The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov or The Anatomy of Fascism

The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov: The Story of Stalin's Persecution of One of the Great Scientists of the Twentieth Century

Author: Peter Pringl

In The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov, acclaimed journalist and author Peter Pringle recreates the extraordinary life and tragic end of one of the great scientists of the twentieth century.

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 sandy deserts and freezing tundra, in drought and flood. He would launch botanical expeditions to find these vanishing genes, overlooked by early farmers ignorant of Mendel's laws of heredity. He called it a "mission for all humanity."

To the leaders of the young Soviet state, Vavilov's dream fitted perfectly into their larger scheme for a socialist utopia. Lenin supported the adventurous Vavilov, a handsome and seductive young professor, as he became an Indiana Jones, hunting lost botanical treasures on five continents. In a former tsarist palace in what is now St. Petersburg, Vavilov built the world's first seed bank, a quarter of a million specimens, a magnificent living museum of plant diversity that was the envy of scientists everywhere and remains so today.

But when Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin took over, Vavilov's dream turned into a nightmare. This son of science was from a bourgeois background, the class of society most despised and distrusted by the Bolsheviks. The new cadres of comrade scientists taunted and insulted him, and Stalin's dreaded secret police built up false charges of sabotage and espionage.

Stalin's collectivization of farmlandcaused chaos in Soviet food production, and millions died in widespread famine. Vavilov's master plan for improving Soviet crops was designed to work over decades, not a few years, and he could not meet Stalin's impossible demands for immediate results.

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 most cruel 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 anti-science demagogues, ideology, censorship, and political expedience.

Publishers Weekly

Pringle (Food, Inc.), former Moscow bureau chief for the Independent, offers a well-researched and well-written study of the murder of an outstanding Soviet geneticist and the ideological perversion of science. Pringle details the life and career of Nikolai Vavilov (1887-1943) through his rise in the early Soviet scientific establishment and awarding of the Lenin Prize. Vavilov was a scientist's scientist, traveling the world to collect seeds and plants unavailable in Russia in order to transform "Soviet and even world agriculture, and ensure the survival of humanity through an adequate food supply." He was one of the U.S.S.R.'s top scientists when Soviet authorities fell in love with the now-discredited notions of a rival scientist, Trofim Lysenko, who believed in the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Using recently opened archives, Pringle is able to detail Vavilov's arrest on trumped-up charges of sabotage and spying, his torture and death in prison. Pringle has added another page to the lengthy tale of the deadly workings of the Soviet bureaucracy-and the toll of Stalin's terror on the world by turning science into propaganda. (May)

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Edward Cone - Library Journal

It seems incredible that millions of desperate or idealistic souls who believed in the revolution left the United States, fleeing the Depression, and flocked to the new Soviet state in hopes of starting life over. The fate of those who once had such faith in the Soviet experiment is tragically chronicled in these two works. Pringle (Insight on the Middle East War) presents his work from the viewpoint of an insider, foremost Soviet biologist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, who ran afoul of the regime when Stalin championed Trofim Lysenko, whose views were eventually discredited. Vavilov amassed one of the largest seed collections in the world and hoped to prevent the famines that had plagued the USSR and other countries. As the terror of the 1930s mounted, Vavilov apparently continued to believe in the revolution until it was too late. Left to languish in the Gulag, this "eminent plant hunter who had a plan to feed the world died of starvation," concludes Pringle. Documentary filmmaker and television journalist Tzouliadis traces the lives of immigrants to the USSR and their fate in the land of the revolution. Most eventually perished once the Stalinist state declared them to be enemies. This is a collection of heartbreaking stories about people who were neglected or ignored by their own government. The author presents numerous instances in which official intervention might have saved thousands of lives, yet officials, from President Roosevelt on down, found it inconvenient or untimely to risk disrupting U.S.-Soviet relations by peering too closely into the cases of U.S. citizens stuck in the USSR. The Forsaken is actually a grim testament of Stalin's crimes against his ownpeople as well as the immigrants. With copious notes, it is highly recommended for public and academic libraries. Vavilov is written in a popular style sometimes lacking nuance on a subject that should still be of interest to academics as well as informed readers. (Photos not seen for Vavilov.)

