by Simon Ings
The tug of war between his scientific concerns and his administrative responsibilities was something Vavilov felt keenly, and he was not particularly stoical about it. In January 1930 he wrote to Georgy Karpechenko, who was studying alongside Theodosius Dobzhansky with Thomas Morgan’s fruit fly team in California:
I am completely squeezed here. On top of all the work [at the Lenin Academy] with its tens of institutes, I suddenly turned out to be my own supervisor, as I was made a voting member of the Collegium of the USSR Commissariat for Land. We want to build Washington, nothing less. They told me, ‘We will let you go in a year.’ All in all, I have eighteen posts. My cranium will soon explode from these layers of rubbish on all sides.11
The huge expansion of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences at the end of the 1920s, from paper plans to a federation of real research centres, was predicated on the crazy belief that the peasants, once collectivised, would be able to harness the latest scientific techniques overnight. But the academy’s promotion of Vavilov’s grand project – to gather, organise and exploit a world-spanning collection of useful plants – could only widen the gulf between scientists and farmers.
Agrarian revolutions cannot be won with seed alone. On the average peasant farm, infested with weeds, rarely fertilised, and lacking a seed drill, improved seed was a complete waste of money, and the peasant farmer was quite right to spurn the government’s improved seed in favour of the tried and tested, locally adapted mongrel seed he had been using year in, year out.
The answer was to turn ordinary farmers themselves into scientists, and to shape collectivisation around what actually worked in real fields. Collectivisation was the first great experiment in ‘citizen science’ the world had ever seen.
No one took citizen science more seriously, or had a more sincere belief in its potential to transform science, than Yakov Yakovlev, editor, since 1923, of Bednota (Peasants’ Gazette), the state’s mouthpiece to the vast majority of Russia’s population and the only news organ most Soviet farmers ever saw. To drive modernisation forward, the Gazette organised an army of peasant scientists in ‘hut labs’, claiming over 23,000 participants by 1929.
A Time article from 1935 neatly captured Yakovlev’s importance: ‘Imagine sombrero-wearing William Randolph Hearst editing with Communist zeal the Great American Farm Newspaper and you begin to have some faint idea of Comrade Yakov Arkadevich Yakovlev.’12 Yakovlev devoted his efforts as editor-in-chief to education, publishing articles on weed control, the application of manure, the introduction of clover, sprouting potatoes before planting, and other solid, practical advice. The Peasants’ Gazette also promoted the sale of improved varieties in the hope that, as modernisation set in, these varieties would turn out to be worth the money.
The Gazette was anything but dry. It was a campaigning paper, and wanted its readers’ active participation. Most of its pages were given over to self-promotional articles penned by the readership. Every crank plantsman in the country wrote in to the Gazette to share his ‘sure-fire’ agricultural technique. The contribution of these articles to the modernisation campaign was marginal; what they did contribute was a creeping hysteria, just waiting to be put in harness.
*
As a boy, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was bright and industrious. His father even allowed him to spend an extra couple of years at the village school. By the age of thirteen he could read and write. Still, being the son of a peasant, Lysenko would not have amounted to anything very much had it not been for the revolution.
This talented youngster made the very most of the new opportunities given him. In 1917 he entered the Uman Horticultural School. He studied there for four years, while the Civil War raged about him. (Uman changed hands several times between the Whites, the Greens and the Reds.) His higher education came via correspondence courses from the Kiev Agricultural Institute, while he worked at a small plant-breeding station in the town of Belaya Tserkov in the Ukraine. In 1925 he graduated and left for Gandzja (now Kirovabad) in the Caucasus (now Azerbaijan). There, at a small experimental station, he was given the job of acclimatising beans as a green-manure crop. The results of his labours were promising. Practical, working-class, ambitious and working for the common good: was he not the very model of the new Soviet scientist?
Pravda thought so. Hungry for agricultural good-news stories – and arriving before Lysenko’s experiments could be repeated and the results confirmed – the journalist Vitaly Fedorovich arrived in Gandzja to profile this Wünderkind of beans.
