In October 1939, one of the world’s most infamous scientific debates took place in a Moscow auditorium packed with scientists and Communist Party officials. After several back-to-back famines, the search was on for crops that could withstand the Soviet Union’s harsh climates.
The debate between two scientists, each with a very different approach to plant adaptation, was the main event at the “Genetics and Selection” conference sponsored by the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The well-traveled, scientifically sophisticated Nikolai Vavilov faced off against a government-anointed upstart, Trofim Lysenko, whose animosity toward “foreign seeds” was well-known.
The legacy of Vavilov v. Lysenko, unearthed from the annals of a country that no longer exists, reverberates today as the Trump administration continues its unprecedented assault on public and private scientific research, demanding loyalty above all. This little-known debate outside of scientific circles that took place more than 80 years ago offers a cautionary tale about what happens when science is forced to bend to the will of political ideology.
The scientist and the charlatan
By 1939, Nikolai Vavilov, director of the Institute for Plant Industry in St. Petersburg, had served as the Bolshevik government’s chief botanist for two decades. His far-flung plant expeditions in search of seeds that could withstand changing climates over multiple generations helped demonstrate to the world why diverse genetic sources are the key to resilience in agriculture. Since the Russian Revolution, he had been looking for seeds on every inhabited continent, from the Caucasus Mountains of Central Asia to the horn of Africa to the Brazilian Amazon to the United States.
On several journeys to the United States between 1921 and 1930, he met with pioneering botanist Luther Burbank in California, Navajo and Hopi nation leaders in Arizona, and officials at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Washington, D.C. From 1921 to 1925, the USDA—in a surprising act of seed diplomacy—provided Vavilov an office in New York City where he exchanged seeds and research findings with American agriculture researchers. The still-functioning seed bank Vavilov established in Leningrad, now once again St. Petersburg, was until the mid-1990s the largest collection of seeds in the world. His insights on the importance of biodiverse seed populations to a healthy, resilient agriculture are still considered definitive today.
Debating Vavilov that day in Moscow was Trofim Lysenko, who, over the course of just five years, catapulted from his junior researcher position to become one of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin’s prized “experts” because he told Soviet leaders what they wanted to hear.
Lysenko had asserted in speeches and articles in the government-controlled press that there was no need to travel in search of “foreign” seeds. Food crops, he claimed, could be trained to respond to environmental stress by exposing them to extreme conditions in, among other things, refrigerators or temperature-controlled hothouses. Spring cereals could be turned into winter cereals—and vice versa. Plant survival responses, he maintained, could trigger adaptations to extreme climates within a single generation, suggesting an adaptive evolution at a speed never seen before.
The Moscow conference offered the two a prime slot to articulate their opposing theories in front of a cast of scientists and apparatchiks and—as everyone in attendance knew—to an audience of one: Josef Stalin. Although he was not in the room, he was omnipresent.
Botany on trial
The debate did not go well for Vavilov. Lysenko and his allies in the audience attacked him for maintaining ties to foreign scientists, harboring “bourgeois” sympathies, and—in the anti-religious Soviet Union—following Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk and scientist who invented modern genetics.
Relying on what turned out to be fraudulent experimental results, Lysenko affirmed his position during the debate as Stalin’s favored pet scientist. After the debate, the dictator praised Lysenko publicly and raised doubts about his rival Vavilov.
Lysenko’s theory about plant adaptation appealed to Stalin’s belief that humans, too, could be changed by simply altering their conditions. He was, after all, in the midst of trying to dramatically reengineer the livelihoods of tens of millions of Soviet citizens by attempting to do with people what Lysenko was trying to do with plants.
The conference and debate represented the last gasp of public scientific deliberation in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Lysenko’s “victory” and Vavilov’s “defeat” signaled the moment when free scientific inquiry in the country ended, according to the Russian science historian Mark Popovsky, whose research on the Vavilov-Lysenko rivalry and Vavilov’s contributions to global science prompted the Soviet government to deport him in 1977. After the debate, Soviet scientists—who had made valuable contributions to medicine, agriculture, astronomy and other fields—turned inward and isolated themselves from their peers in the United States and Europe.
Lysenko’s manipulation of science to conform to ideological orthodoxies had other tragic consequences. Eighteen of Vavilov’s colleagues at the Institute for Plant Genetics were arrested and sent to the gulag. And a year after the debate, Vavilov himself was arrested on trumped-up charges by Stalin’s secret police while on a plant exploration expedition in Ukraine. He died of starvation in prison in January 1943.
Riding high on a foundation of fraudulent science, Lysenko was appointed director of the Soviet Academy of Science’s Institute of Genetics. As he rose on a mountain of fraud, he replaced scientific inquiry with foregone conclusions supporting the reigning ideology. Fear and suspicion replaced curiosity, the lifeblood of science, across all Soviet scientific institutions.
