In "The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov," acclaimed journalist and author Peter Pringle recreates the extraordinary life and tragic end of one of the great scientists of the twentieth century.
In Stalin\'s Terror of the 1930s, Russian geneticists.
Vavilov\'s master plan for improving Soviet crops was designed to work over decades, not a few years, and he could not meet Stalin\'s impossible demands for immediate results.
Stalin\'s collectivization of farmland caused chaos in Soviet food production, and millions died in widespread famine.
The new cadres of comrade scientists taunted and insulted him, and Stalin\'s dreaded secret police built up false charges of sabotage and espionage.
This son of science was from a bourgeois background, the class of society most despised and distrusted by the Bolsheviks.
But when Lenin died in 1924 and Stalin took over, Vavilov\'s dream turned into a nightmare.
Petersburg, Vavilov built the world\'s first seed bank, a quarter of a million specimens, a magnificent living museum of plant diversity that was the envy of scientists everywhere and remains so today.
In a former tsarist palace in what is now St.
Lenin supported the adventurous Vavilov, a handsome and seductive young professor, as he became an Indiana Jones, hunting lost botanical treasures on five continents.
He called it a "mission for all humanity." To the leaders of the young Soviet state, Vavilov\'s dream fitted perfectly into their larger scheme for a socialist utopia.
He would launch botanical expeditions to find these vanishing genes, overlooked by early farmers ignorant of Mendel\'s laws of heredity.
Vavilov\'s plan would use the emerging science of genetics to breed super plants that could grow anywhere, in any climate, in sandy deserts and freezing tundra, in drought and flood.
Zhivago," Pringle tells the Story of a young Russian scientist, Nikolai Vavilov, who had a dream of ending hunger and famine in the world.
In a drama of love, revolution, and war that rivals Pasternak\'s "Dr.
In "The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov," acclaimed journalist and author Peter Pringle recreates the extraordinary life and tragic end of one of the great scientists of the twentieth century
