The VOOP Congress of 1947

The long-awaited delegate congress—nine years after the previous one—was brought to order by Makarov on April 26, 1947 (see figure 4). Delegates elected a working presidium and an honorary one (the Politburo) and, after a greeting by Old Bolshevik F. N. Petrov, commenced its real work. One of the more memorable addresses was that of Susanna N. Fridman, the longtime secretary of VOOP from its founding through the war, who voiced the feelings of the founders' generation: "We are the generation already exiting from life." She had not come to the tribune, however, simply to pass the baton. A bigger question was on her mind: "Is nature protection, or, more

correctly, the survival of wild nature and its blossoming, compatible or incompatible with our quickly changing culture and civilization?" "Science," she continued, "has answered that it is compatible, and, I would go further, that if that is not the case our science is worthless, empty, and, as theory, holds no water. We know a great deal, but if we cannot [make the survival of wild nature compatible with culture], then that which we know wasn't worth knowing."^[43] With these remarks Fridman had exposed—for a remarkable instant—the submerged tension between ethics and science within the nature protection cause. Because nature was held to have a normative, healthy state that was identifiable by scientific experts, the scientists who led the nature protection movement promoted the view that nature protection was a fundamentally scientific problem. But Fridman was suggesting that nature protection was fundamentally a problem of values and ethics; science as a system of social knowledge and organization could be fundamentally flawed in its ethical vision, in which case it was important openly to defend more compelling alternative ethical positions. Taken to its logical conclusion, Fridman's talk raised the question of whether the Russian nature protection movement wished to represent scientific opinion or a broader public opinion in the spirit of Russian moral and political activism from Radishchev to Tolstoi to the Marxists and other socialists. Although outweighed in the leadership by scientists, nonscientists such as Fridman, Krivoshapov, Protopopov, and, to a certain closeted extent, Makarov always represented a minority within the movement who viewed nature protection as a civic and ethical imperative rather than as a defense of part of the empire of science, however sacred. It was rare, though, to hear this explicitly; the scientists' hegemony within the movement was nearly total. That was not surprising: openly ethical speech was far more dangerous under the Soviets than scientific speech, which tended to submerge its ethical positions.

In line with her wider conception of nature protection as the problem of protecting life itself, Fridman—as Makarov had done earlier—raised the call for replacing the Main Administration for Zapovedniki , which she characterized as just another economic agency, with something broader and more authoritative to handle conservation policy questions. "Nature protection is a momentous question," she averred, "not only of international but of planetary importance," but it has become "not only unpopular, but, in fact, odious. And that is our failure." Challenging all sorts of narrow orthodoxies and emphasizing the moral poignancy of the issue, Fridman called for a new educational offensive by activists fueled by an independent moral vision. "I must declare that in our Union we must engage in nature protection with pure and burning hearts and with passion," she proclaimed, for, among the broad masses, "no one has any conception of the sweeping scope of this cause or its crucial importance for the whole world. We must enter the international arena. Life itself urges us that way." In perhaps the

ultimate heresy, she concluded that "it is not necessary for us to wage a struggle with the world of private property over those specific problems which those societies have already successfully tackled."^[44]

Perhaps inspired by Fridman, Krivoshapov was equally blunt in his critique of Soviet economic and ideological rigidity: "We have a planned economic system, but there is no sense to it. We write laws, focus our attention on delineated issues, but things never get further than producing a document." The only way out, he said, was to raise VOOP's status to the all-Union level and generally to elevate the level of culture of young adults, focusing on the middle schools.^[45]

On the morning of April 28, the congress held its final session to hear the concluding remarks of the Society's acting president. Remarkably, Makarov tentatively engaged the difficult questions raised by Fridman and Krivoshapov. Addressing the questions of education and youth, he urged the adoption of a prewar Estonian statute that required those seeking certification as teachers to pass a special exam in problems of nature protection and natural history. "We, of course, have had nothing like this in memory," he lamented, courageously holding up a "bourgeois" legal precedent as a model. Perhaps his courage, like Fridman's, was stimulated by the realization that "the old guard is little by little leaving its posts . . . and our ranks are thinning."^[46] Would there be a new generation to which the founders could pass the torch? The Society's demographics were far from encouraging, for there had been no appreciable influx of young people into the Society in the two years following the war.

