by Simon Ings
In 1876 the family returned to St Petersburg. Vladimir was now thirteen years old, and was scouring the bookshops for anything and everything to do with the home they had left. He taught himself Ukrainian and, since a lot of books about the Ukraine were in Polish, he taught himself that language as well.
As a university student in St Petersburg, Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky was ‘very soft in appearance but very determined once he had set himself a goal’. Vladimir Posse, a medical student who went on to become a leading Marxist journalist, recalled that Vernadsky and Sergei Oldenburg, one of Vernadsky’s closest friends, ‘had already set themselves the goal not only of becoming professors but also members of the Academy of Sciences’.3
Vernadsky and his university friends were better off than most of their fellow students. Vernadsky, born in St Petersburg, Russia’s imperial capital, and brought up in Kharkov, capital of the Ukraine, was among the wealthiest of them, having inherited from his father the 750-hectare estate of Vernadovka.
During one all-night conversation among the brotherhood, someone suggested they buy an estate together. It was going to be called ‘The Haven’. The plan fell through, but it gave the group a name: Bratstvo Priutino or the ‘Haven Brotherhood’. The influence of the novelist Leo Tolstoy on the group is palpable. In devoting their lives to the good of the Russian people, they swore (to quote Oldenburg’s formula) ‘to work and produce as much as possible, to consume as little as possible, to treat the needs of others as if they were one’s own’.4
They attracted a lot of girls. Deprived of the right to a higher education, bright young women of their generation constantly sought whatever intellectual outlet they could.5 They supported and helped run the Brotherhood’s St Petersburg Committee of Literacy, preparing reading materials and reading lists, and setting up lending libraries.
Vernadsky’s was not the only marriage to come out of this meeting of minds. The Brotherhood could be dreadful prigs, though: the wedding of Vladimir to Natalia Staritskaya, complete with frock coats, wedding gowns, engraved invitations and an orchestra, was boycotted by his abstemious friends.
Vernadsky, a mineralogist, had arrived to study at St Petersburg University at an opportune time. Mendeleev, Butlerov, and Dokuchaev were his mentors. Vasily Vasilievich Dokuchaev held the chair in mineralogy at St Petersburg University, and dispatched Vernadsky on fascinating, exotic, and sometimes dangerous scientific missions to various corners of the Russian Empire. Alexander Mikhailovich Butlerov was one of the pioneers of modern chemistry. More than ten years before Becquerel’s discovery of radioactivity in France in 1896, Butlerov was arguing that the atom was divisible, and Vernadsky was witness to the lively debates he had with Mendeleev over this issue. Dmitry Ivanovich Mendeleev had formulated the periodic table of elements. When he lectured, the halls were packed. Listening to him, ‘we entered a new and wondrous world … as if released from the grip of a powerful vise’.6 From these men, Vernadsky acquired a view of an earth in constant flux, its elements flowing and spiralling through the earth’s crust over geological time.
Like all his generation, Vernadsky went abroad to further his studies. He went to the University of Naples, and the world-renowned crystallographer Professor Arcangelo Scacchi, only to discover that the old man was succumbing to senility. He went on to Munich, and the laboratory of mineralogist Paul Groth. From his letters we know Vernadsky had a fine time there, a kid locked in an intellectual candy store.
In 1887 a son was born (George Vernadsky would later find modest fame as a historian in the USA). While Natalia returned to her family’s dacha in Finland to look after the baby, Vladimir developed friendships and contacts that would shape his later career. In the summer of 1888, walking in the Alps, he had his epiphany: he saw that mineralogy, studied the right way, as a science of change and energy transfer, could connect cosmological history with the history of life itself. Vernadsky’s fascination with earth’s development at a cosmic scale would last him his whole career, though he worried that men like Groth would ‘take me for a fantasiser’.7
Moving to Paris in 1889 (‘really the most grandiose city I ever saw’), Vernadsky went to work at the Collège de France. To a Russian, the Collège must have seemed an odd institution: there were no students as such, just professors (who were, however, obliged to deliver lectures), small labs and a staggeringly good library. Here, study was being given room to breathe. Researchers were well-resourced and their ideas were taken seriously. Here, leading a life of the mind was unlikely to land you in trouble with the authorities. It was a different kind of life.
