The Cure: A Story of Cancer and Politics from the Annals of the Cold War, and: Delo KR: Sudy chesti v ideologii i praktike poslevoennogo stalinizma (review)

In 1945, two Soviet scientists, Nina Georgievna Kliueva and Grigorii Iosifovich Roskin, appeared to have made substantial progress in the search for a cure for cancer. The results of their efforts seemed so promising that Soviet and American newspapers spread the news. Doctors, cancer patients, scientists, and politicians from around the world eagerly expressed their interest in finding out more about the breakthrough. In the Soviet Union, the Communist Party quickly recognized the propagandistic value of such a discovery. Cancer has been one of mankind's most deadly and intractable enemies. If Soviet scientists came up with a cure, it would help validate the Soviet system and provide a peaceful counter-balance to the latest belligerent achievement of Western science: the atomic bomb. It could also help convince Soviet citizens that the march towards communism--the Soviet Union's raison d'être--was making headway. The regime wanted to take credit for easing the suffering of millions of people and enriching and prolonging their lives. But like so many Soviet promises and scientific possibilities, Kliueva and Roskin's idea never panned out.

As the two books under review convincingly argue, the story of this scientific effort and its broad political and cultural ramifications is significant for a number of reasons. It is hard to think of any other single episode that illuminates so many aspects of Soviet politics and life in the period between the end of World War II and Stalin's death in 1953. As news of Kliueva and Roskin's potential cure for cancer traveled from the laboratory through the Soviet bureaucracy to Stalin's desk, scientific issues became enmeshed in international relations and the Cold War, Soviet high politics, the zhdanovshchina, party propaganda, the contradictory relationship between the state and intellectuals, the anti-cosmopolitan campaign, the bureaucratic battles in Soviet "big science," and, not least of all, the ways in which Soviet scientists reconciled their work with their responsibilities as Soviet citizens.

Despite its centrality to the postwar history of the USSR, the "KR affair" (delo KR)--as the political events surrounding Kliueva and Roskin's work are called--remains relatively unknown outside a small group of specialists.¹ This obscurity belies the event's significance. The KR affair deserves billing alongside Andrei Aleksandrovich Zhdanov's attacks on literature, philosophy, and the arts, the Lysenko affair, and the anti-Semitic campaign as a key episode of Soviet intellectual and political life during Stalin's last years. Fortunately, those who are not familiar with the KR affair can now read Nikolai Krementsov's The Cure: A Story of Cancer and Politics from the Annals of the Cold War. Those who finish it without fully satisfying their curiosity about the wide-ranging effects of the affair can turn to Esakov and Levina's Delo KR: Sudy chesti v ideologii i praktike poslevoennogo stalinizma. Each book makes excellent and extensive use of the considerable paper trail that the KR affair left behind in the Soviet archives, as well as the authors' expertise in the relevant medical and political issues.

With 213 pages of text, including dozens of photographs, Krementsov's book is short, gripping, and fun to read. Its overtly theatrical organization - the book opens with a list of the "cast of characters" and is divided into eight "acts" instead of chapters--does justice to the dramatic nature of the subject. (Krementsov is following Stalin's lead in this respect. The USSR's "editor-in-chief" also saw the...