Last, Makarov touched on aesthetic questions of nature protection, which were ideologically among the most sensitive for Soviet conservation. "I here would like to fully associate myself with the comments of Comrade Bogdanov of the Bashkirian ASSR and consider that the aesthetic importance of nature protection must not be sidelined from VOOP's field of action. We must care for and protect not only the paintings of Kuindzhi, Shishkin, and Levitan, which we treasure as works of great aesthetic value, but those natural scapes that inspired Kuindzhi, Shishkin, and Levitan."^[47] "I have always been amazed," he continued, "that people are conscious of the value of these products of human creativity but find it impossible to perceive the beauty of nature and protect the actual nature [that inspired these paintings]."^[48]

Makarov then shared a personal recollection:

I sometimes recall a particular time in my life when I was in the Crimea; there I used to be terribly struck and upset by the following picture: a few lonely pines standing on a high precipice. That scene had always upset me, and I was traveling once with a friend with whom I would frequently talk about things, and he was perplexed by the power of a devastated forest to upset me. "Why does that scene touch you so?" he asked. "It would be nice to build a beautiful palace where those pines now stand." I answered him that the palace

might indeed be beautiful and that it might captivate me for the moment, but that I might not pay it any attention the next time. But I could see pines ten times and they would still stir me, because they tell much . . . because they are more valuable to me than a palace built in their place. It seems to me that we love nature through its specific examples, and, loving nature, we also love our homeland. For that reason, it is in the interests of the homeland and of cultivating love for it that we must care for the preservation of the most ancient examples of our own land's nature.^[49]

During a final question and answer session, a number of delegates asked about past and future press coverage of the movement. Makarov and other organizers assured the delegates that the entire domestic press, as well as overseas press representatives, had been informed about the congress. Makarov admitted that there were no articles in Pravda or Izvestiia , and promised to find out the reason for that. "Perhaps they are covering more important questions now than the work of our congress," he wryly observed.^[50]

Tsitsin chaired the first meeting of the new Central Executive Committee, which met on May 15 to elect a presidium.^[51] The scholarly secretary, Zaretskii, offered a list of eleven, which was immediately amended by M. A. Zablotskii to include V. G. Geptner, and by N. A. Gladkov to include S. N. Fridman and K. N. Blagosklonov. A proposal by Tsitsin to limit the nominees to the original eleven with an option to expand later was put to a vote, and passed over surprisingly strong opposition, sixteen to eight, with one abstention. Ratification of the eleven as a group then proceeded smoothly, with twenty-three in favor and only two abstentions.^[52]

Under the new president, Tsitsin, and his first deputy, Makarov, the new Presidium of VOOP included a founder of the Society, F. N. Petrov, and long-time activists A. P. Protopopov, a retired agronomist, and ornithologist G. P. Dement'ev, who became second deputy president. D. V. Zaretskii was elected scholarly secretary, and the remaining members included I. S. Krivoshapov of the Main Spa Administration of the USSR Ministry of Public Health; the USSR minister of higher education, S. V. Kaftanov; the USSR minister of the timber industry, G. P. Motovilov; G. A. Avetisian, an expert on bees at the Academy of Science's Institute of Evolutionary Morphology; and the Moscow University geology professor Vera Aleksandrovna Varsonof'eva.^[53]

Although VOOP was not given the opportunity by the regime to celebrate either its twentieth or twenty-fifth anniversaries, one anniversary was warmly marked: V. N. Makarov's sixtieth birthday on October 20, 1947.^[54] The presence of 285 people at the Executive Council meeting, a record crowd, testified to the genuine affection Makarov inspired. More than fifty greetings from agencies and societies were read, with an additional hundred messages from individuals and private groups. Makarov was truly in his prime, bathed in the appreciation and devotion of his colleagues and followers. A motion

was presented to make Vasilii Nikitich an honorary member of VOOP, a high honor in Russian academic culture. It passed unanimously.^[55] And a handsome photograph of Makarov was included in the second fascicle of Okhrana prirody , which appeared in 1948.

Finally, 1947 was remarkable for the appearance of the first major popular work on nature protection in the USSR, Makarov's sixty-page soft-covered book, Okhrana prirody v SSSR . With its attractive cover showing bison peaceably grazing in an alpine meadow of the Caucasus zapovednik , where they were being reintroduced, the message of Nature Protection in the USSR was serious: if we continue destroying habitat we could put an end to evolution itself. To make this point as strongly as possible, Makarov cited a letter from Russia's great paleontologist V. O. Kovalevskii to his brother, dated December 27, 1871, in which Kovalevskii wrote: "The vertebrate kingdom, especially Ungulata [hoofed mammals] now is simply in flight, seeking refuge anywhere they may find it. There will be no place for them to develop and to evolve into new forms; for this they will need thousands of years of a free and unfettered existence."^[56]

From the end of the war until the summer of 1948 was a transitional period, in which the dying embers of hope for a postwar liberalization could still occasionally be fanned. The new realities of the Cold War and of an almost airtight and militantly anti-intellectual isolationism began to be felt with the onset of the Zhdanovshchina (the Party's new campaign for culural orthodoxy, led by Central Committee secretary for ideology Andrei A. Zhdanov) in 1947 and, in the natural sciences, with the final battle over genetics that took shape during 1948.