by Simon Ings
On 20 May 1937 Mohr received a letter from Cyril Darlington, informing him that ‘Koltsov and Serebrovsky have been arrested … [Julian] Huxley suggests to me that we ought to organise a protest signed by all leading geneticists in this country.’ American geneticists, meanwhile, were circulating information (which turned out to be false) that ‘seventeen professors of several of Moscow’s universities and institutions are imprisoned’. On 28 May, Mohr received a cable from Vavilov: ‘Information you received about Koltsov and Serebrovsky completely wrong letter follows,’ but by then he had had enough. The British Genetical Society had already offered to host the congress should circumstances require it. So be it: the Seventh International Genetics Congress would be held in Edinburgh.6
This was a coup for the general secretary of the British organising committee, Francis Crew. Crew had been filling his draughty genetics department in Edinburgh, one refugee at a time, by offering places to young geneticists desperate to flee mainland Europe. Peo Koller, Charlotte Auerbach and Guido Pontecorvo had joined him; so too of course had Hermann Muller (though, unlike the others, he never did adapt to the cold, and never learned the knack of working with gloves on). Now Crew sent Vavilov an official letter inviting him and his Soviet colleagues to Edinburgh. Cambridge, Oxford and London might have their Fishers and their Haldanes, but hosting the Seventh Congress would put Edinburgh’s motley international community on the map.
Crew also told Vavilov that the organising committee had unanimously elected him president of the congress. This was the first time a delegate not of the host country had been so honoured, and Crew hoped this would mollify the Soviet authorities and make it more likely that their geneticists could attend.
On the eve of the congress, however, Crew received a letter from Vavilov: ‘Soviet geneticists consider it impossible to take part in the congress held in Scotland instead of its originally planned location – the Soviet Union.’
The letter came as a complete surprise. A new programme was printed, bearing the legend: ‘After this programme had been printed and only ten days before the actual opening of the congress, no fewer than fifty names and titles had to be removed and the whole programme hurriedly recast.’
The Congress convened on 23 August 1939. That same day in Moscow, Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression treaty that became known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact. The war that had been looming over Europe for over three years was quickly becoming a reality.
The next evening, British citizens in Germany were advised to leave the country. German subjects in Britain received similar advice, and the German delegation prepared to leave for home. Many other European geneticists started packing up, too, anticipating a difficult journey. Some geneticists from England also left Edinburgh to be with their families. The congress was cut short by a day and on the Tuesday evening the farewell party continued well into the night with toasts to absent friends and those in danger and distress.
The next day Polish forces mobilised against the massing German invaders, and the Second World War began.
*
‘The announcement of the pact between Stalin and Hitler struck us all like a thunderbolt,’ wrote the memoirist Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov. Everyone knew that representatives of Britain and France had visited Moscow to discuss a union against Hitler, ‘officially characterised as our primary and most evil enemy’. But out of four million Muscovites, perhaps only a thousand knew that Germany’s foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was holed up in the Kremlin, signing a pact of friendship. ‘This turn of events stunned everyone. We were all so bewildered for the first few hours that no one could collect his thoughts.’7
Stalin’s ideas about the Second World War were shaped by the terrors and losses of the First. He had little interest in Adolf Hitler, and certainly no affection. He did understand that Hitler would touch off a second worldwide conflagration. He believed that, just as the First World War had led to a successful socialist revolution in Russia, so a second and more terrible war would lead to major socialist gains across the continent. This was Russia’s manifest destiny, expressed by no less an authority than Lenin.
Stalin’s pact with Germany was opportunistic. The French and British had refused to consider Polish territorial concessions to the USSR, but the Soviet Union’s non-aggression pact with Germany contained a secret codicil allowing the Soviets to do as they pleased with most of the Baltic region, and gave them additional rights to parts of Poland and Romania. On 17 September, then, the Red Army duly began its ‘liberation’ of western Ukraine and western Belorussia from the ‘Polish yoke’.
