Ass Backwards Podcast

The world's greatest botanist died of starvation in a Soviet prison. His crime: refusing to say plants worked the way Stalin needed them to. 🧵

The Siege of Leningrad lasted 872 days without supply lines. Hundreds of thousands of people starved. The Vavilov Institute sat in the middle of it. Inside: seeds. Outside: starvation. The scientists who worked there chose to die rather than eat the collection. Dmitry Ivanov starved to death surrounded by bags of rice. Alexander Stchukin died at his desk next to peanuts he never touched. They understood that what they were protecting wasn't a museum. It was the future.

Soviet secret police arrested Vavilov in August 1940, during a botanical expedition in Ukraine. The charges: espionage, sabotage, leading an "anti-Soviet" scientific organization. In interrogation, he was asked to confess that genetics was a capitalist conspiracy. He refused. "We shall go to the pyre, we shall burn, but we shall not retreat from our convictions." He was sentenced to death. The sentence was later commuted to twenty years of labor camp. He died of starvation in a Saratov prison on January 26, 1943. This is what happens when political authority supersedes scientific inquiry.