Rodion Tadenev3/25/12The Galileo ProjectFinal Paper- First draft

Casualties of the Soviet War on Genetics: A comparison of the lives and works of Vavilov and Ivanov

through the prism of the Galileo Paradigm

I. Introduction

The advancement of human knowledge through scientific inquiry is an unstoppable

phenomenon, fueled by man’s innate curiosity. Yet, there exists a diametrically opposed

counterforce of institutional pressure to maintain the status quo, driven by man’s innate fear of

the unknown. The former is typically represented by individual scientific pioneers, like Galileo

Galilei, whereas the latter is in the form of religious and political bodies like the Roman Catholic

Church. Of course, an accurate analytical framework is never quite this simple. Individual

scientists are supported by international communities, patrons, and politicians. The institutions

that oppose these scientists are themselves composed of persons, each of whom has unique

private and public motivations. Nevertheless, the “scientist versus institution” model (or simply

the “Galileo Paradigm”) allows one to draw surprising parallels, like that between Galileo and a

pair of Soviet geneticists of the nineteen-twenties and thirties, Nikolai Vavilov and Ilya Ivanov.

Vavilov and Ivanov shared a common fate as victims of a totalitarian Soviet regime that

quashed progress in genetics. But, the two could not have been more different. Vavilov was the

brilliant botanist with a humanitarian mission to feed the masses through genetic manipulation of

crops. Ivanov was a “mad scientist” who sought to crossbreed a human with an ape in order to

prove the evolutionary origins of man. Vavilov practiced in the well-respected, “good” side of

genetics, whereas Ivanov ventured into the “sinister”, ethically clouded side of the science. I will

explore how each man advanced his science but eventually struggled and succumbed to the

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regime; how, counterintuitively, the state feared Vavilov’s research more than it did Ivanov’s;

and how both stories fit within the context of the Galileo Paradigm.

II. Historical Background

To understand the life and times of Nikolai Vavilov and Ilya Ivanov, one must understand the

violent social upheaval that accompanied phenomena like the Russian Revolution of 1917,

Stalin’s forced collectivization of 1928, the Cultural Revolution of 1928-32, and the Great Purge

of 1937. During the middle of the nineteenth century, it appeared as if Russia would transition

into a constitutional monarchy under the reformative and progressive policies of Alexander II.

In 1861, a year before his friend, Abraham Lincoln, signed the Emancipation Proclamation,

Alexander emancipated the serfs of the Russian Empire. Twenty years later, Alexander would

sign Russia’s first constitution, which provided for two legislative bodies, following the

American and British systems. Tragically, the day following Alexander’s ratification of the

constitution, he was assassinated by an anarchist bomb plot. Russia’s hopes for a constitution

died with the czar. His successor, Alexander III, and eventually Nicholas II would be extremely

wary of relinquishing the power of the monarchy, and largely unsympathetic to the plight of the

common folk. By the time of the Bloody Sunday massacre (when imperial guards fired into a

crowd of protesters with disastrous results) and the Revolution of 1905, the country was

inevitably spinning toward civil war. Nine years later, Russia had become embroiled in World

War I. The mandatory military conscription of the war, coupled with Russia’s horrific losses and

the mass starvation on the home front provided the fuel that Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik

Party needed to foment mutiny within the tsarist troops and to overthrow the monarchy.

The Communist Revolution of 1917 set off a fierce civil war between the communist and

czarist forces. When the dust settled, millions were killed, the country was starving and

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impoverished and Russian society was entirely upended. The aristocracy, intelligentsia, middle

class businessmen, and even successful farmers either fled overseas or faced persecution (labor

camps and firing squads) at home. During this time, Nikolai Vavilov’s father, a businessman,

was forced into exile, leaving his wife and children behind. With famine threatening to choke

off the Revolution, Lenin instituted the New Economic Policy (NEP) which allowed for some

private for-profit business. Rather than being stripped of their agricultural surpluses, Russian

farmers could now sell excess crops on the market, providing an incentive for increased

agricultural production. However, Lenin died in 1924, and by 1928, Lenin’s successor, Joseph

Stalin abandoned NEP in favor of forced collectivization. The next year he announced the

“liquidation of the kulaks as a class”, leading to the first in a series of purges that would kill tens

of millions of Russians. Kulaks, or better-off peasants, were arrested en masse and either

executed or sent to forced labor camps in Siberia. Millions more would perish from starvation as

a direct consequence of collectivization.

