March 20, 2024 • 59 mins
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the main event. The greatest botany rivalry in history! It's Vavilov vs. Lysenko for the fate of the Soviet Union.
In the 1920s and '30s, Nikolai Vavilov was a big deal. He was studying seed genetics and learning how to prevent famines. Everyone wanted to work with him. Including a young kid named Trofim Lysenko.
Lysenko studied with Vavilov. They were friends. But years later, Lysenko turned on his mentor, and turned against science. This became a problem, because Lysenko was good buddies with Stalin. The feud would bring the Soviet Union to its knees. And it would force Vavilov to make a fateful choice: one between the truth … or his life.
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Very Special Episodes is a new podcast with a simple premise: we tell one incredible story each week. Follow us down a different rabbit hole every Wednesday.
Hosted by Dana Schwartz, Zaron Burnett, Jason English
Written by Lucas Reilly
Produced by Josh Fisher
Editing and Sound Design by Chris Childs
Additional Editing by Jonathan Washington
Mixing and Mastering by Baheed Frazier
Story Editor is Josh Fisher
Research and Fact-Checking by Austin Thompson and Lucas Reilly
Voice Actors: Tom Antonellis, Zaron Burnett, Josh Fisher, and Chris Childs
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Show Logo by Lucy Quintanilla
Executive Producer is Jason English
Hear Also...
Noble Blood: Catherine the Great and Her Husband the Mediocre
Noble Blood: The Ice Queen
Ridiculous Crime: Dope Floats: The Uncrashable Gary Betzner
Further Reading...
Check out two excellent sources: Peter Pringle's great book on Vavilov, and the essential Where Our Food Comes From by Gary Nabhan. Thanks for listening!
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:08):
Fireheart originals.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
This is an iHeart original. In nineteen twenty nine, Joseph
Stalin ordered the farmers of the Soviet Union to start
a utopia. Back then, the USSR was a quilt of
old school, frankly almost medieval farming villages. Peasants lived simply.
(00:37):
They grew their own food and if they felt like it,
sold the surplus. Stalin saw that as a problem. The
Soviet Union was industrializing. People were flocking to cities, and
many of them didn't have garden plots to grow their
own food. Meanwhile, the country's stockpile of grain was shrinking
(01:01):
by the day. The situation was so bad that the
USSR was importing wheat and rye from the United States.
As you can imagine, Stalin hated this, so he cooked
up a strategy to fill every belly in the country
with locally grown food. The plan collectivization. The state would
(01:26):
take over farms and all those old school peasants would
begin growing food for everybody with the stroke of a pen.
The government began gobbling up farmland. It bought new state
of the art machinery. It introduced new breeds of high yield,
(01:47):
disease resistant crops, but there was one problem. Many of
the farmers refused to join the fight.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
There was sort of a systemic depression among farmers. Now
they were working for Stalin, not for themselves.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
That's Gary Paul Nabhan. He's an agricultural ecologist, conservationist, and
past winner of a MacArthur Genius Grant. He describes Stalin's
push for collectivization this way. Imagine you live on a
farm that's been in your family for generations. You know
the land inside and out.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
Say have a pride in taking care of their land.
They have motivations for working hard to produce crops, both
for their own food and for others.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
And now suddenly the government is handing you seeds and
giving you quotas, and you can't even keep the spoils.
Farmers didn't take the news well, especially the most powerful peasants,
a class of farmers called the Kulos. They simply ignored
Stalin's demands. When Stalin realized that the Kulaks were resisting,
(03:02):
he didn't respond with a sternly written letter. He responds
by promising and I quote, to liquidate the Kulaks as
a class. Police swooped onto Kulock farms around five million
would be arrested, deported sent to prison camps. Untold numbers
(03:26):
were killed. Turns out, exterminating your most successful farmers is
a bad idea. Productivity plummeted, food became even more scarce,
yields failed to improve, and the USSR plunged into a
famine that would lead to the deaths of seven million people.
(03:51):
Not to put too fine a point on it, but
Stalin had gotten himself into a bit of a mess.
He needed help, and one of the people he turned
to was a guy named Nikolai Vavolov was one of
the world's leading experts in plant genetics. He had turned
(04:12):
the dusty botanical labs of Imperial Russia into the world
capital for plant science, and now his job was to
resurrect Soviet agriculture, to turn the USSR into a self
sufficient farming wonderland with crops sprouting from the desolate scrublands
(04:33):
of the Eurasian step to the craggy mountains of Kazakhstan.
Vavolov would work tirelessly to lift his country out of
Stalin's man made famine, but he was also a realist.
He told the government it would take years to recover
developing new hardy plant breeds took time. Stalin didn't want
(04:58):
to hear this. He wanted a solution fast. He needed
somebody who would make collectivization and work, somebody who could
engineer seeds that could be planted anywhere, anytime of the year.
So he began searching for a hero. The search would
(05:19):
bring the Soviet Union to its knees, and it would
force Nikolai Vavilov to make a fateful choice, one between
the truth or his life. Welcome to very special episodes
and iHeart original podcast. I'm your host, Danish Schwartz, and
this is seed Wars. I have to say I was
(05:45):
never a botany kid. I know some kids are, you know,
out in the backyard, like looking at leaves, identifying trees.
That was never a skill set of mind. But add
a historical element and add some characters like Bavolov, and
then that makes me care about botany.
Speaker 4 (05:59):
My fiance is all about plants and trees, like I can,
I think, point to any tree and say what is that?
And she'll know, So for her the story would be amazing.
For me, I was just wrapped up in the Vavilov
of it, like just it's so wrong, what happens.
Speaker 5 (06:12):
I want to give a shout out before we start
to Lucas Riley, who wrote today's episode, So if you
like the botany aspects, he wrote another show here called
Bad Seeds, so check that out. If you like the
repressive dictatorship aspects, he worked on a show called Big Brother,
all about the assassination of Kim Jong UN's older brother.
(06:35):
So something for everybody. And in this episode we kind
of combine them.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
Yeah, totally. And also the Soviet Union, what's up without
it always sounds like the worst group project in the
history of humanity. Like nothing is worse than Like I
got together with some of my Soviets and we came
up with a plan.
Speaker 5 (06:50):
One quick spoiler. We have some superb voice acting by
one of the three of us later in this episode,
and it's not me.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
It's not me. I have my podcast voice and that's it.
Speaker 5 (07:03):
This was showing new new talents. I'd have to do
an episode about Zarin's acting abilities and career later on.
I don't know if we can get into it now.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
And how I draw inspiration from the Hunt for the
Red October for my Russian accents.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
This is just a fascinating story. We get botany, we
get seed banks, we get politics, we get Russian accents.
I mean, should we get into it?
Speaker 5 (07:27):
Yeah, let's do do it.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
When Nikola I Vovolov was a kid, he heard horrific
stories from family about what it was like to almost
starve to death.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
Russia I had undergone several famines from the eighteen sixties
on that literally devastated the population. There was great traumatic
stress in his own family about the dramatic social cost
of those famines.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Hunger was a fact of life in the late eighteen hundreds.
When you went out, you expected to see people's bones
through their clothes. It was like living in a world
where skeletons walked the streets. But this nightmarish vision fired
up Vavolov. He had a dream to create a world
(08:22):
where nobody would starve. As a kid attending the Petrovskiya
Agricultural Academy, he wrote in his diary.
Speaker 6 (08:31):
I want to commit my life to understanding nature for
the betterment of humankind, to work for the benefit of Zippor.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Vavolov hit the books and became a plant science whiz kid.
After graduating, he traveled abroad to study even more In England,
he studied evolutionary theory by pouring over the original manuscripts
in Charles Darwin's personal library. Along the way, he made
important contacts.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Babolov was in contact with some of the greatest evolutionary geneticist.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
One of those great geneticists was William Bateson, the man
who literally came up with the word genetics. He also
added people like Reginald Punnitt to his rolodex, which if
you remember doing Punnitt squares in high school biology, it's
well that guy. By his late twenties, Vavolov's vast network
(09:34):
of connections turned him into an internationally known up and comer.
It helped that Vavolov was, frankly, a really nice guy.
He was one of those people who seemed to have
an endless battery, always on the go, solving problems at
every turn. He seemed to never sleep, but was always
(09:55):
radiating energy and enthusiasm. He carried a smile everywhere he went,
and he never forgot the names of people he worked with.
Simply Vavolov, it was a mensch and a talented one too.
As a young scientist, he started connecting dots that nobody
had ever considered. Take for example, this idea about plant diversity.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
He was the first one to sell the alarm about
biodiversity that connected it to our food system. Wabolov was
clear that famines were going to occur at an increasingly
frequent and severe level if we didn't diversify our food system.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Weavlov argued that if most farms raised the exact species
of the exact same crop, a single disease could decimate
the region, but plant diversity could prevent these future calamities.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
It was chafing that against quickly evolving question and diseases.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Vavolov resolved to take this knowledge home. He returned to
Russia and joined the Ministry of Agriculture, and then his
country changed for good. The Tsar is dethroned, the Winter
Palace is stormed. Vladimir Lenin takes control for Vavolov. The
(11:27):
new Communist government is pretty friendly to his research interests.
The Bolsheviks were pitching themselves as a party of peasants' rights.
Lenin in particular knew the country's poorest needed easy access
to food. The famine to prevent is the next one,
Lenin said, and the time to begin is now. The
(11:50):
Soviets funneled money into agricultural research. Flush with cash, Vavlov's
tiny botany bureau would become a plant breeding mecca. Meanwhile,
Vavolov was doing some cutting edge research. When he was
thirty three, he presented a theory on plant classification that
(12:11):
turned him into Russia's top plant science celebrity. Vavolov was
becoming hot stuff. Russia's leading botanist called him quote the
future pride of Russian science. The Komissar of Agriculture compared
him to the inventor of the periodic table. Biology, he
(12:32):
said has found its Mendolaev. With Vavolov's profile on the rise,
he had the Soviet government's attention, and he made a pitch.
If the USSR was going to diversify its crops, if
it was going to breed new varieties of plants, then
the government would need a library of sorts, a library
(12:57):
of seeds.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
It was to be the first living collection of culture
seeds from around the world.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
To build this library, Vavolov would have to travel and
collect every seed variety known.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
To man to find resistance and tolerant strains of those
prop plants and then to either breed them or select
them to new conditions and uses.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
The government listened to Vavolov's pitch and approved it. Soon
the young scientist was hitting the.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Road horseback, mule back, camelback in small plains and wrapting
rivers to get to places where he thought he might
find seeds that had been underappreciated.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Vavolov's passport grew fat with stamps. He traveled to Persia, Afghanistan,
Syria and Palestine. He explored Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Ethiopia.