In Vernadsky’s homeland, universities were teaching institutions, not centres of research, and most certainly not intellectual melting pots. (The tsarist bureaucracy itself recruited from just a handful of expensive institutes, closed to everyone but the children of the aristocracy: the Corps of Pages, the Alexandrovsky Lycée, the Institute of Law.)
Repression of higher education was a fixed policy, dating from the thirty-year reign of Nicholas I. Inspectors watched the students, meting out punishments for scruffy uniforms or long hair. One student in Kiev University who appeared at a compulsory religious service without a proper uniform was thrown out of the church by an inspector and expelled from the university the next day.
When Nicholas I died in 1855, the government had tried undoing the harsh regime he had imposed. In Kiev, delighted Polish students marched through the streets in national dress. In Kazan, they wore animal skins. In Moscow and St Petersburg, students took to wearing peasant costumes, showing solidarity with the soon-to-be-liberated serfs. Appalled at what it had unleashed, the government promptly raised tuition fees, banned student assemblies, and reintroduced all the old rules on behaviour and uniform. This new repression lasted decades. Student-run organisations, ‘reading rooms, dining halls, snack bars, theatres, concerts, balls, any meetings not having an academic character’, were banned – and God forbid you should show any ‘signs of approval or disapproval at lectures’. Punishments included admonitions, confinement in the kartser (the university jail) for terms ranging up to four weeks, suspension and expulsion.
Returning to Russia and a professorship at Moscow University, Vernadsky found little had changed in his absence. The city was dusty and provincial, and it literally stank. It was also oppressive. Middle-aged men in bowler hats passed by his home each morning as he set off to work. He used to offer them a cheerful greeting until one day, as he was leaving for a European trip, he spotted one of them tailing him through the railway station, and realised they were undercover policemen.
In the beginning of the 1890s [the police report runs] Vernadsky moved … to live in Moscow, where he continued his dubious acquaintanceships, took an active part in evenings organised by students of Moscow university where he gave speeches about the necessity of coming together of professors and students for purposes of political education of youth and struggle with the present regime.8
Life at the university was dismal. It lacked even the most basic texts in his subject, and the mineralogical collection had not been catalogued since the 1850s – nor, for that matter, dusted. The place was riddled with corruption and the junior administrators were the worst of the lot, cutting up rooms meant for laboratories into unofficial student housing. Vernadsky had a good idea how this was all going to end, and spent time outside Moscow sorting out and refurbishing Vernadovka in case he lost his job.
Vernadsky reckoned that if push came to shove, and he and his family had to live there all year round, they could comfortably make do on what their acreage could provide. In the autumn of 1891, however, came the catastrophe that galvanised Vernadsky’s political career. Famine struck Tambov and many places besides, razing the harvest across Russia’s vital belt of black earth.
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The crisis had been building for a year. In 1890, a dry autumn had delayed the sowing of winter cereals, and then winter had arrived much earlier than usual. It was dry, too: there was not enough snow to provide
a blanket from the cold, so the winter crop froze to death.
Spring brought further trouble. Harvests in eastern Europe were equally dismal, and these countries had money to hand, so Russia’s spring crop, instead of feeding its own mouths, was immediately snapped up for export.
Bread was scarce even in Moscow and St Petersburg. Lenin described the hunger bread of that time as ‘a lump of hard black earth covered with a coating of mould’. In the countryside, people bulked out their dough and porridge with straw and weeds.
As 1891 wore on, conditions went from poor to calamitous. Five months passed without rain. The summer was far too hot and dry to plant out vegetables, but farmers had little choice but to chance it. Their plants withered and died. And after all that, a deluge: winter cereals planted that autumn were washed out of the soil by torrential rains.