At twenty-nine, with no postgraduate training or higher degree and no formal claim to the title of scientist, Lysenko explained to Fedorovich how he solved practical problems by a few calculations ‘on a little old piece of paper’. The encounter was not a particularly easy one:
If one is to judge a man by first impression, Lysenko gives one the feeling of a toothache; God give him health, he has a dejected mien. Stingy of words and insignificant of face is he; all one remembers is his sullen look creeping along the earth as if, at the very least, he were ready to do someone in.13
Still, Fedorovich was impressed. ‘The Fields in Winter’, published in Pravda on 7 August 1927, cast Lysenko as a ‘barefoot scientist’, who ‘holds a plough with one hand, a flask with the other’. Rather than studying ‘the hairy legs of flies’, this sober young man ‘went to the root of things.’
This article not only turned Lysenko’s head; it derailed his scientific career. His experiments in acclimatising beans to new conditions were genuinely interesting and he should have persevered with them. He should have repeated them. The hype which engulfed him, however, took his mind off method. He was still at the stage of his education when science seems easy – a few calculations on a piece of paper. And all of a sudden, important organs of the state, bureaucrats and pundits were rushing to agree with his findings. Vavilov himself took an interest, dispatching a colleague to look into Lysenko’s work. Lysenko was very excited, and even gave up his bed to his visitor and slept on the floor.
The report Vavilov got back was uncannily prescient: Lysenko was ‘an experimenter who was fearless and undoubtedly talented, but he was also an uneducated and extremely egotistical person, deeming himself to be a new Messiah of biological science’.14
Lysenko’s work on acclimatising plants to new conditions focused on the calendar. He studied how different varieties of the same crop responded to being planted at different times of the year.
Wheat was of particular interest. Normally, winter wheat gets established as the weather grows colder, then waits till early spring to produce its grain. There’s the risk that a harsh winter can kill it. If you plant winter wheat in the spring, though, it probably won’t ear (develop grain-producing spikes) at all. This is because it is waiting for a signal – a period of winter cold – that has already passed.
Lysenko studied the way a spell of artificially induced cold can fool a winter wheat variety to ear. This process is called vernalisation. By moistening and chilling winter wheat, the seed experiences a tiny amount of germination and growth – just enough to allow it to detect the chilly conditions in which it is stored. The seed will then do all its growing – earing and all – in a frantic burst once planted out in early spring.
The question is: why bother? What is the economic value of turning winter wheat into spring wheat? True, you avoid the risk of having your crop killed by a severe winter, and you get an early crop – but are these real advantages, or just paper ones? The Ohio State Board of Agriculture reported experiments in vernalisation as early as 1857, but could find no economic value in the practice: it was a scientific curiosity, nothing more.
Lysenko’s ‘Monograph No. 3 of the Azerbaijan Experiment Station: The influence of temperature on the length of the developmental period of plants’ made no bid for originality. It was work in a well-established research tradition. But Lysenko did admit to an ambition: to evolve a precise, comprehensive theory to explain how plants adapted to the annual temperat
ure cycle. For all the work that had already been done, no one really knew why plants responded to temperature in such a regular and predictable way.
Vavilov’s institute was already devoting serious effort to the problem. Its resident vernalisation expert, Nikolai Alexandrovich Maksimov, had been working away since 1923, and courteously but firmly set Lysenko straight about the weaknesses in his paper. Lysenko’s statistics were a mess, and further reading would have saved him the bother of reinventing a lot of ideas that were already in the literature.15
Maksimov considered the paper too weak to include at the All-Union Congress planned for January 1929, but Vavilov disagreed. Lysenko’s work, for all its weaknesses, was original and promising, and delivering a paper would give him useful experience.
