The main reason for the arrest of Nikolai Vavilov was the confrontation with the agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who began to spread his ideas to all biological sciences.
People's Commissar Beria wrote to Molotov on July 16, 1939:
“The NKVD considered materials that after the appointment of Lysenko T. D. President of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Vavilov N. I. and the bourgeois school of so-called“formal genetics”headed by him organized a systematic campaign to discredit Lysenko as a scientist … Therefore, I ask your consent to arrest of NI Vavilov.
It can be said that for the Soviet regime, imprisoning a scientist of this magnitude was a rather serious problem. That is why the time of the arrest was chosen for a long time and was carefully calculated. As a result, they chose August 1940 - the Second World War had been going on for almost a year (France had fallen), and the Europeans were no longer up to tracing the fate of the Soviet biologist. In addition, it was at this time that Vavilov went on an expedition to Western Ukraine in the region of Chernivtsi. We must pay tribute to the special services - they did everything quite quietly, and for a long time the scientific community did not know the whereabouts of Nikolai Vavilov at all. Many believe that the expedition itself was in many ways a trap for the academician. As a result, on August 6, 1940, the scientist was arrested. And everyone in the NKVD understood perfectly well that execution would be a punishment.
They began to collect dirt and fabricate a criminal case against Vavilov much earlier than 1940. Already in the early thirties, testimony was beaten out of arrested agronomists and biologists across the country, in which the scientist was proclaimed the ideologist of the group responsible for organizing the famine in the country. Thus, the forester V. M. Savich from Khabarovsk under torture testified against the local historian V. K. Arsenyev, and Vavilov was accused of transmitting information to the Japanese. The scientist himself learned about some of these "confessions". The head of the department of fodder crops of the All-Russian Institute of Plant Industry P. P. Zvoryakin was arrested, and after exhausting interrogations and torture he signed everything that was offered to him. The accusations naturally fell on him and on his colleagues at the institute. Vavilov, learning about this, said:
"I do not blame him, I feel great regret for him … and yet, all the same, and contempt …"
Obviously, from that moment the scientist realized that at any moment he could be sent to jail on a trumped-up charge - the special services have already accumulated enough evidence exposing his "anti-Soviet" activities.
Stalin also did not deny himself irritable comments about Vavilov. So, in 1934, at one of the meetings, a biologist made a mistake and suggested that the Soviet Union use the best US experience in agriculture. According to Vavilov, this could be justified. In response, Stalin openly contrasted the researcher with the others:
“You, professor, think so. We Bolsheviks think differently."
By this time, Stalin was informed from the OGPU about the disclosure of "members of a counter-revolutionary organization in agriculture" consisting of Nikolai Vavilov, Nikolai Tulaykov and Efim Liskun. From this list, only the latter was able to avoid arrest. In the previous part of the material about Nikolai Vavilov, the relationship between Stalin and the scientist is described in more detail.
Despite the obvious threat, until his arrest, Vavilov continued to actively engage in science. Several of his catchphrases have gone down in history:
“Life is short, we must hurry”, “We work and we will work” and “There is no time to wait until the best time comes”.
Until 1940, agronomist, geographer and genetics Nikolai Vavilov tried to collect as much plant material as possible around the world for further acclimatization in the country. The Soviet Union was distinguished by a wide variety of climatic conditions, which required extensive source material for breeding work. This was done only partially.
It should be noted separately that Vavilov had the opportunity to stay abroad and find a worthy place in the scientific world elite. So, for example, the geneticist Theodosius Dobrzhansky did when in 1931 he stayed in the United States, which, of course, saved his life and became a world-renowned geneticist. Dobrzhansky worked in the group of a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, cytologist Grigory Levitsky, who also came under pressure in connection with the Vavilov case and died in a prison hospital in 1942. At the same time, many of Levitsky's disciples were repressed. Or take the example of biologist Nikolai Vladimirovich Timofeev-Resovsky, whom Academician Nikolai Koltsov dissuaded in 1937 from returning from Germany to the Soviet Union. At this time, Timofeev-Resovsky headed the department of genetics and biophysics at the Institute for Brain Research in Buch, Germany (a suburb of Berlin). At the same time, Nikolai Vavilov handed over to his foreign colleague a note warning of imminent arrest upon his arrival at home. Timofeev-Ressovsky's son in Germany was thrown into the camp for anti-fascist activities, where he died. After the war for treason, the biologist was sentenced to 10 years in the camps. Nikolai Koltsov was hounded in connection with the Vavilov case and in 1940 he died of a heart attack.
