Vavilov and Lysenko

I learned about Larmarckism (and Lysenkoism) in high school biology class, some time in the 1975-76 school year. I was not a fan of biology class generally, and I managed to make it one of the last science classes I ever took. But even I could see that Lamarckism was utterly without merit.

As I remember understanding it, Lamarckism was the belief that living things inherited traits from their parents that the parents acquired during their lifetimes. The example my teacher gave was a rat-parent whose tail was chopped off having babies with short tails. I think she gave us some background on Lysenko's adoption of this perspective, and on Stalin's role in this, but I don't remember any details of that.

I've learned more about Lysenkoism over the years, but the chapter in Rebecca Solnit's Orwell's Roses puts it together in a fairly neat, if excruciating, package (pages 131–141).

It also brought to the forefront Lyskeno's heroic inverse in Soviet science, Nikolai Vavilov. (Gary Nabhan's book about him, Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End Famine, has been sitting in my Future Favorites sidebar for years!)

Vavilov had collected food crop seeds from five continents and 64 countries, trying to improve food production. He established the world's largest seed bank, in Leningrad, which he directed from 1921 to 1940, and which he famously helped to protect from the starving hordes of people during the 872-day siege of Leningrad.

But Lysenko promised Stalin easy answers in the midst of food crises, while Vavilov was working with real genetics, which take longer than magical thinking and fakery. Lysenko's anti-science, combined with bad weather and brutal policies beginning in 1929 and going into the 1930s, killed about 5 million people through starvation in the "terror famine," mostly in Ukraine, where most of the wheat farms were located.

Show trials began in 1936, then purges and airbrushing of photos to remove leaders as if they had never been. Solnit quotes writer Adam Hochschild's book The Unquiet Ghost as saying historians estimate Stalin was responsible for the deaths of 20 million people between 1929 and 1953. (I assume that doesn't include the deaths of people from World War II.)

In 1936, the scientific geneticists tried to debate the Lysenkoists at a public conference, which led to a dozen geneticists being arrested and executed. Vavilov was not touched for a while, though he had denounced Lysenko. But in 1940, after a final argument with Lysenko, Vavilov was abducted during a field expedition. He was interrogated for almost a year, called a spy, and accused of causing the famine. He was sent to a prison camp, where he died of hunger in early 1943, given only frozen flour and cabbage to eat.

Lysenko became an even greater force after Vavilov was removed. Orwell, Solnit tells us, had pasted this headline into his journal in December 1949:

"Wheat can become rye" — Lysenko

It's hard not to see how this method of distorting truth relates to our present in many ways. On page 139, Solnit writes,

Stalin was intent not just on liquidating his potential rivals...so that he could rule unchecked but on destroying them and their credibility in ways that terrified everyone else into silence and deference. As Orwell would convey more powerfully than almost anyone before or since, one of the powers tyrants hold is to destroy and distort the truth and force others to submit to what they know is untrue (page 139).