Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday

by Gavan Tredoux

  Charlotte’s trip and the information she gave about Vavilov are curious, given the campaign that Haldane subsequently conducted against reports that Vavilov was dead. These had been circulating since 1940, when Vavilov had completely dropped out of sight; even a casual observer of the Russian scene would suspect that he had been “disappeared” deliberately. Concerned scientists in the UK had him elected to the Royal Society in 1942, in his absence, in the hope that this foreign prestige might protect him from further harm if he were still alive. Among the twenty proposers on the membership nomination, one stands out: J. B. S. Haldane.6

  Writing in the Labour Monthly later in 1942, Haldane mentioned Vavilov again, much as he had often done before, as an example of a great Soviet scientist.7 No reference was made to the rumors that he was missing. But by 1944 these could no longer be ignored. Haldane dissimulated: Vavilov’s institute “was cut down to some extent in the years before the war, largely because the best varieties had been selected, and partly because Lysenko’s invention of vernalization rendered many of them less valuable.” Of course, in reality it had been closed down in 1940 as a nest of “Mendelist-Morganist” wreckers. Moreover, “Vavilov was shot about once a year in the American press, though he continued to communicate papers to the Academy at least up to 1942.”8 But what of Charlotte’s specific information about that?

  Haldane reassured his readers with information that he certainly did not have. “Vavilov still directs research on a vast scale. So far from having been muzzled for his alleged anti-Darwinian views he communicated seventeen papers on genetical topics to the Moscow Academy of Sciences between January 1st and April 10th of 1940.” A later footnote adds that “Vavilov’s name is now less prominent, but up till June 1941 the output of genetical work showed no sign of abatement.”9 Previously Vavilov had supposedly been heard from in 1942, but now the date is 1941. More diversions followed, along with an early use of the what-about-racism tactic. “Anyone who studies the record . . . will certainly realise that thought on scientific topics is pretty free in Moscow. . . . I could wish that those of my European and American colleagues who have taken up the cudgels on behalf of Vavilov, who is not incapable of self-defense, would transfer some of their energies to an attack on [doctrines of racial inequality].”10

  After 1945, more specific reports of Vavilov’s demise required a change in tactics. Cyril Darlington and Sydney Cross Harland had published an obituary of Vavilov in Nature that year. “The circumstances are not precisely known, but the time was after December 1941 and the place probably Saratov.”11 From now on, Haldane’s previous statements about Vavilov’s active direction of research during the war, on a “vast scale,” vanish without explanation, and instead his fate is neatly assimilated by sleight of hand into those of “other refugees” from Leningrad. “It is widely believed that plant genetics in the Soviet Union came to an end with the death of the geneticist Vavilov, who had done very fine work on the origin and geographical distribution of cultivated plants. I do not know how Vavilov died, nor do I know how tens of thousands of other refugees from Leningrad died. As his institute at Detzkoë Seloe became a battlefield throughout the siege of Leningrad, it is not surprising that no research has been done there in recent years.”12

  The story changed again in 1948. “You may have been told that Vavilov, a famous Russian plant breeder, died in prison. His research station outside Leningrad became a battlefield in 1941, and according to a very anti-Lysenko article in the Journal of Heredity he appears to have died at Magadan in the Arctic in 1942 while breeding frost-resistant plants.”13 None of this was true either, though one has to admire the detail about “frost-resistant plants” and puzzle at Vavilov’s demotion from a giant of modern science, in Haldane’s previous estimation, to a “famous plant breeder.”

  Nikolai Vavilov, photographed in the Gulag, 1942.

  The truth was that Vavilov was arrested by the NKVD in 1940 and tortured to try to produce a confession to a farrago of fantastic crimes. By then the ritual of confession was standard practice. The NKVD file on him stretched back to 1931 and was packed full of denunciations by suborned coworkers and planted agents, kept handy until the time was right. His numerous trips abroad and extensive correspondence were useful for introducing foreign governments into the story. Great care had been taken to arrest him out of sight, on a plant-collecting trip to the newly conquered Carpathian mountains (a bonus from the Nazi-Soviet Pact). Vavilov endured four hundred interrogations, totaling nearly 1,700 hours over a period of eleven months, after his arrest on August 6, 1940. A single interrogation could last twelve or thirteen hours at a stretch. The longer the session, the fewer the written records left behind. The notorious thirty-three-year-old interrogator Aleksandr Khvat was assigned to his case. He usually got prisoners to confess to something, and Vavilov was no exception. A cellmate, the artist Grigori Fillipovsky, was there to witness the aftermath of some of these brutalities.