At the same time, starting in 1928, a “Cultural Revolution” began. Several government

committees including RAPP, the organization of proletarian writers, waged a war on the

intelligentsia and sought to replace “bourgeois specialists” with young communists educated in

the ways of Marx and Lenin. The term “bourgeois specialist” was applied to practitioners of

education, the arts, and sciences who began their careers before 1917. Such a man would be

“officially under suspicion as a potential saboteur and agent of international capitalism”1.

Indeed, Ilya Ivanov was just such a specialist and was convicted of “having created a

counterrevolutionary organization among agricultural specialists”2. The Cultural Revolution

1 Fitzpatrick, Sheila. “Cultural Revolution in Russia 1928-1932” Journal of Contemporary History Vol. 9, No. 1 (Jan. 1974), pp. 39-40. Available at http://www.jstor.org/stable/260267.

2 Rossiianov, Kirill. “Beyond Species: Il’ya Ivanov and His Experiments on Cross-Breeding Humans with Anhropoid Apes” Vol. 15, No. 2 (Jan. 2003), p 307. Available online at

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would abruptly end in 1932 when Stalin disbanded the RAPP, but the damage to the scientific

community had already been done.

Throughout the nineteen-thirties, Stalin would invent scapegoats on which to hang the

failures of his policies. Such men were often charged with spying, wrecking, or anti-Soviet

agitation, all capital offenses (incidentally, Vavilov would later be charged with each of these

crimes3). Finally, in 1937, in what came to be known as the Great Purge, Stalin instituted a level

of terror beyond any that had been seen before, targeting the intelligentsia, military, kulaks, old

party members (contemporaries of Lenin), and anyone else caught in the crosshairs of the

NKVD, the Soviet secret police. As society was gripped by paralyzing fear, the NKVD

encouraged and recruited informants to denounce their “comrades” as traitors. The accused

usually admitted to his fabricated crime under extreme physical and psychological torture. After

a brief show trial, the “enemy of the people” was summarily executed. It is a small miracle that

Vavilov, who was first targeted by the NKVD in 1930, was able to avoid arrest until 19404.

III. Nikolai Vavilov: A Man with a Mission to End Famine

a. The Rise of Vavilov

In 1906, eighteen-year-old Nikolai Vavilov entered the Petrovskaya Agricultural

Institute, or simply “Petrovka”. The Petrovka was founded by Alexander II to develop a science

that could ease the plight of the peasants5. Vavilov took this mission seriously, as he pledged to

“commit his life to understanding nature for the betterment of humankind” and to “work for the

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=124129&fulltextType=RA&fileId=S0269889702000455

3 Cite to Pringle.

4 Id at ____.5 Id at ____.

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benefit of the poor, the enslaved class of my country, to raise the level of their knowledge”6.

True to his word, Vavilov worked feverishly at his studies, often forsaking his own health. His

professors described him as a genius and provided him with volumes of books and the

opportunity to study overseas under the tutelage of some of the world’s greatest biologists7.

Vavilov also made his name as one of the Petrovka’s staunchest supporters of Gregor Mendel’s

theory of dominant and recessive genes.

In Russia as in other parts of the world, there was at this time a great debate among

biologists as to whether acquired characteristics could be transferred to new generations as

originally postulated by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, or if genes carried immutable characteristics as

theorized by Mendel. The debate was more than an academic exercise; it would determine how

to breed hardy varieties of wheat and rye that could withstand harsh Siberian winters and

produce yields high enough to feed the masses. Those in the Mendel camp had scientific facts

and raw data, whereas those in the Lamarckian camp relied primarily on centuries-old plant

breeding practices and observations. While Vavilov passionately supported Mendelism, he

conceded that there was room in evolutionary theory for some of the Lamarckian tenets, namely

that the environment did have a role in plant development 8. This willingness to concede and

tolerate opposing viewpoints separated Vavilov from some of his more impatient colleagues, but

would eventually contribute to his demise.

By 1911, however, the year that Vavilov graduated from the Petrovka, the study of

Mendelian genetics had taken off in England, France, and Germany. The young biologist began

6 Id at 24.

7 Vavilov worked with … Id at ____.

8 Vavilov believed that… Id at ____.

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an internship in the Bureau of Applied Botany in Saint Petersburg, and in 1912 set off on a series

of travels to London and Paris, to learn from the greatest European biologists9. He interned at

the Pasteur Institute in France making valuable connections that would aid him in obtaining

international visas, he combed the books of Darwin’s personal library in Cambridge, and he

worked under the supervision and mentorship of Britain’s top geneticist, William Bateson in a

laboratory outside of London10. In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, Vavilov was recalled

from Europe and he returned to Moscow. Back at the Petrovka experimental garden, Vavilov

found a wheat variety that was impervious to fungus, his first major discovery11. In the years

preceding the Revolution, Vavilov assisted in diagnosing a food-related illness that spread

among the Imperial Army in Persia, and set out on his first international plant specimen

collecting expedition12.

