Socialist Seeds – Nikolai Vavilov, Trofim Lysenko and the Dark Side Of Pseudoscience

Nikolai Vavilov was born in Moscow in 1887 into a family of wealthy textile merchants. Wanting for nothing as a child, he nonetheless was aware of the physical and mental toll of famine, as his father’s youth was defined by crop failures and starvation. As a boy, Vavilov dreamed of a world without famine, and his aptitude for science led him on a path that would eventually collide with pseudoscience and the incompetence of the Soviet regime. In 1906, he attended the Petrovskya Agricultural Academy, followed by a year of work at the Bureau For Applied Botany and the Bureau of Mycology and Phytopathology (the study of fungi and plant disease). 

In 1913, Vavilov traveled to England to study with William Bateson at the John Innes Horticultural Institute. Bateson was the world renowned biologist who coined the term “genetics” and espoused the laws of inheritance discovered by Gregor Mendel. For young Nikolai, this education further fueled his desire to protect global crops, but his studies were cut short by the outbreak of World War I. Instead of giving up on his dreams, Vavilov doubled down on them after returning to Russia. Calling on his earlier studies at the phytopathology institute, he began post-doctoral work on plant disease resistance and spent the next 25 years travelling the world, collecting thousands of disease resistant seeds. He learned a dozen languages so he could converse with the locals and even though most everyone he met was willing to cooperate, his travels weren’t without danger. On his very first trip in 1916, with war raging in Europe, he was arrested at the Iranian-Russian border on suspicion of espionage (he was carrying German textbooks at the time). Other travel mishaps were physical in nature – he nearly died falling in between two train cars in Afghanistan and contracted typhus and malaria at the same time in Syria, but those hardships didn’t quench his thirst for knowledge. By 1920, Vavilov’s work was beginning to catch the eye of the government and he was invited to speak at the All-Russian Congress on Breeding and Seed Production. He lectured a group of like-minded botanists on what he called his “law of homologus variation” – homology is similarity due to shared evolutionary history, and he believed that by knowing the traits of one species, he could accurately predict parallel traits in similar species. Over time, he found proof in wheat, rye, millet, oats, cotton, grasses and potatoes. In that same year he became head of the Department of Applied Botany in Petrograd and eventually assumed leadership positions within the All – Union Institute of Plant Industry (the VIR) and the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL). VASKhNIL was a massive conglomerate made up of 11 research institutes, 206 specialized “zonal stations”, 26 agricultural research stations and 36 breeding stations. In addition to overseeing the entire network, Vavilov identified what he called “centers of plant domestication.” These included southwest and southeast Asia, coastal areas of the Mediterranean, Ethiopia, Mesoamerica, the Chiloe archipelago, the border between Paraguay and Brazil and one island center near Indonesia. Vavilov believed that modern crops grown in these regions were more genetically diverse because they evolved from the first domesticated wild plants and that they should be gathered and banked in case of a future global catastrophe. He was one of the first scientists to win the Lenin Prize and was elected to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR as well as several global academies. All seemed to be going well for Nikolai Vavilov – he was conducting meaningful research and his star was on the rise.

Until it wasn’t.

By the late 1920’s, the Communists began placing uneducated and unqualified men in positions of power as part of the Soviet glorification of the common man. Enter Trofim Lysenko, an illiterate Ukrainian peasant. The only education he had was at the Vocational School for Gardners in Uman and a brief training class in cultivating sugar beets at the Kiev Agricultural Institute. How was it possible that an ignorant peasant from a Soviet backwater would eventually eclipse Vavilov’s success? Quite simply, Lysenko was in the right place at the right time and knew how to exploit the system. He was working at the Ghandzha Plant Breeding Institute in Azerbaijan doing nothing but planting peas when the opportunity to show off presented itself. A Pravda journalist was assigned to the lab to write a puff piece about peasant scientists and Lysenko convinced the reporter that his crop yields were far above average and could feed the entire country. The article was published on October 8, 1929 and claimed “the barefoot professor Lysenko has followers…and the luminaries of agronomy visit…and gratefully shake his hand.” It’s hard to tell who was the bigger liar, but the article caught Stalin’s attention and further emboldened Lysenko. He eventually grew so arrogant that he started claiming he had experimented with wheat and barley seeds and had found they produced higher yields in the winter when the seeds were frozen in water before planting. Lysenko called the process “vernalization” and claimed he could double crop yields in just a few years because it converted spring crops to winter ones; he also stated – with no scientific proof whatsoever – that the offspring of high yield plants would also have high yields. This belief that characteristics are acquired from the environment and not genes (Lamarckian inheritance) had been completely debunked but that didn’t stop Lysenko from pushing his pseudoscience. He merely changed his perspective and tied Lamarckian inheritance to Marxism by arguing that his beliefs were more in line with Marxism than Mendelian genetics were. He never performed controlled experiments and most of the “data” he relied on to make his claims was completely fabricated. The lies didn’t matter. He had Stalin on his side and therefore was given carte blanche to discredit Vavilov and Western (and therefore bourgeoise) Mendelian genetics.