Among the most consequential Lysenko initiatives was his declaration that statistics related to agricultural yields would be a state secret, a crackdown on independently sourced information that made it nearly impossible to challenge how his theories worked in practice. (Those theories would not be decisively discredited until nearly a decade after Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, loosened some constraints on the sciences). Many of the country’s most vital and adaptive seed varieties, nurtured over multiple seasons by Vavilov and his colleagues, were lost due to Lysenko’s failed experiments. Instead, at Lysenko’s behest, Soviet agricultural authorities wasted several disastrous seasons trying to grow wheat and corn in the Arctic Circle.
Meanwhile, crop yields on Soviet collective farms plummeted and millions went hungry. At the height of the Cold War, the USSR was compelled to turn to the United States for food. American farmers were saved from bumper crops by a Soviet market desperate for wheat and corn, which were the main casualties of Lysenko’s ersatz experiments. Exports of U.S. agricultural products to the Soviet Union in the years after Khrushchev dismissed Lysenko jumped from $654 million (in inflation-adjusted 1980 dollars) in 1965 to more than $2 billion by 1980. The veil was finally torn off Stalin and Lysenko’s farcical attempts to manipulate science by millions of starving Soviets.
A crackdown in America
President Trump’s efforts to undermine American scientific institutions and derail the careers of government scientists is all too reminiscent of Stalin’s evisceration of the Soviet scientific establishment. From sacking the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s vaccine reviews and the Bureau of Labor Statistics director to dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) toxics research arm, the administration is purging experts with the capacity and experience to render independent judgments and replacing them with unqualified, loyal lackeys.
The administration’s cancelation of funding for climate research, adaptation and renewable energy, which to date includes some 200 actions to slash funds addressing the climate crisis alone, and putting fossil fuel industry-linked executives in charge of energy policy echoes Lysenko’s campaign to replace scientific methodologies with harebrained schemes in line with preexisting conclusions. At the same time, the administration is discouraging federal scientists who still have their jobs from publishing their findings in major peer-reviewed journals, cutting them off from the give and take of experimentation and research. Similarly, Stalin throttled Soviet scientists in the years after he imprisoned Vavilov.
An open letter signed by more than 1,900 U.S. scientists last spring protesting the cuts to scientific research and publishing reads as if it could have been written by Soviet scientists in an underground samizdat 80 years ago. “A climate of fear has descended on the research community,” the scientists wrote. “[T]he nation’s scientific enterprise is being decimated.”
Amid the extensive cutbacks, one of the relatively smaller cuts reveals the potential consequences of the Trump administration’s effort to end the government’s role as a source of independent data. Lysenko’s suppression of crop yield information, which made it impossible to assess the success or failure of his grandiose claims, has a contemporary counterpart: the Department of Government Efficiency’s elimination of a small team of environmental accountants associated with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Billion Dollar Weather and Climate Disaster unit.
The loss of those accountants, who collected data on the costs of climate change-related extreme weather events, means that there will not be a record of the price we will have to pay for the Trump administration’s reversal of federal climate policies. Recovery expenses from the recent flooding disaster in southern Texas and the wildfires in Los Angeles, considered by scientists to be textbook examples of extreme weather events fueled by carbon pollution, would no doubt qualify for the unit’s billion-dollar ledger many times over if it still existed. Similarly, the closure of the EPA’s Office of Research and Development, announced earlier this month, will compromise the ability to identify public health threats from environmental toxins.
Out of sight, out of mind
Of course, the Trump administration did not need to study Stalin to craft its agenda. It had the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which provided the blueprint for the administration’s assault on science and regulatory agencies, and many of its contributors now hold executive branch positions.
Such an attack on independent science inexorably leads to a common authoritarian result: If threats to public health and the environment can’t be identified—a key function of publicly supported science—then they need not be addressed. Out of the public eye, out of mind.
In the end, the Soviet Union had to grudgingly recognize that its one-time hero, Lysenko, had betrayed what Stalin called the “Fatherland.” The fact that his bogus experiments did not deliver the crop yields as promised became indisputable when Soviets clamored for food. Lysenko’s delusional approach caught up with him despite his ludicrously tragic efforts to suppress the news.
Likewise, the consequences of the Trump administration’s dangerous assault on science will eventually become painfully obvious. Censoring scientists and defunding their research on threats to public health and the environment will not make those threats disappear—and the administration’s reckless policies will undoubtedly exacerbate them. But like those starving Soviets, we likely won’t know how dire things have become until it’s too late.
Mark Schapiro’s most recent book is “Seeds of Resistance: The Fight for Food Diversity on our Climate-Ravaged Planet.” He is a continuing lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, a former senior correspondent at the Center for Investigative Reporting, and his articles have appeared in Harper’s, Inside Climate News, Mother Jones, Smithsonian and other publications. He is now working on a biography of Nikolai Vavilov.
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An important piece! Thank you. I appreciated reading history of this sceintific seed conflict, and its reverberations with the terrifying reality that we face with our authoritarian regime. May it be read widely!
Excellent piece! Really interesting parallels. And as Winston Churchill once said: "Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it."