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The Vavilov Brothers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

David Joravsky
David Joravsky*
Affiliation:
Russian Research Center, Harvard University
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Extract

Social science in the Russian revolution is as big a topic as theology in the Protestant Reformation. So it must be set aside with the inevitable “few observations,” guidelines for a future history of social thought in Soviet Russia. The dominant mode is that of Kafka's “Great Wall of China“: masters of scientific socialism, energetically rebuilding society on scientific principles, are gradually brought to suspect that they have no social science. Marx and Lenin come more and more to resemble Kafka's Emperor; their dying word would make everything clear, but it cannot reach the builders through the overwhelming crush of ordinary men and grubby circumstance. Reports that the word still reaches distant backward places like Vietnam only heighten the bewilderment.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 24 , Issue 3 , September 1965 , pp. 381 - 394
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1965

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References

1 For a list of reminiscences and biographies see ) (Moscow, 1962), pp. 27-35 (a publication of the USSR Academy of Sciences; ), No. 6). Perhaps the most thoughtful evaluation, and therefore the most genuine tribute, is that of N. V. Kovalev, who was assistant director of the All-Union Institute of Plant Industry when Vavilov was director. He, too, was arrested but managed to survive. See (Moscow, 1963), pp. 142-57. The compiler of this collection is Iu. N. Vavilov, Nikolai's son.

2 For Nikolai's account of his own scientific development, see (Moscow, 1924), pp. 13-76. He began with a study of plant immunity to disease, and found it necessary to bring systematics, physiology, and genetics to bear on the problem.

3 (Saratov, 1917), p. 10.

4 It was part of the official Commission for the Study of the Natural Productive Forces of Russia. See , Nos. 1-3, 1922-25.

5 Vavilov himself, in his peroration, drew the comparison with the periodic law. See , No. 1 (n.p., 1920), pp. 54-56.

6 The telegram is quoted in , p. 46.

7 One of the important inspirations was Harwood's, W. S. The New Earth: A Recital of the Triumphs of Modern Agriculture in America (New York, 1906)Google Scholar. K. A. Timiriazev had translated this romantic exaggeration of agricultural improvements made possible by advances in biology and, Timiriazev noted in his Preface, “by the solicitude of a genuinely democratic government of a free country” (, X [Moscow, 1940], 82). Several authors, including Lenin's administrative assistant Gorbunov, attest the influence of the book on Lenin.

8 Nikolai became director of the Laboratory of Genetics in 1930, on the death of Filipchenko. By 193S he transformed it into an institute with a greatly enlarged staff, including the famous American geneticist, H. J. Muller. See Vavilov's report in , No. 5,1934, pp. 1-18.

9 The shift is noticeable in ), No. 9, 1930, for an obituary of Filipchenko, which tells how he grew “disenchanted with the practical usefulness of this work,” i.e., eugenics, and concentrated instead on genetical research that might be of use to agriculture. For the shift in the Bolshevik view of eugenics, see the discussion , No. 20,1927, pp. 212-54.

10 See C. D. Darlington, Chromosome Botany and the Origin of Cultivated Plants (London, 1963), for an evaluation of Vavilov's theory in the context of contemporary biology.

11 , April 24, 1929. See ibid., July 11, 1929, for announcement of an additional appropriation of four million rubles.

12 , XIV, No. 5,

13 Nikolai Vavilov was first attacked in print by a man he had placed in charge of plant introduction at the All-Union Institute of Plant Industry. See ), Jan. 29, 1931. Vavilov's reply appeared in the same paper March 13, 1931, but with an editorial note of disapproval. The first official sign of displeasure in the highest places was a decree issued jointly by the Party's Central Control Commission and the government's Worker and Peasant Inspectorate. See , Aug. 3, 1931.

14 , Sept. 16, 1935.

15 See, for example, )(Moscow, 1932), pp. 20-21. It is often said that Nikolai Vavilov was a magnanimous administrator, who tried to encourage everybody showing any promise of doing useful work. There is some truth in this analysis; it applies to his praise of Michurin in the 1920s, when Vavilov was free to point out Michurin's errors. It does not apply to his praise of Michurin in the 1930s. See, for example, ), No. 11, 1934, p. 141, where Vavilov paints an extravagant picture of Michurin's achievements in breeding improved varieties of fruit. He must have known that an All-Union Conference for the Standardization of Fruit, which met in Kiev in December 1931, had found only one of Michurin's creations worth including in the list of certified varieties and that the leader of the Conference was subsequently condemned as a “wrecker.” See ), 1932-33, passim. Nor can magnanimity explain such praise of Lysenko as Vavilov published in , No. 2, 1936, p. 63. Genuine respect for Vavilov requires full recognition of the torment he was forced to endure.

16 See Maksimov's articles in ), XX (1929), 169-212, and XXIII (1930), 465-70. In 1934, at the request of the British Imperial Bureau of Plant Genetics, Maksimov wrote a brief report, The Theoretical Significance of Vernalization, published as the Bureau's Bulletin, No. 16. His criticism is here greatly subdued, but the Lysenkoites nevertheless were enraged. See ), No. 1, 1935, pp. 127-28. Maksimov's capitulation can be traced most clearly in successive editions of his (1927; 2d ed., 1929; 3d ed., 1931; 4th ed., 1932; 5th ed., 1935; 6th ed., 1938; 7th ed., 1941; and so on).

