Vavilov and his astonishing botanists - III

Vavilov’s disappearance from the Plant Institute led to confusion. That month the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition awarded Vavilov a gold medal for services to Soviet agriculture. His colleagues couldn’t understand why the authorities would simultaneously arrest him. They wrote letters to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, the government, and the NKVD, vouching for his character and declaring that he was no spy. But a warning came that anyone who put his or her signature to the letter would be arrested for supporting a suspected “enemy of the people."

They hoped that Vavilov’s younger brother, Sergei, director of the Optical Institute, would be able to intervene but nothing came of it. Vavilov was dismissed from his position as director of the Plant Institute. Police arrived to search his office, then his apartment. A bogus story was circulated that had he visited Ukraine with a plan to cross the border and flee to the West, taking his scientific knowledge and findings with him. Trofim Lysenko's supporters were promoted to senior positions in the Institute and Vavilov's supporters were dismissed. 

All the while, Operation Barbarossa, the German plan for the invasion of Russia, had been in full swing. Nobody had any inkling that, within three months, Leningrad — formerly known as St. Petersburg —  would become the setting for the longest siege in recorded history. Hitler told his military chief of staff that Leningrad was not merely to be attacked, but was to be leveled, to become “uninhabitable.” By razing the city, the German army would eliminate a center of Bolshevism and nationalism. Also, according to Hitler, the German army would be spared “the necessity of having to feed the population through the Winter." The siege of Leningrad lasted for almost nine hundred days. 

The tactic to besiege a city is to soften up the people living there and to stop food and supplies entering the city. Starvation and hunger began in earnest as soon as the siege ring closed. It's estimated that upwards of one million people died, four times the number that died in the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined. In 1942, every third person living in the city perished. Most died from starvation. 

Vavilov had instilled in his followers a keen sense of responsibility; many of the specimens in the seed bank, he taught them, were as irreplaceable as precious artworks. They could not easily be re-collected or, in some cases, replaced at all, as the landscapes from which they had been harvested had already been destroyed by human activity. His staff understood that preserving the collection was now their primary goal. 

Although  the siege of Leningrad is very well documented, it was not known for a while because there was a state-wide cover-up to minimize the amount of casualties and the suffering that had happened in the city. But by the 1960s and 1970s the details started coming to light from people who had kept diaries. These showed what it was like throughout September, October, November of the first few months of the siege. The cupboards started to empty, as the people started to face the terrible decision of maybe butchering their pets or doing whatever it is that they needed to do in order to get some calories into their bodies to prepare for the winter. 

These diaries were by ordinary people but the botanists who worked at the Plant Institute did not keep the same kind of records. Much of the information about them comes from the things that they wrote in the years afterwards, which were much more plain, perhaps because they were government employees. But what comes through is that, throughout this ordeal, these scientists overcame hunger and injury and risked their lives to protect the world's first seed bank. They were literally starving during the siege and yet they refused to eat the very seeds they were safeguarding throughout it. 

It was a brutal winter in 1941 and more calories were needed in trying to stay alive in such cold temperatures. But the botanists made a collective decision that they're not going to touch any of the seeds. There were more than a quarter of a million seeds and plants inside the Institute in little tins. Many of them were edible. There were nuts and things that they just could have taken off the shelf and eaten on the spot which would have prolonged their lives. Instead, they gathered up the seeds and put them in two of the rooms, stacked them up, and then bolted the door shut so that no one could get in and touch them.

Some of them died while at their desks while continuing their work. One scientist was found slumped at his desk and when one of his colleagues tried to rouse him by shaking his shoulder, a packet of almonds spilled out of his hands. He had died while sorting through these almonds and cataloging them while resisting the urge to eat them and stay alive. What is it that drove the scientists to such extreme levels of self-sacrifice that resulted in the loss of life of 19 of the botanists who worked there?

They knew that some of these seeds were irreplaceable, priceless. The habitats where some of these seeds had been collected had been lost and there was no way to get them back. So eating them would have been a betrayal of that work and of their colleagues. There was a sense that this was their life's work. After the war, a journalist asked why they chose not to eat the seeds or give them to the starving people. One of the botanists said (as quoted in The Forbidden Garden):

Imagine this scenario: Here you are, a writer, who has authored a book. You’ve put your all into it — your whole life. And suddenly, let’s say, there is a severe frost, and you find yourself in a room without firewood to keep warm, only your manuscript.… Now can you begin to understand the psychology of the situation? You are freezing to death: Will you destroy this, the only copy of your book? Would you die to preserve this work? Yes, or no? Will you give in to temptation? 