Kirkus Reviews

A tragic story of the totalitarian suppression of knowledge-one that is all too familiar to history, even in our own time. Pringle (Day of the Dandelion, 2007, etc.), former Moscow bureau chief for The Independent, recounts that in that city he lived on a street named for Lenin's otherwise little-known brother. Down the way, on a grid named as a kind of "Who's Who of the old USSR and its socialist allies, even Ho Chi Minh," was Vavilov Street, named after the great physicist Sergei Vavilov, whose admitted brilliance was nothing compared to that of his brother Nikolai. A kind of Indiana Jones of the plant world, Nikolai was always tearing off in search of rare einkorn or interesting hybrids. Pringle records a meeting of Vavilov and American botanist Luther Burbank, with the former concluding that "it was difficult to learn anything from Burbank-'the artist's intuition overwhelmed his research.' " When the Bolsheviks came to power, Lenin, though despising the intelligentsia, recognized their at least temporary usefulness as technocrats in the new state, and Vavilov was allowed to continue his research in plant genetics and agronomy. Stalin was less kindly disposed toward the knowledge-working class, and he gave pride of place in the new Soviet science to the quack Trofim Lysenko, who dismissed Mendelian genetics in favor of a particularly ungainly kind of Lamarckism. Vavilov generously insisted that his scientific colleagues hear Lysenko out, even though "there was no proof of the inheritance of acquired characteristics," as Lysenko insisted. Lysenko won out with his theories of vernalization; the result was a killing famine, one of several the Soviet Union endured. For his part,increasingly marginalized in a politicized scientific community, Vavilov wound up in the Gulag. The war on science is an old story. Pringle lends it specific weight with this chilling story of a man who, had he survived, might have saved millions of lives. Agent: Michael Carlisle/InkWell Management

Table of Contents:

Prologue: Ukraine, August 6, 1940 9

1 Moscow, December 1905 13

2 The Petrovka and Katya 22

3 In Darwin's Library 35

4 Moscow, Summer 1916 43

5 On the Roof of the World, 1916 51

6 Revolution and Civil War 60

7 The Gardener of Kozlov 73

8 Lenochka 80

9 Petrograd: City of Ravens 88

10 Ingots of Platinum 96

11 Afghanistan, 1924 108

12 Abyssinia, 1926 119

13 The Barefoot Scientist 130

14 The Great Break 143

15 State Security File 006854 154

16 The Passionate Patriot 160

17 A Modest Compromise 168

18 The Red Professor 175

19 The Last Expedition 180

20 Thunder and Dragons 190

21 The Lysenko Offensive 198

22 The showdown 206

23 The Terror 215

24 Into the Pyre 223

25 Comrade Philosophers 232

26 The Arrest 242

27 The Interrogation 253

28 Return to Saratov 268

29 "Oleg, Where Are You?" 280

Epilogue: Vavilov's Ghost 290

Main Events in the Life of Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov 307

Sources and Archives 313

Notes 317

Acknowledgments 347

Index 351

Book review: Green Cuisine or Globalization Women and Health in the 21st Century

The Anatomy of Fascism

Author: Robert O Paxton

What is fascism? Many authors have proposed definitions, but most fail to move beyond the abstract. The esteemed historian Robert O. Paxton answers this question for the first time by focusing on the concrete: what the fascists did, rather than what they said. From the first violent uniformed bands beating up “enemies of the state,” through Mussolini’s rise to power, to Germany’s fascist radicalization in World War II, Paxton shows clearly why fascists came to power in some countries and not others, and explores whether fascism could exist outside the early-twentieth-century European setting in which it emerged.
The Anatomy of Fascism will have a lasting impact on our understanding of modern European history, just as Paxton’s classic Vichy France redefined our vision of World War II. Based on a lifetime of research, this compelling and important book transforms our knowledge of fascism–“the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain.”

The Washington Post

… Paxton has made a helpful contribution, thoughtfully mapping out the descent of a civilized people -- first the Italians, then the Germans -- into a primal state (and state of being) ruled by mythology, symbol and emotion. While avoiding much discussion of the intellectual and cultural roots of fascism, he traces the political and structural development of a movement that evolved into a party and then a state and, finally, a war against humanity. — Peter Savodnik

The New York Times - Samantha Power

The Anatomy of Fascism is the work of a distinguished scholar who has sifted through the primary sources, the tomes and the trends in an effort to synthesize and even settle prior debates. His main emphasis is on Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany, but in order to demonstrate why certain fascist movements were able to seize power while most remained marginal, he contrasts these ''successes'' with fascist sputterings in Britain, France, Hungary, Portugal, Spain and elsewhere … the lasting contribution of this splendid book is to remind us that fascism, if it returns, will do so not simply because of a rousing leader, but because of his timid accomplices.