Come January, then, Lysenko presented his paper, and Maksimov, sitting through Lysenko’s errors a second time, lost some of his courtesy. Lysenko seemed to think that plants came with little clocks inside them, when all the evidence suggested it was temperature, not time, that dictated how plants organised their development. As for his actual results, they did little more than confirm the results of the German researcher Gustav Gassner. ‘The results obtained by Comrade Lysenko do not represent anything new in principle, [and] are not a scientific discovery in the precise sense of the word.’16
Maksimov’s own presentation was much more convincing. One of the more stirring headlines to come out of the Congress – ‘It is possible to transform winter into spring cereals: an achievement of Soviet science’ – was referring to Maksimov, not Lysenko.
If Lysenko did not particularly shine at the congress, he had little to complain about. He had made good on Pravda’s hype by presenting his first real paper at a national congress, and the leaders in his field were taking a critical interest in his work. Only a man of Lysenko’s gloomy stripe would interpret this modest success as a snub.
But this is what Lysenko did. He never touched statistics again, relying ever afterwards on crude theories ‘proved’ by arbitrary examples. And he avoided the science press; virtually everything he wrote after that was published in newspapers or in journals created for him by the government.
We do not know whether this extreme reaction of his had anything to do with Isaak Prezent. We do know that it was at this congress that this pair of mathematical illiterates met for the first time, and the most destructive partnership in the history of science was born.
*
The 1929 Congress could not have been more timely. Ukraine was suffering, for the second year in a row, a calamitous failure of its winter wheat harvest. About 7 million hectares of winter wheat had perished – 90 per cent of the entire crop.
The story goes that Lysenko’s father – faced, like all his fellow farmers, with ruination – took a risk and tried to vernalise his own seed. (He did this in secret, afraid that his neighbours would sneer at him – a telling detail of peasant life, and one which lends the story some credence.) Lysenko’s father soaked forty-eight kilos of Ukrainka, a winter wheat, in water and buried the moist seed in a snowbank to keep it cold until the spring. In the spring, he planted it alongside a field of spring wheat – and got a better yield from the winter wheat.
That, anyway, was the claim. A commission sent by the Ukrainian Commissariat of Agriculture investigated, and became markedly enthusiastic, ordering large-scale production tests of vernalisation. And after two terrible winters, and with Bolshevik leaders breathing down their necks demanding grain to feed their monstrous industrialisation drive, the commissariat went further. Even before their tests began, the commissars were telling the papers that a solution to the problem of winter crop destruction had been found.
One season’s success on half a hectare made Lysenko a hero. Even Maksimov – as hungry as anyone for a quick fix to the famine problem – came on-side. On 1 September 1929 he attended a lecture Lysenko gave at the Bureau of Applied Botany in Leningrad, and was much more positive than he had been at the big congress in January. ‘Both Gassner and I,’ he wrote later, ‘being plant physiologists, went no further than laboratory experiments. Cold germination appeared to us to be too complicated for direct application in field farming.’ Lysenko had simplified the method to the point where ordinary peasant farmers could use it. It was ‘certainly impossible not to acknowledge this as a great achievement’.17
The trouble with Lysenko, however – you might even say his tragedy – was that he could never see when he had won. Insisting that his theory of ‘winterness’ was quite different from Gassner’s and Maksimov’s theory of ‘cold germination’, he contrived to take offence at Maksimov’s welcoming words. He did not want to be part of Maksimov’s scientific community, or any other scientific community. He did not want his work considered as part of an honourable tradition. He wanted credit, all the time, for everything he touched.
In October 1929, Lysenko started work at the All-Union Institute of Plant Breeding in Odessa, the most important centre of agricultural research in the Ukraine. The following month Yakov Yakovlev, whose newspaper had made much of Lysenko’s vernalisation, replaced Gorbunov as commissar for agriculture. No reader of the Peasants’ Gazette would have been surprised at what followed. Following a glowing field report by Yakovlev himself, mass national trials of the vernalisation of wheat were ordered for 1932. Lysenko was given his own journal, the Bulletin of Vernalisation; the opportunity to construct his own courses; and 150,000 roubles. Vavilov’s Bureau of Applied Botany was ordered to cooperate with the mass vernalisation scheme. Yakovlev himself told Vavilov to offer Lysenko ‘every assistance’ and ‘personally look after him’.