Ordinary Russians observed the seizure of these lands with cynical indifference. ‘We will extend them a hand,’ ran a popular joke, ‘and they will be lying at our feet.’ Meanwhile those who could get permits to travel – mainly writers, journalists and filmmakers – followed the Red Army into Poland to help enlighten their ‘liberated brothers’. They returned with furniture, musical instruments, leather coats and shoes, and not just for their own use, either: the film-maker Alexander Dovzhenko brought several train-car-loads of booty back from Poland under the guise of film equipment.
The Finns, unlike the Poles, did not have to fight on two fronts, and when the Soviet Union declared war on them on 30 November they put up a savage resistance. Disfigured corpses of Red Army troops littered Finnish forests, their ears or noses cut off, their eyes gouged out. The Finns set boobytraps, connecting landmines to pens, cameras, bicycles – whatever they thought a Russian soldier might want to take and sell. The weather wrought an even more terrible toll than the Finnish mobilisation: thousands of Red Army troops froze. More died from the cold than from combat. Train convoys arriving in Moscow from the front disgorged frostbitten amputees by the thousand.
By March 1940 Finland was in Russian hands. It was a pyrrhic victory, for the German high command now knew how ripe the Soviet Union was for invasion: how inadequate its transport network, how unprepared its men.
*
Soviet authorities, meanwhile, wanted a deal more from their new territories than a few car-loads of second-hand furniture. The western Ukraine, in particular, offered fantastic farming potential, and in May 1940 Nikolai Vavilov was appointed to lead a short expedition to the Carpathians to assess the agricultural potential of the area.
Vavilov travelled by train and met his staff and members of the Ukrainian Academy of Science in Kiev on 26 July. After a short and busy stay in the capital, visiting institutions and exhibitions, arranging a conference on the history of agriculture, and delivering a speech at a Rally of Pioneers, Vavilov and his staff headed for the foothills of the Carpathians, squashed into three small, black, Soviet-made cars. One of Vavilov’s staff, Fatikh Bakhteyev, wrote later:
I remember his excitement when he viewed the vast fields under newly-bred wheat cultivars reaching the old border of the Ukraine, far beyond the horizon. His interest became even more lively after this frontier was crossed. Here we were facing wide fields resembling a patchwork quilt: each tract was under a different crop. As a plant breeder, Vavilov was enjoying it and, in spite of his haste, he very often stopped the car to gather samples of rye, wheat, barley and oats …8
On 6 August Bakhteyev was bumped from a trip up to the highlands of Putila to make room for a local guest. (His side-mission – visiting a local brewery to ask about the barley cultivars they used – provided some consolation.) The journey, meanwhile, proved far harder than expected. One of the cars couldn’t handle the gradient and had to turn back. In it rode another of Vavilov’s colleagues, Vadim Lekhnovich. As they descended the mountain they met another car, whose passengers waved them to a stop. They were looking, they said, for Academician Vavilov; Moscow needed to speak to him urgently on the phone. Lekhnovich told the men not to try the road, as it was virtually impassable. The strangers ignored him and drove on.
‘V. S. Lekhnovich and I were not at all astonished by the fact that N. I. was wanted in Moscow,’ Bakhteyev wrote
later. ‘The scientist would quite frequently be consulted on important state affairs … I was inclined to consider this a good omen.’
When in the evening they returned to their hostel, however, Bakhteyev and Lekhnovich were told by the doorman that Vavilov had been driven off ‘to Moscow’ in a great rush – indeed, he had left all his luggage behind. ‘Thus we parted from N. I. Vavilov for ever.’
*
Vavilov’s arrest had nothing to do with Trofim Lysenko. Three or fours years before, certainly, Vavilov’s run-ins with the Michurinist camp might have led to his detention, even his execution. But times had moved on, and life had become a lot less hysterical. Lysenko, for all his institutional clout, was no longer a favourite, now that Andrei Zhdanov was part of Stalin’s inner circle. His recent performances had won him few friends among the philosophers, and the failures of the vernalisation programme were becoming for hard for the state to ignore.