  When Fillipovsky was thrust into the cell, he noticed immediately a strange figure among the prisoners who were lying, sitting, and standing around—an elderly man lying on a bunk with his swollen legs raised up. It was Academician Vavilov. He had only recently returned from a night-long interrogation during which the interrogator had kept him standing for more than ten hours. His face was swollen, there were bags beneath his eyes indicating heart trouble, and the soles of his feet were swollen and looked to Fillipovsky to be huge and gray in color. Every night Vavilov was taken off for questioning. At dawn a warder would drag him back and throw him down at the cell door. Vavilov was no longer able to stand and had to crawl on all fours to his place on the bunk. Once there his neighbors would somehow remove his boots from his swollen feet and he would lie still on his back in his strange position for several hours.14

  Vavilov told Fillipovsky that interrogations invariably began: “Who are you?,” “I am academician Vavilov,” “You’re a load of shit and not an academician.”

  Khvat had worn Vavilov down to destruction, physically and mentally, by the summer of 1941; but he did not get exactly what he was after. Vavilov refused to confess directly to espionage. After the invasion by the Germans, Khvat had to rush to completion. Interrogations with dead people were invented for the files. A troika convicted Vavilov of espionage regardless, identifying him as the member of an organization of “right wingers,” who had carried on widespread agricultural “wrecking” and transmitted state secrets to White Russian émigrés abroad. The eminent geneticist was sentenced to be shot.

  Vavilov’s appeals were turned down, and two of his colleagues, who were tried at the same time as part of his nefarious ring, were immediately shot. Unexpectedly, a last-minute appeal for clemency, sent to Lavrenti Beria (head of the NKVD) from the appointed place of execution, Butyrskaya prison in Moscow, succeeded. (Recall that at this time Charlotte Haldane was still in Moscow.) Vavilov was then transferred to Saratov, as the Germans threatened to overrun Moscow. Like the other prisoners, he was forced to kneel for six hours at the Kursk railway station on October 16, 1941, to wait for a train in the thawing snow, excoriated by the gawking citizens of Moscow. The train journey took two weeks, in appalling conditions. Vavilov, unlike many, made it there alive, only to be crammed into a cell for the condemned, to wait for word from Beria about his disposal.

  By the end of 1941, Vavilov had scurvy. In 1942, the Royal Society election almost paid off, after diplomatic intervention by the British government, and on July 4 Vavilov’s sentence was commuted by Beria to twenty years of hard labor in the Gulag. Or perhaps, as Vadim Birstein speculated, Beria intended Vavilov for work in the “special projects” unit run by Pavel Sudoplatov.15 Either way, it was too late. Vavilov would die at Saratov of starvation on January 26, 1943. Meanwhile Vavilov’s colleague Georgii Dmitrievich Karpechenko, another host of Haldane on his 1928 tour, had been arrested in 1941, tortured, and forced to sign a confession. He defiantly retracted the confession at trial. Karpechenko was executed on July 28, 1941.

/>   These finer details could not have been known to Haldane and only emerged when Vavilov was posthumously “rehabilitated” more than a decade later in the 1950s, and the entire NKVD/KGB file was eventually released to Vavilov’s descendants. But Haldane had been privately concerned, enough so to ask Charlotte to make inquiries. Her report back could only have been interpreted one way, when combined with Vavilov’s dried-up publication record and newspaper silence. Haldane’s own sister, Naomi, later suggested that “he might, possibly, after the last genetics conference, have been able to do something to help Vavilov.”16 What Haldane had really done was offer the Soviets the equivalent of covering fire, before, during, and after this episode.

