Nikolai Vavilov vs. Hunger
Or how a brilliant scientist’s dream to end world hunger did not fit into Socialist utopia. (Part 1/2)
Who is Nikolai Vavilov? A seed collector, plant hunter, botanist, and adventurer, he is also one of Soviet Russia’s greatest and most-wronged sons. The. man who wanted to end hunger, died of starvation under Stalin’s misguided regime.
Ravaged by recurring famines and decaying agricultural production, Soviet Russia’s hope lay on the science and vision of a brilliant botanist and agronomist, Nikolai Vavilov — the man who could have ended world hunger.
He spent his entire life trying to end the hunger problem.
Born November 25, 1887, into a merchant family, Nikolao was one generation past poverty. His grandfather was a serf, and Nikolai knew all too well the curse of being poor and starving. At an early age, he obsessed over ending hunger for Mother Russia, and the world.
In 1910, young Nikolai graduated from the Moscow Agriculture Institute with a dissertation on snails as pests. He joined the Bureau of Mycology and Phytopathology that worked on plants, plant diseases, and immunity. From 1913–1914, Nikolai encountered William Bateson, a Cambridge don and one who laid the foundations of genetics.
Young Nikolai was inspired by Bateson. He realized the practicality of genetics and hit upon the brilliant idea of cross-species genetics. Excited, he envisioned cross-breeding plants to produce super crops for Soviet Russia.
Russian winters were long and harsh. Traditional Russian food crops yielded paltry harvests and the soil depleted quickly unable to sustain any sizeable harvest. Nikolai knew from his travels in Europe of the plant gene diversity. He was convinced that Mendel’s laws of inheritance in genetics could help create crops that could survive the Russian climate. But he needed to collect the plants and seeds that would help develop his theory on the centers of origin of cultivated plants. He hoped to harvest a great botanical treasure in his quest!
With the support of comrade Lenin himself, Nikolai Vavilov launched several hundred botanical-agronomic expeditions across the world. He traveled extensively across five continents — from Afghanistan to Eritrea and Brazil. He collected seeds, shoots, and plant samples.
Back in Leningrad, Nikolai established a central vault and pioneered the seedbank — world’s largest collection of plant seeds. His hunt for the crop varieties never stopped and added to the growing seedbank.
“Life is short, we must hurry’, Nikolai was wont to say.
A man of passion, he was a sharp dresser, and seldom seen without his trademark three-piece suits even on expeditions! On expeditions, the dapper Nikolai worked tirelessly alongside his team to collect samples.
He focused on the mountain regions more and made routine expeditions to Central Asia, because he observed that plants at higher altitudes were most adaptable and versatile.
In Nuristan region of Afghanistan, he came across wheat that grew in salt-encrusted soil. In Algeria, he collected onions that weighed two kilogram each! From Kazakhstan, he collected wild apples. In Japan, he found radishes that weighed sixteen kilogram.
Nikolai Vavilov’s travels became the stuff of legend in Soviet Russia. He spoke no less than twenty-two languages and dialects. He visited fifty-two countries in two decades of explorations. He was arrested multiple times on suspicion of being a Soviet spy! In many regions, natives attacked and ambushed his party repeatedly.
Nikolai Vavilov even defied death: he almost drowned in China once and even contracted near-fatal malaria and typhoid! Even so, Nikolai Vavilov remained dogged in his search.
He had a singular purpose in life: to end hunger. He collected 250,000 seeds and plants in his travels; all sampled, recorded, and stored with meticulous details and notes.
Nikolai Vavilov was a member of the USSR Central Executive Committee, President of All-Union Geographical Society and a recipient of the Lenin Prize.
He served as Director of the All-Union Agricultural Science Institute in Leningrad from 1924 to 1935. He established a network of four hundred institutes and research stations spread across the Soviet Union and employed thousands of people to help further his research.
These institutes worked tirelessly on hybridization and experiments on cross-species genetics. Nikolai Vavilov propounded the Law of the Homologous Series of inherited variation. Based on this empirical law, he hoped to predict the direction of the evolution of established species and the emergence of new biological species.
Following Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin rose to become the leader of the Soviet Union and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
By 1928, Stalin implemented the policy of collective farms and a centuries-old system of farming, already feeble, was destroyed! In 1932–33, the Soviet famine claimed over ten millions lives in major grain-producing areas of the Soviet Union.
Stalin was not a man too keen to on scientific indulgences. For him, genetics was ‘bourgeois Western propaganda’.
Genetics was stigmatized as ‘fascist science’, hinting its closeness to eugenics and Nazi propaganda. Mendelian genetics, in particular, enraged Stalin because its founder, Gregor Mendel, was a Catholic Christian priest.
Intolerant, impatience, and unwilling to wait, Stalin ordered Nikolai Vavilov to show results with immediate effect.
Originally published in Vol. 01, January-February 2014, Meet the City, a bimonthly luxury & lifestyle magazine published by Panchshil.
