A Dangerous Place for Botany
Nikolai Vavilov was a man marked for death. He was a scholar, a botanist, a collector of seeds with the singular desire to feed his hungry nation. None of these things should have gotten him into any trouble, but in Soviet Russia, you would be surprised what was considered . . . troublesome.
Born in a small, rural village Nikolai was no stranger to famine. He dedicated his life from an early age to eradicating hunger. With a background in plant breeding and immunity, Nikolai was also on the forefront of genetics, a new science at the time. He believed that plants closely related through evolutionary decent shared certain parallel traits, and if you knew the traits of one plant, you could predict a similar pattern of traits in its relatives. His revelation, called the Law of Homologous Lines, became a foundation stone for modern plant breeding programs.
For a short time, Nikolai was a hero in Russia. Supported by Lenin himself, Nikolai was elevated to the director position of several important agricultural institutes. He managed research stations scattered throughout Russia and dreamed of building the world’s largest seed bank. To accomplish this feat, Nikolai himself scoured five continents locating and collecting ancestors of cultivated plants, a task that often endangered his life, required a competent knowledge of at least a dozen languages and only four hours of nightly slumber.
But all was not well in Russia. During the 1920s, the Communist Party began promoting uneducated peasant scientists into positions of authority. One such “scientist” was Trofim Lysenko, an “average man” with little education or experience in agriculture. Trofim began to make fictitious claims that he could boost the yield of crops using methods based on Lamarckian hypotheses. These erroneous hypotheses suggested that traits acquired during the lifetime of an organism could be passed to the offspring. Want to convert spring wheat to winter wheat? Just keep the wheat seeds in the cold for a while and the next generation will acquire cold resistance.
Trofim’s claims were laughably wrong and unrepeatable . . . but they aligned more closely with Marxist ideas than the West’s understanding of Mendelian genetics. Because of this, Trofim quickly became a favorite of Stalin. Nikolai, who was deeply suspicious of Trofim’s claims, became an outspoken opponent. The state tolerated his opposition as long as he argued numbers and figures, but in 1939 he dared to suggest that Trofim’s ideas were allowing other countries to outpace Russia. Soon after, Nikolai disappeared. He was abducted and shipped off to a gulag, where he died some years later of severe malnutrition.
But the story has some glimmer of a happy ending. While the state abandoned Nikolai for his Western ideas, the scientists who worked for Nikolai at his seed bank in Leningrad were devoted. During the siege of Leningrad by Nazi forces, which lasted from 1941 to 1944, the population experienced one of the most extreme famines in history. Surrounded by seeds, the staff of the bank kept them safe from a ravenous population of fellow comrades and desperate rats. Several members of the staff, experts in food, starved rather than compromise their work.
Because of the efforts of Nikolai and other brave Russians, 60 boxes full of seeds have survived to this day and now reside in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway.
Brian Rutter, PhD, is the cofounder of Thing in a Pot Productions and a postdoctoral researcher in plant biology at Indiana University. Subscribe to our newsletter to receive our “Things About Things – Odd Facts About Plants” and video production tips in your inbox every month!
Works Cited:
Baranski, M. Nikolai Ivanovic Vavilov (1887-1943). embryo.asu.edu, 15 April 2014, https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/nikolai-ivanovic-vavilov-1887-1943.
Dugatkin, L. A. The Botanist who defied Stalin. nautil.us, 21 April 2021,
https://nautil.us/the-botanist-who-defied-stalin-9707/.