by Simon Ings
It is unlikely that Vavilov opened up to Hawkes to any great extent. He had learned to be very circumspect in conversing with foreigners. In letters abroad, he communicated by code. The American botanist Jack Harlan remembers wanting to study with Vavilov, who was a great friend of his father and an occasional house guest. Jack even studied Russian during his school days in preparation for the trip. But when at last Harry Harlan wrote to Vavilov about Jack studying in Leningrad, the reply came immediately: ‘My Dear Dr. Harlan, what you said about Chinese barley is very interesting …’
‘My Dear’ was a code between the two men that something was wrong. Besides, Harry Harlan had said nothing about Chinese barley. So Jack would not be going to Russia after all.6
*
In May 1938 the government decided to reorganise the Academy of Sciences completely, to increase the number of its divisions, enlarge its membership, and ‘strengthen’ it with ‘young scientific forces’. The establishment of a new Philosophy Division, and the election to the Academy of Stalin’s favourite philosopher Mark Mitin, was an obvious draw for the ambitious philosopher Isaak Prezent, while Lysenko and Tsitsin, president and vice-president respectively of the Lenin Academy, stood an excellent chance of being ‘elected’ under the Academy’s new constitution.
Among their natural opponents, as the January 1939 elections neared, was Nikolai Koltsov, head of the Institute of Experimental Biology. A bizarre chain of events had put Koltsov’s name on the rolls. His institute had only just been assigned to the Academy from the Commissariat of Health – a bit of bureaucratic tinkering that to Koltsov’s mind threatened the survival of his ‘independent, entire, and unfractured institution’. The move also meant that the institute was the only bastion of genetics within the Academy.
Koltsov, mindful of his anomalous status within the Academy, did not put his own name forward for election. Unfortunately, he omitted to explain his reasoning to Maria, his wife, who felt she owed him because back in 1915, he had turned down an offer for ordinary membership of the Academy because it would have entailed a move to St Petersburg and Maria hadn’t wanted to leave Moscow. In his absence, then, Maria put his name forward.
Koltsov’s popularity as a candidate made a discreet withdrawal from the contest impossible. Forty-five colleagues rushed to second his nomination. He sent the president of the Academy an official request to withdraw from the election, but by then the Lysenkoists had already launched a furious attack on him, Prezent exhuming, yet again, the articles Koltsov had contributed to the Russian Eugenics Journal in the 1920s. ‘In the institute directed by Koltsov and in the journal edited by him,’ Prezent wrote, ‘his collaborators dragged in all sorts of pseudoscientific trash, and at times open fascist homilies, in the guise of genetics.’
Worse was to come. A few days before the election, on 1 January 1939, Pravda carried an article under the headline ‘Pseudoscientists Have No Place within the Academy’. Signed by Lysenko’s backers, including academicians Alexei Bakh and Boris Keller, it described Koltsov as ‘a counterrevolutionary’ and a ‘fascist’.
The Pravda article oppressed Koltsov greatly. He wrote personally to Stalin, pointing out that he himself had closed down both the Russian Eugenics Society and its journal when the first indications appeared in Germany about the connection between fascism, racial ideology and eugenics.
That letter – cogent, dignified, and ungainsayable – kept Koltsov out of further trouble. But it did not keep Lysenko and Tsitsin from being elected to the Academy, and it did not save the institute to which Koltsov had devoted his career. After their election to the Academy of Sciences, the Lysenkoists began a direct assault. On 4 March 1939 the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences set up a commission headed by Bakh and conducted by Isaak Prezent to investigate the ‘pseudoscientific deviations’ of Koltsov’s institute.
The committee held four meetings, the most important of which was on 15 April 1939, when Koltsov was present to answer questions. These questions were phrased in such a way that Koltsov could not win – or that, anyway, had been the intention. But Koltsov was in fighting mood. He knew a witch-hunt when he saw one and, naming no names, he let everyone know he blamed Isaak Prezent for the current farrago. Far from disarming, Koltsov actually got two of the judges, Alexei Bakh and Khachatur Koshtoyants, to admit that they had not in fact read the articles that they had been criticising so savagely in Pravda.