Come the spring of 1892, farmers were watching in horror as the wind blew away their precious black earth in dust storms, ‘concealing the sun’s rays and turning day into night. Witnesses unanimously testified that the phenomenon had such a dreadful and frightening character that everyone expected “the end of the world”,’9 recalled soil scientist Per Zemyatchensky. Trains were halted by drifts of earth, and crops killed by blasts of dust. Swathes of the country were stripped of all vegetation; not even weeds remained. Farmers killed their livestock for food.
The catastrophe was epic. The commercial attaché in the British embassy in St Petersburg, E. F. G. Law, reckoned that the Russian government had ‘to find the means of supplying a deficit of food to 35,500,000 people in sixteen provinces’. Even in the relatively well-off province of Tambov, the peasants lost over half their livestock. Vernadsky’s estate manager wrote to tell his employer that they were selling their animals to the local gentry for a pittance, and about a quarter of them were already making ‘famine bread’, mixing their dwindling supplies of rye flour with hay, and even brick dust. They were knocking on the doors of Vernadovka for help.
Vernadsky did not immediately rush home. He realised that he could do more good by remaining in Moscow. A gifted bureaucrat, he assembled a relief effort among his friends. A retired neighbour, V. V. Keller, travelled tirelessly, informing him of the situation across the district. With another friend, L. A. Obolianinov, Keller visited Leo Tolstoy to study his methods of famine relief, and reproduced his organisation in Vernadovka. In Moscow, the historian Alexander Kornilov quit his government job to back the relief effort. The medievalist Ivan Grevs joined in; there were several future politicians, and even, under conditions of strict anonymity, the tsar’s own uncle, Grand Duke Nikolai. This skilled, ad hoc administration made people’s efforts count in a way liberal good intentions had never counted before. By July 1892, as the crisis eased, there were 121 famine relief kitchens in Tambov feeding 6,000 people; 1,000 horses had been saved and 220 more were gifted by lottery to horseless families.
And this raised a question: if a bunch of professors could do this sort of thing, why couldn’t the government?10
1891 had given liberal opponents of the regime – the impotent intellecty parodied in the stories of Turgenev and Chekhov – a brief taste of civic power. They had enjoyed it, made the most of it, proved to their own satisfaction that they were worthy of it, and they wanted more. Their model response to the famine – scientific, rational and, in the best sense, bureaucratic – had given hope to Russia’s demoralised educated class. Vernadsky and his friends had shown by example what it would be like for capable people to really participate in the running of their country. The vision spread. To realise that vision, however, required organisation.
The Union of Liberation was founded in July 1903 and campaigned publicly (and peacefully) for an end to autocracy. Its tiny membership – just twenty liberals and radicals – held meetings in Vernadsky’s apartment in Moscow. Vernadsky wrote to his wife: ‘I consider that the interests of scientific progress are closely and inextricably tied to the growth of a wide democracy and humanitarian attitudes – and vice versa.’11
The difficulty was in attracting political support outside the tiny, well-heeled liberal coteries of Moscow and St Petersburg.
On Sunday 22 January 1905, more than 300,000 striking workers and their families walked towards the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, bearing icons and singing hymns. They came to petition the tsar for better labour conditions and an eight-hour working day. The Imperial Guard opened fire on them, leaving a thousand dead or wounded. Passing through the Alexander Gardens that day, suitcase in hand, was a young field geologist, B. A. Luri, Vernadsky’s most promising student. Soldiers shot him twice in the back. In an angry article to a leading liberal newspaper, Vernadsky declared that ‘one more victim has fallen in the long martyrology of the Russian intelligentsia’. But the time for writing stiff letters to the papers was long past.
