by Simon Ings
10. Roll-Hansen, The Lysenko Effect, p. 90.
11. Pringle, The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, p. 153.
12. ‘Russia: Collective Congress’, Time, 25 February 1935; available at http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,754543,00.html.
13. Quoted in Zhores A. Medvedev, The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko, p. 11.
14. Semen Reznik, Nikolai Vavilov, p. 267.
15. The richness of that literature – soon to be subsumed, championed (and, later, caricatured) as ‘Michurinism’ – is made evident in Douglas R. Weiner’s ‘The Roots of “Michurinism”: Transformist Biology and Acclimatization as Currents in the Russian Life Sciences’, Annals of Science, 42 (1985), pp. 243–60.
16. Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair, p. 190.
17. Roll-Hansen, The Lysenko Effect, p. 118.
18. Vavilov, Five Continents, p. 58.
19. Roll-Hansen, The Lysenko Effect, p. 135.
11: Kooperatorka
Children in Donetsk dig potatoes out of the frozen ground for transportation elsewhere. A decree in August 1932 forbade peasants from eating their own crops.
Lysenko is a careful and highly talented researcher. His experiments are irreproachable. 1
Nikolai Vavilov to the Lenin Academy, 17 June 1935
Perhaps it was only his perseverance, his extraordinary thirst for knowledge and his undeviating pursuit of the road he had chosen that distinguished [Lysenko] from the rest. And one other very characteristic feature: for him, knowledge was something that was immediately put into practice … The fact that, having arrived in Ganja in the autumn, he did not wait until the spring to commence work on his legumes, already revealed the ‘Lysenko style’. 2
Vadim Andreevich Safonov, Land in Bloom, 1951
The talented Soviet geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky had come a long way since the Civil War, when he had smuggled food parcels out of Kiev for Vladimir Vernadsky. In March 1927 he had applied for a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship to spend a year at Thomas Morgan’s lab. The following autumn he had followed Morgan to Caltech, extending his fellowship for another year. Dobzhansky adored America, He used to cross the country by car each summer.3 In October 1930, over the course of a walk in California’s Sequoia National Forest, Nikolai Vavilov did his best to tempt Dobzhansky back to the Soviet Union, but Dobzhansky had little desire to return home. There was no lab space for him in Leningrad, and Vavilov was quite open about him having to lecture and write textbooks if he hoped to make ends meet.
These privations were not the sticking point. Quite simply, Dobzhansky did not trust the Soviet government. He feared for the future of his country, and could not imagine his own future within its borders.
‘We have to ignore, we have to leave out of consideration, the political matters with which we do not agree,’ Vavilov conceded.4 But even as he tried to argue Dobzhansky out of his position, the Soviet authorities were undercutting him. Vavilov’s ambitions for a US-style extension service for his Bureau of Applied Botany were falling apart through lack of funds and trained staff. While he was away, the New York office had its funds cut and Borodin was dismissed, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that Vavilov got the operation restarted. Then, on 11 October, a telegram recalled him to a high-level political meeting.5 Vavilov’s confident, patrician response made an impression on Homer Leroy Shantz, president of the University of Arizona and a friend and fellow explorer, who set it down:
But I am employed by the Communists to work for the welfare of the people of the USSR, so I am still free to judge what is best … it is more important for the future of the people of the USSR that I visit the centres of origin of cultivated plants in Central America than I attend any state dinner that can be arranged.6
Vavilov was in a vulnerable position – a bourgeois absentee collecting plants of no immediate usefulness at a time of national famine. Even Shantz, having listened to him lecture, detected ‘a wonderful capacity to confuse plan with accomplishment, and to conclude that what is decreed is already accomplished.’7 It would take a determined enemy to brand as trivial Vavilov’s breakneck schedule and devotion to duty. But Vavilov, like any major patron, attracted as many disgruntled enemies as he did friends and suitors – and one somewhat inept colleague, Alexander Kol, was to prove a particularly nasty opponent.
