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In The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, acclaimed journalist and author Peter Pringle recreates the extraordinary life and tragic end of one of the great scientists of the twentieth century. In a drama of love, revolution, and war that rivals Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, Pringle tells the story of a young Russian scientist, Nikolai Vavilov, who had a dream of ending hunger and famine in the world. Vavilov's plan would use the emerging science of genetics to breed super plants that could grow anywhere, in any climate, in sandy deserts and freezing tundra, in drought and flood. He would launch botanical expeditions to find these vanishing genes, overlooked by early farmers ignorant of Mendel's laws of heredity. He called it a "mission for all humanity." To the leaders of the young Soviet state, Vavilov's dream fitted perfectly into their larger scheme for a socialist utopia. Lenin supported the adventurous Vavilov, a handsome and seductive young professor, as he became an Indiana Jones, hunting lost botanical treasures on five continents. In a former tsarist palace in what is now St. Petersburg, Vavilov built the world's first seed bank, a quarter of a million specimens, a magnificent living museum of plant diversity that was the envy of scientists everywhere and remains so today. But when Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin took over, Vavilov's dream turned into a nightmare. This son of science was from a bourgeois background, the class of society most despised and distrusted by the Bolsheviks. The new cadres of comrade scientists taunted and insulted him, and Stalin's dreaded secret police built up false charges of sabotage and espionage. Stalin's collectivization of farmland caused chaos in Soviet food production, and millions died in widespread famine. Vavilov's master plan for improving Soviet crops was designed to work over decades, not a few years, and he could not meet Stalin's impossible demands for immediate results. In Stalin's Terror of the 1930s, Russian geneticists were systematically repressed in favor of the peasant horticulturalist Trofim Lysenko, with his fraudulent claims and speculative theories. Vavilov was the most famous victim of this purge, which set back Russian biology by a generation and caused the country untold harm. He was sentenced to death, but unlike Galileo, he refused to recant his beliefs and, in the most cruel twist, this humanitarian pioneer scientist was starved to death in the gulag. Pringle uses newly opened Soviet archives, including Vavilov's secret police file, official correspondence, vivid expedition reports, previously unpublished family letters and diaries, and the reminiscences of eyewitnesses to bring us this intensely human story of a brilliant life cut short by anti-science demagogues, ideology, censorship, and political expedience.… (more)
User reviews
The discussion of Vavilov's travels to collect seeds is delightful. The tale of Lysenko and Stalin and the whole murderous Soviet regime is utterly chilling. Probably nothing really new here, but the concrete details really do give the story impact.
Politics and science still collide today. Probably climate science is the scariest arena. Medicine might be even more twisted - there is so much money at stake, so many lobbyists. The stakes with climate science may be higher in the end, but still the "alarmists" are essentially powerless. The battles in medicine are quieter, which probably means more serious winning and losing is happening.
What else can we do with the kind of tragedy we learn about in this book? Let us do what we can not to repeat it, but to support and encourage the kind of heroism personified by Vavilov.
Sadly, his story does not end well. A political opportunist arose who was able to discredit him with a competing view of the way plants grow and change over time. While this competing view had significant problems it was politically palatable and became the view of the Russian government. Ending with Nikolai Vavilov being sent to prison, condemned to death and ultimately he starved to death in jail in 1943. Ironic that the man who spent his whole adult life only caring about plants and trying to feed the world was killed by his government by starvation in a prison cell.
His seed banks were in many cases preserved. Even to the point of several parts living thru the siege of Leningrad. Some of scientists starved to death and afterwards the seeds they preserved were found. Rice and other grains they refused to die instead of eat to preserve.
Another bloody blot on the history of communism.