents. Any volume might thereby enjoy a readership in the tens or even hundreds of thousands; extreme times call for extreme measures! Eventually a copy of The Life was smuggled our of the USSR and published in West Germany.
Paranoia plays a leading role in The Life, fear of death being a kind of universal human trait. As a bit of historical context, Stalin, who one could argue is the main character of The Life, died in 1953, and his successor Khrushchev’s made his speech to the Politburo three years later condemning Stalin and his many abuses of power in the murder of millions, so the fact the novel was published surreptitiously 16 years after Stalin’s death indicates the paranoia it depicts as central to Soviet life was very real indeed, and very long lasting.
Gregor Mendel, in 1866, published work that made the case, from his experiments with peas, for the heritability of traits, and his work is now seen as instrumental in the development of genetics; in fact, the laws of inheritance are known as the Mendelian Laws. Essentially, Mendel proved that it is the cross fertilization of pea strains, each with its own dominant and recessive genes, that produce the traits evident in the offspring; this was the missing piece of Darwinian evolution. Mendel, a Franciscan Friar, remained in obscurity until 1900 when three separate biologists rediscovered his work, and by 1920 he was celebrated as the father of modern genetics.
Ideology, pick the flavor, always takes the path to madness, evident on close examination in its first spark of life. As one example The Life heralds the work of two real life Soviet scientists, Lysenko and Michurin. Here’s a bit about Lysenko from a 2017 article in The Atlantic:
Although it’s impossible to say for sure, Trofim Lysenko probably killed more human beings than any individual scientist in history. Other dubious scientific achievements have cut thousands upon thousands of lives short: dynamite, poison gas, atomic bombs. But Lysenko, a Soviet biologist, condemned perhaps millions of people to starvation through bogus agricultural research—and did so without hesitation. Only guns and gunpowder, the collective product of many researchers over several centuries, can match such carnage.
Having grown up desperately poor at the turn of the 20th century, Lysenko believed wholeheartedly in the promise of the communist revolution. So when the doctrines of science and the doctrines of communism clashed, he always chose the latter—confident that biology would conform to ideology in the end. It never did.
How did Lysenko murder so many people, with biology? He convinced Stalin and others that Mendel was wrong; a species’ traits were not inherited but learned and then passed on. Instead of crossing strains of wheat until you had a strain with the traits you wanted, size of seed, ability to handle cold, soggy ground, etc. , Lysenko told farmers to plant their seed into cold, soggy ground and the seeds would learn how to grow there, and somehow pass along this knowledge to their own seeds.
In The Life the whole episode of communist Soviet ideology adopting the exactly wrong evolutionary idea is mocked hilariously by the character of Gladishev, a peasant worker in the local collectivist farm, and Chonkin’s neighbor, who, like Lysenko, fancies himself a scientist and enthusiastic socialist:
But beyond all these incidental ideas, there was one Gladishev had decided to dedicate his whole life to, and thereby immortalize his name in the annals of science; inspired by the progressive teachings of Michurin and Lysenko, he had undertaken to create a hybrid of the tomato and potato; i.e., a plant that would grow the tubers of a potato on the bottom at the same time as tomatoes would grow from the top. In the spirit of that great epoch Gladishev called his hybrid-to-be the ”Path to Socialism” or “PATS” for short. He had intended to spread his experiments across the entire territory of the kolkhoz [collective farm], but they wouldn’t allow him to and he had to limit himself to the confines of his own vegetable garden. For that reason he was sometimes forced to buy both potatoes and tomatoes from his neighbors.
So far these experiments had not produced any actual results, although certain characteristics of the PATS had started to appear: the leaves and stems were potato-like, while the roots were letter perfect tomato. Despite his numerous failures, Gladishev did not lose heart, understanding that genuine scientific discovery demands labor and no little sacrifice. Those who knew about his experiments didn’t put much stock in them, but Gladishev’s work had been noticed and given support, which could not ever have happened in the days of the tsars.
At one point the district newspaper, Bolshevik Tempos, printed a big two column feature about Gladishev, under the general heading “People of the New Village.” The column was called “The Born Breeder.” It even carried a photograph of him bending over his hybrid as if could discern there the faint outline of our planet’s beautiful future.
You must ask yourself what would lead scientists, of all people, down such a disastrous path as Lysenko’s? The father of communism, Karl Marx, following the French ‘thinker’ Jean Jacques Rousseau, believed that human behavior is the result of environment and culture exclusively; man is infinitely malleable. Children may look and behave like their parents, but that’s only because they live in the same house and eat the same food! So of course a good communist must believe that wheat seeds follow the same evolution. When forced into cold, soggy ground they will respond with unmatched vigor and resiliency, as we would expect any good Soviet citizen to respond! And next year, why the seeds will be even heartier! Madness.
Voinovich was forced out of the Soviet Union but then returned after Glasnost allowed writers freedom again. Obviously there was much to mock in the Soviet system, and this novel does a very good job of it, using the character of a halfwit soldier Ivan Chonkin to tell the story of an ideology of control that’s out of control. Stalin, the secret police, the army, scientists, the collective farms and their leaders, even JJ Rousseau makes an appearance. No stone was left unturned by Voinovich’s wit. At one point Chonkin takes a group of secret police prisoner, and, since all of the men of the village were called to WWII, puts them to work in the fields; much like Stalin, with his secret police, forced millions to work in the labor camps.
The only people who mostly escaped Voinovich’s rancor were the peasants who, in difficult moments, still made the sign of the cross and still believed in love and family. Of course they are, like all of us, a fallen race; their behavior sometimes as dumb as the cow who eats all of the PATS one day and creates the drama of the novel’s second half. Jealousy, envy, greed, lust, sloth, selfishness and drunkenness, no matter the culture or the environment, seem to be our human cross to bear.
To be fair it’s understandable that many still have difficulty with the idea that human behavior, like our emotional and decision making systems, is heritable, as heritable as eye and hair color. As trait inheritance became popular in the early 20th century we had, in a display of perfect human weakness, an ugly form of eugenics in America and later race science in Nazi Germany. That’s enough right there to stop a decent person in their tracks. But the research and literature of evolutionary psychology and behavior continues apace, and has become very interesting reading. Of course environment and culture have a lot do with human outcomes, but they do not imprint on a blank slate; we are not simple social constructs. If you saw the review in this stack about Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family and Social Class it’s clear that a stable, loving home will help produce the best outcome for any child. But it won’t produce perfect adults. Our evolution will also play a large role in our behavior; believing otherwise is the path to utopian madness, and in some cases starvation.
The Life is not a masterpiece of literature, but it is a well crafted, and often hilarious, satire of Soviet life. If you want to understand the humiliations of average people under communism, it’s an excellent place to begin. It also does what all good stories do: it avoids grand argumentation by instead exposing human folly to full sunlight in a tale of everyday people making their way through life; story telling and hearing are apparently two traits we have all inherited!
Also by Voinovich, I recommend his short story A Circle of Friends, which is a very direct hit on Stalin. Like The Life, it also takes place on the eve of Hitler’s invasion in 1941. Apart from the mass murders of his regime, Stalin is today also hated by Russians for being duped by Hitler. Well, you really can’t blame them.