  In confidence, Haldane used different arguments. In a letter to Bertrand Russell at around this time, he claimed that Vavilov’s case was equivalent to that of the surgeon Sir Victor Horsley.17 During the First World War, Haldane had served with Horsley in Mesopotamia. Horsley had gone there after falling out with his military superiors, only to perish. Haldane’s implication was that Horsley had been, in effect, eliminated by the British authorities, just as Vavilov had been by Stalin. But Haldane was being dishonest. Horsley—a gifted but eccentric, quarrelsome, and fanatical teetotaler—apparently believed that teetotalism would protect him from the sun. He promptly died of heatstroke in the ordinary course of his duties. He was not ill-treated in any way and served in Mesopotamia during the war as a surgeon in the usual manner.18

  The dissimulations continued as late as 1948, artfully incorporating plausible counterfactuals; they might have gone on even longer had Haldane delivered on a promise he had made to the Royal Society. It is customary for Fellows of the Royal Society to receive detailed obituaries in the form of biographical notices, summarizing their accomplishments and publications. Haldane was asked by the Society to write Vavilov’s notice in 1945, and accepted on condition that he be sent a bibliography of Vavilov’s publications—one assumes this was supplied. Years passed. Repeated inquiries produced no result.19 Ultimately Vavilov’s biographical notice did appear, seven years later, in 1952. But it was written by the geneticist Sydney Cross Harland.

  And so it was that Vavilov, who was wrongly accused of espionage, met his death, while Haldane, who was guilty of espionage, got off scot-free.

  Several Soviet scientists risked their lives to intervene on Vavilov’s behalf. The academician Dmitry Pryanishnikov (1865–1948) sought and obtained a personal interview with Beria to protest. When shown Vavilov’s supposed confessions by Beria, he refused to believe them unless told so directly by Vavilov. Once Vavilov had disappeared into the meat grinder, Pryanishnikov stubbornly kept up appeals and audiences with Beria. Once he heard the rumors that Vavilov was dead, he pestered Beria about Karpechenko, not knowing that he, too, had been murdered. Pryanishnikov died in 1948, before the consequences of his appeals could catch up with him. The botanist Leonid Ipatevich Govorov (1885–1941) had also issued inquiries about Vavilov. A trip to Moscow in 1941 to appeal to Stalin found only closed doors, and Govorov was immediately arrested by the NKVD when he returned home. He was shot on July 27, 1941.20

  In his study of Lysenkoism, David Joravsky counted at least 105 “repressed specialists” (agronomists, biologists, philosophers of science, and physicists) where “repression” meant anything from public execution after a nominal trial to disappearance and execution without trial or publicity; or to internal exile, often leading to death by overwork, starvation, or disease; or, more rarely, external exile.21 This toll is, he conceded, greatly underestimated. Joravsky necessarily counted only the more visible cases, and did not count those who merely had their careers ruined. As we have seen, this process was not an attack on just plant genetics and Vavilov; it warmed up with social biology, proceeded to human genetics, and only got to plant genetics last.

  In 1987, Aleksandr Khvat, comfortably retired with four children, was interviewed by a journalist. She asked him if he had ever felt compassion for Vavilov. Khvat laughed out loud.22 But the Vavilov case was just one of many. Lina Stern, for example, had followed a different trajectory.

  The Haldanes met the Jewish-Latvian physiologist Lina Stern on their tour of the Soviet Union in 1928, and spent a lot of time with her, staying in the apartment above hers in the Arbat district of Moscow—“modern though shabby,” because each expected the other to keep it up.23 Stern, who never married, made her scientific name through her pioneering work on what she called the “blood-brain barrier,” which she formulated in the early 1920s when she was still in Switzerland. When she arrived in the Soviet Union in 1925, at the invitation of Professor A. N. Bach, she was already forty-eight years old, with more than a hundred publications to her name. She was left-wing by sympathy, but later confided that she was not political by nature. Only in 1939 did she officially join the Communist Party, a useful thing to do in the circumstances. Bach had long been a member and sat on the Central Committee.

