by Simon Ings
The problem was proving it. Komarov sent the letters, diplomas and forms that Vavilov was supposed to sign to his brother Sergei, who was also an Academician. With Sergei’s spurious signature, the form was then handed over to the British Embassy in Moscow. The Embassy wasn’t taken in and sent the form back to Alma Ata.
Hopelessly compromised by this fiasco, Komarov wrote a letter to Stalin himself, asking for definitive information regarding the academician’s whereabouts. The efforts made to find him were genuine by now, but they came too late. The NKVD traced Nikolai Vavilov at last to the records of Saratov prison hospital. He had died there of dystrophy on 26 January 1943.
Notes
1. Quoted in Pringle, The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, p. 238.
2. Joravsky, The Lysenko Affair, p. 110.
3. Roll-Hansen, The Lysenko Effect, pp. 69–70.
4. Krementsov, Stalinist Science, p. 76.
5. A word of caution: there is some doubt over Yefrem Yakushevsky’s account of these days. If Vavilov’s meeting with Stalin actually occurred, Stalin never made a note of it, which is highly unusual. See Loskutov, Vavilov and His Institute.
6. Krementsov, International Science between the World Wars, pp. 66–8.
7. Gennady M. Andreev-Khomiakov and Ann Healy, Bitter Waters: Life And Work In Stalin’s Russia, 1998.
8. Bakhteyev, ‘Reminiscences of N. I. Vavilov’, pp. 79–84.
9. Sergei Vavilov, Secretary of the Academy of Sciences from 1945 to his death in 1951, managed to perform his job without committing any major political mistakes. Sergei’s position was ambiguous – dangerously so – but not uncommon. Even Politburo members like Molotov and Kalinin had convicts among their closest relatives. Sergei was a solitary intellectual whose hobby was searching for rare books among the heaps in second-hand bookstores. He translated Isaac Newton’s Lectiones Opticae into Russian. He also (quietly and unofficially) countermanded decisions to which he himself had put his official stamp. The physicist and industrialist Dmitry Rozhdestvensky once noted: ‘He carries in his pocket a letter of resignation, already signed but without a date on it. When the moment comes and he is forced to agree with something totally unacceptable, he is prepared to take this letter out of his pocket. But he can never decide whether this moment has already come.’ Alexei Kojevnikov, ‘President of Stalin’s Academy: The Mask and Responsibility of Sergei Vavilov’, Isis 87, no. 1 (1996), pp. 18–50.
10. Quoted in Pringle, The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, p. 250.
11. A detailed and distressing account of Vavilov’s questioning is provided by Birstein in The Perversion of Knowledge, pp. 223–9.
Part Three
DOMINION
(1941–1953)
Visions of plenty: at a youth festival in 1939 young men and women in sports gear parade a papier maché harvest across Moscow’s Red Square.
Stormy applause. Ovation. All rise.
Transcript of the August 1948 Session of the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Science
16: ‘Lucky stiffs’
At the Volkovo cemetery, men bury victims of Leningrad’s siege. Food was scarce: police units were ordered to shoot anyone they found eating human flesh.
At various stages of the war Stalin’s genius found the correct solutions that took into account all the circumstances of the situation: Stalin’s mastery was displayed both in defence and offence. Comrade Stalin’s genius enabled him to divine the enemy’s plans, and defeat them. 1
Joseph Stalin
Defeated in the Battle of Britain, in the autumn of 1940 Adolf Hitler turned his attention eastwards. In a directive dated 18 December 1940 he declared: ‘The German armed forces must be prepared to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign before the end of the war against England.’
Stalin still imagined that Russia’s best chance of avoiding war lay in alliances (Russia signed a neutrality pact with Japan in April 1941) and appeasement. Large shipments of Soviet material continued to be sent to Germany, right up until the invasion – which was late. German troops were beginning to mass on the Soviet border by April 1941 but it was not until 22 June that three army groups crossed onto Russian territory.
