BOOK OF THE DAY: The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin's Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century By Peter PringleJR Books pp 305, £18.99
THE TRAGIC story of the enthusiastic Russian geneticist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov serves to contrast the evil of Stalin’s Soviet Union with the light that can shine from one person using reason to better the world.
Reading about Stalin is usually distressing, as anyone who has read Simon Sebag Montefiore’s books on the monster will attest. This book is not so heavily drenched with the presence of epic cruelty, as for whole chapters Stalin and his regime are far in the background. That changes as the book nears its end.
Upon leaving school in 1906, Vavilov went to the Petrovskaya Agricultural Academy, from which he emerged as a star graduate. He travelled to France, Germany and England. In Cambridge he met evolutionary biologist William Bateson and was allowed into Darwin’s library to read the evidence of the great man’s intellectual journey.
Vavilov’s interest was in the capacity of science to improve the crops grown in Russia and the Soviet Union. He grew convinced that certain, usually mountainous areas of the world, contained seed that could be useful to this project, and in this way began one of the great themes of his story – extraordinary seed and plant hunting expeditions to remote and dangerous places. As well as being the story of a scientist, this is also a gripping yarn about Indiana Jones-type adventures.
Mostly on horseback or walking, Vavilov visited Persia in 1905, Afghanistan in 1924, Abyssinia in 1926, and Central and South America in 1932. He visited North America also, and criss-crossed the Soviet Union. All the time he was collecting seeds for the institute in Leningrad where he and his fellow workers were building up one of the best, if not the best, seed and plant collections in the world. In time he became a Russian scientist of international repute.
Then the hugely unattractive Trofim Lysenko appears on the stage. Lysenko was a plant breeder who disliked cosmopolitan, learned men such as Vavilov. He began to make scientific claims that were backed by Marxist philosophy rather than experiment. Stalin appears to have targeted Vavilov because of the failure of the Soviet farm collectivisation policy, and to have been attracted to Lysenko’s combination of bitterness, nastiness and capacity to make daft and opportunistic claims.
Lysenko clambered his way up the pole of Soviet “science”, eventually becoming Vavilov’s boss. The Soviet State began attacking its own scientists and Vavilov ended up in the notorious Lubyanka prison. Colleagues were arrested on Lysenko’s testimony and shot; Vavilov was sentenced to death for trying to “wreck” Soviet agriculture and for being a spy. An appeal saw the sentence commuted. However, within less than two years, in January 1943, Vavilov died, aged 55, of malnutrition. A scientist devoted to improving crop yields starved to death in Stalin’s jails.
Journalist Peter Pringle has written a straightforward and highly readable account of a ghastly story, using family documents, interviews and the Soviet archives. You wonder, reading it, if people such as Vavilov and his family, and the likes of Stalin and Lysenko, can be made of the same genetic stuff.
Colm Keena is an Irish Timesjournalist and a science graduate of Trinity College Dublin.