The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov

The Story of Stalin’s Persecution of One of the Greatest Scientists of the Twentieth Century
by Peter Pringle

In a drama of love, revolution, and war that rivals Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, Pringle tells the story of a young Russian scientist, Nikolai Vavilov, who had a dream of ending hunger and famine in the world. Vavilov's plan would use the emerging science of genetics to breed super plants that could grow anywhere, in any climate, in drought and flood. Lenin supported the adventurous Vavilov, and in a former tsarist palace in what is now St. Petersburg, the young scientist built the world's first seed bank, a quarter of a million specimens, a magnificent living museum of plant diversity that remains the envy of scientists everywhere.

When Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin took over, Vavilov's dream turned into a nightmare. The new cadres of comrade scientists taunted and insulted him, and Stalin's dreaded secret police built up false charges of sabotage and espionage. In Stalin's Terror of the 1930s, Russian geneticists were systematically repressed in favor of the peasant horticulturalist Trofim Lysenko, with his fraudulent claims and speculative theories. Vavilov was the most famous victim of this purge, which set back Russian biology by a generation and caused the country untold harm. He was sentenced to death, but unlike Galileo, he refused to recant his beliefs and, in the cruelest twist, this humanitarian pioneer scientist was starved to death in the gulag.

Pringle uses newly opened Soviet archives, including Vavilov's secret police file, official correspondence, vivid expedition reports, previously unpublished family letters and diaries, and the reminiscences of eyewitnesses to bring us this intensely human story of a brilliant life cut short by a totalitarian regime.

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