The wave–particle duality of light is no enigma, Sergei Vavilov insisted in public in the late 1940s, for, as Stalin said, ‘Marxist philosophical materialism holds that the world and all its laws are fully knowable … there is nothing in the world that is not knowable.’ The ‘new physics’, Soviet ideologists feared, sought to de materialise matter and resurrect ‘idealism’ on the basis of new understandings of radioactivity. In Lenin and the Philosophical Problems of Modern Physics, Sergei Vavilov praised Lenin for bringing light to the ‘obscure and winding back alleys of the new physics in which idealism tries to hide’. There is much, however, that will never be known about the ways in which he worked in the shadows within the corrupted institutions of Soviet science, taking advantage of the state’s interest in nuclear weapons, to defuse the polemics about quantum physics that threatened to lead to another purge.
The main subject of Sergei Vavilov’s life’s research was luminescence, the science of the laws of transformation by matter of different kinds of energy in light. This too took him back to Italy, alchemy and fairy tale. The study of luminescence began in 1602 when a dilettante alchemist, Vincenzo Casciarolo, found a lump of barium sulphide on Monte Padermo outside Bologna. The material glowed in the dark, and he hoped it might be the Philosopher’s Stone. Fortunius Licetus, professor of philosophy at Bologna, called it the Luciferous Stone, which ‘absorbs the golden light of the sun, like a new Prometheus stealing a Celestial Treasure’. He argued that the source of moonlight was phosphorescence of the kind that lit the Luciferous Stone, but Galileo rightly held that the moon glowed with sunlight reflected from the earth. Vavilov, who had dreamed of alchemy in childhood, illustrated luminescence with a scene from the Russian magical tale Konyok Gorbunok, ‘The Little Humpback Horse’. Ivan the Fool, the brother who never knows what is happening to him, succeeds in fulfilling the impossible tasks the Tsar sets for him, retrieving a lost ring from the bottom of the sea. On his journey, at the end of which he finds fortune, Ivan sees a ‘miraculous light’ in the forest, which gives neither smoke nor warmth. He thinks the light may be an evil spirit, but it is a plume of the Firebird.
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Why did Sergei Vavilov, the aesthete physicist for whom the world was full of mysterious beauty, end his life hymning Stalin and writing his memoirs in the quiet of Mozzhinka? Why did his elder brother, the convinced materialist who poured all his bright energy into the revolutionary new society, die in prison?
‘Our life is on wheels,’ Nikolai Vavilov would often say in the years after the Revolution. If the new Bolshevik state was moving forward at speed towards the bright future, Nikolai was in the vanguard. Shura Ipatev, his nephew, remembers him as a giant personality, full of charm and radiant energy, absent-minded in all things but science; so different from Sergei, whom Ipatev recalls as a cautious, guarded man. Nikolai was one of the few people in the new society with a car of his own, which he loved. In 1920 he announced his ‘Law of Homologous Lines’, an ordering of vegetation analogous with Dmitri Mendeleev’s periodic table of elements, a revolution in the science of botany which improved on the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus’ classification of plant species. He drove between Moscow and Leningrad in the 1920s, setting up botanical institutes, lecturing on Darwin, fruit hybrids and the geographical specificity of wheat genes. He had a protegé, the young peasant scientist Lysenko, who was always covered in mud and wore his cap askew on his head. Vavilov drove to Afghanistan in search of edible grains that might be grown in the USSR. Ipatev remembers him in a cream summer suit, with a field bag over his shoulder, tipping his ‘hello-goodbye hat’ as he set out on his travels. In Abyssinia, he was received by the barefoot regent Tafari-ras, who kept him up all night talking about life in the workers’ state. He greeted people in eastern languages: ‘Salaam aleikum’, ‘Salamat bashid’. He loved children and gave them exotic gifts: rings set with Afghan turquoise, a silk umbrella. He took his nephew to row on the pond at the Moscow zoo and observe sex transplants on chickens. Sometimes he allowed him to ride with him up to the Kremlin gates in Lenin’s Rolls-Royce.