The Academy’s new president Vladimir Komarov, a plant geographer and a quiet convert to genetics, did not have the stomach to cook up criticisms of his own, and instead quoted Prezent’s accusation ‘that you did not pay enough attention to the influence of the environment on the hereditary process’.
Koltsov shrugged: ‘He says that by feeding one can turn a cockroach into a horse.’ (It is said that Stalin laughed out loud when he read the transcript.) But there was nothing more that he could do. He was dismissed from his directorship, and left working in his personal laboratory while his institute was taken apart around him. On 3 June 1939 he wrote to his old friend, Secretary Academician Leon Orbeli:
It looks as though I will not be ejected from my apartment and my small laboratory (both are completely separate from the other rooms of the institute) … Do I still have a salary? Will my wife, M. P. Koltova (Doctor of Biological Sciences), and my personal technician, E. P. Kumakova, be permitted to carry on working with me? How am I going to be paid and funded? (I need very little money for experiments – I can cover those sums from my salary.) I would prefer to get this money from the Academy directly, but if this is not possible, you could affiliate my small operation (three persons) to any institute within the Academy …7
Koltsov died of a heart attack on 2 December 1940. The next day his wife settled her affairs and drank poison. Her deathbed letter was read out at the funeral. She recalled that as Koltsov lay dying he had a moment of complete lucidity and said: ‘How I wish that everybody would wake up. That everybody would wake up.’8
Notes
1. Loren R. Graham, Moscow Stories, p. 124.
2. Roll-Hansen, The Lysenko Effect, p. 212.
3. Babkov, The Dawn of Human Genetics, p. 679.
4. Mark Popovsky, The Vavilov Affair, p. 152.
5. John Hawkes to Igor Loskutov, 1995; quoted in Loskutov, Vavilov and His Institute. For Lysenko’s involvement in attacks on Nikolai Vavilov, see Bakhteyev, ‘Reminiscences of N. I. Vavilov’, pp. 79–84.
6. Calvin O. Qualset, ‘Jack R. Harlan (1917–1998), Plant Explorer, Archaeobotanist, Geneticist, and Plant Breeder’, The Origins of Agriculture and Crop Domestication, p. 1. See also Jack Harlan’s The Living Fields: Our Agricultural Heritage.
7. In N. A. Grigorian, ‘N. K. Koltsov i experimental’naya genetika vysshei nervoi deyatel’nosti’ [‘N. K. Koltsov and the Genetics of Higher Nervous Activity’], Priroda 6 (1992), pp. 93–7.
8. Babkov, The Dawn of Human Genetics, pp. 686–8.
15: ‘We shall go to the pyre’
The last image to survive of Nikolai Vavilov is this prison photograph, probably taken at Saratov in 1941.
Clearly sparks were flying. We entered the room and saw that Vavilov was holding Lysenko by his suit collar, cursing him for ruining Soviet science. 1
A worker at the Bureau of Applied Botany
The Great Purge wore itself out. By February 1938 Andrei Vyshinsky, perhaps with an eye to his decorous second career as an academician, used his reputation as prosecutor in the Moscow show trials to condemn any future use of torture. The man notorious for shouting down defendants was weary of interrogations and tortures, and the ‘direct fabrication of cases’. In March the Procuracy Council, under his direction, deplored the ‘beating of honest Soviet people’. Vyshinsky’s hypocrisy was jaw-dropping, but hypocrisy is not the worst vice: many memoirs report that by the autumn, torture had become a rarity.
Controversies conducted during the Great Purge had not gone away; eventually it seemed possible to revisit them in a more measured way. A group
of Leningrad biologists wrote to Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s right-hand man in Leningrad and the Party secretary responsible for science, about the lack of open public debate on genetics. ‘Conditions for work in the field of genetics’, they complained, ‘are absolutely abnormal at the present time.’
The request was well-judged. Zhdanov’s role in the Great Purge, and his famous mistrust of Western foreigners, made him an unlikely ally of genetics. But he was a practical, plain-speaking man who had seen through the forced collectivisation of agriculture in his district and he frankly despised Lysenko, whose assurances about bumper harvests and high-yield species had come to nothing. Zhdanov saw to it that a new conference, ‘On the Controversy in Genetics and Breeding’ was held in October 1939.
