Censorship and its costly fallout

History shows the damage caused by rewriting unpopular elements of literature or economics extends beyond stifling the soul of education. It holds a nation's progress back

A few years before the Berlin Wall came down, I became friends with an East German engineer, a well-educated man fluent in English. I was reading The Black Obelisk, one of Erich Maria Remarque’s later novels at the time. My friend said he had never heard of the author.

This is equivalent to an IIT graduate never having heard of Sarat Chandra. Remarque’s best known work, All Quiet on the Western Front, is generally acknowledged as the greatest anti-war novel ever written. Serialised in the 1920s, it has sold close to 100 million copies across multiple languages, and inspired several iconic, award-winning movies. 

Upon learning Remarque was German, my friend bravely made enquiries at his local library. He learnt Remarque had been banned in the 1930s as “unpatriotic” by the Nazis. The post-war Communist regime perpetuated the ban, since he was considered “reactionary”. However, the librarian said his works were available in English translation, so my friend committed an act of petty treason by reading All Quiet on the Western Front in translation.

For me, this offered an insight into how a warped but apparently efficient education system works. In East Germany, along with its big brother the Soviet Union, everyone went to school, and most went to college. The system turned out good scientists and engineers. It even churned out excellent musicians, dancers, and filmmakers, so it’s not as though “kultur” was ignored.

But the education system erased the names of the “unpatriotic” and the “reactionary” from existence, and worked to ensure only approved elements of literature, history, economics, philosophy and political science were taught. The Soviets used to joke that the task of a historian was to ensure the past was reliable. Historical events that did not fit with dogma or doctrine had to be expunged. Moreover, if the regime’s idea of “reliable” changed, the textbooks had to be rewritten.

The damage caused by this censorship and rewriting may be at least partly responsible for eastern Germany lagging behind the western part in so many ways. It may also be a reason why Russia and the other successor Soviet states have struggled to transition to democracy.

The selective holes in the education system also affected STEM research. Soviet scientists could not easily speak to their peers on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Academics in general could not participate in exchange programmes with Western universities without tons of high-level clearances.

And, of course, there was Trofim Lysenko and a bunch of other quacks, with access to the higher echelons of the Politburo. Lysenko was an agro-scientist with strange ideas about genetics and inheritance. But Stalin liked him. Other Soviet scientists knew his ideas were wrong, and proved it by experiment and observation. But this was treasonous. Scientists went to jail for questioning Lysenko.

Hence, the brightest minds simply steered clear of the biosciences. The USSR ended up decades behind the West in these disciplines. It also suffered famines and multiple food shortages, because Lysenko’s theories hindered the development of crops that could handle the climate. 

There are similar issues visible today, even in the United States where the Theory of Evolution is not taught in school in many of the red states of the so-called Bible Belt because it contradicts religious dogma. Fewer bioscience researchers emerge from those states.

The Soviets (and the Bulgarians, Romanians, etc) were also oddly superstitious. The old Czarist regime had its Rasputin, who performed faith healing to “cure” haemophilia. The communists who took over put their faith in astrologers, mediums and psychics of all descriptions. In a move that tied in with the Lysenko-weirdness, they also looked at alternative systems of folk-healing and considered it to be on a par with actual medicine. Maybe as a result, the Soviet Union had a life expectancy lower than most of its satellites, even lower than dirt-poor Cuba.

It is, of course, very tempting for an authoritarian regime to rewrite the books to be seen as reliable and expunge the inconvenient bits. Unfortunately, history tells us “the evil that men do lives after them while the good is oft interred with their bones”.