Алексей Навальный, better known to readers of the Latin alphabet as Alexei Navalny, is likely dying in a Russian prison right now. It was announced recently that he’s ended the hunger strike that left him with a reportedly tenuous grasp on life. On paper his crime is embezzlement. In reality, it’s the proud Russian tradition of telling the government to fuck itself.
Politico or scientist, authoritarianism spares no room for dissent.
Today’s Moment of Science… the crimes of/against Nikolai Vavilov.
For a species that’s been growing food for about ten thousand years, we’ve been largely shit at it until somewhat recently. Mendel only started playing with his pea plants in the mid-1800s. However, nobody picked up on his research until decades after his death, and it took a while to work its way into common understanding. In that knowledge vacuum, some strange notions barged their way through the empty space.
Born in 1887 in Russia, Nikolai Vavilov graduated from the Moscow Agricultural Institute in 1912. Changing the course of his life for the historic in 1913, he departed to study under William Bateson at Cambridge University. Bateson’s the first known person to use the term ‘genetics,’ and a crucial popularizer of Mendel’s ideas. Vavilov brought cutting edge scientific training back to Russia with him in 1917, just a few years before the formation of the Soviet Union.
At first, he thrived in the USSR. When they were hit with a famine in the early 1920s, Lenin was like “comrade, let’s get that bread.” Off to America Vavilov went. He returned with a more robust knowledge of agriculture in the US and over sixty boxes of seeds. He was just getting started.
Through the course of his career, Vavilov traveled to five continents, leaving few types of habitats unexamined for seeds. From his work, the USSR gained a collection of 50,000 seed varieties from wild plants. His specialty being wheat breeding, he collected 31,000 wheat specimens. They were stored in the Leningrad Seedbank, a triumph in the effort to safeguard future generations against famine.
He was the founding director of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences at Leningrad. From the late 1920s to the mid 1930s, he established 400 research institutes throughout the country.
Unfortunately, by the time Vavilov had collected a small universe of seeds and researched new, legitimate theories in plant genetics, Stalin was the head of the Soviet Union. You could say things had taken a bit of a turn.
The infamously pseudoscientific Trofim Lysenko had become all but the dictator of biological sciences in Russia. Lysenko’s less daffy ideas included the notions that genetics were bullshit, DNA didn’t exist, and that Darwin was a poo poo head. Lysenko theorized that if you wanted a plant to be better at surviving in the cold, for instance, just stick it in the cold and it would sort itself out eventually.
Also, it’s dawning on me where my Russian father got some of his ideas for parenting.
Vavilov had been encouraging to Lysenko, telling him to research his ideas early in his career. The opposite wasn’t the case when Lysenko gained power. When Vavilov refused to Dr. Birx it, firmly disagreeing with Lysenko’s whackadoodle hypotheses, he likely knew this put him directly at odds with Stalin. Lysenko called Vavilov an apologist for “Mendelist–Morganist genetics,” something only the evil westerners were into, apparently.
A successful campaign was waged to destroy Vavilov’s reputation. In 1940, he was in modern day Ukraine collecting specimens when he was abducted by the NKVD. He suffered through months of torturous interrogation, and was eventually sentenced to life in prison.
The man Lenin hired to save the USSR from famine died of starvation in a Soviet prison in 1943.
The Soviet Union had one of the best genetics programs, if not the best, in the world before Lysenko’s rise to power. His methods only succeeded in killing millions upon millions of people. Eventually, the tactic of “pretend the famine is getting better and keep jailing everyone who points out that this guy sucks” got old.
By which I mean Stalin died.
A few years after Stalin’s death in 1953, the long process of De-Stalinization began. Political prisoners were released and sentences were overturned. Vavilov was given a posthumous pardon in 1956, his image rehabilitated by the 1960s. He’s considered a hero of Soviet science today.
Even so, it’s hard to say how well De-Stalinization worked. Six decades later, we’re still watching a guy starving to death in a Russian prison for speaking truth to power.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, suggesting that the truth shouldn’t hurt the person telling it.
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