I am currently reading God The Science The Evidence by Michel-Yves Bollore and Olivier Bonnassies, a book to which I will return in due course, because, to paraphrase the renowned literary critic F.R. Leavis, it is annoying the arse off me. Its central idea is that the universe and life are so complicated and so many scientists have said they aren’t yet fully understood, there must be a creator god.

However, what was new to me was that Stalin was opposed to the Big Bang theory of the universe because it arguably left room for the notion of a creating mind. What didn’t help was that the idea was first properly theorised by the Belgian physicist Georges Lemaître who happened to be a Catholic priest. The Stalinist view was that there was a chance reality might contradict their understanding of dialectics and interpreted this as a threat to their campaign of theocide and compulsory atheism.

Even when Edwin Hubble confirmed the expansion of the Universe by observing it Stalin and his scientists said it was nothing but American propaganda. The ideological charge was led by Andrei Zhdanov who ran the Communist Party in Leningrad who accused those who agreed with Lemaître of seeking “to bring back to life the fairy tale according to which the world came from nothing.” Stalin, Molotov and Beria took the view that matter was eternal.

Oddly enough, Alan Woods, the leader of the International Marxist Tendency, spends a quixotic number of pages in one of his books arguing for a version of the Stalinist theory and asserts that the universe has always been and always will be.

There is not much information available in English about Yevgeny Perepyolkin, but Bollore and Bonnassies say that he did his own calculations with the equations of Einstein’s theory of General Relativity and concluded that they pointed to a dynamic universe. He was arrested in May 1937, accused of conspiring with Trotsky and was murdered by the Stalinists the following January. Among the charges against him was a refusal to rule out the idea of a creator god, an unusual accusation to make against someone you are branding a Trotskyist.

By an odd quirk, one of Perepyolkin’s friends and intellectual collaborators was Matvei Bronstein who happened to share Trotsky’s original surname. He had been working on a theory to combine General Relativity and quantum mechanics. Stalin rewarded him for his independent thought with a bullet in February 1938.

Trotsky never expressed an opinion on the Big Bang, but we do know that, contrary to Stalin, he refused to reject scientific advances on ideological grounds. His view was that “objective relationships, which are determined by the properties of matter itself, are corrected by practical experience. This alone seriously guarantees natural sciences, chemical research, in particular, from intentional, unintentional, semi-deliberate distortions, misinterpretations and falsifications.” This is an approach which necessarily means you don’t murder people because you are frightened of their science.

God The Science The Evidence is an irritating book in many ways and is militantly anti-Marxist, but its authors have done us a favour by reminding its half million or so readers of two brilliant young scientists who had the courage to defy Stalin.