[History of Agriculture] The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov

"The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov" by Peter Pringle

another installment in our series on the history of ag innovation. And to be honest, I’ve waited too long to do this episode. I read this book “The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov” months ago. And it was one of the most incredible stories I had ever heard. But every time I went to make an episode about it, the episode just never did justice to the greatness of the book. But those of you who haven’t read it or have any familiarity with Vavilov, I decided that I just needed to do my best and send it.

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was a pioneer in plant breeding and genetics, but he was also much more than that. At a time, in the early 1900s that the field of genetics was just newly formed and not widely accepted, he saw the potential to collect plant species and varieties from all over the world and bring them back to his home country of Russia which desperately needed a solution to food shortages and starvation.

But as you can probably tell by the title of Peter Pringle’s book “The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov”. The story does not have a happy ending. But it is both a story of incredible contributions to agricultural innovation and a cautionary tale of what happens when science is seen as a threat instead of a solution. As with every story I read on the history of ag innovation, the insights and lessons are as relevant today as they were when this story was transpiring.

To quote the book:

“Nikolai Ivanovich’s extraordinary life would end in 1943, not in the cities where he made his reputation as one of the great scientists of the twentieth century, not in Moscow, or Leningrad, or any of the distant places on five continents where he had risked his life for samples of rare food plants - in the Hindu Kush of Afghanistan, the high plateau of Abyssinia, the Andes of Argentina, Bolivia and Peru. He would die of starvation in Saratov, in a fetid prison, on the edge of the rich black earth of the steppe. It was here that he planned to use his new plant varieties to end the ghastly cycle of Russian famines and turn them into crops that would feed the world.”