Sunshine Recorder

It was nearly dusk when Nikolai Vavilov and his companions returned to their hotel. Vavilov was a famous botanist and geneticist, the founder of the world’s largest seed bank, and the Soviet government had appointed him to head a scientific expedition to a part of the Ukraine. He and his colleagues had spent the day plant-hunting and were ill-prepared for what was about to happen. Outside the hotel, four NKVD agents approached the scientists and told Vavilov he was needed back in Moscow. Whether he believed them, we do not know; but he went with them in their car, and they drove him out of town towards Lvov. It was the last time his colleagues saw him alive.

We should bear in mind that none of this was especially unusual. Countless people were arrested by the OGPU/NKVD, and the tragic tale of arrest, interrogation and confession often began and ended in a similar way. Arrests could come about thanks to informers, careless remarks or anonymous tips, of course, but occasionally people were actually arrested for entirely random reasons. During Stalin’s purges, the NKVD branches had quotas on how many arrests they had to make. Exceeding the quotas was a good way to stay ahead, and so the NKVD would occasionally arrest and destroy people for no particular reason at all.

But Vavilov’s arrest was nonetheless unusual, because he had committed a surprising crime: rejecting Lamarckism. It seems strange that he should have been arrested for this, because the Soviet Union was ostensibly very pro-science. Certainly, many scientists were shipped off to Siberia because of their political views, but their fates were no different from those of many peasants, lawyers, officers, doctors, writers and so forth. In general Stalin et al. said they were highly supportive of science, that science was a Communist priority. Indeed, they believed that Marxism was itself a science, the “science of history”. And herein lay the problem; the dividing line between science and politics had been abolished. For Soviet biology this ultimately proved very dangerous.

(Source: sunrec)

Since the breakup of the Soviet Union twenty years ago, Western commentators have often celebrated it as though what disappeared from the world arena in December 1991 was the old Soviet Union, the USSR of Stalin and Brezhnev, rather than the reforming Soviet Union of perestroika. Moreover, discussion of its consequences has focused mostly on developments inside Russia. Equally important, however, have been the consequences for international relations, in particular lost alternatives for a truly new world order opened up by the end of the cold war. Following my election as general secretary of the Communist Party in March 1985, the Soviet leadership formulated a new foreign policy agenda. One of the key ideas of our reforms, or perestroika, was new political thinking, based on the recognition of the world’s interconnectedness and interdependence. The top priority was to avert the threat of nuclear war. Our immediate international goals included ending the nuclear arms race, reducing conventional armed forces, settling numerous regional conflicts involving the Soviet Union and the United States, and replacing the division of the European continent into hostile camps with what I called a common European home. […] What happened after the Soviet Union ended in 1991? Why were the opportunities to build what Pope John Paul II called a more stable, more just and more humane world order not realized? To answer this question we need to look back at the events associated with the breakup of the Soviet Union and the West’s reaction to it.

It was nearly dusk when Nikolai Vavilov and his companions returned to their hotel. Vavilov was a famous botanist and geneticist, the founder of the world’s largest seed bank, and the Soviet government had appointed him to head a scientific expedition to a part of the Ukraine. He and his colleagues had spent the day plant-hunting and were ill-prepared for what was about to happen. Outside the hotel, four NKVD agents approached the scientists and told Vavilov he was needed back in Moscow. Whether he believed them, we do not know; but he went with them in their car, and they drove him out of town towards Lvov. It was the last time his colleagues saw him alive. […] But Vavilov’s arrest was nonetheless unusual, because he had committed a surprising crime: rejecting Lamarckism. It seems strange that he should have been arrested for this, because the Soviet Union was ostensibly very pro-science. Certainly, many scientists were shipped off to Siberia because of their political views, but their fates were no different from those of many peasants, lawyers, officers, doctors, writers and so forth. In general Stalin et al. said they were highly supportive of science, that science was a Communist priority. Indeed, they believed that Marxism was itself a science, the “science of history”. And herein lay the problem; the dividing line between science and politics had been abolished. For Soviet biology this ultimately proved very dangerous.