17 Vavilov usually phrased his tributes to Lysenko in such a manner as to avoid untruth. The Lysenkoites were angered by his subtle, implicit reservations, but outsiders, whether Soviet agricultural officials or Western scientists, read Vavilov's praise as confirmation of the significance of Lysenko's work. For example, in ), No. 5, 1934, p. 74, Vavilov was reported, on the basis of an account in an Italian journal, to have declared in a speech made in Paris that vernalization “is the most important discovery of the present century in the field of plant physiology.” See (Moscow, 1937), p. 228, for a Lysenkoite, at the decisive Conference of December 1936, ridiculing Vavilov's “heterozygous condition, or rather, vegetative chimera, whose individual parts are incompatible. He is both … a Michurinist and an anti-Michurinist, he is both a Lysenkoite and an anti-Lysenkoite.“

18 See , p p . 11-38.

19 A. I. Muralov was the successor. See his article in ), June 29, 1935, and his concluding speech at the Conference of December 1936, in , pp. 474-77.

20 The evidence of Muralov's arrest is the sudden cessation of his prolific stream of articles and speeches and the subsequent omission of references to him where they would normally have occurred.

21 See reports in , No. 5, 1938, pp. 72-79 and 101; and No. 6, pp. 39-40 and 75-77.

22 See , No. 11, 1939, p p . 127-40.

23 See the references in note 1 above.

24 I know of only one clear exception to this generalization. V. N. Stoletov attacked Tulaikov in Pravda, April 11, 1937, virtually accusing him of wrecking. Tulaikov was soon arrested. Stoletov is at present Minister of Higher Education of the RSFSR and chairman of the Department of Genetics at Moscow University. A second possible exception is G. N. Shlykov's attack on Vavilov at a conference in 1939. See , No. 11, 1939, p. 96.

25 For particularly violent calumny of geneticists, see Glushchenko's speech in , No. 9, 1948, p p . 59-66. His accusations against Dubinin and Rappoportd id not lead to their arrest, even though neither one made the “self-criticism” demanded of them. Among the others that Glushchenko attacked, Timofeev-Resovsky and Panshin were probably already in jail. Efroimson is the only biologist, as far as I know, who was arrested after the August session of 1948.

26 The evidence in support of these estimates is too extensive to present here but will appear in a book I am now writing. Meanwhile I shall be glad to make it available upon request. The two Lysenkoites who probably suffered arrest were G. N. Shlykov, who survived, and A. K. Kol', who seems to have perished. Both were harsh critics of Vavilov.

27 For a list of reminiscences and biographies see ) (Moscow, 1961), a publication of the USSR Academy of Sciences ), No. 13). The most vivid picture of h im is provided in B. P . (Moscow, 1961).

28 See the tributes to him in the newspaper of Moscow University, , June 12, 1930, and Oct. 19, 1931.

29 See Vavilov's articles, ibid., July 19, 1931, a n d March 3, 1932.

30 ibid., Oct. 19, 1931.

31 ), p . 170. On occasion Sergei's public comments on the administration of science eschewed grandiose rhetoric in favor of realistic analysis, very neatly expressed. See, for example, , No. 7, 1935, p p . 39-40.

32 See the editorial , Nov. 21, 1938. Sergei's notebooks have not been published, but his comments on Faust and Wagner are reported in Keдep, p p . 54-57.

33 The original articles by Cherenkov and Vavilov were published in ), 1934. Vavilov offered a hypothetical explanation of the effect that Cherenkov had discovered. Vavilov's explanation was corrected by I. M. Frank and I. E. Tamm in 1937. All four received a Stalin Prize for this work in 1946. The Nobel Prize “for the discovery and explanation of the Cherenkov Effect” was awarded to the three survivors in 1958. For one of the many Soviet statements that Vavilov would have shared in the prize had he been alive, see (Moscow, 1960), p. 27. For one of the very few Western appraisals of Sergei Vavilov's work, see Bernal's obituary in Nature, Oct. 20, 1951, p. 679.

34 See , Vols. III-IV (Moscow, 1956), for a selection of his popularizations and his work on the history and philosophy of science.

35 , No. 8, 1939, pp. 140-51. Note Sergei's comment on the death of Lavoisier and Condorcet: byvshie liudi, les ci-devant, had to be dealt with regardless of their scientific fame (pp. 144-45). At the end he makes the analogy with the Russian revolution quite explicit.

36 See Keдep, p. 230. Note, too, that Sergei had silently witnessed the persecution of D. F. Egorov and N. N. Luzin, his former teachers of mathematics at Moscow University, and the condemnation of his colleague B. M. Gessen (or Hessen).

37 The stenographic report of the meeting is in , No. 9, 1948. Sergei's confession is on pp. 26-27.

38 See Vols. III-IV of his .

39 Sergei edited Vols. I-VII (1949-51) of the second edition. It is difficult to believe that he genuinely approved of many things in those Stalinist volumes. See, for example, the characterization of the Copenhagen school in Vol. Ill, pages 429-30, and Vol. V, p. 568. It is also difficult to believe that he was expressing his own thoughts when he wrote his programmatic introductory article to (Moscow, 1952), pp. 5-30.

40 The quotation is from ), No. 11-12, 1932, p. 997. Compare Sergei's remarks in 1939, when he was made chairman of a Commission on the History of the Academy of Sciences, following the liquidation of the former Institute of the History of Science; an abridged text is printed in , XVII (Moscow, 1957), 100-105.

41 See , No. 2, 1951, pp. 23-32, for a description of the funeral.