He searched for seeds in Italy and crete in China
and Japan, In Mexico, Peru, Chile and Trinidad. Vavolov became
(14:19):
the world's top seed hunter, bringing tens of thousands of
specimens back to his seed library in Leningrad. He didn't
just collect seeds, though, he collected local knowledge.
Speaker 6 (14:33):
Two.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
He was really the first scientist to listen deeply to
the traditional knowledge of farmers.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
He'd ask, where do you grow this crop in moist soil,
dry soil, on the side of a hill in the shade.
What time of day do you water it? Vavolov sponged
in all of the knowledge he could, and by doing
that he formed another bombshell idea. It's nineteen twenty four
(15:06):
and Vavolov is in Afghanistan. He steps into a region
called Nuristan Province, a place of unspoiled beauty. Imagine jagged
tan mountains carpeted with pine trees, valleys of lush tall grass,
rivers blue as a gemstone, all untouched by agriculture. Wandering
(15:29):
the foothills, Vavolov is struck by an idea.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
He realized that which diversity of plants are distributed in
a few patches river basins, or coastlines or mountain ranges,
they had been maintained in place for thousands of years
and had diversified into all kinds of colors and shapes,
almost like a rainbow of food plant diversity.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
That is, there are a handful of places on Earth
that preserve a dazzling diversity of ancient crumps. These regions
are like natural museums, and they are Vavolov suggested the
center of origin for those plant species. In other words,
places like this valley in Afghanistan was where the world's
(16:21):
food originated.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
The food crops that are the mainstays of every country
in the world come from just a few places.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
This idea, what Vavolov called gene centers, would turn Vavolov
the plant celebrity into Vavolov the plant genius. Vavolov became
the most famous plant scientists, not only in Russia, but
arguably in the whole world. Vavolov's new theory essentially helped
(16:56):
create a manual for making new breeds of plants, breeds
that could stand up to drought or heavy rain, or disease,
even the unpredictable seasons of Russia. Here's Vavolov again, with
an assist from Peter Pringle's translations in his excellent book
on Bablov.
Speaker 6 (17:16):
We have before us is the possibility of sculpturing organic
forms at vil. In the near future, men will be
able by means of crossing, to synthesize forms such as
are absolutely unknown in nature.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
When Vavolov came home from his adventures with a new
collection of seeds, he'd mail the specimens out to experimental
research farms that were scattered across the Soviet Union. There,
groups of scientists would plant the seeds and observe how
they grew in varied soil and climate conditions. Vavolov's work
(18:00):
would launch the USSR to the peak of plant science.
It would also launch his international career. He'd be elected
vice president and later president of the International Genetics Conference.
In the USSR, he became leader of eighteen different agricultural posts.
(18:23):
At the Bureau of Applied Botany, he managed more than
fifteen hundred staff members and was hiring more by the day.
Vavlov was assembling an army of scientists, and one of
the people to join that army was a kid named Trophimlesenko.
Lisenka was a poor kid with little formal education. He
(18:48):
worked at an experimental farm in Azerbaijan, where he tended
plots of pea plants in bear feet. He was a nobody,
but he was an ambitious nobody, and soon he would
wreck everything Vavolov had built. Trofim Lisenko was nothing like
(19:18):
Nikolai Vavlov. Where Vavolov was gregarious and open, Lisenka was
joyless and cold. Vavolov had an actual twinkle in his eyes. Meanwhile,
Lisenka was gaunt, with shallow eyes and tight sunken cheeks.
A journalist at the newspaper Pravda charitably described him as
(19:41):
quote stingy of words and insignificant of face. Unlike Vavolov,
who trained at universities under some of the most famous
geneticists of his day, Lisenka was mostly self taught. The
two men's educations reflected their backgrounds. Vavolov was born to privilege,
(20:01):
Lisenko born to peasants. Since Lisenko grew up farming, he
knew plants inside and out. He often said that he
didn't need a fancy science degree to understand how plants worked.
By the nineteen twenties, Lisenko was working at an experimental
plant breeding station in Azerbaijan where he was growing peas,
(20:26):
and he was trying something unique. Usually peas are grown
over the spring and summer, but Lisenko wanted to try
to grow them over the winter so that the local
cattle would have something to munch on over the cold months.
And it worked. Lisenko felt exhilarated. It was like he
(20:47):
had cracked a secret code, a way to grow plants
any time of the year. If this was true, it
was groundbreaking. It could increase yields and save lives. He
started telling everybody about it, including journalists. When a reporter
with the state run newspaper Pravda visited Lisenko's farm, the
(21:10):
writer took the gardener at his word. The story, after all,
had a good hook. A young, uneducated scientist who had
grown up dirt poor was using his common sense to
make scientific discoveries. The writer said that Lisenko didn't quote
toil in a laboratory away from the land. He went
(21:33):
to the root of things back at the seed library
in Leningrad. Vavolov must have read the article with amusement.
Lisenko hadn't discovered anything. Regular farmers had stumbled upon the
same trick generations ago. In fact, Vavolov had created an
entire department to study the effects of heat, light, climate,
(21:56):
and season on plant growth. But Lisenko didn't know this.
He didn't read botany journals or keep up with the
latest science, so when he made his so called discovery,
he was convinced it was news to everybody. Vavolov didn't
resent Lisenko for taking credit for an old idea. The
(22:17):
kid clearly had talent, so he encouraged the young scientists
to keep at it. In the meantime, Vavolov was curious
about Lisenko's methods, so he sent one of his top
scientists down to Azerbaijan to check on Lisenko's science. The
report that came back was not great. Lisenko had little
(22:40):
knowledge of scientific literature. The report said, he paid no
attention to pesky things like lab practices or control groups.
Lisenko wasn't tracking any data. He was just charting vibes
up in Leningrad. Vavolov was dismayed by the report, but
(23:01):
remained optimistic that Lisenka was just young and arrogant. He
would grow out of it. But Vavolov's optimism was his weakness.
He didn't know that Lisenko had no interest in learning
from so called elites like him. He didn't know that
Lisenko thought universities were quote harmful nonsense. Lisenko was one
(23:25):
of those people who was convinced he already knew everything,
which is funny because Lisenko believed a lot of nonsense.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Lisenko was stuck in sort of a nineteenth century ideology.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
To start, Lisenko did not believe in genetics, chromosomes, genes, DNA, heredity.
All of that stuff might as well be fairy dust. Meanwhile,
he believed in things like spontaneous generation, the idea that
life can just appear. He even believed that a species
(24:05):
could transform midlife into another species, like wheat could transform
into rye. And then there were his opinions about evolution.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
He didn't understand anything about natural selection.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Liseno didn't believe in Darwin's theory. Instead, he was what
you'd call a Lamarkist, named after the French naturalist Jean
Baptiste Lamarque. Lamarkists believed that traits aren't acquired through genes,
they're acquired through actions that we take during our lifetime.
(24:42):
Take a giraffe. Lamarkists believed that the giraffe got its
long neck because its ancestors stretched their necks reaching for leaves.
All of that stretching lengthened the neck, and over generations,
they passed this long neck to their offspring. To be clear,
(25:02):
that is not how evolution works.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Oh couldn't accept the breath and I think the wonder
and beauty of revolution as we understand it today.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Lisenko didn't accept that you could help plants evolve by
crossbreeding them. Instead, he believed you could essentially train a
plant to transform into something different. To be clear, again,
that is not how evolution works. Up in Leningrad, Vavolov
(25:37):
knew Lisenko harbored some weird ideas, that he was a
bit sloppy with his data, but he never truly understood
the extent of Lisenko's wackiness. Instead, all he saw was
somebody who, like him, loved plants, a kid who quote
walked by faith and not by sight. After all, what
(25:58):
was so wrong about employing someone who thinks outside the box,
who knows? Vavolov said, maybe Lisenko would stumble on a
way quote to grow bananas in Moscow. He believed in
Losenko's potential, and Lisenko returned that goodwill by stabbing him
in the back. In the early nineteen thirties, Lisenko was
(26:26):
experimenting with planting schedules. What if we plant potatoes in
the winter or in the fall, how would that change productivity?
He called this big idea vernalization. The so called journalists
at the state newspaper.
Speaker 7 (26:43):
Ate it up a Grandmamus. Lisenko's discoveries will lead our
agriculture onto a high road of vast possibilities in extraordinary
achievements and greatly increased the tempo of our social construction.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Meanwhile, scientists whistled a different tune. When Lisenko presented his
findings at a science conference, most colleagues ignored his work. Vavolov, meanwhile,
acted like a good mentor. He called Lisenko's work remarkable
and encouraged the young scientist again to keep at it.
(27:17):
But each time he sent a scientist down to check
on Lisenko's methods, the reports that returned were brutal.
Speaker 8 (27:26):
Lisenko is an experimenter who was fearless and undoubtedly talented,
but he was also an uneducated and extremely egotistical person,
deeming himself to be a new messiah of biological.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
Science, the new Messiah of biological science. By now, Lisenko
had become a darling of the Communist press, and it
was getting to his head. In his mind, he was
just a poor kid coming up with great ideas that
the elites in Leningrad just didn't appreciate, and he was
(27:59):
getting sick of the fact that they weren't validating his efforts.
So he went out and found somebody who would. In
the early nineteen thirties, Lisenko Medigui named Isaac Present, Present
was not a scientist. He was a political philosopher and professor,
(28:20):
a guy with a deep interest in biology, and by
deep interest, I mean he believed that communism and biology
were incompatible. Take genetics here was an idea that basically said,
your bloodline determines your fate. It sounded fascist, a scientific
(28:40):
way to justify racism. To Present, genetics was metaphysical bs
it had no real evidence behind it, he said. He
and Lisenko also took issue with natural selection, instead, arguing
that plants, at least plants within the same species, were
like good communists and didn't compete with other members of
(29:04):
their species. Now, anybody who tends a garden knows that
beloney plants compete for sunlight, soil, water, basically everything else.