Attacking on a broad front, from the Black Sea to the Baltic coast, commanders responsible for the previous year’s Blitzkrieg to the west looked likely to repeat their earlier success. Heinz Guderian’s armoured corps advanced eighty kilometres in the first day and three days after that, on 27 June, he reached Minsk, over 300 kilometres inside Russia. On 10 July he crossed the Dnieper. On 16 July he reached Smolensk. He had covered 650 kilometres in less than four weeks and was heading straight for Moscow.
By now Russia had lost around 2 million men, 3,500 tanks and over 6,000 aircraft. The state was so ill-prepared, there weren’t even air-raid shelters in the Kremlin. Stalin had to work in the Moscow Metro. By 14 October law and order were breaking down. Shops were looted, empty apartments burgled. A pall of smoke hung over the city as officials burned papers.
‘We are obliterating stupid business forms as a category! Look.’ He dragged me to the window, out of which he passionately and with obvious satisfaction hurled the folders, which hitherto had been preserved with great care. I might have expected this, yet all I could do was rub my eyes: Could I be dreaming? They were throwing out the valuable cover vouchers and cherished reports on which our entire economic system was based!
Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov’s eye-witness account in his memoir Bitter Waters captures the absurdity and panic of the time. With the Germans just forty kilometres from Moscow, ‘secretaries, draftsmen, accountants, and typists were willingly devoting themselves to the demolition. It was as if they had been seized by the joy of destruction. Perhaps they were simply fed up with clacking away on their typewriters to produce those reams of financial reports, full of incomprehensible and boring figures.’2
A penetrating wind tore across the city, bringing with it a sprinkling of snow. It was cold: winter had come early. No one knew whether this was good news or bad. With luck the Germans would all freeze – but not before the ground did, and on that surface the Germans could advance as if they were driving on tarmac.
*
And so they would, had Hitler himself not already prevented them, insisting that his generals first disable as much of the Russian Army as they could.
Guderian, under protest, moved south towards Kiev, where a pincer movement captured another half a million men. But the delay proved crucial. By early December only a few advance detachments had managed the 200 kilometres to the suburbs of Moscow, and by then it was clear that the non-aggression pact between Russia and Japan was holding. Soviet forces rushed westwards to defend the capital. General Georgy Zhukov, a brilliant career officer in the Red Army, forced the Germans to a standstill on 5 December 1941. The weather turned out to be good news, after all: the Germans, confident in their technique of Blitzkrieg, had come unprepared for freezing conditions. And now the Russian winter started in earnest.
Further to the north another German army, pushing along the Baltic coast, had made spectacular progress. By August it had reached Leningrad. Unable to capture the city, the Germans besieged it, expecting it to surrender before winter took hold.
The siege of Leningrad lasted 900 days, until January 1944. Administering the city, and ensuring its heroic resistance, was Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s right-hand man in the purges that had wracked the place only a few years before, a man with a famously weak constitution and no military experience whatsoever.3
Some people have greatness thrust upon them, and this was certainly the case with Zhdanov. Leaving Moscow for Leningrad in the autumn of 1941, he had fully expected to return to the capital, one way or another, before the onset of winter. In fact it would be five years before he was able to resume his post as second-in-command of the Party.
Stalin himself repeatedly accused Zhdanov of military incompetence and even insubordination. It is true he began badly, bungling both the evacuation of civilians and the busines
s of fortifying the city. In late June men and women of working age were being ordered to dig trenches and anti-tank ditches, lay barbed wire, set mines, and build pillboxes. For three hours a day after work or school, the Leningraders laboured; pensioners and housewives toiled for eight hours a day on the lines.
What followed, as the siege took hold, was unimaginably worse – ten times worse than Hiroshima, if you count the dead. Leningrad’s population dropped from well over 3 million to approximately 640,000, mostly through starvation and cold. People dropped dead on the street. Some were put on sleds and carted off to burial in immense common graves at the Piskarevskoe Cemetery. Others fell into huge snowdrifts and had to be cut out when they reappeared in the spring to stop the spread of disease. Food stocks disappeared. People ate whatever they could: shoe leather, wallpaper glue, spoiled animal fat. When the Badaev sugar stores burned down, people sold and ate the ‘sweet earth’ found amongst the ruins. Cats and dogs vanished. People vanished. Special police units were sent to shoot anyone who was found to have eaten human flesh.
