What happened to Vavilov? It took many years for that story to emerge. After he was taken from Ukraine, he was subjected to brutal interrogation. Then he was put on a trial and found guilty of spying for the British, which was not true, and he was sentenced to death. So by the time of the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Vavilov was no longer on the scene, he was in prison, awaiting execution.
It's only because of the dedicated work of a Russian academic called Mark Popovsky in the 1960s that we even know that story. He managed to get access to the NKVD papers against all the odds, managed to write a book and smuggle it out of the Soviet Union. Popovsky became the first outsider to learn the story of how and why the security services arrested Vavilov, who informed on him, what sentence he received, and how and where he died.
He recorded in detail how Vavilov had to face innumerable interrogations until the botanist agreed to collude in the fictional version of events that had been prepared for his confession. Then Popovsky began giving lectures, one of which he delivered at the seed bank itself. The informers whom he mentioned by name jumped up and left the hall to the hissing and jeers of their colleagues. Then he published an article in which he described the three years leading up to Vavilov's arrest, and Trofim Lysenko’s role in these events.
This mild provocation made the state issue a two-year ban on the publication of Popovsky’s writing. By 1967, attitudes toward Vavilov and his rival Lysenko had sufficiently shifted that the Institute was named the N. I. Vavilov All-Russian Institute of Plant Genetic Resources. While publicly engaged in the restoration of Vavilov’s reputation, the Soviet Union sought to suppress details about his demise. It did not want the world to know that the state had murdered a famous scientist.
A KGB agent visited Popovsky and issued a stern warning to the writer not to communicate in conversation, lecture, or publication, the information he had obtained about Vavilov. On June 3, 1977, the KGB searched Popovsky’s apartment for his notes but they did not find them. He had already photographed his notes and distributed them among friends and colleagues both within and outside Russia revealing Vavilov's story.
In the years that followed, Vavilov's colleague Nikolai Ivanov worked tirelessly to revive and honor his friend and teacher’s work. He worked closely with Vavilov’s widow, Yelena, to locate and collect Vavilov’s unpublished manuscripts. With this material Ivanov published three major books detailing Vavilov's account of his specimen-gathering expeditions around the world. Ivanov edited two editions of Vavilov’s biography, and two articles that recentered his research in the arena of Soviet science.
Vavilov laid the foundations of modern plant breeding. His vision for preserving plant biodiversity was ahead of its time. These are the same principles that are being used to give us the wheat, that gives us the bread that we eat every week today. He was also motivated by the idea of trying to build up a library of seeds and plants in the event that habitat was lost. This kind of work involving the preservation of threatened types of plants was extremely important and is what so many botanical scientists and banks are involved in today.
Varieties of wheat collected by Vavilov from Spain, Japan, Italy, and Argentina and saved by the staff of his institution were crossbred to create the winter variety Bezostaya 1, used across the world for its high yield. Samples of a rare and disease-resistant variety of wheat collected by Vavilov in the mountain valleys of Dagestan were used by British and Australian plant breeders to develop a new, high-yielding variety.
By 1967 a hundred million acres of Russian agricultural land had been planted with seeds derived from the Institute’s collection. By 1979 that area had almost doubled to a third of all Russia’s arable land. Today the seed bank in St. Petersburg holds more than 320,000 separate samples, a collection that has proven invaluable in ensuring food security in Russia, with more than 4,500 new and unique types of plants bred from original samples collected by Vavilov and his teams. Ninety percent of the seeds and planted crops held in the St. Petersburg collection are found in no other scientific collections in the world.
Around the world, people continue to benefit from the sacrifice of the scientists who gave their lives during the siege of Leningrad. This story is well known to plant scientists, people who work at seed banks but outside of that small community, it's not well known at all.
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