But for Present, a guy who taught classes with titles
like class Struggle on the natural science front, that sort
(29:24):
of knowledge was the old way of doing science. It
was time to embrace a new communist friendly science.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
Now.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
By the early nineteen thirty's Present took a shine to
the young Lisenko. Here was a kid whose ideas were
being spurned by his bourgeois bosses. Lisenko in turn looked
up to Present. Finally, somebody in the upper ranks of
academia was taking him seriously. They began to meet and
(29:57):
chat about science. After a few meetings, Present decided to
become Lisenko's biggest cheerleader, his publicist, his promoter, his spin doctor.
Together they would concoct a quote new biology that reflected
a communist worldview. Take that idea about natural cooperation. Lisenko
(30:21):
would go on to suggest that since plants, like good communists,
don't compete, then a farmer could plant seeds as close
together as possible to achieve a higher yield. This is
a catastrophically bad idea, but Lisenko didn't bounce his idea
off other scientists. He bounced it off Present. Meanwhile, he
(30:46):
bumped Lisenko's ideas up to his friends in the Kremlin,
where he lauded the young scientist as an unsung genius
whose ideas were being ignored, which was true in a way,
scientists like Vavolov were ignoring him. Lisenko kept pushing to
bring his big idea of vernalization to the masses, but
(31:09):
Vavolov kept shooting him down, telling him that the idea
was best for slow and controlled experimentation, not something that
should be forced on every farm in the USSR. Lisenko
didn't like getting rejected. Vavolov wasn't a real farmer. He
(31:29):
was a phony who spent most of his work here
traveling the world hunting for seeds.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
He thought that Babolov was an elitist that was spending
a lot of money going around other countries, almost on
a scientific joy ride.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
By the mid nineteen thirties, some people high up in
government were beginning to feel the same way. After Stalin
liquidated the Kulux and sent the USSR spiraling into famine,
the government was anxious to recover, and Vavolov, they believed,
was moving too slow. The Kremlin demanded new varieties of
(32:11):
grain to be ready in three years. Vavolov calmly told
his superiors that that was not how science works. It
would take at least ten The government did not like
hearing that, and Lisenko saw that as his chance. Lisenko
(32:31):
argued that he alone knew how to save the Soviet
Union from starvation, but elites like Vavolov were holding him
and the country back.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
Lyshenko laim Babilov and said that he could come up
with a more cost effective solution to avoiding famines.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Lisenko became more and more aggressive. In nineteen thirty five,
he made another speech comparing his superiors to the kulaks.
His bosses, he said were obstructing progress. Joseph Stalin was
in the audience when Lisenko made his speech. He didn't
know anything about biology, but he knew good rhetoric. When
(33:13):
he heard it, he stood up and began.
Speaker 4 (33:15):
To clap Bravo, comrad Lisenko.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
The next year, the Commissariat of Agriculture ordered approximately five
hundred farms to put Lisenko's farming techniques to the test.
After the government ordered farmers to try out Lisenko's planting methods,
the scientist mailed hundreds of questionnaires to track the experiment's progress.
(33:42):
When the envelopes came back, Lisenko threw most of the
results out. He kept only ten percent of them, the
ones that made his idea look correct. His idea was
a complete failure, but because he cherry picked the data
and tossed anything that made him look wrong. All of
(34:03):
the news reports made him out to be a boy genius.
When reality on the ground became too hard for even
the state sponsored newspapers to deny, one reporter twisted it
this way, summer plantings are very good, but because of
poor cultivation of the land, we obtained a low harvest.
(34:25):
In other words, it was the farmer's fault. In the
nineteen thirties, there was a word for people like this,
people who obstructed the communist revolution, wreckers, And as Lisenko
saw it, the farmers were wreckers, and so were scientists
like Vavolov, who were demanding that he published transparent data.
(34:48):
Even with these silent failures, all the press, the government support.
The momentum was still on Lisenko's side, and as his
star was rising, Vavolov's was falling. Vavlov was barred from
traveling internationally and banned from receiving foreign science journals. Meanwhile,
(35:09):
people like Present were writing articles lambasting Vavolov for not
finding fast solutions to the famine. Present compared Vavolov's belief
in genetics to religious devotion. Vavolov responded by writing in
a journal.
Speaker 6 (35:25):
To those who propose elimination of modern genetics, v say,
first offer a substitute of equivalent value. Let chromosomal theory
be replaced by better theory, not a theory that sets
us back seventy years.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Lisenko replied in the same issue, calling Vavalov's beloved genetics.
Speaker 9 (35:51):
A reactionary, idealistic absorb falsification of science.
Speaker 6 (35:57):
Genetics is undisguised metaphysics.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Up in Leningrad, Vavolov tried to tune out all of
this rubbish. He continued cataloging his seeds, expanding the holdings
of his vast plant library, but it was getting harder
to stay the course. Wavlov was giving lectures as usual,
but now he was getting booed off the stage. Lisenko
(36:25):
was getting more fiery too.
Speaker 6 (36:28):
Comraatesvzre and easier.
Speaker 9 (36:32):
Really no class stluggle on the vernylization front. Instead of
helping the collective farmers, scientists like Vardilov sabotage sinks. A
class enemy is always enemy, even if it is scientist.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Vavolov usually kept his head down, but he couldn't help
but defend the sanctity of science. He knew his old
protege was cooking the books. Lisenka was failing upward, and
it was plunge the Soviet Union closer and closer to famine.
Speaker 6 (37:12):
Our magicians do not take into accounts the years of
long experience of warm science. They do not want to
here opinion of other researchers. They want to live in
their birthta suits.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
In the old days, criticizing the work of a fellow
scientist was just part of the discourse. It's what made
science well science. But these were new times. Scientific criticism
wasn't just criticism anymore. It was something downright unpatriotic. In
(37:53):
the late nineteen thirties, Stalin issued in order to quote
fight the high priests of science. It started when the
secret police arrested two leaders of the USSR's top farm school.
The school's former president, Alexander Murlov, would be charged with
(38:16):
sabotage and shot dead. The school's current president, Georgie Meister,
would be arrested too. The person to take his job
would be Trophen Lisenko. It's unclear exactly what Vavlov was
thinking when his colleagues began disappearing, but he clearly assumed
(38:40):
that he was next. But over the next two years,
his number never came up. Instead, Vavolov watched as dozens
of the country's leading geneticists, all of them his friends,
were declared enemies of the people and rounded up, never
to be seen again. All the while, Lisenko began taking
(39:04):
jobs that used to be Vavolov's. The Kremlin installed Lisenko
as new director at the Institute of Genetics. Vavolov was
baffled the guy running the Institute of Genetics didn't even
believe in genetics. By nineteen thirty nine, he was at
(39:25):
wits end.
Speaker 9 (39:26):
We shall go to Zipire, we shall burn, but we
shall not retreat from our convictions.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
The people in high posts were listening. In fact, they
were slowly building a case against Vavolov. The State Security
Service concocted a conspiracy claiming that the USSR's agricultural scientists
had deliberately sabotaged Stalin' push for collectivisation. In the report,
(40:00):
Vavolov was one of the scientists named. It said that
he and the Institute oft had provided quote grist to
the mills of anti scientific theories. Lisenko was happy to
jump onto that narrative.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
He blamed Vavolov for famines and other disruptions of peasant
agriculture that were really caused by the Collectivizationlysenko manipulated Stalin
to think that Vabolov's whole point of view was a
capitalistic elitist endeavor.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
The secret police had a lot of phony evidence to
suspect Vavolov of wrongdoing. He received his higher education in
the West, and he was chummy with scientists from capitalist
parts of the world.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
He was open to dialogue between the Western world and
Eastern world, sharing feedsen knowledge with other scientists.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
Wavolov believed in sharing knowledge to push science forward, but
Lisenko was suspicious of his motives.
Speaker 3 (41:10):
Lysenko was xenophobic and suggested to Stalin that Davilov was
both a spy for other country and was sharing secrets
with people in other countries.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
In nineteen forty, Vavolov was traveling Ukraine doing his usual
chatting with farmers, examining crops. He visited a research institute
dedicated to propagating sugar beets. One day, after exploring the
grassy valleys of the Carpathian Mountains, Vavolov returned to his
hostel near turnipsy and was greeted by four Soviet agents.
(41:49):
The men said he was needed in Moscow. Vavolov knew
what they really meant. Vavolov's file contained reports from spies
(42:10):
and moles who had been tailing him for almost a decade.
Included in the file was a memo struggle waged by
reactionary scientists against academician Lisenko. The charges against Vavolov were broad.
He was accused of political betrayal, sabotage, even espionage. Secret
(42:32):
police turned his lab upside down, his apartment was searched,
and at Lubyanka Prison he was interrogated. Thanks to archived
transcripts of his interrogations and Peter Pringle's book, we know
how the talks started.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
You are arrested as an active participant of anti Soviet
wrecage organization and a spy for foreign intelligence services. Do
you admit your guilt?
Speaker 6 (43:01):
No, I do not admit my guild. I never was
a spy or participant of anti Soviet organization. I always
voted honestly for the benefit of Soviet step You are alive.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
The investigation is aware that during a long period of
time you headed the anti Soviet wreckage organization in the
field of agriculture, and you are a spy for a
foreign intelligence services. With the man truthful information.
Speaker 6 (43:35):
I ctagorically declare that I was not involved into espionage
or any anti Soviet activity.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
Over the next two weeks, Vavalov was interrogated an average
of ten hours a day. The questionings were always in
the middle of the night, There was never a break,
and Vavolov was never allowed to set Looking back, it's
clear he was being tortured into giving a false confession, because,
(44:07):
almost ten hours into his twenty third interrogation, Vavalov broke.
Speaker 6 (44:14):
I am guilty of being member of a righteous organization
existing in USSR Commissariat of Agri Kurtu.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
In a letter, Vavlov's brother despaired.
Speaker 10 (44:30):
His big, useful life is being ruined, his end, the
lives of his close ones for that this is a
cruel mistake and an injustice, the end of scientific work,
zeeslanda ruining, the lives of family members, the threat of
it all.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
As Wavolov languished in jail, Lisenko assumed the leadership of
all of the Soviet Union's top agricultural departments, installing his
pseudo scientific followers in important posts. More than three one
thousand mainstream biologists would be dismissed or imprisoned. Numerous scientists
(45:13):
were relieved from their jobs with a bullet to the head. Meanwhile,
Lisenko's farming policies were failing, but Lisenko kept cooking the
books and the press kept blindly singing his praises. He'd
earned full support of the Communist Party's Central Committee, and
(45:37):
in nineteen forty eight he'd give a speech declaring Mendelayan
genetics a pseudoscience. Teaching genetics and cell biology in schools
was soon banned. Textbooks were purged, school teachers were re educated.
