Rodion Tadenev
3/25/12
The Galileo Project
Final Paper- First draft
Casualties of the Soviet War on Genetics:
A comparison of the lives and works of Vavilov and Ivanov
through the prism of the Galileo Paradigm
I. Introduction
The advancement of human knowledge through scientific inquiry is an unstoppable phenomenon, fueled by man’s innate curiosity. Yet, there exists a diametrically opposed counterforce of institutional pressure to maintain the status quo, driven by man’s innate fear of the unknown. The former is typically represented by individual scientific pioneers, like Galileo Galilei, whereas the latter is in the form of religious and political bodies like the Roman Catholic Church. Of course, an accurate analytical framework is never quite this simple. Individual scientists are supported by international communities, patrons, and politicians. The institutions that oppose these scientists are themselves composed of persons, each of whom has unique private and public motivations. Nevertheless, the “scientist versus institution” model (or simply the “Galileo Paradigm”) allows one to draw surprising parallels, like that between Galileo and a pair of Soviet geneticists of the nineteen-twenties and thirties, Nikolai Vavilov and Ilya Ivanov.
Vavilov and Ivanov shared a common fate as victims of a totalitarian Soviet regime that quashed progress in genetics. But, the two could not have been more different. Vavilov was the brilliant botanist with a humanitarian mission to feed the masses through genetic manipulation of crops. Ivanov was a “mad scientist” who sought to crossbreed a human with an ape in order to prove the evolutionary origins of man. Vavilov practiced in the well-respected, “good” side of genetics, whereas Ivanov ventured into the “sinister”, ethically clouded side of the science. I will explore how each man advanced his science but eventually struggled and succumbed to the regime; how, counterintuitively, the state feared Vavilov’s research more than it did Ivanov’s; and how both stories fit within the context of the Galileo Paradigm.
II. Historical Background
To understand the life and times of Nikolai Vavilov and Ilya Ivanov, one must understand the violent social upheaval that accompanied phenomena like the Russian Revolution of 1917, Stalin’s forced collectivization of 1928, the Cultural Revolution of 1928-32, and the Great Purge of 1937. During the middle of the nineteenth century, it appeared as if Russia would transition into a constitutional monarchy under the reformative and progressive policies of Alexander II. In 1861, a year before his friend, Abraham Lincoln, signed the Emancipation Proclamation, Alexander emancipated the serfs of the Russian Empire. Twenty years later, Alexander would sign Russia’s first constitution, which provided for two legislative bodies, following the American and British systems. Tragically, the day following Alexander’s ratification of the constitution, he was assassinated by an anarchist bomb plot. Russia’s hopes for a constitution died with the czar. His successor, Alexander III, and eventually Nicholas II would be extremely wary of relinquishing the power of the monarchy, and largely unsympathetic to the plight of the common folk. By the time of the Bloody Sunday massacre (when imperial guards fired into a crowd of protesters with disastrous results) and the Revolution of 1905, the country was inevitably spinning toward civil war. Nine years later, Russia had become embroiled in World War I. The mandatory military conscription of the war, coupled with Russia’s horrific losses and the mass starvation on the home front provided the fuel that Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik Party needed to foment mutiny within the tsarist troops and to overthrow the monarchy.
The Communist Revolution of 1917 set off a fierce civil war between the communist and czarist forces. When the dust settled, millions were killed, the country was starving and impoverished and Russian society was entirely upended. The aristocracy, intelligentsia, middle class businessmen, and even successful farmers either fled overseas or faced persecution (labor camps and firing squads) at home. During this time, Nikolai Vavilov’s father, a businessman, was forced into exile, leaving his wife and children behind. With famine threatening to choke off the Revolution, Lenin instituted the New Economic Policy (NEP) which allowed for some private for-profit business. Rather than being stripped of their agricultural surpluses, Russian farmers could now sell excess crops on the market, providing an incentive for increased agricultural production. However, Lenin died in 1924, and by 1928, Lenin’s successor, Joseph Stalin abandoned NEP in favor of forced collectivization. The next year he announced the “liquidation of the kulaks as a class”, leading to the first in a series of purges that would kill tens of millions of Russians. Kulaks, or better-off peasants, were arrested en masse and either executed or sent to forced labor camps in Siberia. Millions more would perish from starvation as a direct consequence of collectivization.