Stalin must at some point, and for some reason, have believed in Zhdanov’s military capability, but Zhdanov was soon disabused: he quickly learned to defer to his generals, Zhukov, Meretskov and Govorov, who remembered Zhdanov in their (censored) memoirs as ‘polite, well behaved, and a good listener who did not pull rank’.4 He worked out of a third-floor office in the Smolny Institute, the walls hung with pictures of Stalin, Marx and Engels. ‘His asthma was much worse,’ the American journalist Harrison Salisbury remembered. ‘His breath came in sharp, uneven gulps. His heavy face was puffed with fatigue and only his dark eyes glowed.’
*
Leningrad was full of treasures. The Hermitage Museum, founded in 1764 by Catherine the Great, contained over 2 million paintings, sculptures, coins, articles of jewellery and other artefacts. In just six days, three-quarters of its contents were readied for storage, in hidden vaults, in a nearby cathedral, and out of town.
Packing up Leningrad’s other great storehouse – the seed and plant collection of Vavilov’s Bureau of Applied Botany – presented unique challenges. For a start, its 380,000 examples of 2,500 species of grains, fruits and tubers had to be kept alive.
Collections of potato, rye and other crops were planted out at the bureau’s research stations at Pavlovsk and Pushkin. The Pavlovsk station, located forty-five kilometres south-east of Leningrad, was ablaze from enemy bombing and the field containing the potato collection was under fire. Red Army soldiers helped carry the collection back to the city in military trucks to the bureau’s offices in St Isaac’s Square.
The plan was to evacuate the collection, one part carried by employees in their hand luggage, the other part – five tonnes of seeds – in a railway van scheduled for the town of Krasnoufimsk in the Ural mountains. Come winter the institute’s director, Iogan Eikhfeld, and several staff were evacuated there. But the train car never arrived. For six months or more it was shuttled from siding to siding until all hope of sending the collection away was lost, the car was unloaded and its cargo returned to St Isaac’s Square.
The largest and most important part of the collection was left in the besieged city. The institute had already lost more than thirty researchers, some in the bombing of the city, some in action, others from starvation and cold. January and February 1942 were the worst months; temperatures fell to record lows of –36 to –40 °C.
In the dark, freezing building of the bureau, the remaining workers prepared seeds for long-term preservation. They divided the collection into several duplicate parts, while bombs and shells burst around them. St Isaac’s Square was a target. Its cathedral was damaged; so were many nearby buildings. It was only after the war that survivors learned why the bureau had been left unscathed: Hitler had planned to hold a victory banquet and to make a speech from the balcony of the nearby Astoria Hotel.
The Germans never did succeed in overrunning Leningrad. But the rats did. That winter, hordes of vermin swarmed into the building. All efforts to protect the collection proved fruitless. Rats started breaking into the ventilated metal boxes and devouring seeds. Vadim Lekhnovich, who was the curator of the collection during the siege of Leningrad, recalled: ‘For more safety I started sealing the basement and locked it with three different locks. I also reinforced the doors with iron. However, this could not avert minor thefts.’
In the spring, thieves crashed through the blocked windows. Workers secured the windows with plywood and the seeds were transferred to a more reliable place.
Evgeny Vulf, an expert in volatile oil plants, was hit by a shell splinter and bled to death. In January, A. G. Shchukin died at his writing table, holding in his hand a packet of peanuts he had hoped to send off for a grow-out. G. K. Kreyer, head of the herb laboratory, died of starvation. O. S. Ivanov, a rice specialist, also succumbed, surrounded by several thousand packets of rice. L. M. Rodine died among packets of carefully preserved oats.
Come summer the surviving bureau staff planted out cabbages and seed potatoes in the churchyard of Saint Isaac’s cathedral and at Pushkin, standing guard over the fields day and night to fight off both rats and men.