When Lisenko and his acolytes traveled to international biology conferences,
(46:01):
scientists from other countries were astounded by how backward the
USA R had become.
Speaker 5 (46:09):
The faithful followers of Lysenko prepared their scientific results just
to support its fantastic theories. Listeners acquainted with biology were horrified.
It was simply inconceivable that such gibberish could be presented
in the guise of scientific discoveries.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
Indeed, Lisenko became more unhinged with time. Many of his
followers declared that viruses don't exist around the world. Scientists
were baffled. The USSR used to be leading the plant race.
Now it was totally backward, and all were wondering what
(46:48):
in the world happened to Nikolai Vavolov. After his arrest,
Vavlov would be interrogated almost four hundred times, totaling seventeen
hundred hours. The interrogations were so exhausting that Vavlov often
returned to his bunk, crawling on all fours. But through
(47:12):
it all he refused to deny the legitimacy of his
scientific work. He also didn't forget who helped send him there.
According to his cellmate, a police informant, Vavlov cursed Lisenko
as a false scientist. Lisenko's henchmen would say the same
of Vavlov. After his interrogations, a panel of scientists reviewed
(47:38):
the scientific merit of Vavlov's testimony. Their report confirmed that
genetics was metaphysical and that Vavlov was a wrecker. All
of the scientists on the panel, of course, were approved
by Lisenko. When a judge read the report, he made
(47:59):
his sentence.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
Nikolay Vavlov must suffer the supreme penalty to be shot
and for all his personal property confiscated.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
Ponn sentencing, Vavalov begged for his life. He made an
appeal for a reduced sentence, which miraculously was approved. But
just as hope appeared on the horizon, the Nazis invaded
the Soviet Union. World War two hit the Motherland, and
Vavolov was evacuated to a new prison, and he follow
(48:32):
through with his appeal died with the advance of World
War In the city of Saratov, Vavlov lived in a
dank jail basement holding other intellectuals. His cellmates were an
engineer and a literary critic. They had no clothes. They
wore canvas sacks and shared a single bed. They barely ate.
(48:58):
Vavlov grew skinny and weak, but in the darkness he
found light. His cellmates were thinkers. They they were intellectually curious,
and so he passed the time in his cage by
telling stories of his adventures abroad, giving lectures on genetics
and biology. Three years into his sentence January nineteen forty three,
(49:24):
Vavolov would become pale and emaciated. Payne shot through his
chest his breathing was shallow. He had become one of
those walking skeletons he had wished to save as a child.
When he visited the prison hospital, doctors diagnosed him with
(49:44):
dystrophy from prolonged malnutrition. Two days later he died. The
man who had dedicated his life to feeding the world
had died of starvation. Trofumlsenko would lead the USSR's Agricultural
(50:06):
School another two decades, but by nineteen sixty five it
became obvious to everyone that Vavolov was right. Lisenko's ideas
were trash. It was a long time coming. In nineteen
forty nine and nineteen fifty, nearly all of Lisenko's summer
(50:26):
plantings were destroyed by drought and disease. His belief that seeds,
like good communists, could be planted close together had proven
especially disastrous. In Communist China, Mao Zidong embraced Lisenkoism. The
result the Great Chinese Famine, considered one of the worst
(50:49):
man made disasters in history. Lisenko's methods led to the
deaths of at least fifteen million people in China. According
to Sam Keene, writer at The Atlantic Trophen Losenko probably
killed more human beings than any individual scientist in history.
(51:10):
After Lisenka was removed from his position, the study of
genetics became acceptable again. Eighty thousand biology teachers had to
be retrained. Officials decided to rename the All Union Institute
of Plant Industry. Coming up with a new name was easy.
(51:31):
They would call it the Vavolov Institute. By the late
nineteen sixties, Nikolai Vavolov's reputation had been resurrected, and for
good cause, because if you eat vegetables, or bread or
meat from animals that eat vegetables, chances are high that
(51:51):
you've consumed something descended from Nikolai Vavolov's massive seed collection.
This was especially true for anybody living in the former
Soviet Union.
Speaker 3 (52:04):
History bears out that what Russia fed for the sixty
years after Babylov's death was in fact the plants, the
crop plants and seeds that he brought in.
Speaker 2 (52:20):
In the nineteen thirties, Vavolov's seed collection had totaled at
more than two hundred and fifty thousand samples. It was
the world's first and largest seed bank. It would inspire
scientists around the world to protect the hereditary material of
their native plants. Today, there are hundreds of seed banks
(52:43):
all over the planet routinely coming to our rescue. In
the early nineteen eighties, for instance, when a parasitic worm
was attacking soybean crops all over the United States, scientists
stopped the attack by crossbreeding with beans kept at the
Vavolov institutes. Vavolov knew his science could have that kind
(53:07):
of impact, and when compared to other scientific heretics, he
remains in a league of his own. Take Galileo, when
he was facing down the inquisition for his scientific beliefs,
he recanted his claims. He caved to the political pressure.
(53:27):
Vavolov never caved. Staring down the interrogator, Vavolov chose truth.
He never denied the existence of genetics. He never dismissed
his life's work. He chose to be on the right
side of science, even if it put him on the
wrong side of the protege who killed him. In the end,
(53:50):
Vavolov couldn't save himself, but he did save us. So
that's it's sort of a downer of an episode. But
I have to say there's a spirit of optimism that
I do think runs through Bavlov's story completely.
Speaker 4 (54:10):
I mean, I can't aworry with a new hero, and like,
I never expect a story about like a pair of
battle and Soviet botanists who would rope in my man Galileo.
But like more than that, I also never expect to
walk away from the story thinking that my Man Galileo
was a punk ass, which I did. I was like, dude,
but Galileo, he's not nearly the guy that Vabilov is,
because Babilov was down to die for science and Socrates
(54:31):
had that same spirit, but not Galileo. He's like, no,
I'm going to cop to the charges. I want to
keep my life. Avolov's like, I'm going down for the cause,
like new hero. And also he dies with the most
brutal cosmic irony ever.
Speaker 5 (54:42):
Yeah, it would make a very good movie. And so
if it were a movie, who would play Babilov?
Speaker 2 (54:49):
Oh God, we need like a hero. I don't know,
I like sort of an atom driver type. But maybe
I would just cast him in anything.
Speaker 4 (54:57):
Okay, I went two ways on this. I went there,
you could do it as a dark comedy, and I
know you're like dark comedy with the story we just heard.
But seriously, imagine this Nikolai Vavlov seth Rogen and for
trofim Lysenko Jeremy Allen White from The Bear Dude can
nail before right. Also, you need you need to Stalins.
You need a young Stalin and an old Solan For
young Stalin. Some will say it's stunt casting, but I
(55:18):
think it works perfectly because he looks like him. Zane
Malick from One Direction as young Stalin and for Old
Stalin Javier Bardem, but keeping in the spirit of Sean
Connery from in The Hunt for the October, he does
it without a Russian accent, Tavier Bardem Spanish accent, but
a thick and lush mustache.
Speaker 5 (55:34):
What do you say?
Speaker 2 (55:35):
I just respect how quick and how well thought out.
Speaker 4 (55:39):
That answer was unbelievable, But okay, I also got an
Oscar bay one if you want that. This one's the
more serious one. Now imagine the hero Vigo Mortensen as
Nikolai Bavelov, and then you pair it with that cat
from Always Sunday in Philadelphia, Charlie Day. He does unhinged well,
so you have him as trophim Lysenko. Then for young
Stalin it's still Zane Malick from one direction. For Old Stalin,
(56:02):
it's Tom Hardy with an outrageous Russian accent and outrageous
by stash boom oscar bait.
Speaker 2 (56:08):
I'm in I Where do I send the check?
Speaker 3 (56:10):
Right?
Speaker 7 (56:11):
Hollywood?
Speaker 5 (56:11):
Are you listening? Yeah, let's fund this. Let's not put
this out because someone will steal this idea and we
got to get a piece of this.
Speaker 4 (56:19):
Also, by the way, did you guys notice the High
Priests of Science bit that one line stuck out at me?
And I haven't told you the guys this, but I
have this hobby. I like to collect band names, perfect
band names. And now I'm going to put on the
list right below Cruise Ship Magician, the High Priests of Science.
Speaker 5 (56:34):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (56:35):
I would listen to them.
Speaker 5 (56:36):
Very special running segment. So let me ask you guys this.
You've both hosted hundreds of episodes of your own podcasts,
Dana Noble, Blood Zarin, Ridiculous Crime and others. What's your
favorite set in Russia episodes that you two have told
anything come to mind?
Speaker 6 (56:57):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (56:57):
Absolutely, I would say I have an episode on Catherine
the Great Coup against her husband. And if you have
any interest in Russian history. I would I would go
back to listen to that one. I think it's called
Catherine the Great and her husband the Mediocre. They just
had a fascinating relationship and then a real throwback back
(57:17):
in like like early early noble blood days. So it's
like the audio quality may not be up to snowf
but give give it a whirl. I have an episode
on the Empress Anna Ivanovna, who built an ice palace
entirely to humiliate and ideally freeze to death a political enemy.
Speaker 5 (57:38):
Incredible way to do it. That's Russian style. That's Russian style.
See as far as.
Speaker 4 (57:44):
I don't think we have any episodes set in Russia, though,
we did go and talk about how for a while,
the Soviet Union was selling their battleships and so Pepsi
was the sixth largest navy in the world thanks to
the Soviet Navy. They've been buying because the Soviet wanted
Pepsi cola, so then they traded their old defunct ships
to Pepsi for cola. So eventually, for a while Pepsi
(58:05):
had the sixth largest navy in the world. So we
didn cover that.
Speaker 5 (58:08):
Well, that's good further listening. If you want to dive
into those. I'll put the links in the show description
here so they don't do too much hunting.
Speaker 2 (58:17):
Thanks for listening, Bye.
Speaker 5 (58:22):
Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.
This episode was written by Lucas Riley. Our producer is
Josh Fisher. Editing and sound design by Chris Childs. Additional
editing by John Washington, Mixing and mastering by Beheid Fraser.
Very Special Episodes is hosted by Danish Schwartz, Zaren Burnett
(58:45):
and me Jason. English. Original music by Elise McCoy. Research
in fact checking by Austin Thompson and Lucas Riley. Show
logo by Lucy Kintonia. Shout out to our voiceover crew,
especially Tom antonellis a total pro who did some great
work in this episode. I hope we get to hear
(59:05):
him again soon. I'm your executive producer and we'll see
you back here next Wednesday. Very Special Episodes is a
production of iHeart Podcasts.