At the same time, starting in 1928, a “Cultural Revolution” began. Several government committees including RAPP, the organization of proletarian writers, waged a war on the intelligentsia and sought to replace “bourgeois specialists” with young communists educated in the ways of Marx and Lenin. The term “bourgeois specialist” was applied to practitioners of education, the arts, and sciences who began their careers before 1917. Such a man would be “officially under suspicion as a potential saboteur and agent of international capitalism”[1]. Indeed, Ilya Ivanov was just such a specialist and was convicted of “having created a counterrevolutionary organization among agricultural specialists”[2]. The Cultural Revolution would abruptly end in 1932 when Stalin disbanded the RAPP, but the damage to the scientific community had already been done.
Throughout the nineteen-thirties, Stalin would invent scapegoats on which to hang the failures of his policies. Such men were often charged with spying, wrecking, or anti-Soviet agitation, all capital offenses (incidentally, Vavilov would later be charged with each of these crimes[3]). Finally, in 1937, in what came to be known as the Great Purge, Stalin instituted a level of terror beyond any that had been seen before, targeting the intelligentsia, military, kulaks, old party members (contemporaries of Lenin), and anyone else caught in the crosshairs of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. As society was gripped by paralyzing fear, the NKVD encouraged and recruited informants to denounce their “comrades” as traitors. The accused usually admitted to his fabricated crime under extreme physical and psychological torture. After a brief show trial, the “enemy of the people” was summarily executed. It is a small miracle that Vavilov, who was first targeted by the NKVD in 1930, was able to avoid arrest until 1940[4].
III. Nikolai Vavilov: A Man with a Mission to End Famine
a. The Rise of Vavilov
In 1906, eighteen-year-old Nikolai Vavilov entered the Petrovskaya Agricultural Institute, or simply “Petrovka”. The Petrovka was founded by Alexander II to develop a science that could ease the plight of the peasants[5]. Vavilov took this mission seriously, as he pledged to “commit his life to understanding nature for the betterment of humankind” and to “work for the benefit of the poor, the enslaved class of my country, to raise the level of their knowledge”[6]. True to his word, Vavilov worked feverishly at his studies, often forsaking his own health. His professors described him as a genius and provided him with volumes of books and the opportunity to study overseas under the tutelage of some of the world’s greatest biologists[7]. Vavilov also made his name as one of the Petrovka’s staunchest supporters of Gregor Mendel’s theory of dominant and recessive genes.
In Russia as in other parts of the world, there was at this time a great debate among biologists as to whether acquired characteristics could be transferred to new generations as originally postulated by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, or if genes carried immutable characteristics as theorized by Mendel. The debate was more than an academic exercise; it would determine how to breed hardy varieties of wheat and rye that could withstand harsh Siberian winters and produce yields high enough to feed the masses. Those in the Mendel camp had scientific facts and raw data, whereas those in the Lamarckian camp relied primarily on centuries-old plant breeding practices and observations. While Vavilov passionately supported Mendelism, he conceded that there was room in evolutionary theory for some of the Lamarckian tenets, namely that the environment did have a role in plant development [8]. This willingness to concede and tolerate opposing viewpoints separated Vavilov from some of his more impatient colleagues, but would eventually contribute to his demise.
By 1911, however, the year that Vavilov graduated from the Petrovka, the study of Mendelian genetics had taken off in England, France, and Germany. The young biologist began an internship in the Bureau of Applied Botany in Saint Petersburg, and in 1912 set off on a series of travels to London and Paris, to learn from the greatest European biologists[9]. He interned at the Pasteur Institute in France making valuable connections that would aid him in obtaining international visas, he combed the books of Darwin’s personal library in Cambridge, and he worked under the supervision and mentorship of Britain’s top geneticist, William Bateson in a laboratory outside of London[10]. In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, Vavilov was recalled from Europe and he returned to Moscow. Back at the Petrovka experimental garden, Vavilov found a wheat variety that was impervious to fungus, his first major discovery[11]. In the years preceding the Revolution, Vavilov assisted in diagnosing a food-related illness that spread among the Imperial Army in Persia, and set out on his first international plant specimen collecting expedition[12].