*
With swathes of its richest territory in German hands, Russia nonetheless managed to re-arm itself, in part using supplies arriving in convoys from the West, along the dangerous Arctic route north of Scandinavia and down to Archangel. That year alone, 20,000 tanks and 35,000 planes rolled out from factories hurriedly relocated in remote regions of eastern Russia. Russian forces took back Smolensk, Kiev and Kharkov. By the end of 1943 two-thirds of the land taken by the Germans was back in Russian hands. In February 1943 the Germans had suffered a devastating defeat in the battle of Stalingrad (now Volgograd), a major industrial centre on the Volga River. The horror of Stalingrad lasted for 199 days. Soviet losses were so great that, at times, the life expectancy of a newly arrived soldier was less than a day. The Germans, fighting from house to house and from staircase to staircase, joked bitterly that they had seized the kitchen but were still fighting for the living room. And at last, in January 1944 – a moment of huge psychological importance – Leningrad was freed.
Little enough of the city remained. On 22 September 1941 Hitler had ordered that ‘St Petersburg must be erased from the face of the Earth’ and ‘we have no interest in saving lives of civilian population.’5 Thousands of homes, factories, roads and railways, schools, hospitals and power plants were completely destroyed. Take a tour round the Peterhof Palace today and your guide will likely tell you about the German artillery shrapnel embedded in the trees – metal enough to draw down lightning whenever there’s a storm.
The bureau’s collection of useful plants survived, after a fashion. Lysenko, who had spent the war in Siberia conducting an urban gardening campaign, maintained that the whole enterprise was disordered and for a long time it was allowed to deteriorate. But the Bureau of Applied Botany survived, at least on paper, and veterans of the Leningrad siege maintained what they could. By 1969 the collection boasted 175,000 holdings, all available for the creation of new crop varieties.
Contributions to the Bureau came from all over the world. Its chief, Peter Zhukovsky (a brilliant geneticist and a former close associate of Nikolai Vavilov), once received potatoes from the Tucaman University in Argentina, thanks to a chance meeting in 1958 with a German plant collector who worked there, Heinz Brücher. Forty years later, in the late 1990s, it turned out that Brücher had been an officer in the SS. In June 1943, Heinrich Himmler had placed him in charge of a special commando unit charged with raiding Soviet agricultural experimental stations. Brücher hadn’t been donating valuable varieties of potato after all: he had been returning them.6
*
To win its Great Patriotic War, the Soviet state changed its relationship with its scientists and engineers – not once, but twice. One change was already in train as war loomed in the late 1930s. The other change came later, was born of necessity, and disconcerted everyone.
/> The planned change was the incarceration of large numbers of specialists in a prison science network. The idea came from scientists and engineers themselves. Some time in late 1937, as they awaited sentencing, a group of specialists who were languishing in the NKVD’s infamous Lubyanka prison put together a short proposal. They listed a number of specific military weapons that they could develop. In return, they asked for resources, and not to be sent to Siberia.
The bald idea was nothing new to Lavrenty Beria, then a senior NKVD official. Experiments of this sort had been tried before. In the early 1930s prisoners at the Solovki Special-Purpose Reformatory Camp had even issued their own scientific journal. What excited Beria was the idea’s scaleability. The NKVD was already a powerful economic organ in its own right – ultimately, it controlled all the gold in Kolyma. If part of its gulag system could be given over to design and manufacturing, then its economic empire could expand into new territories, while its control of leading scientists and engineers would lend it huge political clout.
Beria created the Department of Special Design Bureaux in 1938. His energetic lobbying won it an entire factory plant and an initial government investment of more than 35 million roubles. The department went through a number of name changes but it was always Beria’s pet project, and shut down only when, shortly after Stalin’s death, Beria was executed.
Beria’s special prisons or sharashki solved at one stroke the two besetting difficulties of Soviet industrialisation: the political unreliability of the old guard, and the inexperience of the new. If the old specialists would work under guard, then their political unreliability hardly mattered. All you had to do was keep them incarcerated. (There was never any need to arrest and incarcerate people to feed the sharashka system; the arrest quotas for the NKVD were high, and there were always enough specialists already in detention.)