Fireheart originals.
Speaker 2 (00:10):
This is an iHeart original. In nineteen twenty nine, Joseph
Stalin ordered the farmers of the Soviet Union to start
a utopia. Back then, the USSR was a quilt of
old school, frankly almost medieval farming villages. Peasants lived simply.
(00:37):
They grew their own food and if they felt like it,
sold the surplus. Stalin saw that as a problem. The
Soviet Union was industrializing. People were flocking to cities, and
many of them didn't have garden plots to grow their
own food. Meanwhile, the country's stockpile of grain was shrinking
(01:01):
by the day. The situation was so bad that the
USSR was importing wheat and rye from the United States.
As you can imagine, Stalin hated this, so he cooked
up a strategy to fill every belly in the country
with locally grown food. The plan collectivization. The state would
(01:26):
take over farms and all those old school peasants would
begin growing food for everybody with the stroke of a pen.
The government began gobbling up farmland. It bought new state
of the art machinery. It introduced new breeds of high yield,
(01:47):
disease resistant crops, but there was one problem. Many of
the farmers refused to join the fight.
Speaker 3 (01:57):
There was sort of a systemic depression among farmers. Now
they were working for Stalin, not for themselves.
Speaker 2 (02:06):
That's Gary Paul Nabhan. He's an agricultural ecologist, conservationist, and
past winner of a MacArthur Genius Grant. He describes Stalin's
push for collectivization this way. Imagine you live on a
farm that's been in your family for generations. You know
the land inside and out.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
Say have a pride in taking care of their land.
They have motivations for working hard to produce crops, both
for their own food and for others.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
And now suddenly the government is handing you seeds and
giving you quotas, and you can't even keep the spoils.
Farmers didn't take the news well, especially the most powerful peasants,
a class of farmers called the Kulos. They simply ignored
Stalin's demands. When Stalin realized that the Kulaks were resisting,
(03:02):
he didn't respond with a sternly written letter. He responds
by promising and I quote, to liquidate the Kulaks as
a class. Police swooped onto Kulock farms around five million
would be arrested, deported sent to prison camps. Untold numbers
(03:26):
were killed. Turns out, exterminating your most successful farmers is
a bad idea. Productivity plummeted, food became even more scarce,
yields failed to improve, and the USSR plunged into a
famine that would lead to the deaths of seven million people.
(03:51):
Not to put too fine a point on it, but
Stalin had gotten himself into a bit of a mess.
He needed help, and one of the people he turned
to was a guy named Nikolai Vavolov was one of
the world's leading experts in plant genetics. He had turned
(04:12):
the dusty botanical labs of Imperial Russia into the world
capital for plant science, and now his job was to
resurrect Soviet agriculture, to turn the USSR into a self
sufficient farming wonderland with crops sprouting from the desolate scrublands
(04:33):
of the Eurasian step to the craggy mountains of Kazakhstan.
Vavolov would work tirelessly to lift his country out of
Stalin's man made famine, but he was also a realist.
He told the government it would take years to recover
developing new hardy plant breeds took time. Stalin didn't want
(04:58):
to hear this. He wanted a solution fast. He needed
somebody who would make collectivization and work, somebody who could
engineer seeds that could be planted anywhere, anytime of the year.
So he began searching for a hero. The search would
(05:19):
bring the Soviet Union to its knees, and it would
force Nikolai Vavilov to make a fateful choice, one between
the truth or his life. Welcome to very special episodes
and iHeart original podcast. I'm your host, Danish Schwartz, and
this is seed Wars. I have to say I was
(05:45):
never a botany kid. I know some kids are, you know,
out in the backyard, like looking at leaves, identifying trees.
That was never a skill set of mind. But add
a historical element and add some characters like Bavolov, and
then that makes me care about botany.
Speaker 4 (05:59):
My fiance is all about plants and trees, like I can,
I think, point to any tree and say what is that?
And she'll know, So for her the story would be amazing.
For me, I was just wrapped up in the Vavilov
of it, like just it's so wrong, what happens.
Speaker 5 (06:12):
I want to give a shout out before we start
to Lucas Riley, who wrote today's episode, So if you
like the botany aspects, he wrote another show here called
Bad Seeds, so check that out. If you like the
repressive dictatorship aspects, he worked on a show called Big Brother,
all about the assassination of Kim Jong UN's older brother.
(06:35):
So something for everybody. And in this episode we kind
of combine them.
Speaker 4 (06:40):
Yeah, totally. And also the Soviet Union, what's up without
it always sounds like the worst group project in the
history of humanity. Like nothing is worse than Like I
got together with some of my Soviets and we came
up with a plan.
Speaker 5 (06:50):
One quick spoiler. We have some superb voice acting by
one of the three of us later in this episode,
and it's not me.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
It's not me. I have my podcast voice and that's it.
Speaker 5 (07:03):
This was showing new new talents. I'd have to do
an episode about Zarin's acting abilities and career later on.
I don't know if we can get into it now.
Speaker 4 (07:13):
And how I draw inspiration from the Hunt for the
Red October for my Russian accents.
Speaker 2 (07:18):
This is just a fascinating story. We get botany, we
get seed banks, we get politics, we get Russian accents.
I mean, should we get into it?
Speaker 5 (07:27):
Yeah, let's do do it.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
When Nikola I Vovolov was a kid, he heard horrific
stories from family about what it was like to almost
starve to death.
Speaker 3 (07:41):
Russia I had undergone several famines from the eighteen sixties
on that literally devastated the population. There was great traumatic
stress in his own family about the dramatic social cost
of those famines.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Hunger was a fact of life in the late eighteen hundreds.
When you went out, you expected to see people's bones
through their clothes. It was like living in a world
where skeletons walked the streets. But this nightmarish vision fired
up Vavolov. He had a dream to create a world
(08:22):
where nobody would starve. As a kid attending the Petrovskiya
Agricultural Academy, he wrote in his diary.
Speaker 6 (08:31):
I want to commit my life to understanding nature for
the betterment of humankind, to work for the benefit of Zippor.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Vavolov hit the books and became a plant science whiz kid.
After graduating, he traveled abroad to study even more In England,
he studied evolutionary theory by pouring over the original manuscripts
in Charles Darwin's personal library. Along the way, he made
important contacts.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Babolov was in contact with some of the greatest evolutionary geneticist.
Speaker 2 (09:11):
One of those great geneticists was William Bateson, the man
who literally came up with the word genetics. He also
added people like Reginald Punnitt to his rolodex, which if
you remember doing Punnitt squares in high school biology, it's
well that guy. By his late twenties, Vavolov's vast network
(09:34):
of connections turned him into an internationally known up and comer.
It helped that Vavolov was, frankly, a really nice guy.
He was one of those people who seemed to have
an endless battery, always on the go, solving problems at
every turn. He seemed to never sleep, but was always
(09:55):
radiating energy and enthusiasm. He carried a smile everywhere he went,
and he never forgot the names of people he worked with.
Simply Vavolov, it was a mensch and a talented one too.
As a young scientist, he started connecting dots that nobody
had ever considered. Take for example, this idea about plant diversity.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
He was the first one to sell the alarm about
biodiversity that connected it to our food system. Wabolov was
clear that famines were going to occur at an increasingly
frequent and severe level if we didn't diversify our food system.
Speaker 2 (10:40):
Weavlov argued that if most farms raised the exact species
of the exact same crop, a single disease could decimate
the region, but plant diversity could prevent these future calamities.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
It was chafing that against quickly evolving question and diseases.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
Vavolov resolved to take this knowledge home. He returned to
Russia and joined the Ministry of Agriculture, and then his
country changed for good. The Tsar is dethroned, the Winter
Palace is stormed. Vladimir Lenin takes control for Vavolov. The
(11:27):
new Communist government is pretty friendly to his research interests.
The Bolsheviks were pitching themselves as a party of peasants' rights.
Lenin in particular knew the country's poorest needed easy access
to food. The famine to prevent is the next one,
Lenin said, and the time to begin is now. The
(11:50):
Soviets funneled money into agricultural research. Flush with cash, Vavlov's
tiny botany bureau would become a plant breeding mecca. Meanwhile,
Vavolov was doing some cutting edge research. When he was
thirty three, he presented a theory on plant classification that
(12:11):
turned him into Russia's top plant science celebrity. Vavolov was
becoming hot stuff. Russia's leading botanist called him quote the
future pride of Russian science. The Komissar of Agriculture compared
him to the inventor of the periodic table. Biology, he
(12:32):
said has found its Mendolaev. With Vavolov's profile on the rise,
he had the Soviet government's attention, and he made a pitch.
If the USSR was going to diversify its crops, if
it was going to breed new varieties of plants, then
the government would need a library of sorts, a library
(12:57):
of seeds.
Speaker 3 (12:59):
It was to be the first living collection of culture
seeds from around the world.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
To build this library, Vavolov would have to travel and
collect every seed variety known.
Speaker 3 (13:18):
To man to find resistance and tolerant strains of those
prop plants and then to either breed them or select
them to new conditions and uses.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
The government listened to Vavolov's pitch and approved it. Soon
the young scientist was hitting the.
Speaker 3 (13:42):
Road horseback, mule back, camelback in small plains and wrapting
rivers to get to places where he thought he might
find seeds that had been underappreciated.
Speaker 2 (13:57):
Vavolov's passport grew fat with stamps. He traveled to Persia, Afghanistan,
Syria and Palestine. He explored Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco and Ethiopia.
He searched for seeds in Italy and crete in China
and Japan, In Mexico, Peru, Chile and Trinidad. Vavolov became
(14:19):
the world's top seed hunter, bringing tens of thousands of
specimens back to his seed library in Leningrad. He didn't
just collect seeds, though, he collected local knowledge.
Speaker 6 (14:33):
Two.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
He was really the first scientist to listen deeply to
the traditional knowledge of farmers.
Speaker 2 (14:42):
He'd ask, where do you grow this crop in moist soil,
dry soil, on the side of a hill in the shade.
