The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin's Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century - Hardcover

Pringle, Peter

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743264983 ISBN 13: 9780743264983

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2008

Synopsis

Documents the early years of the genetic revolution as a period marked by one of the most relevant scientific scandals of the twentieth century and the tragic murder of leading Soviet geneticist Nikolai Vavilov by the Stalin regime. 35,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Pringle is a veteran British foreign correspondent. He is the

author and coauthor of several nonfiction books, including the

bestselling Those Are Real Bullets, Aren't They? He lives in New York

City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Prologue

Ukraine, August 6, 1940

The black sedan, a Soviet version of the American Ford, hurtled along a dirt road from Chernovtsy spreading clouds of dust over the ripening wheat fields. Inside the car were four men dressed like government officials in dark suits and ill-fitting fedoras.

As the road started to climb into the Carpathians near the border with Romania, the men met another car coming down the hill toward them. The car was limping along with a puncture, but when the black sedan stopped it was not to offer help.

"Where is Academician Vavilov?" one of the four men shouted from the car window. "We must find Academician Vavilov."

In the second car was a young botanist, Vadim Lekhnovich, a member of a Commissariat of Agriculture expedition led by the Soviet Union's chief geneticist and plant breeder, Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov. It was August 6, 1940. Europe was in flames, the Battle of Britain was engaged, but western Ukraine was basking peacefully in the summer sun. The botanists had been in the fields looking for rare specimens of wild grasses that could be bred into new forms of wheat able to withstand the inhospitable climates of the northern steppes.

For Lekhnovich, the intensity of the men in the black sedan, even the rude one who was shouting, had broken into their peaceful pursuit of plant hunting, but the urgent request for Nikolai Ivanovich did not seem out of the ordinary. Vavilov was an important scientist who was frequently summoned to Moscow at short notice.

"Nikolai Ivanovich is with the others, collecting specimens," Lekhnovich called back. "Is there an emergency?"

The man in the black sedan glared and spat out an answer.

"Academician Vavilov has important official documents about grain exports. They are needed immediately at the Commissariat of Agriculture."

The cold, demanding voice was suddenly unsettling. This was no idle bureaucrat.

"Where is Academician Vavilov?" the man demanded again.

"Tell us where we can find him."

"He is with the others, in a field farther up the mountain -- " Lekhnovich began, but before he could finish, the black sedan accelerated away, the dust billowing.

Lekhnovich coaxed his crippled vehicle back down the mountain to Chernovtsy and the university hostel where they were all staying.

At dusk, Nikolai Ivanovich returned with his botanists to the hostel. The four men in the black sedan were waiting for him. As he got out of his car, the door of the black sedan opened, and one of the men jumped out. He began talking earnestly with Nikolai Ivanovich, who then got into the sedan and it drove off. The guard at the hostel, who had overheard the conversation, reported to the botanists that the men told Nikolai Ivanovich he was needed urgently in Moscow. He had gone with them, saying that he would return.

Shortly before midnight, two of the four men returned to the Chernovtsy hostel. They carried a note for Lekhnovich from Vavilov, penned in his own distinctive handwriting.

"In view of my sudden recall to Moscow, hand over all my things to the bearer of this note. N. Vavilov, August 6, 1940, 2315 hours."

The two men insisted, politely but firmly, that all Vavilov's belongings should be put into his suitcase, not leaving anything out, not even a scrap of paper. They said that Vavilov was already at the airport and was waiting for his belongings before flying to Moscow.

Lekhnovich and another of the botanists, Fatikh Bakhteyev, did as they were told. As they packed the papers, even scraps of Vavilov's notes, they wondered why Nikolai Ivanovich had not been given a chance to pack his own bag, or, more importantly, to give instructions to the staff on how to continue the expedition in his absence. They decided that one of them should accompany the bags to the airport to get the orders directly.

Bakhteyev volunteered to go. They took the luggage out to the car where the men were waiting, one of them already at the wheel. Bakhteyev started to explain why he had to go with them and began to get into the car. But as he opened the door, one of the men forced Bakhteyev out of the way, pushed him to the ground, and jumped into the sedan as it drove off.

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov had disappeared into Stalin's prisons.Copyright © 2008 by Peter Pringle

Introduction

When I was a correspondent in Moscow in the last days of communism, I lived on a street named for Dmitry Ulyanov, Lenin's brother. Other streets nearby were a Who's Who of the old USSR and its socialist allies, even Ho Chi Minh. Many of the names meant nothing to me. Ulitsa Vavilova, Vavilov Street, was a mystery until one day a Russian friend told me the story of the Vavilov brothers.