Kol was a seed curator, charged with coordinating the bureau’s plant introduction programme. He was ten years older than Vavilov, and jealous of the younger man’s reputation. Worse, he was not very good at his job. Vavilov had had to reprimand him repeatedly for losing or mislabelling the fruits of his expeditions. Finally, Kol had been demoted.
With a nice sense of timing, Kol waited till Vavilov was abroad before launching his attack. ‘Applied Botany, or, Lenin’s Renovation of the Earth’ appeared on 29 January 1931 in the influential newspaper Economic Life. Not all its criticisms were baseless. Kol had worked briefly in the United States, where agricultural scientists tended to focus on just a few cultivated plants, especially wheat and maize. Vavilov’s was a more comprehensive approach, and Kol took Vavilov to task for this ‘separation from practice’. Why collect and maintain exotica that were useless to the breeder?
The overall tone of the article was something else again. It was nothing short of a political denunciation, branding Vavilov an enemy of the working class: ‘Under cover of Lenin’s name a thoroughly reactionary institution, having no relation to Lenin’s thoughts or intents, but rather alien in class and inimical to them, has become established and is gaining a monopoly in our agricultural science.’
Vavilov did not take this accusation lying down. Replying through the same magazine, he made public the catalogue of Kol’s ineptitude and spite. Remarkably, he made no effort to examine or criticise his own actions. This was risky: it was expected that bureaucrats regard any attack, however vexatious, as a valuable learning experience. In fact this was a point of honour among Bolsheviks, and was supposed to preserve the democratic spirit in a one-party state. Vavilov’s commitment to the state was genuine. The trouble was, the more harried and overworked he became, the more he let his patrician side show.
On 3 August 1931, Vavilov’s impossibly heavy work schedule collided with Yakovlev’s hysterical agricultural planning. This was the day Pravda published a truly ridiculous Party and government resolution ‘On Plant Breeding and Seed Production’, in which the government posed the Lenin Academy and the Bureau of Applied Botany the following superhuman targets: for wheat and a few other crops, the Commissariat of Agriculture and the Lenin Academy would complete the transition from the usual peasant mongrel seed to certified varieties within two years. Wheat was to be improved so it could replace rye in the north and east. Potatoes were to be improved so diseases wouldn’t ravage the crop when planted in regions with dry summers. And the capstone: to achieve all this, breeding times for improved varieties would be reduced from ten or twelve years, to four.
The majority of geneticists present regarded these totally unrealisable goals as ludicrous, and the following month, a conference was held at the Lenin Academy to discuss the decree. The plant breeder Georgy Meister spoke for many when he warned that the demands of the decree were impossible to fulfil. To produce a new variety in four or five years was not practically possible. ‘We cannot wait for ten years,’ was Yakovlev’s terse reply.8
That being the case, several speakers suggested the state gear itself up to create a vast and expensive system of greenhouses in order to insulate experimental crops from the vagaries of the weather.
Yakovlev considered this as special pleading: collective farms could provide all the controlled conditions the scientific community could possibly want. All they had to do was descend from their ivory towers and muck in with the collectivists.
Again and again, Yakovlev approached Trofim Lysenko, encouraging him to lead the campaign for accelerated plant breeding. At the All-Union Conference on Drought Control in October 1931, he told Lysenko off for underestimating the ch
anges his experiments would bring about in agriculture. A resolution was passed declaring that Lysenko’s research was so important that his works must be rushed into print, that he should be freed from other duties and given ‘maximally favourable research conditions’. Even Lysenko’s inflamed ego balked at such a crazy task (even today, new varieties take around a dozen years to enter production) and, for some years afterwards, Yakovlev’s poster boy remained carefully silent on the subject.
*
Nikolai Vavilov was careful to invite Trofim Lysenko to an upcoming congress in America:
In August there will be an International Congress of Geneticists and Breeders in Ithaca, USA, and the Commissioner has informed me that if you were willing to attend, the Agricultural Commissariat would apply all efforts to support your trip, so that you could make a presentation of your work there and prepare a display of your activities for the exhibition.9
But whether or not Lysenko actually wanted to go, the trip proved impossible to arrange: in December 1931, the Politburo’s Departure Commission recommended that all foreign travels of Soviet scientists be cut back in order to save hard currency for industrialisation.