What time of day do you water it? Vavolov sponged
in all of the knowledge he could, and by doing
that he formed another bombshell idea. It's nineteen twenty four
(15:06):
and Vavolov is in Afghanistan. He steps into a region
called Nuristan Province, a place of unspoiled beauty. Imagine jagged
tan mountains carpeted with pine trees, valleys of lush tall grass,
rivers blue as a gemstone, all untouched by agriculture. Wandering
(15:29):
the foothills, Vavolov is struck by an idea.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
He realized that which diversity of plants are distributed in
a few patches river basins, or coastlines or mountain ranges,
they had been maintained in place for thousands of years
and had diversified into all kinds of colors and shapes,
almost like a rainbow of food plant diversity.
Speaker 2 (15:58):
That is, there are a handful of places on Earth
that preserve a dazzling diversity of ancient crumps. These regions
are like natural museums, and they are Vavolov suggested the
center of origin for those plant species. In other words,
places like this valley in Afghanistan was where the world's
(16:21):
food originated.
Speaker 3 (16:24):
The food crops that are the mainstays of every country
in the world come from just a few places.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
This idea, what Vavolov called gene centers, would turn Vavolov
the plant celebrity into Vavolov the plant genius. Vavolov became
the most famous plant scientists, not only in Russia, but
arguably in the whole world. Vavolov's new theory essentially helped
(16:56):
create a manual for making new breeds of plants, breeds
that could stand up to drought or heavy rain, or disease,
even the unpredictable seasons of Russia. Here's Vavolov again, with
an assist from Peter Pringle's translations in his excellent book
on Bablov.
Speaker 6 (17:16):
We have before us is the possibility of sculpturing organic
forms at vil. In the near future, men will be
able by means of crossing, to synthesize forms such as
are absolutely unknown in nature.
Speaker 2 (17:39):
When Vavolov came home from his adventures with a new
collection of seeds, he'd mail the specimens out to experimental
research farms that were scattered across the Soviet Union. There,
groups of scientists would plant the seeds and observe how
they grew in varied soil and climate conditions. Vavolov's work
(18:00):
would launch the USSR to the peak of plant science.
It would also launch his international career. He'd be elected
vice president and later president of the International Genetics Conference.
In the USSR, he became leader of eighteen different agricultural posts.
(18:23):
At the Bureau of Applied Botany, he managed more than
fifteen hundred staff members and was hiring more by the day.
Vavlov was assembling an army of scientists, and one of
the people to join that army was a kid named Trophimlesenko.
Lisenka was a poor kid with little formal education. He
(18:48):
worked at an experimental farm in Azerbaijan, where he tended
plots of pea plants in bear feet. He was a nobody,
but he was an ambitious nobody, and soon he would
wreck everything Vavolov had built. Trofim Lisenko was nothing like
(19:18):
Nikolai Vavlov. Where Vavolov was gregarious and open, Lisenka was
joyless and cold. Vavolov had an actual twinkle in his eyes. Meanwhile,
Lisenka was gaunt, with shallow eyes and tight sunken cheeks.
A journalist at the newspaper Pravda charitably described him as
(19:41):
quote stingy of words and insignificant of face. Unlike Vavolov,
who trained at universities under some of the most famous
geneticists of his day, Lisenka was mostly self taught. The
two men's educations reflected their backgrounds. Vavolov was born to privilege,
(20:01):
Lisenko born to peasants. Since Lisenko grew up farming, he
knew plants inside and out. He often said that he
didn't need a fancy science degree to understand how plants worked.
By the nineteen twenties, Lisenko was working at an experimental
plant breeding station in Azerbaijan where he was growing peas,
(20:26):
and he was trying something unique. Usually peas are grown
over the spring and summer, but Lisenko wanted to try
to grow them over the winter so that the local
cattle would have something to munch on over the cold months.
And it worked. Lisenko felt exhilarated. It was like he
(20:47):
had cracked a secret code, a way to grow plants
any time of the year. If this was true, it
was groundbreaking. It could increase yields and save lives. He
started telling everybody about it, including journalists. When a reporter
with the state run newspaper Pravda visited Lisenko's farm, the
(21:10):
writer took the gardener at his word. The story, after all,
had a good hook. A young, uneducated scientist who had
grown up dirt poor was using his common sense to
make scientific discoveries. The writer said that Lisenko didn't quote
toil in a laboratory away from the land. He went
(21:33):
to the root of things back at the seed library
in Leningrad. Vavolov must have read the article with amusement.
Lisenko hadn't discovered anything. Regular farmers had stumbled upon the
same trick generations ago. In fact, Vavolov had created an
entire department to study the effects of heat, light, climate,
(21:56):
and season on plant growth. But Lisenko didn't know this.
He didn't read botany journals or keep up with the
latest science, so when he made his so called discovery,
he was convinced it was news to everybody. Vavolov didn't
resent Lisenko for taking credit for an old idea. The
(22:17):
kid clearly had talent, so he encouraged the young scientists
to keep at it. In the meantime, Vavolov was curious
about Lisenko's methods, so he sent one of his top
scientists down to Azerbaijan to check on Lisenko's science. The
report that came back was not great. Lisenko had little
(22:40):
knowledge of scientific literature. The report said, he paid no
attention to pesky things like lab practices or control groups.
Lisenko wasn't tracking any data. He was just charting vibes
up in Leningrad. Vavolov was dismayed by the report, but
(23:01):
remained optimistic that Lisenka was just young and arrogant. He
would grow out of it. But Vavolov's optimism was his weakness.
He didn't know that Lisenko had no interest in learning
from so called elites like him. He didn't know that
Lisenko thought universities were quote harmful nonsense. Lisenko was one
(23:25):
of those people who was convinced he already knew everything,
which is funny because Lisenko believed a lot of nonsense.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Lisenko was stuck in sort of a nineteenth century ideology.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
To start, Lisenko did not believe in genetics, chromosomes, genes, DNA, heredity.
All of that stuff might as well be fairy dust. Meanwhile,
he believed in things like spontaneous generation, the idea that
life can just appear. He even believed that a species
(24:05):
could transform midlife into another species, like wheat could transform
into rye. And then there were his opinions about evolution.
Speaker 3 (24:17):
He didn't understand anything about natural selection.
Speaker 2 (24:21):
Liseno didn't believe in Darwin's theory. Instead, he was what
you'd call a Lamarkist, named after the French naturalist Jean
Baptiste Lamarque. Lamarkists believed that traits aren't acquired through genes,
they're acquired through actions that we take during our lifetime.
(24:42):
Take a giraffe. Lamarkists believed that the giraffe got its
long neck because its ancestors stretched their necks reaching for leaves.
All of that stretching lengthened the neck, and over generations,
they passed this long neck to their offspring. To be clear,
(25:02):
that is not how evolution works.
Speaker 3 (25:06):
Oh couldn't accept the breath and I think the wonder
and beauty of revolution as we understand it today.
Speaker 2 (25:15):
Lisenko didn't accept that you could help plants evolve by
crossbreeding them. Instead, he believed you could essentially train a
plant to transform into something different. To be clear, again,
that is not how evolution works. Up in Leningrad, Vavolov
(25:37):
knew Lisenko harbored some weird ideas, that he was a
bit sloppy with his data, but he never truly understood
the extent of Lisenko's wackiness. Instead, all he saw was
somebody who, like him, loved plants, a kid who quote
walked by faith and not by sight. After all, what
(25:58):
was so wrong about employing someone who thinks outside the box,
who knows? Vavolov said, maybe Lisenko would stumble on a
way quote to grow bananas in Moscow. He believed in
Losenko's potential, and Lisenko returned that goodwill by stabbing him
in the back. In the early nineteen thirties, Lisenko was
(26:26):
experimenting with planting schedules. What if we plant potatoes in
the winter or in the fall, how would that change productivity?
He called this big idea vernalization. The so called journalists
at the state newspaper.
Speaker 7 (26:43):
Ate it up a Grandmamus. Lisenko's discoveries will lead our
agriculture onto a high road of vast possibilities in extraordinary
achievements and greatly increased the tempo of our social construction.
Speaker 2 (26:56):
Meanwhile, scientists whistled a different tune. When Lisenko presented his
findings at a science conference, most colleagues ignored his work. Vavolov, meanwhile,
acted like a good mentor. He called Lisenko's work remarkable
and encouraged the young scientist again to keep at it.
(27:17):
But each time he sent a scientist down to check
on Lisenko's methods, the reports that returned were brutal.
Speaker 8 (27:26):
Lisenko is an experimenter who was fearless and undoubtedly talented,
but he was also an uneducated and extremely egotistical person,
deeming himself to be a new messiah of biological.
Speaker 2 (27:37):
Science, the new Messiah of biological science. By now, Lisenko
had become a darling of the Communist press, and it
was getting to his head. In his mind, he was
just a poor kid coming up with great ideas that
the elites in Leningrad just didn't appreciate, and he was
(27:59):
getting sick of the fact that they weren't validating his efforts.
So he went out and found somebody who would. In
the early nineteen thirties, Lisenko Medigui named Isaac Present, Present
was not a scientist. He was a political philosopher and professor,
(28:20):
a guy with a deep interest in biology, and by
deep interest, I mean he believed that communism and biology
were incompatible. Take genetics here was an idea that basically said,
your bloodline determines your fate. It sounded fascist, a scientific
(28:40):
way to justify racism. To Present, genetics was metaphysical bs
it had no real evidence behind it, he said. He
and Lisenko also took issue with natural selection, instead, arguing
that plants, at least plants within the same species, were
like good communists and didn't compete with other members of
(29:04):
their species. Now, anybody who tends a garden knows that
beloney plants compete for sunlight, soil, water, basically everything else.
But for Present, a guy who taught classes with titles
like class Struggle on the natural science front, that sort
(29:24):
of knowledge was the old way of doing science. It
was time to embrace a new communist friendly science.
Speaker 3 (29:33):
Now.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
By the early nineteen thirty's Present took a shine to
the young Lisenko. Here was a kid whose ideas were
being spurned by his bourgeois bosses. Lisenko in turn looked
up to Present. Finally, somebody in the upper ranks of
academia was taking him seriously. They began to meet and
(29:57):
chat about science. After a few meetings, Present decided to
become Lisenko's biggest cheerleader, his publicist, his promoter, his spin doctor.