The street had been named for Sergei Ivanovich Vavilov, a physicist of great renown. He became Stalin's president of the Academy of Sciences at the end of the Second World War and oversaw the beginnings of the Russian atomic bomb project. But it was Sergei's older brother, Nikolai, who was an even greater scientist and who was actually more famous, my friend said. Nikolai Vavilov was a botanist and geneticist, a plant breeder, an intrepid explorer, and an organizer of science. He had an ambitious plan to end famine throughout the world. He wanted to use the new science of genetics to breed varieties that would grow where none had survived before. The key was a treasure trove of genes he was sure he could find in the unknown and wild types that had been ignored by our ancestors as they started farming more than ten thousand years ago. To cultivate these crops, the early farmers selected the seeds of plants that looked strong and yielded more grain -- visible characteristics. But Vavilov was looking for the complex properties, such as the ability to withstand extremes of temperature and resistance to pests.

In the 1920s, Nikolai Vavilov roamed the world hunting for these wild varieties of wheat, corn, rye, and potatoes. He built the first international seed bank of food plants, a magnificent collection of hundreds of thousands of botanical specimens, a living library of the world's genetic diversity that would preserve species from extinction and could be used to breed his new miracle plants.

Nikolai's fame spread far beyond Russia, my friend told me. He was a leader of the biological world of the early twentieth century. His seed bank was the envy of his colleagues in Europe and America and they came to work with him at his plant breeding Institute in Leningrad.

In the first years after the 1917 revolution, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin understood the ultimate economic power of Nikolai Vavilov's dream -- to push Russia into the forefront of world food production -- and he supported Vavilov's expeditions. But Lenin died in 1924, and his successor, Josef Stalin, had a very different priority. Russians were starving. Stalin's forced collectivization of Russian agriculture had disrupted the harvests, and a widespread famine would claim millions of lives. The shortage of food was also a constant threat to the revolution.

Stalin gave Vavilov three years to produce his new miracle plants -- an impossible task, as Vavilov knew. To breed improved varieties using the new science of genetics took ten to twelve years. Impatient and ruthless, Stalin charged the geneticists like Vavilov with treason, called them "wreckers" and "saboteurs." They were jailed or executed. Vavilov died of starvation in 1943 in jail. "Just imagine," said my Russian friend, "the man who wanted to feed the world died of hunger in Stalin's prisons."

For many years in the Soviet Union you couldn't read Vavilov's scientific papers or even mention his name, my friend continued. But after Stalin died in 1953, Vavilov was "rehabilitated" -- pardoned -- and his reputation as a great scientist restored. The street near my Moscow home was named for his brother, Sergei, but Nikolai Vavilov is the one who is remembered all over Russia today. He has many memorials and plaques where he lived in St. Petersburg, and where he died in prison in Saratov on the Volga.

"And so, there you have it," my Russian friend had concluded, "a Shakespearean tragedy about two brothers, two brilliant scientists caught in revolution, civil war, and Stalin's terror, where one is destroyed by the regime and the other becomes a tool of it."

The story of the Vavilov brothers, like so many other seductive Russian sagas, leaves the listener wondering how much is true, and how much folklore. What began for me as idle curiosity about a street's name turned into a long and fascinating path of discovery about the violent birth of genetics in Russia, a path that would also reveal an intimate portrait of a bourgeois Russian family trying desperately to survive revolution, civil war, and Stalin's terror.

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was a bogatyr, as the Russians say, a man of incredible powers, a Hercules. He was indeed an international figure, a fearless explorer, a plant hunter who saw more varieties of food plants in their place of origin than any other botanist in his time. His collection of seeds from five continents captivated the scientific world.

In the early years of the genetic revolution, Vavilov changed the way scientists looked at their new bounty -- the world's vast store of valuable plant genes. Now, in the age of biotech agriculture it seems obvious to us that if you want to create a better, sturdier variety of corn or wheat, you should explore the total genetic diversity of the botanical kingdom for those exotic genes. But back then, as scientists debated the practical use of Mendel's laws of heredity and the words "gene" and "genetics" had only just entered the vocabulary,Vavilov' concepts were radical and innovative.

Before biotechnology and even before Watson and Crick had broken the genetic code, Vavilov laid out a grand plan for "sculpting" plants to human needs, for synthesizing varieties unknown in nature. He opened the eyes of the world's plant hunters and breeders to new ways of applying their expertise, forcing them to think outside the limits of a s...

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0743264983
• ISBN 13: 9780743264983
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384