The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov by Peter Pringle

Author:Peter Pringle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2008-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

A former political commissar in the Red Army, Isaak Prezent had a sharp mind, a vicious tongue, and a deceivingly pleasant face. He was an extreme example of the power of the vydvizhentsy. He began his academic career as a lecturer at Leningrad University, teaching the new, politically correct ways of interpreting theories in biology. In reality, he knew very little about biology, having studied as a lawyer and social scientist. He even prided himself, as Lysenko would soon do, on not having read the latest research on genetics. He delighted in being a class vigilante and especially enjoyed bullying students of the bourgeoisie who knew genetics, but no Marxist theory. His lectures had such titles as “Class Struggle on the Natural Science Front,” in which he attacked traditional liberal ideals of science. He once tried to get a young female student expelled for not being able to speak in class about the Marxist-Leninist “theory of cognition.” 1

While still in Leningrad, he started writing political pamphlets criticizing his fellow teachers. In one of these pamphlets, he attacked a Leningrad teacher who had written a harmless poem about the joys of the May Day holiday. Prezent castigated the teacher for not pointing out that this year was the thirteenth year of the revolution and that May Day was “a holiday of struggle, not of flowers.”

From such petty encounters, Prezent launched personal campaigns against older bourgeois professors. He ridiculed the idea of a “pure science” independent of political loyalties and immediate practical usefulness. In one campaign his target was Boris Raikov, an outstanding Darwinian scientist twenty years his senior. Prezent denounced Raikov as an “agent of the world bourgeoisie, who would arouse nothing but loathing, disgust and hatred in every honest comrade.” 2 Raikov was arrested in 1931, tried, exiled to the north, and was only allowed to return to Leningrad at the end of World War II in 1945. The term “Raikovism” was adopted as a method of condemning politically unacceptable scientific trends, and Prezent had established himself as a political force. Those who encountered Prezent at this time recalled the young man, in his early twenties, prancing about in front of his audience, waving his arms when making a political point. 3

Within a few years Prezent would become Lysenko’s political minder, promoter, publicist, and ideological spin doctor. Without him, Lysenko might have remained a lowly plant breeder with a good eye for a fine variety of wheat and several, speculative, anti-science ideas about how to improve crop yields. But with Prezent by his side Lysenko would become increasingly daring, and his scientific claims increasingly fraudulent as he worked to give the government, and even Stalin himself, exactly what they demanded. Lysenko offered quick solutions to the entrenched problems of Soviet agriculture. Prezent would broaden Lysenko’s narrow political vision, feed his ambition, trigger his native cunning, and show him how a peasant farmer’s son could become a political force in Moscow.

Lysenko said he first met Prezent in 1933, 4 but another

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