Together they would concoct a quote new biology that reflected
a communist worldview. Take that idea about natural cooperation. Lisenko
(30:21):
would go on to suggest that since plants, like good communists,
don't compete, then a farmer could plant seeds as close
together as possible to achieve a higher yield. This is
a catastrophically bad idea, but Lisenko didn't bounce his idea
off other scientists. He bounced it off Present. Meanwhile, he
(30:46):
bumped Lisenko's ideas up to his friends in the Kremlin,
where he lauded the young scientist as an unsung genius
whose ideas were being ignored, which was true in a way,
scientists like Vavolov were ignoring him. Lisenko kept pushing to
bring his big idea of vernalization to the masses, but
(31:09):
Vavolov kept shooting him down, telling him that the idea
was best for slow and controlled experimentation, not something that
should be forced on every farm in the USSR. Lisenko
didn't like getting rejected. Vavolov wasn't a real farmer. He
(31:29):
was a phony who spent most of his work here
traveling the world hunting for seeds.
Speaker 3 (31:36):
He thought that Babolov was an elitist that was spending
a lot of money going around other countries, almost on
a scientific joy ride.
Speaker 2 (31:46):
By the mid nineteen thirties, some people high up in
government were beginning to feel the same way. After Stalin
liquidated the Kulux and sent the USSR spiraling into famine,
the government was anxious to recover, and Vavolov, they believed,
was moving too slow. The Kremlin demanded new varieties of
(32:11):
grain to be ready in three years. Vavolov calmly told
his superiors that that was not how science works. It
would take at least ten The government did not like
hearing that, and Lisenko saw that as his chance. Lisenko
(32:31):
argued that he alone knew how to save the Soviet
Union from starvation, but elites like Vavolov were holding him
and the country back.
Speaker 3 (32:42):
Lyshenko laim Babilov and said that he could come up
with a more cost effective solution to avoiding famines.
Speaker 2 (32:51):
Lisenko became more and more aggressive. In nineteen thirty five,
he made another speech comparing his superiors to the kulaks.
His bosses, he said were obstructing progress. Joseph Stalin was
in the audience when Lisenko made his speech. He didn't
know anything about biology, but he knew good rhetoric. When
(33:13):
he heard it, he stood up and began.
Speaker 4 (33:15):
To clap Bravo, comrad Lisenko.
Speaker 2 (33:19):
The next year, the Commissariat of Agriculture ordered approximately five
hundred farms to put Lisenko's farming techniques to the test.
After the government ordered farmers to try out Lisenko's planting methods,
the scientist mailed hundreds of questionnaires to track the experiment's progress.
(33:42):
When the envelopes came back, Lisenko threw most of the
results out. He kept only ten percent of them, the
ones that made his idea look correct. His idea was
a complete failure, but because he cherry picked the data
and tossed anything that made him look wrong. All of
(34:03):
the news reports made him out to be a boy genius.
When reality on the ground became too hard for even
the state sponsored newspapers to deny, one reporter twisted it
this way, summer plantings are very good, but because of
poor cultivation of the land, we obtained a low harvest.
(34:25):
In other words, it was the farmer's fault. In the
nineteen thirties, there was a word for people like this,
people who obstructed the communist revolution, wreckers, And as Lisenko
saw it, the farmers were wreckers, and so were scientists
like Vavolov, who were demanding that he published transparent data.
(34:48):
Even with these silent failures, all the press, the government support.
The momentum was still on Lisenko's side, and as his
star was rising, Vavolov's was falling. Vavlov was barred from
traveling internationally and banned from receiving foreign science journals. Meanwhile,
(35:09):
people like Present were writing articles lambasting Vavolov for not
finding fast solutions to the famine. Present compared Vavolov's belief
in genetics to religious devotion. Vavolov responded by writing in
a journal.
Speaker 6 (35:25):
To those who propose elimination of modern genetics, v say,
first offer a substitute of equivalent value. Let chromosomal theory
be replaced by better theory, not a theory that sets
us back seventy years.
Speaker 2 (35:45):
Lisenko replied in the same issue, calling Vavalov's beloved genetics.
Speaker 9 (35:51):
A reactionary, idealistic absorb falsification of science.
Speaker 6 (35:57):
Genetics is undisguised metaphysics.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
Up in Leningrad, Vavolov tried to tune out all of
this rubbish. He continued cataloging his seeds, expanding the holdings
of his vast plant library, but it was getting harder
to stay the course. Wavlov was giving lectures as usual,
but now he was getting booed off the stage. Lisenko
(36:25):
was getting more fiery too.
Speaker 6 (36:28):
Comraatesvzre and easier.
Speaker 9 (36:32):
Really no class stluggle on the vernylization front. Instead of
helping the collective farmers, scientists like Vardilov sabotage sinks. A
class enemy is always enemy, even if it is scientist.
Speaker 2 (36:52):
Vavolov usually kept his head down, but he couldn't help
but defend the sanctity of science. He knew his old
protege was cooking the books. Lisenka was failing upward, and
it was plunge the Soviet Union closer and closer to famine.
Speaker 6 (37:12):
Our magicians do not take into accounts the years of
long experience of warm science. They do not want to
here opinion of other researchers. They want to live in
their birthta suits.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
In the old days, criticizing the work of a fellow
scientist was just part of the discourse. It's what made
science well science. But these were new times. Scientific criticism
wasn't just criticism anymore. It was something downright unpatriotic. In
(37:53):
the late nineteen thirties, Stalin issued in order to quote
fight the high priests of science. It started when the
secret police arrested two leaders of the USSR's top farm school.
The school's former president, Alexander Murlov, would be charged with
(38:16):
sabotage and shot dead. The school's current president, Georgie Meister,
would be arrested too. The person to take his job
would be Trophen Lisenko. It's unclear exactly what Vavlov was
thinking when his colleagues began disappearing, but he clearly assumed
(38:40):
that he was next. But over the next two years,
his number never came up. Instead, Vavolov watched as dozens
of the country's leading geneticists, all of them his friends,
were declared enemies of the people and rounded up, never
to be seen again. All the while, Lisenko began taking
(39:04):
jobs that used to be Vavolov's. The Kremlin installed Lisenko
as new director at the Institute of Genetics. Vavolov was
baffled the guy running the Institute of Genetics didn't even
believe in genetics. By nineteen thirty nine, he was at
(39:25):
wits end.
Speaker 9 (39:26):
We shall go to Zipire, we shall burn, but we
shall not retreat from our convictions.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
The people in high posts were listening. In fact, they
were slowly building a case against Vavolov. The State Security
Service concocted a conspiracy claiming that the USSR's agricultural scientists
had deliberately sabotaged Stalin' push for collectivisation. In the report,
(40:00):
Vavolov was one of the scientists named. It said that
he and the Institute oft had provided quote grist to
the mills of anti scientific theories. Lisenko was happy to
jump onto that narrative.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
He blamed Vavolov for famines and other disruptions of peasant
agriculture that were really caused by the Collectivizationlysenko manipulated Stalin
to think that Vabolov's whole point of view was a
capitalistic elitist endeavor.
Speaker 2 (40:40):
The secret police had a lot of phony evidence to
suspect Vavolov of wrongdoing. He received his higher education in
the West, and he was chummy with scientists from capitalist
parts of the world.
Speaker 3 (40:53):
He was open to dialogue between the Western world and
Eastern world, sharing feedsen knowledge with other scientists.
Speaker 2 (41:01):
Wavolov believed in sharing knowledge to push science forward, but
Lisenko was suspicious of his motives.
Speaker 3 (41:10):
Lysenko was xenophobic and suggested to Stalin that Davilov was
both a spy for other country and was sharing secrets
with people in other countries.
Speaker 2 (41:23):
In nineteen forty, Vavolov was traveling Ukraine doing his usual
chatting with farmers, examining crops. He visited a research institute
dedicated to propagating sugar beets. One day, after exploring the
grassy valleys of the Carpathian Mountains, Vavolov returned to his
hostel near turnipsy and was greeted by four Soviet agents.
(41:49):
The men said he was needed in Moscow. Vavolov knew
what they really meant. Vavolov's file contained reports from spies
(42:10):
and moles who had been tailing him for almost a decade.
Included in the file was a memo struggle waged by
reactionary scientists against academician Lisenko. The charges against Vavolov were broad.
He was accused of political betrayal, sabotage, even espionage. Secret
(42:32):
police turned his lab upside down, his apartment was searched,
and at Lubyanka Prison he was interrogated. Thanks to archived
transcripts of his interrogations and Peter Pringle's book, we know
how the talks started.
Speaker 1 (42:50):
You are arrested as an active participant of anti Soviet
wrecage organization and a spy for foreign intelligence services. Do
you admit your guilt?
Speaker 6 (43:01):
No, I do not admit my guild. I never was
a spy or participant of anti Soviet organization. I always
voted honestly for the benefit of Soviet step You are alive.
Speaker 1 (43:19):
The investigation is aware that during a long period of
time you headed the anti Soviet wreckage organization in the
field of agriculture, and you are a spy for a
foreign intelligence services. With the man truthful information.
Speaker 6 (43:35):
I ctagorically declare that I was not involved into espionage
or any anti Soviet activity.
Speaker 2 (43:46):
Over the next two weeks, Vavalov was interrogated an average
of ten hours a day. The questionings were always in
the middle of the night, There was never a break,
and Vavolov was never allowed to set Looking back, it's
clear he was being tortured into giving a false confession, because,
(44:07):
almost ten hours into his twenty third interrogation, Vavalov broke.
Speaker 6 (44:14):
I am guilty of being member of a righteous organization
existing in USSR Commissariat of Agri Kurtu.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
In a letter, Vavlov's brother despaired.
Speaker 10 (44:30):
His big, useful life is being ruined, his end, the
lives of his close ones for that this is a
cruel mistake and an injustice, the end of scientific work,
zeeslanda ruining, the lives of family members, the threat of
it all.
Speaker 2 (44:52):
As Wavolov languished in jail, Lisenko assumed the leadership of
all of the Soviet Union's top agricultural departments, installing his
pseudo scientific followers in important posts. More than three one
thousand mainstream biologists would be dismissed or imprisoned. Numerous scientists
(45:13):
were relieved from their jobs with a bullet to the head. Meanwhile,
Lisenko's farming policies were failing, but Lisenko kept cooking the
books and the press kept blindly singing his praises. He'd
earned full support of the Communist Party's Central Committee, and
(45:37):
in nineteen forty eight he'd give a speech declaring Mendelayan
genetics a pseudoscience. Teaching genetics and cell biology in schools
was soon banned. Textbooks were purged, school teachers were re educated.
When Lisenko and his acolytes traveled to international biology conferences,
(46:01):
scientists from other countries were astounded by how backward the
USA R had become.
Speaker 5 (46:09):
The faithful followers of Lysenko prepared their scientific results just
to support its fantastic theories. Listeners acquainted with biology were horrified.
