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

Table of Contents

A cutting from Picture Post, February 2, 1943, from J. B. S. Haldanes MI5 file. National Archives, KV 2-1832.

2018 by Gavan Tredoux http://jbshaldane.org

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FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Tredoux, Gavan, 1967 author.

Title: COMRADE HALDANE IS TOO BUSY TO GO ON HOLIDAY: the genius who spied for Stalin / Gavan Tredoux.

Description: New York; London: Encounter Books, [2018] |

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017039032 (print) | LCCN 2018006820 (ebook) | ISBN 9781594039843 (Ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Haldane, J. B. S. (John Burdon Sanderson), 18921964 | Lysenko, Trofim, 18981976. | BiologistsGreat BritainBiography. | CommunistsGreat BritainBiography. | Espionage, SovietGreat Britain. | GeneticsSoviet UnionHistory. | Science and stateSoviet UnionHistory.

Classification: LCC QH31.H27 (ebook) | LCC QH31.H27 T74 2018 (print) | DDC 570.92 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039032

Appendixes 1, 2, and 5 are reproduced from material held in the Haldane Papers, University College London, with permission from the estate of J. B. S. Haldane.

Appendix 3 is reproduced with permission from Immediate Media Co.

Appendix 4 and other quotations from the VENONA Intercepts are reproduced under Open Government Licence from material held in the Government Communications Headquarters Records, HW 15/43, National Archives, Kew, Richmond, England.

At the front side of the Natural History Museum in Berlin there is a memorial plaque. It informs visitors about the fate of zoologist B. Arndt, who worked here and later died in a Nazi death camp. If similar plaques were installed on the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Plant Industry building in St. Petersburg, they would cover not just its faade, but also all the walls of the building.

EDUARD I. KOLCHINSKY, 2014

I am, so far as I know, the only person who has ever got duplicate determinations of urea by a volumetric method to agree to within one part in a thousand. And I am a better communist because of it.

...

I would sooner be a Jew in Berlin than a Kaffir in Johannesburg or a negro in French Equatorial Africa.

J. B. S. HALDANE, 1939

CONTENTS

The cover of J. B. S. Haldanes MI5 file. National Archives, KV 2-1832.

S hortly before noon on June 26, 1949, Professor John Burdon Sanderson (JBS) Haldane elbowed his 6-foot, 245-pound frame into Harry Pollitts office. The King Street headquarters of the Communist Party of Great Britain was crowded. JBS had known for some time that he was in serious trouble with the Party. His support for Trofim Denisovich Lysenkoa semi-literate peasant who had shinned his way up the Soviet patronage system to become Stalins anointed authority on properly dialectical non-geneticswas insufficiently enthusiastic. The Party required less finessing and more commitment. It had come to this: a distinguished mathematical geneticist, physiologist, and Weldon Professor of Biometry at University College London (UCL) was consulting a boilermaker, Pollitt, about the correct line on the technical details of biological heredity.

MI5 were listening in as usual through the network of microphones that they had installed in the King Street building some years previously. Pollitt and the Party had been warned by the Soviets, who had long compromised MI5, that King Street was bugged. But several sweeps had failed to turn up anything. They created a safe room. MI5 bugged that, too. They ripped up the floorboards but found nothing. So they carried on anyway, as if only half-aware of the fact.

The transcript of the conversation that followed was duly filed in the dossier that MI5 had fitfully maintained on Haldane since his visit to the Soviet Union in 1928. There were some curious new developments.

11.53. Professor HALDANE came to see HARRY, who was expecting him. HARRY apologised for making him come upstairs. HARRY told HALDANE that the Soviet Academy of Science had asked him officially to approach HALDANE and invite him to go for a holiday to the Soviet Union.

HALDANE said hastily with a lot of stammering that he would not be able to take a holiday this summer.

HARRY said: You wont? in surprise and added that this was very important.

HALDANE stammering more than ever, said he knew it was important but he had to keep his laboratory going.

HARRY said he could choose the place he wanted to go to, they would offer him every facility and at the end of the holiday if he wished to have discussions with any of the comrades in whose work he was interested

HALDANE broke in saying he would have liked to go very much but he absolutely could not take a holiday.

HARRY asked what exactly that meant, not being able to take a holiday.

HALDANE said that it meant that he could not be away for more than 3 or 4 days.

HARRY said rather rudely that he saw the sort of a jam that HALDANE was in but you are a Party man, you know. He suggested September.

HALDANE said he was already booked up in September. He added that it was very awkward, but he could not help it in his rotten job. Next sentence difficult to hear because HALDANE stammered so much but it sounded as if he was explaining to HARRY that his secretary had left him.