Vavilov responded smartly. To his vice-director he wrote: ‘Lysenko’s work is remarkable and forces us to take a different view of many things. It is necessary that the World Collection is worked through with vernalisation.’ His enthusiasm was genuine. Vavilov needed vernalisation to work. He had spent years abroad, collecting the world’s largest collection of cultivated plants. He had risked life and limb in the wildest and most remote regions, beginning in Afghanistan in June 1924, where he was shot at, arrested, and even threatened with execution. In the years since he had travelled through the war-torn Middle East, through Spain (whose exhausted spies brokered a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’ with him that let them stay in bed while he went climbing), and most recently to Japan, where he marvelled at ‘numerous kinds of bamboo, edible in various forms; Chinese yams; and an enormous variety of radishes, turnips, roots, mustards, edible Japanese burdock, water chestnuts, lotus, arrowhead and edible bulbs of lilies … and peculiar vegetables such as “udo”, rhubarb, perennial Chinese “tsyo-tsai” onions, “ou sen” or asparagus lettuce, peculiar white eggplants, colossal cucumbers, edible luffa, edible “miso” chrysanthemums, tuberous asparagus and so on.’18 But having assembled a collection of such useful plants, Vavilov – not himself an expert plant breeder – now confronted the task of turning them to practical use.
Most cultivated plants come from mild latitudes. As much as nine-tenths of Vavilov’s collection would have struggled to flower under Russian conditions. Many would not germinate at all, and crossing them with local varieties often proved impossible. Only through vernalisation could Vavilov hope to adapt his collection quickly to Russia’s cold, dry, unpredictable climate.
This dream was a vain one. In a very few years, it became clear that vernalisation was not the panacea Lysenko and Yakovlev had promised. But this conclusion took time to reach. It took time to investigate, repeat and measure every positive result. It takes time, always, in even the most sceptical and measured study, to demonstrate the absence of an effect. Vavilov was entitled to hope for positive results. He even began to call himself an ‘agronomist’, distinguishing himself from laboratory scientists like Maksimov. In October 1931, at a meeting of biologists in the Communist Academy, he twitted Maksimov for underestimating Lysenko:
Lysenko not only developed Gassner, he went much further, he took the most different objects, he found that not
only lowering of temperature, but also many other factors can be used to speed up development. His approach is very serious, and very new. We agronomists feel that a real revolution has started …19
Notes
1. Kendall E. Bailes, ‘Soviet Science in the Stalin Period: The Case of V. I. Vernadskii and His Scientific School, 1928–1945’, Slavic Review 45, no. 1 (1986), pp. 33–4.
2. Margarita Fofanova, O Vladimire Ilyiche Lenine: Vospominaniya [About Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Reminiscences], pp. 175–6.
3. Nils Roll-Hansen, ‘Wishful Science: The Persistence of T. D. Lysenko’s Agrobiology in the Politics of Science’, Intelligentsia Science: The Russian Century, 1860–1960, p. 171.
4. Maurice Hindus, ‘Henry Ford Conquers Russia’, The Outlook (29 June 1927), p. 282. See also Kendall E. Bailes, ‘The American Connection: Ideology and the Transfer of American Technology to the Soviet Union, 1917–1941’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 23 (1981), pp. 421–48.
5. L. C. Dunn, ‘Soviet Biology’, Science, New Series, 99, no. 2561 (28 January 1944), pp. 65–7.
6. Pringle, The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, p. 36.
7. Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair, p. 31.
8. F. Kh. Bakhteyev, ‘Reminiscences of N. I. Vavilov (1887–1943) on the Eightieth Anniversary of His Birthday’, Theoretical and Applied Genetics: International Journal of Plant Breeding Research 38, no. 3 (1968), p. 81.
9. Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair, p. 25.