Instead Vavilov – the country’s only high-level attendee – praised the absent Lysenko to the skies, saying his techniques would make it possible to grow alligator pears and bananas in New York and lemons in New England. News of Lysenko’s ‘discovery’ made quite a splash in the American papers, who predicted the ‘growing of subtropical wheat in cold climate’ and the use of vernalisation as a ‘weapon against drought’. Several US geneticists tried to repeat Lysenko’s experiments.10
That Vavilov was able to attend the congress at all was thanks to some risky bureaucratic manoeuvring – inserting a side-trip to Ithaca as part of yet another collecting expedition to North and South America. From his cabin aboard the steamship Europa, about to sail from Riga, Vavilov wrote to his partner Elena: ‘I want to bring an immense amount of seed from America this time because it’s unlikely I’ll go again.’ Vavilov’s itinerary was frantic. In less than eight months he visited Cuba, Trinidad, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama, Columbia, Suriname, Brazil, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. His schedule was so tight that he only ever slept while travelling. A fellow geneticist, Carlos Offerman, once watched him fall asleep during a plane ride through a lightning storm over the rainforests of the Brazil–Suriname border. The other passengers spent the journey screaming their heads off.11
At Cornell University in Ithaca, Vavilov’s positive stories and indefatigable energy cheered along a conference convened under more than one bad star.
For one thing, America was already in the grip of the deepest and longest-lasting economic downturn in the history of the Western industrialised world. By the time the Great Depression reached its nadir, some 13–15 million Americans were left unemployed and nearly half of the country’s banks had failed.
There was a gathering environmental crisis, too. During the drought of the 1930s, the soil of the US and Canadian prairies, loosened by mechanised agriculture, turned to dust. Prevailing winds blew 40 million hectares of topsoil into huge clouds that sometimes blackened the sky.
Innumerable crises much closer to home affected the congress. The conference president, Thomas Morgan, was still convalescing from an appalling car crash. Almost every delegate was poor, and there were no grants to pay for travel or accommodation. Those coming by car were told that ‘there are several very attractive camping places within thirty minutes’ drive …’12
The trick, among these privations and annoyances, was to lose yourself in the work of the Congress. 1932 was a gala year for the new science of genetics. Timofeev-Ressovsky, visiting from Berlin, caught the mood nicely: ‘We geneticists are in a very happy condition: our science is young, its “development curve” is rising rapidly and the future will bring us the most interesting facts and views concerning the gene problem.’ Living organisms, charts, photographs, and hundreds of microscopes filled the rooms of the congress, while a ‘living chromosome map’ of mutant maize plants, planted out in positions corresponding to the genetic locations of their mutations, proved a hugely popular exhibit. As Vavilov put it, ‘Genetics has, so to speak, “broken down” the species of maize into “building blocks” and presented an absolutely unusual aspect to the botanist.’
Unless you counted Timofeev-Ressovsky, visiting from the Vogts’ Institute of Brain Research in Berlin, Vavilov was the only high-level Soviet geneticist at the congress. He did not come alone. With him was Vladimir Saenko, the head of the agricultural section of the Soviet trade agency in the United States. Saenko did not have much to say for himself, and attendees got the distinct impression that he was there first and foremost to keep an eye on Vavilov. Leslie Dunn, a Columbia geneticist and social campaigner, managed to invite Vavilov to his house in Riverdale for dinner. There, Dunn, the British geneticist John Haldane and three other interested guests tried to get out of their Russian colleague the reason for Saenko’s presence, and why no one else from the Soviet Union had been allowed to attend. But as Dunn later remembered, Vavilov ‘never took down his hair entirely’.13
While he was in Ithaca, Vavilov truly confided in only one man – Theodosius Dobzhansky, the geneticist he had failed to bring back to the Soviet Union two years before. Dobzhansky and Vavilov were unable to speak privately until they turned up for lunch in a crowded cafeteria and found only two seats available at a table; Saenko had to find a place elsewhere. They conversed in Russian, which no one around them understood, but Vavilov was still careful about what he said.