What actually triggered Vavilov’s arrest was most likely the determined way he had kept up his international network. Despite the fact that the Molotov–Ribbentrop pact had made Britain an enemy of the Soviet Union, Vavilov had continued his work with British geneticists, and in the spring of 1940 had even approved a plan by Cyril Darlington to arrange for the English translation and publication of the latest volume on genetics issued by the Bureau of Applied Botany. The Theoretical Basis of Plant Breeding summed up the main results of Soviet plant-breeding research (including, ironically, a broad and very positive chapter on Lysenko). Letters went back and forth between Vavilov and Darlington all that summer. Vavilov’s readiness to provide ‘British imperialists’ with an account of the latest Soviet genetics research was all the NKVD needed to trigger a warrant.
A week after his brother’s arrest, Sergei Vavilov9 wrote: ‘My diary is full of grief: mother’s death, sister’s death, and now the horror hanging over my brother, I cannot think of anything else. It is so terrifying, so pitiful, and it makes everything senseless.’10
Nikolai’s first interrogation began at 1.30 p.m. on 12 August 1940.11 It lasted for five hours, and NKVD Senior Lieutenant Alexander Khvat was only just getting started. On 14 August Khvat began interrogating Vavilov during the night, in sessions lasting between ten and thirteen hours.
After ten days of this, on 24 August, Vavilov signed his first confession: ‘I admit that I was guilty of being from 1930 a participant in the anti-Soviet organisation of right-wingers that existed in the People’s Commissariat of Agriculture. I am not guilty of espionage activity.’
It was not enough. Vavilov had named as co-conspirators only those he knew had already been tried and executed. Khvat piled on the pressure. On 11 September Vavilov confessed to being a ‘wrecker’ and signed a document titled ‘The Wrecking in the System of the Institute of Plant Breeding That I Directed from 1920 until My Arrest on 6 August 1940’.
More interrogations followed, and more signatures on more documents. Vavilov was interrogated by the NKVD for around 900 hours altogether, with some interrogations lasting half a day or more. ‘At dawn a warder would drag him back and throw him down at the cell door,’ recalled his cell-mate, the artist Grigory Fillipovsky, in 1968. ‘Vavilov was no longer able to stand and had to crawl on all fours to his place on the bunk. Once there his neighbours would somehow remove his boots from his swollen feet and he would lie still on his back in his strange position for several hours.’
Following the outbreak of war with Germany on 22 June 1941, NKVD investigators were ordered to close down their cases, and Khvat had to pick up the pace.
The case against Vavilov was sketchy enough, though police records of his activities began in 1931 and had by now grown to seven volumes. Evidence against Vavilov came from a motley assortment of forced confessions. Georgy Meister, who had famously lost his mind during his incarceration, had called Vavilov a ‘wrecker’ during interrogation but later withdrew the charges. Vavilov’s old patron Gorbunov had refused to speak against him. Rather more surprising, Yakov Yakovlev, Lysenko’s champion and one of Vavilov’s harshest critics, had steadfastly refused to testify against Vavilov right up to his own execution. Vavilov’s colleague and Lenin Academy president Alexander Muralov had testified against Vavilov, at least according to the transcript, but since the transcript was dated 7 August 1940 and Muralov had been shot in 1937, this was hardly admissible evidence.
With no decent documentation to draw upon, Khvat set about manufacturing his own. He created a commission of scientific experts under Vavilov’s former employee Stepan Shundenko, who was by now back in NKVD uniform. This commission would evaluate the ‘wrecking activity’ of Vavilov, and here Lysenko did play a role, by vetting its members. The commission members duly signed the papers put in front of them, without discussion or any opportunity to meet.
Khvat meanwhile was orchestrating confrontations between the exhausted and broken Vavilov and the men he had been tortured into implicating: Boris Panshin, Georgy Karpechenko (who had only returned to Russia because Vavilov had persuaded him), Anton Zaporozhets (whom Vavilov hardly knew) and Lenin Academy vice-president Alexander Bondarenko.
On 8 July the Military Collegium of the USSR Supreme Court decided to hear the Vavilov case ‘in a closed trial, without participation of the prosecution and defence’. The trial, on 9 July, lasted only a few minutes. On 26 July Vavilov was transferred to Butyrskaya prison for the death sentence to be carried out.