What are you asking me, you and all the others? You’re surprised? You’re perplexed? Yes, it was difficult to walk at that time. It was unbearably difficult to get up every morning, move your hands and feet.… But to refrain from eating the collection? That wasn’t difficult. No, not at all. Because it was impossible to eat your life’s work, the life’s work of your friends and colleagues. Do I really need to prove such an elementary, simple thing to you?

Vavilov and his astonishing botanists - II

One of Vavilov's former pupils, a peasant horticulturalist named Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, followed Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s theory that organisms could acquire traits in their lifetimes from their environments. These qualities would then be passed down to the next generation. There was no need for genetic engineering or seed banks, which, Lysenko argued, represented a waste of time and resources: one simply had to train plants to meet one’s goals, a theory he named vernalization.

Lysenko's outlier theory resonated with the country's leader, Joseph Stalin. He liked the idea that plants, like workers, could be transformed by an act of political will. Stalin also liked that, unlike Vavilov, Lysenko came from peasant stock, and that his theories did not rely on academic laboratory work. Lysenko promised Stalin that he could meet the demand for improved crop varieties within three years, seven fewer than Vavilov estimated his work required to produce results.

Stalin's policies had induced famine and he needed quick solutions. So when, at a 1935 conference, Lysenko delivered a speech in which he vilified the scientific elite and promised quick-fix solutions to the problems of Soviet food production and distribution, his message was welcomed. Vavilov followed Lysenko's work closely but suspected that he had manipulated the results of his experiments to support his ideas. But since he was supported by Stalin, Lysenko sailed past Vavilov, who was his former teacher, through the ranks of the Soviet hierarchy.

Vavilov had begun to experience powerful opposition in the late twenties itself because of Stalin's attacks on the intellectual elite. Lysenko’s arrival on the scene increased the attacks. The seed bank was increasingly viewed as a wasteful drain on the state without tangible benefit. Vavilov’s expeditions began to be viewed as little more than expensive luxury tourist trips that cost millions. 

It was Vavilov, however, whose reputation prevailed internationally. His expeditions were covered by Western journalists, and, on his travels, he befriended dignitaries and world leaders. In Stalinist Russia, to be acclaimed by so many international writers and intellectuals could soon become a problem. Vavilov suspected that his close ties to Western science had brought him under the surveillance of the Soviet security services.

Science in Stalinist Russia seemed deeply politicized. He faced criticism for hiring staff to work at the seed bank regardless of their social background and Party affiliation. In October 1937, Pravda published an editorial that claimed “[Vavilov’s] expeditions have absorbed huge amounts of people’s money. We must declare that practical value of the collection did not justify the expenses.” Stalin began to imprison intellectuals on charges of being "enemies of the state,” banishing them to labor camps to be “reeducated” in accordance with Communist principles.

Vavilov wondered for how long he could lead the Plant Institute in such an oppressive climate. He continued his work with great determination, maintaining that discipline, not politics, should inform research and scientific collaboration. At a March 1939 staff meeting he said: “We shall go to the pyre. We shall burn. But we shall not retreat from our convictions.” 

Nevertheless, the past twelve months had been trying. International fame and status had pushed Vavilov unwillingly into the shadow world of Stalin-era politics. Stress had started affecting his health. The doorman noticed how he became short of breath whenever he climbed the building’s staircase. He had become increasingly prone to fits of rage, which burned out quickly, leaving him feeling awkward and embarrassed because it was not like him. The jealousy of his peers had affected his health and led him on several occasions to attempt to resign from his position as director of the seed bank.

On August 6 1940, he was out collecting samples on a mountainside near Ukraine with some colleagues.  A black car pulled up with three shady looking characters who tell him that he was needed on urgent business in Moscow. He got into the car and left with them. But it' was a ruse because these were members of the NKVD, the precursor to the KGB, and they arrest him. He was never seen again in public. 

Some months later, to everybody's surprise, Hitler broke off the nonaggression pact that he had signed with Stalin and invaded Russia. Before this,  for the first part of the Second World War, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were allied. Stalin had received a lot of warnings from his various spies that Hitler will break the pact but for whatever reason, he had chosen not to believe them.