Reopening the debate around genetics made sense, given the desperate state of Soviet agriculture. What the geneticists had not caught on to, however, was the decline in their own importance. Scientists, whether bourgeois hangovers or militant Marxists from the Communist Academy, were used to being taken seriously. Was the Soviet Union not supposed to be the first truly scientifically run state?
Since the First Five-Year Plan, however, the balance of power had changed. ‘Practical results’, gathered through questionnaires, discussed in public debates and disseminated through the popular press, now trumped the academic mill of specialist publication and peer review. And philosophy, of the militant kind practiced by Mark Mitin and Isaak Prezent, ensured that debates remained comprehensible to non-specialists, and ended with clear declarations and calls to action.
In line with the new orthodoxy established at the Academy of Sciences, the terms of the genetics debate were set by philosophers, not scientists. The meeting was held under the auspices of the party’s theoretical journal, Under the Banner of Marxism, and chaired by its editor-in-chief, the nihilist philosopher Mark Mitin, for whom science was simply a factory for the production of useful technology.
The meeting was held between 7 and 14 October 1939, at the Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute, a handsome Constructivist block in Moscow’s Znamenka quarter, a stone’s throw from the Kremlin. Under the Banner of Marxism fielded four ‘judges’ to oversee the proceedings: Mark Mitin and Pavel Iudin, both recently appointed to the Academy of Sciences; Ernst Kolman, the spy-turned-philosopher of science who had launched the first press attacks on Solomon Levit; and Victor Kolbanovsky, head of the psychology department of the Institute of Philosophy.
Under the aegis of such men, it was impossible to push the debate into specialist territory, or even ask hard factual questions. All the geneticists could do was argue for the ‘practicality’ of their own research, while their opponents the Lysenkoites barracked them for studying a useless fly, Drosophila, while they, the Lysenkoites, busied themselves with tomatoes, potatoes and other useful plants and animals.
Vavilov turned up at the conference grim-featured and close to collapse from exhaustion. He held out little hope for his side. Some months before, at a meeting of the Bureau of Applied Botany, he had spoken in the most hopeless terms about the controversy in which Lysenko had embroiled them: ‘We shall go to the pyre,’ he predicted, ‘we shall burn, but we shall not retreat from our convictions.’
His pessimism soon proved justified. The debate, such as it was, was soon swamped in acrimony. Vavilov’s saboteur-employee Shlykov was so abusive towards his boss that the shocked chairman shut him up and deleted his charges from the transcript.
Lysenko once again responded to every criticism with a belligerence that staggered sense. The Drosophila geneticist Julius Kerkis quoted Lysenko’s words back at him, hoping for a retraction, or at very least an explanation. What were they supposed to make of a statement like ‘In order to obtain a certain result, you must want to obtain precisely that result; if you want to obtain a certain result, you will obtain it … I need only such people as will obtain the results I need’?
‘I spoke correctly!’ Lysenko shouted.
Kerkis was at a loss: ‘It just doesn’t fit in my head,’ he complained.2
It didn’t fit in Mark Mitin’s head, either, and he could see the whole debate sliding out of his control if he let Lysenko reduce it to a broad-brush condemnation of genetics. If anyone was going to condemn anything, it would be his panel of professional philosophers. Behind Lysenko’s wildness he saw the hand of Isaak Prezent, a man despised by the philosophers of his own side – who had to put up with him on a daily basis – quite as much as he was disliked by the geneticists. Mitin laid into Prezent, accusing him of ‘conceit that passes all bounds’ in trying to crowbar his ‘scholasticism’ and ‘bombast’ into the important practical work of Comrade Lysenko. (This was neatly done: both sides broke into loud applause.)