  Stern had a reputation for bluntness and was not overawed by JBS. A worn sports jacket and gray flannel trousers with a soft collar and an old wrinkled raincoat might pass muster in Cambridge, but not in her laboratory, where she didn’t want him setting a bad example to her students. Nor did she hold off lecturing her guests, who had spent a lot of time in the pubs of Fitzrovia, about the evils of alcohol as they shared dinner in her comparatively luxurious two-room apartment with maid—the privileges enjoyed by senior academics. In the years after this visit, JBS would keep in touch with Stern’s work on neurophysiology and other areas. As we shall see later, Haldane also contributed introductions to Soviet propaganda films about Stern that were adapted and distributed during the war by his old comrade Ivor Montagu.

  When Charlotte revisited the USSR in 1941, she tried to look up Stern, whom she seems to have admired for a mixture of political and feminist reasons. By then, Stern had become the first woman to be elected to the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a body similar in intent to the Royal Society. She was also a professing communist, though she had balked at the Nazi-Soviet Pact: when assured that it was a marriage of convenience, she wondered what the offspring would look like. She had her own institute in Moscow. Stalin had even awarded her the rare privilege of a personal car. But now she had been evacuated to Alma-Ata (present-day Almaty), where she would remain until 1943, so Charlotte was not able to see her.

  A letter to Stern from JBS survives from the following year, dated February 1942. He offers to send her reprints of articles he had published connected to physiological problems posed by escape from submarines. Also mentioned is “unpublished data which the Admiralty would undoubtedly allow me to give to your Naval attaché in London” in case she was interested in it. He hopes that, wherever she was, she was “200%.”24 It is likely, then, that JBS was in regular contact with Stern. This is important in light of what followed.

  After the German invasion of Russia, Stalin had created “Anti-Fascist Committees” to tap international contacts possessed by people living in the USSR. One of these was the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which Stern joined when it was founded in 1942. After the war, this body steadily fell out of favor because Stalin was suspicious of any independent centers of power. Increasing hostility to Jews, called “cosmopolitans,” was bound up with this change. By 1947, Stern’s scientific theories suddenly came under withering attack in the papers, a promise of trouble to follow. She was refused leave to travel to Switzerland for an academic conference. The following year, Stalin had the leader of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Solomon Mikhoels, quietly assassinated; it was disguised to look like a car accident. Stern also seems to have attended and spoken at the 1948 meeting of VASKhNIL, which was concerned with Lysenko’s theories, and which we will cover in greater detail later. She was indelicate enough to be critical of Lysenko.25

  At the Joint Scientific Session of the Academy of Sciences and Moscow Society of Physiology, held on October 5, 1948, Stern was once again under fire for unscientific, oversimplified theorizing. Especially troubl
esome was her known opposition to the theories of Ivan Pavlov. Her frequent trips abroad in past years were suddenly highly suspicious. By the end of the year, her institute was closed down on the pretext that it was being moved to Leningrad.

  Late one night in January 1949, the Secret Police (then calling itself the MGB) arrived at Stern’s apartment to escort her to what they said was an urgent meeting with their head, Lavrenti Beria. Three years of detention, conveyor-belt interrogation, and physical torture followed. She was seventy-one at the time of her arrest. Though she was made to stand upright for twenty-hour stretches in tiny punishment cells, it was hard to get much out of her. The endlessly barked questions only confused her. Screaming obscenities at her didn’t work, since she spoke bad Russian and couldn’t decode the slang used. Why, she asked, did they keep shouting about her mother, the one word she recognized?26 Years passed. She wrote an appeal to Viktor Abakumov, the minister of state security, without realizing that he, too, had been arrested in 1951 and was being held in the same building.27

  Stern was one of fifteen people from the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee put on trial in 1952 for treason. They were “unmasked” as heads of a national organization aimed at subverting the Soviet Union. The sentences had all been decided beforehand, once confessions had been duly obtained. Thirteen were shot, one died in prison, and one was given a reduced sentence of ten years’ exile to Kazakhstan. Lina Stern was the lucky one. The families of the executed were exiled to Siberia; being related to a “criminal” was a criminal offense in its own right. The trials and executions were kept secret at the time, for obscure reasons. Some have guessed that Stern was spared because she had worked on ways to prolong life, which she connected to cell metabolism, and Stalin hoped he might be able to use her research. It is a story so implausible that it may even be true.