Vavilov had befriended Lysenko early in the man’s career, and initially agreed with him. Eventually realizing that he’d been played, Vavilov asked one of his students to replicate one of Lysenko’s experiments, which, of course, couldn’t be done. Vavilov became a vocal critic of Lysenko and this marked the end of his career – and eventually his life.. In 1933, the Central Committee forbade him from travelling abroad, and a few years later, Lysenko was put in charge of the purge that targeted Mendelian geneticists. In typical Soviet fashion, they were forced to swear allegiance to Lysenko’s belief, and if they didn’t, they were fined and imprisoned. References to Mendelian genetics were removed from all textbooks.

By 1939, Vavilov knew he was public enemy number one, but he also knew he was right and stood firm in his beliefs. Speaking at the All-Union Institute of Plant Breeding, Vavlilov stated “we shall go into the pyre, we shall burn, but we shall not retreat from our convictions.” By this time, Lysenko was in charge of the VASHKhNIL and had had enough of Vavilov’s open defiance. Thus, on August 6, 1940, Vavilov was arrested and taken to the infamous Lubyanka Prison, where he was interrogated for 1700 hours in 400 separate interrogation sessions. His interrogator, Alexander Khvat, was a sadist who fabricated evidence that Vavilov had sabotaged airstrips in the Leningrad Military Region by sowing them with weeds. He also assembled a panel of “experts” that claimed Vavilov’s institutes were fronts for anti-Soviet activism due to the large number of middle class, merchant class, religious class and traditionalist (tsarist) class people he employed.

Eleven months after Vavilov’s arrest, Khvat had fabricated enough evidence against him to convene a show trial. Vavilov was accused of belonging to an anti-Soviet organization that was conspiring to destroy collectivized farming. He was sentenced to imprisonment in Saratov Prison No. 1. For some reason, Lysenko’s minions had not yet taken control of the VIR, so Vavliov’s employees were able to protect his legacy, which included 35,000 wheat samples, 10,000 corn samples, 26,000 legumes and 1,200 kinds of fruit. By this time, World War II was ravaging Europe, and soon, the dedicated scientists of the VIR had more to worry about than incurring Stalin’s wrath. On September 8, 1941, the siege of Leningrad began and by the time it was over, more than 800,000 people died of starvation and malnutrition. During the winter of 41-42, Vavilov’s team feared the Nazis would destroy the seed bank, but the Sammelkommandos (collecting commandos) saw the VIR as a way to provide for the new concept of Lebensraum (living space) and thus left the scientists alone. Stalin was putting everything he had into fighting Hitler, so the VIR was safe from his purges as well. Instead of fighting ideals, Vavilov’s employees battled the elements and the fear of potential attacks from starving villagers; the people of Leningrad were forced to exist on 250 grams of food per day and had taken to eating pet food (and sometimes their pets) and wallpaper paste to survive. Anticipating a raid, the scientists protected the seed bank by sending seeds for which they had duplicate samples to other labs, and by putting multiple locks on the doors and bars on the windows. To their credit, however, the citizens of Leningrad never tried to break in. Instead, the invaders were of the four-legged kind: rats. The staff divided large samples into multiple smaller ones, reasoning that if the rats were successful, they wouldn’t have access to all the seeds and grains at once. They also suspended some seed canisters between the shelves to slow the rats down.  Both approaches worked and the seed bank survived.

At this point, the 16 scientists who ran the facility were also starving to death surrounded by food, but out of respect for Vavilov and his life’s work, they never touched the seeds, though doing so would have probably saved their lives. Alexander Stchukin, an expert on groundnuts, died at his desk, as did Dmitry Ivanov (rice expert), Georgi Kriyer (medicinal herb expert) and Liliya Rodina (grain crop expert). Vavilov’s friend Vladimir Lekhnovich survived to document their stories. 

Vavilov never knew that the VIR survived – on January 24, 1943 he was admitted to the prison hospital with chest pains, shortness of breath and severe diarrhea. Two days later, at the age of 56, he died. The father of global food protection had been starved to death by his political rivals. A decade would pass until the Soviets admitted there had been “gross breaches” of the law during Vavilov’s trial, as much of an apology as the government would allow. The VIR was eventually renamed the N.I.Vavilov All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Plant Industry and it remains a major seed repository and research facility today. In 2018, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened in Spitsbergen, Sweden and is the 21st century realization of Nikolai Vavilov’s dream. It can store 4.5 million varieties of plants at -18℃ and can protect 2.5 billion individual seeds. The mission statement at Svalbard reads in part “To serve as a global seed vault, to serve as a backup storage facility…to store duplicates (backups) of seed samples from the world’s crop collections.”

Nikolai Vavilov’s work – and death- was not in vain.

Source:

Dugatkin, Lee Alan. “The Botanist Who Defied Stalin”. Nautilus Magazine. April 21, 2021. http://www.natil.us/the-botanist-who-defied-stalin-238183