It was simply inconceivable that such gibberish could be presented
in the guise of scientific discoveries.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
Indeed, Lisenko became more unhinged with time. Many of his
followers declared that viruses don't exist around the world. Scientists
were baffled. The USSR used to be leading the plant race.
Now it was totally backward, and all were wondering what
(46:48):
in the world happened to Nikolai Vavolov. After his arrest,
Vavlov would be interrogated almost four hundred times, totaling seventeen
hundred hours. The interrogations were so exhausting that Vavlov often
returned to his bunk, crawling on all fours. But through
(47:12):
it all he refused to deny the legitimacy of his
scientific work. He also didn't forget who helped send him there.
According to his cellmate, a police informant, Vavlov cursed Lisenko
as a false scientist. Lisenko's henchmen would say the same
of Vavlov. After his interrogations, a panel of scientists reviewed
(47:38):
the scientific merit of Vavlov's testimony. Their report confirmed that
genetics was metaphysical and that Vavlov was a wrecker. All
of the scientists on the panel, of course, were approved
by Lisenko. When a judge read the report, he made
(47:59):
his sentence.
Speaker 1 (48:00):
Nikolay Vavlov must suffer the supreme penalty to be shot
and for all his personal property confiscated.
Speaker 2 (48:09):
Ponn sentencing, Vavalov begged for his life. He made an
appeal for a reduced sentence, which miraculously was approved. But
just as hope appeared on the horizon, the Nazis invaded
the Soviet Union. World War two hit the Motherland, and
Vavolov was evacuated to a new prison, and he follow
(48:32):
through with his appeal died with the advance of World
War In the city of Saratov, Vavlov lived in a
dank jail basement holding other intellectuals. His cellmates were an
engineer and a literary critic. They had no clothes. They
wore canvas sacks and shared a single bed. They barely ate.
(48:58):
Vavlov grew skinny and weak, but in the darkness he
found light. His cellmates were thinkers. They they were intellectually curious,
and so he passed the time in his cage by
telling stories of his adventures abroad, giving lectures on genetics
and biology. Three years into his sentence January nineteen forty three,
(49:24):
Vavolov would become pale and emaciated. Payne shot through his
chest his breathing was shallow. He had become one of
those walking skeletons he had wished to save as a child.
When he visited the prison hospital, doctors diagnosed him with
(49:44):
dystrophy from prolonged malnutrition. Two days later he died. The
man who had dedicated his life to feeding the world
had died of starvation. Trofumlsenko would lead the USSR's Agricultural
(50:06):
School another two decades, but by nineteen sixty five it
became obvious to everyone that Vavolov was right. Lisenko's ideas
were trash. It was a long time coming. In nineteen
forty nine and nineteen fifty, nearly all of Lisenko's summer
(50:26):
plantings were destroyed by drought and disease. His belief that seeds,
like good communists, could be planted close together had proven
especially disastrous. In Communist China, Mao Zidong embraced Lisenkoism. The
result the Great Chinese Famine, considered one of the worst
(50:49):
man made disasters in history. Lisenko's methods led to the
deaths of at least fifteen million people in China. According
to Sam Keene, writer at The Atlantic Trophen Losenko probably
killed more human beings than any individual scientist in history.
(51:10):
After Lisenka was removed from his position, the study of
genetics became acceptable again. Eighty thousand biology teachers had to
be retrained. Officials decided to rename the All Union Institute
of Plant Industry. Coming up with a new name was easy.
(51:31):
They would call it the Vavolov Institute. By the late
nineteen sixties, Nikolai Vavolov's reputation had been resurrected, and for
good cause, because if you eat vegetables, or bread or
meat from animals that eat vegetables, chances are high that
(51:51):
you've consumed something descended from Nikolai Vavolov's massive seed collection.
This was especially true for anybody living in the former
Soviet Union.
Speaker 3 (52:04):
History bears out that what Russia fed for the sixty
years after Babylov's death was in fact the plants, the
crop plants and seeds that he brought in.
Speaker 2 (52:20):
In the nineteen thirties, Vavolov's seed collection had totaled at
more than two hundred and fifty thousand samples. It was
the world's first and largest seed bank. It would inspire
scientists around the world to protect the hereditary material of
their native plants. Today, there are hundreds of seed banks
(52:43):
all over the planet routinely coming to our rescue. In
the early nineteen eighties, for instance, when a parasitic worm
was attacking soybean crops all over the United States, scientists
stopped the attack by crossbreeding with beans kept at the
Vavolov institutes. Vavolov knew his science could have that kind
(53:07):
of impact, and when compared to other scientific heretics, he
remains in a league of his own. Take Galileo, when
he was facing down the inquisition for his scientific beliefs,
he recanted his claims. He caved to the political pressure.
(53:27):
Vavolov never caved. Staring down the interrogator, Vavolov chose truth.
He never denied the existence of genetics. He never dismissed
his life's work. He chose to be on the right
side of science, even if it put him on the
wrong side of the protege who killed him. In the end,
(53:50):
Vavolov couldn't save himself, but he did save us. So
that's it's sort of a downer of an episode. But
I have to say there's a spirit of optimism that
I do think runs through Bavlov's story completely.
Speaker 4 (54:10):
I mean, I can't aworry with a new hero, and like,
I never expect a story about like a pair of
battle and Soviet botanists who would rope in my man Galileo.
But like more than that, I also never expect to
walk away from the story thinking that my Man Galileo
was a punk ass, which I did. I was like, dude,
but Galileo, he's not nearly the guy that Vabilov is,
because Babilov was down to die for science and Socrates
(54:31):
had that same spirit, but not Galileo. He's like, no,
I'm going to cop to the charges. I want to
keep my life. Avolov's like, I'm going down for the cause,
like new hero. And also he dies with the most
brutal cosmic irony ever.
Speaker 5 (54:42):
Yeah, it would make a very good movie. And so
if it were a movie, who would play Babilov?
Speaker 2 (54:49):
Oh God, we need like a hero. I don't know,
I like sort of an atom driver type. But maybe
I would just cast him in anything.
Speaker 4 (54:57):
Okay, I went two ways on this. I went there,
you could do it as a dark comedy, and I
know you're like dark comedy with the story we just heard.
But seriously, imagine this Nikolai Vavlov seth Rogen and for
trofim Lysenko Jeremy Allen White from The Bear Dude can
nail before right. Also, you need you need to Stalins.
You need a young Stalin and an old Solan For
young Stalin. Some will say it's stunt casting, but I
(55:18):
think it works perfectly because he looks like him. Zane
Malick from One Direction as young Stalin and for Old
Stalin Javier Bardem, but keeping in the spirit of Sean
Connery from in The Hunt for the October, he does
it without a Russian accent, Tavier Bardem Spanish accent, but
a thick and lush mustache.
Speaker 5 (55:34):
What do you say?
Speaker 2 (55:35):
I just respect how quick and how well thought out.
Speaker 4 (55:39):
That answer was unbelievable, But okay, I also got an
Oscar bay one if you want that. This one's the
more serious one. Now imagine the hero Vigo Mortensen as
Nikolai Bavelov, and then you pair it with that cat
from Always Sunday in Philadelphia, Charlie Day. He does unhinged well,
so you have him as trophim Lysenko. Then for young
Stalin it's still Zane Malick from one direction. For Old Stalin,
(56:02):
it's Tom Hardy with an outrageous Russian accent and outrageous
by stash boom oscar bait.
Speaker 2 (56:08):
I'm in I Where do I send the check?
Speaker 3 (56:10):
Right?
Speaker 7 (56:11):
Hollywood?
Speaker 5 (56:11):
Are you listening? Yeah, let's fund this. Let's not put
this out because someone will steal this idea and we
got to get a piece of this.
Speaker 4 (56:19):
Also, by the way, did you guys notice the High
Priests of Science bit that one line stuck out at me?
And I haven't told you the guys this, but I
have this hobby. I like to collect band names, perfect
band names. And now I'm going to put on the
list right below Cruise Ship Magician, the High Priests of Science.
Speaker 5 (56:34):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (56:35):
I would listen to them.
Speaker 5 (56:36):
Very special running segment. So let me ask you guys this.
You've both hosted hundreds of episodes of your own podcasts,
Dana Noble, Blood Zarin, Ridiculous Crime and others. What's your
favorite set in Russia episodes that you two have told
anything come to mind?
Speaker 6 (56:57):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (56:57):
Absolutely, I would say I have an episode on Catherine
the Great Coup against her husband. And if you have
any interest in Russian history. I would I would go
back to listen to that one. I think it's called
Catherine the Great and her husband the Mediocre. They just
had a fascinating relationship and then a real throwback back
(57:17):
in like like early early noble blood days. So it's
like the audio quality may not be up to snowf
but give give it a whirl. I have an episode
on the Empress Anna Ivanovna, who built an ice palace
entirely to humiliate and ideally freeze to death a political enemy.
Speaker 5 (57:38):
Incredible way to do it. That's Russian style. That's Russian style.
See as far as.
Speaker 4 (57:44):
I don't think we have any episodes set in Russia, though,
we did go and talk about how for a while,
the Soviet Union was selling their battleships and so Pepsi
was the sixth largest navy in the world thanks to
the Soviet Navy. They've been buying because the Soviet wanted
Pepsi cola, so then they traded their old defunct ships
to Pepsi for cola. So eventually, for a while Pepsi
(58:05):
had the sixth largest navy in the world. So we
didn cover that.
Speaker 5 (58:08):
Well, that's good further listening. If you want to dive
into those. I'll put the links in the show description
here so they don't do too much hunting.
Speaker 2 (58:17):
Thanks for listening, Bye.
Speaker 5 (58:22):
Very Special Episodes is made by some very special people.
This episode was written by Lucas Riley. Our producer is
Josh Fisher. Editing and sound design by Chris Childs. Additional
editing by John Washington, Mixing and mastering by Beheid Fraser.
Very Special Episodes is hosted by Danish Schwartz, Zaren Burnett
(58:45):
and me Jason. English. Original music by Elise McCoy. Research
in fact checking by Austin Thompson and Lucas Riley. Show
logo by Lucy Kintonia. Shout out to our voiceover crew,
especially Tom antonellis a total pro who did some great
work in this episode. I hope we get to hear
(59:05):
him again soon. I'm your executive producer and we'll see
you back here next Wednesday. Very Special Episodes is a
production of iHeart Podcasts.
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