While confined to a crowded prison cell, Vavilov tried to cheer up his companions by arranging them to lecture on whatever they could think of: history, biology, the timber industry. Each of them delivered a lecture in turn. They had to speak in whispers in case the guard heard them.
Vavilov’s death sentence was swiftly commuted, perhaps as early as 1 August. The plan was to move Vavilov to a sharashka – a specialist gulag where his scientific knowledge might be exploited. Vavilov had offered himself up for such treatment in a letter of appeal, and it is likely that Lavrenty Beria, who had charge of the sharashka system, was personally responsible for the petition to reduce Vavilov’s sentence. (Beria’s wife Nina was, like Vavilov, a former pupil of Dmitry Pryanishnikov, and this pioneering chemist, by now in his mid-seventies, was tireless in his efforts to get Vavilov released or at the very least looked after.)
The war, however, disarranged whatever plans Beria had laid. Even as his envoy was discussing with Vavilov what he could do if moved to a specialist prison, German forces were approaching the gates of Moscow.
Just as equipment was smashed to prevent it falling into enemy hands, so NKVD troops had orders to shoot their prisoners in the face of the German advance. As early as the first week of the war, 3,000 Ukrainian political prisoners were slaughtered by the NKVD. The evacuation of prisoners from Moscow started early (Beria believing, as Stalin did not, that a German invasion was imminent). Prisoners from Sukhanovo and Lefortovo Prisons were moved to an old prison in the city of Orel and executed there on 11 September, a month before Nazi troops overran that city.
Vavilov was luckier. On the night of 15 October he and tens of thousands of other prisoners were taken to the square outside Kurska railway station. He spent the night on his knees, forbidden to look up, waiting in the rain and snow to be loaded onto a train going east. (He had good company: in the crowd were the former editor of Izvestiia and the founder of the Marx–Lenin Institute of World Literature.)
Vavilov arrived in Saratov, the site of his early successes, on 29 October. Along with the more important prisoners, he was taken to Prison No. 1, a red-brick tsarist building on Astrakhan Street. He fell sick straight away, and once he was out of hospital, he was placed with another academician, the historian Ivan Luppol, in a cell for prisoners sentenced to death.
On 4 July 1942 his sentence was commuted to twenty years’ hard labour and he was moved to the general cell block. His cellmates remember him saying as he entered: ‘You see before you, talking of the past, the Academician Vavilov; now, according to the opinion of the investigators,
nothing but dung.’
*
Also in Saratov, having fled Leningrad, were Vavilov’s wife Elena and their son Yuri. They lived in one room of a brick bungalow owned by Elena’s sister. Since they were the family of an enemy of the state, they had no means of earning money. Every so often Sergei Vavilov managed to get her some cash. But neither he nor they had any idea that Nikolai was imprisoned not twenty-five kilometres from where Elena and Yuri were staying. The NKVD had told Elena that her husband was still in Moscow. Out of the little she had, she used to save up food parcels for him and send them, at great expense and trouble, to the wrong city.
The disappearance of an intellectual celebrity of Nikolai Vavilov’s calibre did not go unremarked. Even Winston Churchill made repeated personal appeals to Stalin, asking what had happened to Vavilov. Late in the autumn of 1942 the press attaché of the British Embassy visited Alma Ata, where the presidium of the Academy of Sciences was evacuated during the war, bringing with him diplomas for two Soviet scientists who had just been elected members of the Royal Society. One of them was Nikolai Vavilov. Perhaps this high-profile gesture would shame the Soviet authorities into revealing Nikolai Vavilov’s whereabouts.
The president of the Academy at that time, the botanist Vladimir Komarov, was profoundly embarrassed. Since his appointment he had been fighting a rearguard action against Lysenko’s administrative abuses within the Academy, and had even managed to smuggle some genetic principles into his books of popular science. But it was not much of a resistance, and when he was called out over Vavilov’s disappearance, he trotted out the party line: of course Nikolai Vavilov was a free man!