For Nikolai Vavilov, as for so many of his kind, the practice of science was an aspect of a wider commitment to social justice. In the new society, he wanted to use his extraordinary theoretical mind and his preternatural capacity for hard practical scientific work to improve agriculture, improve the quality of grain, make better harvests, feed the Soviet people. He had been taught by Moscow’s great biologist Kliment Timiryazev, and conferred with the leading British geneticists in London and Cambridge. He believed in global research; he wanted to understand the plant world of the whole planet, the cultivation and migration of grain varieties – rye, wheat, rice and flax – with the movement of civilisation across the world, to learn from archaeologists about the seeds the dwellers on the Black Sea steppes had sown five thousand years ago.
In the 1920s biology, particularly the science of plant breeding in the style in which Nikolai Vavilov practised it, was a glamorous science, full of poetry and charm. ‘A plant … is the envoy of a living thunderstorm that rages permanently in the universe … a plant in the world is an event, a happening, an arrow, and not a boring, bearded development,’ Mandelstam wrote in his Journey to Armenia. He was devoted to scientists like his friend Kuzin. He declared,
I don’t know how it is with others, but for me the charm of a woman increases if … she has spent five days on a scientific trip lying on a hard bench of the Tashkent train, knows her way around in Linnaean Latin, knows which side she is on in the dispute between the Lamarckians and the epigeneticists, and is not indifferent to the soybean, cotton, or chicory.
Yet by the 1930s, those very disputes, on either side of which stood Lysenko and Vavilov, were becoming lethal. Lamarckians, also known as ‘progressive biologists’, held that one could change inherited characteristics by changing the external conditions in which a plant or animal lived. With his bogus theory of ‘vernalisation’, which he expounded without scientific terminology or reference to the works of other biologists, Lysenko promised that maize crops would grow in the far north, oak trees on the southern steppe. When applied on collective farms, Lysenko’s ideas led directly to a crisis in Soviet food production.
One of the NKVD informers who had first begun to slander Vavilov (among others) was the plant breeder and professor at the Timiryazev Academy of Agriculture, Ivan Yakushkin, descendant of the famous Decembrist exile. As a gifted young professor at the Agricultural Institute in the southern city of Voronezh during the Civil War, Yakushkin had tried to escape to Turkey with the retreating White forces. He was arrested in 1930 and released the following year. ‘Immediately after my release, I was recruited by the OGPU as a secret agent,’ he wrote in a note found recently in Vavilov’s secret police file. ‘I continued in this job until I was discharged from it in Nov 1952 or 1953.’ In 1931, Yakushkin was already reporting that Vavilov’s institute was a centre of organised ‘wrecking activities’. One day in 1935, Vavilov bumped into Stalin in a corridor of the Kremlin, and the tyrant, for a moment, looked afraid. Vavilov knew the collision was a portent. In the same year, Stalin shouted, ‘Bravo, Comrade Lysenko, bravo!’ at a congress of collective-farm ‘shock-workers’. In 1937, by which time his secret police file was already bulging, Nikolai Vavilov was forced to resign as president of the academic institution that he had founded. Molotov, then Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, dutifully imitated Stalin by supporting Lysenko’s ‘people’s agrobiology’, sneering openly at Vavilov. Molotov refused to allow an international congress of geneticists – which two thousand leading scientists were set to attend – to take place in Moscow. Two years later, Molotov, who was in charge of agriculture for the Central Committee, refused Vavilov permission to lead a Soviet delegation to a scientific conference in New York. Vavilov’s own discoveries about hybridisation and plant genetics could have improved Soviet crops. Instead, the USSR ended up importing seed stocks from America. The great botanist was mocked and silenced; the institutions he had founded were taken over by Lysenko’s followers, or dissolved.