He told Dobzhansky, in so many words, that the Soviet Union had changed a great deal since they had last spoken, and that his own situation was not what it had been. ‘Dobzhansky, do what you want. If you want to return, do so. If you do not want to return, don’t. Stay here.’14
*
Living on the very edge of starvation, working to a plan that starved no one and enriched no one, Russia’s peasant class had learned over the years to count its pennies. Peasants borrowed with great caution, lent reluctantly and at high rates of interest, and everyone lived in fear of debt. They borrowed from each other sooner than from outsiders, and every village had its moneylender. A Ministry of Finance study from 1894 found that ‘the power of moneylenders is founded precisely on the fact that except for them poor people frequently have nowhere else to turn’.15 Without the village grandees who issued a debt for each little article, from salt, matches and kerosene, to luxury goods like clothing, tea, and sugar, it was hard to see how a peasant could live even a month outside harvest time.
Though in the worst cases a bad debt could land a poor peasant in debt slavery, relations between moneylenders and their clients were reasonably good. Before 1917 peasants hardly ever used the pejorative kulak (‘fist’) to describe their fellow villagers. There was, in any case, very little wealth for anyone to argue over. In good times, rich and poor peasants lived almost indistinguishably; the differences between them were only noticeable when times grew tough.
Just a year before the 1932–3 famine, a former blacksmith bemoaned the Bolsheviks’ troublemaking:
There was a time when we were just neighbours in this village. We quarrelled, we fooled, we sometimes cheated one another. But we were neighbours. Now we are bedniaks, seredniaks, koolaks. I am a seredniak – a middle peasant. Boris here is a bedniak – a poor peasant. And Nisko is a koolak – a rich peasant. And we are supposed to have a class war – pull each other’s hair or tickle each other on the toes, eh? One against the other, you understand? What the devil.16
The First Five-Year Plan that had expanded industry, had also swelled the urban population. How were all these new city-dwellers to be fed? The Plan had been put into action without much capital behind it, and to pay for it the state had been deliberately depressing the market value of grain. In January 1928 Stalin visited Siberia and found that despite a good harvest, peasants were withholding grain as pric
es fell.17
Stalin’s solution was draconian. Peasants who could afford to do so had been refusing to sell their grain at the ruinously low prices the government was offering; well then, it was their well-to-do-ness that was at fault. These wealthy peasants, these money-lending kulaks who ran things in the villages, were enemies of the state, and Stalin declared war on them. Once all the little power bases of the countryside were got rid of, then the cities would no longer be held to ransom by the peasants’ refusal to trade, and factory workers would no longer go hungry.
The famine, when it came, naturally and inevitably worsened relationships between poor and rich peasants in the villages, and this provided the cover the government needed. Armed detachments were sent to areas where the secret police anticipated the greatest resistance to their ruthless campaign to remove community leaders from their villages. Hundreds of thousands were rounded up in all parts of the country and dispatched in boxcars to remote and inhospitable regions. Few ever returned. Those who resisted were executed or sent to concentration camps. By eliminating the big men in each rural community, the Soviets robbed the countryside at a single stroke of its organs of resistance and protest. They effectively regimented the countryside, along what they imagined were industrial lines, but which to an outside eye resembled nothing so much as the notorious rural work camps of the lampooned Count Alexei Arakcheev. And it was in these camps – these supposed hotbeds of citizen science – that the assessment of vernalisation was to take place.
The grand experiment began poorly. The winter of 1930–1 was too mild, so there was not enough snow to chill the grain, which therefore tended to sprout or rot. The first issue of Lysenko’s journal admitted as much. Still, practical trials were expanded in 1932, to 43,000 hectares of vernalised wheat.