But prising Lysenko and Prezent apart proved impossible. Lysenko defended his colleague, and spent the remaining days of the conference hurling imprecations at ‘the falsehood of the fundamentals of Mendelism’ – a performance that left Lysenko looking as exhausted and defeated by the conference’s end as Vavilov had at its beginning. Eleanor Manevich, a genetics student, bumped into Lysenko in the cloakroom after the end of the conference: ‘We were standing there. He did not look well and was very hoarse. I felt pity for him. He had been criticised by all the geneticists. I said to him: “Trofim Denisovich you should take care of your health.” His overcoat was not very warm.’3
No side can be said to have won the 1939 debate, if indeed ‘debate’ is the right term for such a slanging match. In the absence of any real substance, all Mitin and his colleagues could do was judge the rhetorical performance of each side, and naturally this swayed them towards Lysenko’s side, as the more ‘practical-minded’ of the contenders. Lysenko’s theories were ‘progressive’ and ‘innovative’, while the geneticists were ‘a self-enclosed group that not only does not want to listen to the voice of practice, but reacts to this criticism in a very negative way’. Pavel Iudin, the philosopher who closed the conference, called upon the geneticists to reject the ‘rubbish and slag that have accumulated in your science’.
The conference had achieved nothing; worse, it gave its official imprimatur to the very clichés and cant phrases that had dogged genetics since the beginning of the 1930s. Vavilov wrote to Mitin afterwards: ‘The conclusions you drew at the conference on questions of genetics left us with a bitter aftertaste.’4
*
Lysenko was by now about as powerful as he would ever be: president of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences; member of the Academy of Sciences and its ruling presidium; and a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union’s highest legislative body.
His petty attacks on his former patron Nikolai Vavilov were boundless. He rejected a whole series of exhibits Vavilov had drawn up for a national agricultural exhibition in Moscow. Vavilov’s temper finally broke: he stormed into Lysenko’s Moscow office. ‘Clearly sparks were flying,’ a passing worker reported:
We entered the room and saw that Vavilov was holding Lysenko by his suit collar, cursing him for ruining Soviet science. Lysenko was terrified, he screamed that he, Lysenko, was an untouchable as a deputy of the Supreme Soviet, he would complain to the government and that Vavilov would be held responsible for an attempt to beat him up.
With the men’s animosity spiralling out of control, Vavilov appealed to the highest authority. According to his bureau colleague Yefrem Yakushevsky, on 20 November 1939 Vavilov presented himself outside Stalin’s office at the Kremlin.5
At around 10 p.m. he was let into the reception room. At around midnight, Stalin found time for him. ‘So,’ began the great patron, the Coryphaeus of science, ‘you are the Vavilov who fiddles with flowers, leaves, grafts and other botanical nonsense instead of helping agriculture, as is done by Academician Lysenko.’ He did not even invite Vavilov to sit down. Talking to Stalin was like talking to a brick wall, and after about an hour, Vavilov left empty-handed.
Yakushevsky met Vavilov eight days later. His boss’s hopes were killed, Yakushev
sky says. It was clear to Vavilov, following his interview with Stalin, that Lysenko had been given carte blanche to do whatever what he wanted.
As if to demonstrate the fact, at the end of 1939 Lysenko sent Vavilov on a scientific expedition to the Caucasus, and used his absence to replace his bureau’s entire scientific council. Vavilov, outraged, appealed to the new commissar of agriculture, Ivan Benediktov, but Benediktov did nothing. By 1940, Vavilov was fully expecting to be arrested. Though his office in the Bureau of Applied Botany was only a couple of minutes away from his flat, he would ring his wife whenever he arrived or left, so she would have warning if he was whisked away.
*
Colleagues and friends overseas found it hard to gauge the true scale of the confusion and controversy consuming Soviet intellectual life. Indeed, very little information of any sort was emerging from a state hell-bent on isolating itself from every foreign influence.
The Soviet authorities had suggested that the postponed Seventh Genetics Congress might finally be held in 1938. But the news since then, such as it was, had been uniformly bad. Vavilov might or not have been arrested. Levit was missing. Agol had been most definitively shot. Muller meanwhile was licking his wounds in Edinburgh and telling the most ghastly anecdotes. Otto Mohr, the Norwegian geneticist whose job it was to oversee the annual international genetics congresses, had to make a decision: could he really stake a global meeting on the promises of a handful of Soviet bureaucrats, more than half of whom had since been replaced, and none of whom seemed capable of replying to letters?