Following the massacre, the students went on strike. The government, in an uncharacteristic gesture, polled the faculty councils on whether or not to resume classes. Perhaps they meant to give professors the impression that their opinions mattered. Whether they mattered or not, the professors spoke out. Not one university agreed to resume teaching. The councils declared that political reforms were necessary to secure peace in the universities. Vernadsky made a public appeal to his academic colleagues to break with tradition. They were independent scholars and teachers, not state hacks. They couldn’t go on letting themselves be pushed around as if they were ‘teaching on some godforsaken Philippine Island’.12
So the professoriate took a step that was blatantly illegal: they organised an Academic Union, declaring ‘that academic freedom is incompatible with the existing system of government in Russia’, and by August had enrolled more than half the university teachers in the country.
All that remained was that some critical national event should give the Union the chance to show its mettle. Four months later, on 27 May, Admiral Togo of Japan launched an attack on the Russian fleet at Tsushima, and by 28 May over half the Russian fleet lay at the bottom of the Pacific. It was the Union’s big chance – but they absolutely bottled it.
‘All means may now be legitimately used to fight the danger represented by the continued existence of the present government.’ So ran a dramatic appeal from the Union of Unions, a broad alliance of professional associations; the Academic Union was a member. ‘Bring about the immediate elimination of the bandit gang that has usurped power and replace it with a constituent assembly … so that it will as quickly as possible end the war and the present regime.’13
But where was the Academic Union? The professors had stayed at home. Fearing the Union of Unions had become too radical, they had boycotted the congress.
Then the nation’s students did something unexpected, something that triggered a chain reaction that exploded into the great general strike of mid-October, and the 1905 Revolution. They went back to college.
And they did not come alone. Following a series of open political rallies, curious workers began visiting the universities. No one was quite sure what to do with them. ‘We had neither agenda nor speakers,’ one student recalled. ‘I began with a few words of welcome, suggested that we discuss the current political situation, and turned the meeting over to the floor. The ensuing discussion was utterly chaotic. Some of the volunteer speakers were wholly inarticulate.’14
News spread through the factories: the police were not interfering. The crowds grew. Whole factories turned up at the college gates without notice. Workers stood up to read their own poetry. Come October it looked as though the buildings would literally collapse under everyone’s weight.
In Moscow the chief of police warned that any meeting spilling onto the streets would be fired upon. Closing the university on 22 September, the rector, Sergei Trubetskoy, explained: ‘University is not the place for political meetings. It cannot and should not be a public square, and by the same token a public square cannot be a university. Any attempt to turn the university into a popular meeting place will destroy it.’15
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br /> Given his responsibilities, Trubetskoy could do little else but close the university gates. But this pushed the workers into the path of the Moscow police, and street violence escalated sharply.
In an article dated 4 October, Lenin himself summed up, none too sympathetically, the impossible bind in which the professors were now trapped:
They closed the university in Moscow because they feared a bloodbath there. But by their action they caused a far greater bloodbath in the streets. They wanted to extinguish the revolution in the university, but they ignited the revolution in the streets. These professors have stumbled into a real vise.16
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In June 1905 in Odessa, a general strike deteriorated into a mêlée between strikers, reactionaries and the local authorities. The crew of the battleship Potemkin mutinied in the harbour. Two thousand were killed, three thousand wounded.
On 8 October, Moscow’s railroad workers struck. The strike became general: by 13 October Russia was paralysed. Two days later the tsar called his close advisors to the palace. The choice facing them was stark: concede major reforms or abdicate the running of the government to the military. Two days after that, Nicholas II pledged to endow a national assembly – the Duma – with legislative powers. Vernadsky and activists within the intelligentsia hurriedly constructed a political party to represent liberal opinion, the Constitutional Democrats – Kadets, for short. (Wags nicknamed them the Professors’ Party.)
But this little, late experiment in parliamentary democracy was never going to work. The fractures that had opened up between the landowners and the people, the reactionaries and the radicals, the young and the old, had grown too wide, and the so-called ‘liberal revolution’ was ushered in with a bloodbath. 1905 led to far more casualties than the subsequent, decisive revolutions of 1917. A week of pogroms greeted the imperial manifesto, as those who depended on the status quo – small merchants, petty artisans and casual labourers – attacked those they believed had ruined them. Students, liberals and Jews were their particular targets.