On the home front, the Revolution opened far more opportunities for Nikolai than for his exiled father. He was widely celebrated for formulating his Law of Homologous Series in 1920[13]. In 1921, he was appointed director of the Bureau of Applied Botany in Petrograd (soon to be Leningrad) and given various accolades including election to the Academy of Sciences of the USSR[14]. He was given permission to visit the United States, and conferred with American scientists about their seed banks in search of a solution to the famine ravishing the Soviet Union[15].
Vavilov’s efforts from the early nineteen-twenties until his arrest in 1940 were largely directed toward building the largest seed bank in the world. If Mendelian genetics were true, then somewhere in the world genes existed that could make wheat survive brutal winters, produce bountiful yields, and resist various agricultural pests and diseases. Vavilov did not limit his search to wheat, rye, and oats; on the contrary, he searched for hardy fruit varietals, vegetables, herbs, and even medicines, all to improve the life of the Russian peasants and end the terrible famines.
Vavilov’s seed-hunting expeditions spanned much of the globe. He traveled to the United States, Mexico, the Caribbean, South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India, and the Far East. His expedition tales rival those of Indiana Jones. Ever the adventurer, dressed always in a three piece suit and a Fedora hat, Vavilov survived riding horseback over perilous mountain trails, undaunted by his run-ins with bandits and hostile military forces. One of his letters is particularly telling, “If crocodiles don’t eat us as we cross the Nile, we hope to be in Asmera [Eritrea] by early April”[16]. During one tense confrontation with bandits, Nikolai bade them enjoy two of his bottles of brandy. As the would-be thieves fell into a drunken slumber, the expedition made its escape[17].
However, trouble was brewing at home. Lenin died in 1924, and his successor, Joseph Stalin was egomaniacal and paranoid bordering on schizophrenic. In 1926, Vavilov’s application to travel abroad was rejected for the first time, and only granted after an impassioned appeal[18]. The worst was yet to come. In 1927, Stalin found himself a pet biologist in a young utilitarian “barefoot scientist” named Trofim Lysenko. Vavilov, the international and domestic hero could not have possibly imagined that Lysenko would spell his downfall.
b. Stalin, Lysenko, and the Fall of Vavilov
In August of 1927, the official party newspaper, Pravda, published a glowing article about young Trofim Lysenko, who had spread a veritable carpet of green peas over the barren fields of Azerbaijan. The article claimed that as a result of Lysenko’s discovery, “cattle will not perish from poor feeding, and the peasant Turk will live through the winter without trembling for tomorrow” (131). In reality, Lysenko had gotten extremely lucky, but the truth was hardly of consequence to the Communist party. Lysenko was the perfect poster boy for Stalin’s new Russia: a practical scientist who toiled in the fields rather than spending his time visiting foreign dignitaries and gallivanting around the globe in search of rare seeds. He was born into a peasant family, educated at a vocational school of agriculture in rural Ukraine, and gained experience working on a government experimental station. In Lysenko, as the Party proclaimed, was the type of “barefoot scientist” who would provide the Soviet Union with immediate improvements in agriculture. Vavilov, meanwhile, insisted that new wheat varieties would take no fewer than ten years to develop and implement.
Lysenko’s biological theory fell squarely with the Lamarckian camp. He discounted the influence of Mendelian immutable genes and proposed the rather antiquated position (even by 1927 standards) that characteristics acquired during the lifetime of the organism would be passed down to its offspring, and that by controlling environmental effects one could effectively turn one wheat varietal into another. Lysenko proposed a method he called “vernalization”, which was really just a rebranded version of the mid-nineteenth century idea that winter varietals of wheat can be changed to spring varietals and vice versa by applying heat to the germinating seeds at the appropriate time. Lysenko’s science was abysmal, his experiments impossible to replicate, and his results were probably skewed if not outright falsified. One of Lysenko’s common ploys was to compare vernalized yields to yields of a control plot of seeds that had never been planted! International scientists quickly caught on to the fallacy of his ideas and the unscientific methodology and ridiculed or simply ignored Lysenko’s contributions. However, Vavilov was more accepting of the young barefoot scientist than most, and invited Lysenko to tour the experimental garden at the Petrovka and to observe for himself the process of Mendelian genetics at work. Lysenko discounted these observations as coincidence and refused to contemplate the idea of genes.