Publishers Weekly

Paxton, the author of seminal works on Vichy France, now sums up a lifelong reflection on fascism's myriad forms. Paxton writes in his introduction that fascism was "the most self-consciously visual of all political forms," yet many of those indelible images (Mussolini haranguing a crowd from a balcony; the perfect choreography of totalitarianism in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will) can "induce facile errors" about the omnipotent leader or the supposed unanimity of the crowd. Rather than begin with a definition of fascism, Paxton prefers to give concrete examples of it in action in various countries, from Italy and Germany to France, Holland and Eastern Europe; in particular, he examines its "mobilizing passions," such as a sense of overwhelming crisis and dread of a native group's decline. This study has several virtues (and few defects): the writing is free of some of the theoretical jargon that threatens our understanding of a defining political movement of the 20th century. This is a study of both the intellectual origins of fascism and how it played out in the streets of Berlin, Rome, Paris and other locales. In addition, Paxton examines such important topics as images of fascism and what we might call "the future of fascism" (in a quick aside on a current controversy, Paxton notes that Islamic fundamentalism is not fascist). Although Paxton doesn't address present or future forms of fascism, his list of its "mobilizing passions" will sound to some readers frighteningly similar to aspects of contemporary America. This is sure to take its place among classics in the field by Stanley Payne and Roger Griffith. (Mar. 26) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Foreign Affairs

The term "fascism" originated with Mussolini in 1919 and has since often been stretched to apply to almost any political group to the right of the person using it. Paxton, a historian, sets out to rescue the term from such sloppy usage, even as he acknowledges that a narrow definition is impossible. In his quest for understanding, Paxton surveys how a broad array of fascist movements has sought out followers, formed alliances, and seized and exercised power. The comparisons show great variety over time and place but also reveal characteristics that distinguish fascism from other kinds of authoritarian rule. Fascists, he concludes, were identifiable most of all by a style of political behavior that emphasized historical grievances, worshiped the cult of leadership, relied on a mass-based movement of national militants, repressed democratic liberties, and used violence as a political tool. Paxton's first book, "Vichy France," has become the standard work in the field despite its once-controversial thesis (that the Vichy regime was not merely imposed by Nazis but had domestic roots); "The Anatomy of Fascism," based on decades of research and teaching, is likely to prove just as authoritative. The in-depth bibliographical essay alone will guide scholars and graduate students for years to come.

Library Journal

Paxton (Mellon Professor Emeritus of the Social Sciences, Columbia Univ.; Vichy France) dissects a historical phenomenon that unleashed the deadliest epoch in world history. It is well known that fascism consumed the passions of Germany and Italy, but Paxton reminds readers that the fascist impulse found expression throughout the globe and still poses a threat to international stability. His goal is to find generic characteristics that shape the dynamics of fascism-not the product of a well-defined ideology, Paxton emphasizes, but rather a visceral response to national crises that defy conventional solutions. Paxton stresses that all fascist movements sanctify violence and view life as a Darwinian struggle; beleaguered constituencies turn toward a leader who revitalizes nationalistic sentiments by demonizing perceived internal and external enemies. The culmination of a lifetime's study, this work is based on a thorough analysis of just about every secondary work on fascism and includes a superb bibliographic essay that will guide students and historians for many years to come. While there are countless studies on fascism, readers will be hard pressed to find anything more in-depth from a scholar with Paxton's credentials. Recommended for all academic libraries and for public libraries with strong political science collections.-Jim Doyle, Marconi P.L., GA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

An immensely learned consideration of "the major political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain."The folks at MoveOn.org notwithstanding, George Bush is no Hitler, John Ashcroft likely no fascist. The looseness of terms and equations disguises the complexity of the deadly far-right ideology, which Paxton (Emeritus, Social Sciences/Columbia Univ.; Europe in the Twentieth Century, not reviewed, etc.) defines, quite comprehensively, as "a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion." A mouthful, but Paxton ably demonstrates why precision is wanted here, having spent the preceding chapters analyzing the many brands of fascism on the world stage. The best known, of course, is the first: Mussolini's pompous, theatrical regime, which came to power a full decade before Hitler's; as Paxton writes, Mussolini coined the term fascismo and set the tone for many a dictatorship to come. These allied but subtly different fascisms shared a radicalism that belied their socialist origins, which has caused some historians to regard fascism as anticapitalist at heart. Not so, Paxton argues: Fascism was at once a revolt against the left and against liberal individualism and a slap in the face of old-school, elitist conservatism, whose exponents "wanted obedience anddeference, not dangerous popular mobilization" of the sort that working-class fascism drew on. But, all the same, it was a very willing crony of big business, which was quite happy with the anti-leftist "new man" that once threatened to rule the world. A solid contribution to political literature, and of much interest to students of 20th-century history. Agency: Wylie Agency