1,700 hours of interrogation
Since the fall of 1940, the academician's relatives did everything possible at that time to be released. Vavilov's wife Elena Barulina was at the reception of the USSR Prosecutor Bochkov, but in vain. The family of the arrested scientist was incredibly lucky - they were invited to live in the village of Ilyinskoye near Moscow, where the family of another repressed geneticist, Professor Georgy Karpechenko, lived. The Vavilovs left Leningrad in May 1941, a few months before the start of the blockade of the city, in which the invalid of the 1st group, Elena Barulina, would not have survived. And on July 28, 1941, Karpechenko himself was shot - the former head of the genetics department of the All-Russian Institute of Plant Industry and the corresponding department of the Leningrad University. He was the world's first genomic engineer who managed to combine two plants in one organism - cabbage and radish. The result is a cabbage-rare hybrid that has no analogues in the world. The reason for the arrest and execution was a dispute with the followers of Trofim Lysenko. Karpechenko was charged with criminal activity under the leadership of Nikolai Vavilov.
After his arrest, Vavilov was interrogated 400 times, and the total duration of grueling interrogations reached 1,700 hours. As a result, the investigators "found out" that since 1925 the academician was one of the leaders of the "Labor Peasant Party" organization. Then, in 1930, he joined a certain organization of the rightists, which conducted its subversive activities in almost all the institutions where Vavilov was. The goals of the scientist's work were to undermine and liquidate the collective farm system as a phenomenon, as well as the collapse of the country's agriculture. But such accusations, as it turned out, were not enough for a death sentence, and the prosecutor added more connections with White émigré circles abroad. This was easy enough to do, since Vavilov very often went abroad on scientific trips, which automatically made him unreliable. It is worth emphasizing the special influence of Trofim Lysenko on the course of the investigation process over Academician Vavilov, which many people forget about. On May 5, 1941, the notorious investigator Khvat, who openly mocked the academician during interrogations, sent a request to the head of the NKGB investigative unit Vlodzimirsky to approve the composition of the expert commission in the Vavilov case. The list was approved only after Trofim Lysenko's visa …
The sentence to capital punishment was announced on July 9, 1941, and a month and a half later the petition for clemency was rejected. During the trial, Vavilov partially admitted his guilt, but later indicated in a statement that he would withdraw his testimony. On August 12, 1940, the scientist said of the unfolding trial:
“I believe that the materials at the disposal of the investigation are one-sided and incorrectly covering my activities and are, obviously, the result of my disagreements in scientific and official work with a number of persons who, in my opinion, tendentiously characterized my activities. I believe that this is nothing but slander being raised against me."
It is interesting that among the many people who gave evidence against Vavilov in absentia, there was also Georgy Karpechenko. Later it turned out that most of the testimony was simply fabricated. So, in the Vavilov case there is a document dated August 7, 1940, which cites the testimony of a certain Muralov, who was shot as an "enemy of the people" back in 1937.
Despite the seemingly decided fate of the academician, in May 1942 Merkulov wrote a letter to the Chairman of the Supreme Court of the USSR Ulrikh with a request to abolish the death penalty for Nikolai Vavilov. He explains the idea by the possibility of attracting a scientist to work of defense significance. Obviously, it was not about specific biological or agronomic research - they wanted to involve the scientist in the camp work. In this letter, Merkulov also petitioned for the abolition of the execution for the academician and philosopher Luppol Ivan Kapitonovich, who was held on death row in the Saratov prison together with Vavilov. As a result, Luppol received 20 years in the camps and died in 1943.
Vavilov was not forgotten abroad. On April 23, 1942, he was elected a member of the Royal Society of London, and four days later he was reported on death row that the execution had been replaced by 20 years of forced labor camps. Was this step somehow connected with the reaction of the West? Be that as it may, on January 26, 1943, Academician Nikolai Vavilov died in prison from dystrophy or, according to other sources, from a heart attack. I didn't have the courage to shoot …
Until 1945, no one spoke directly about the death of the scientist. The first obituaries appeared abroad only after the end of World War II. One of the characteristic reactions to such atrocities of the Soviet regime was the exit of two Nobel laureates, Gregory Möller and Henry Dale, from the USSR Academy of Sciences (in 1948). However, at this time the most interesting thing in the life of "proletarian science" was just beginning: the star of the "true genius" - Trofim Denisovich Lysenko - rose in the firmament.
