«CULTURAL REVOLUTION» IN THE USSR IN 1929–1932 AND THE EARLY ATTACKS AGAINST N.I. VAVILOV’S SCHOOL. A STUDY BASED ON DOCUMENTS FROM ST. PETERSBURG ARCHIVES

• Main Author: E. I. Kolchinsky
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Institute of Cytology and Genetics of Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences 2014-12-01
• Series: Vavilovskij Žurnal Genetiki i Selekcii
• Subjects: «cultural revolution»; n.i. vavilov; a.v. al’bensky; g.i. bykov; i.i. prezent; all-russian research institute of plant-industry (vir); all-union academy of agricultural sciences; central control commission of the workers and peasants inspectorate
• Online Access: https://vavilov.elpub.ru/jour/article/view/68

The article for the first time presents documents from several archival CPSU collections kept in St. Petersburg and from the collections of the Communist Academy held at the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. These documents testify against the image, wide-spread in current literature, that the conflict between N.I. Vavilov and the supporters of T.D. Lysenko was a competition between two rival academic schools for financial, material, and human resources. Already in the early attacks against Vavilov, which began in the years of the «cultural revolution», before T.D. Lysenko would emerge as a person of some importance among agronomists and plant breeders, the scientific content of the debates was rather negligible. In an ordinary situation, the debates would have never had the same tragic consequences as they had for many of their participants. From the very beginning, the criticism against Vavilov was initiated and controlled by Party bodies, and his opponents were mainly inspired by political, ideological considerations and the wish to advance their own careers. In 1932, N.I. Vavilov lost his former independence in personnel management and the control over institutions that he administered. The principal characteristics of «Lysenkoism» as a social-political practice in Soviet science formed before the struggle between geneticists and Lysenkoists. It was in the same years that the main accusations against N.I. Vavilov were first articulated: wrong research strategy, the lack of links with agricultural practice, the promotion of theories hostile to Marxism, and sympathies to bourgeois science.