On the home front, the Revolution opened far more opportunities for Nikolai than for his

exiled father. He was widely celebrated for formulating his Law of Homologous Series in

192013. In 1921, he was appointed director of the Bureau of Applied Botany in Petrograd (soon

to be Leningrad) and given various accolades including election to the Academy of Sciences of

the USSR14. He was given permission to visit the United States, and conferred with American

9 Id at ____.

10 Id at ___, ____, _____

11 Id at ____.

12 Id at ____.

13 Explain Law of Homologous Series and cite Id at ____14 Id at ____.

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scientists about their seed banks in search of a solution to the famine ravishing the Soviet

Union15.

Vavilov’s efforts from the early nineteen-twenties until his arrest in 1940 were largely

directed toward building the largest seed bank in the world. If Mendelian genetics were true,

then somewhere in the world genes existed that could make wheat survive brutal winters,

produce bountiful yields, and resist various agricultural pests and diseases. Vavilov did not limit

his search to wheat, rye, and oats; on the contrary, he searched for hardy fruit varietals,

vegetables, herbs, and even medicines, all to improve the life of the Russian peasants and end the

terrible famines.

Vavilov’s seed-hunting expeditions spanned much of the globe. He traveled to the

United States, Mexico, the Caribbean, South America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, India,

and the Far East. His expedition tales rival those of Indiana Jones. Ever the adventurer, dressed

always in a three piece suit and a Fedora hat, Vavilov survived riding horseback over perilous

mountain trails, undaunted by his run-ins with bandits and hostile military forces. One of his

letters is particularly telling, “If crocodiles don’t eat us as we cross the Nile, we hope to be in

Asmera [Eritrea] by early April”16. During one tense confrontation with bandits, Nikolai bade

them enjoy two of his bottles of brandy. As the would-be thieves fell into a drunken slumber, the

expedition made its escape17.

However, trouble was brewing at home. Lenin died in 1924, and his successor, Joseph

Stalin was egomaniacal and paranoid bordering on schizophrenic. In 1926, Vavilov’s

15 Id at ____.

16 Id at 126.17 Id at ____.

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application to travel abroad was rejected for the first time, and only granted after an impassioned

appeal18. The worst was yet to come. In 1927, Stalin found himself a pet biologist in a young

utilitarian “barefoot scientist” named Trofim Lysenko. Vavilov, the international and domestic

hero could not have possibly imagined that Lysenko would spell his downfall.

b. Stalin, Lysenko, and the Fall of Vavilov

In August of 1927, the official party newspaper, Pravda, published a glowing article

about young Trofim Lysenko, who had spread a veritable carpet of green peas over the barren

fields of Azerbaijan. The article claimed that as a result of Lysenko’s discovery, “cattle will not

perish from poor feeding, and the peasant Turk will live through the winter without trembling for

tomorrow” (131). In reality, Lysenko had gotten extremely lucky, but the truth was hardly of

consequence to the Communist party. Lysenko was the perfect poster boy for Stalin’s new

Russia: a practical scientist who toiled in the fields rather than spending his time visiting foreign

dignitaries and gallivanting around the globe in search of rare seeds. He was born into a peasant

family, educated at a vocational school of agriculture in rural Ukraine, and gained experience

working on a government experimental station. In Lysenko, as the Party proclaimed, was the

type of “barefoot scientist” who would provide the Soviet Union with immediate improvements

in agriculture. Vavilov, meanwhile, insisted that new wheat varieties would take no fewer than

ten years to develop and implement.

Lysenko’s biological theory fell squarely with the Lamarckian camp. He discounted the

influence of Mendelian immutable genes and proposed the rather antiquated position (even by

1927 standards) that characteristics acquired during the lifetime of the organism would be passed

down to its offspring, and that by controlling environmental effects one could effectively turn

18 Id at ____

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one wheat varietal into another. Lysenko proposed a method he called “vernalization”, which

was really just a rebranded version of the mid-nineteenth century idea that winter varietals of

wheat can be changed to spring varietals and vice versa by applying heat to the germinating

seeds at the appropriate time. Lysenko’s science was abysmal, his experiments impossible to

replicate, and his results were probably skewed if not outright falsified. One of Lysenko’s

common ploys was to compare vernalized yields to yields of a control plot of seeds that had

never been planted! International scientists quickly caught on to the fallacy of his ideas and the

unscientific methodology and ridiculed or simply ignored Lysenko’s contributions. However,

Vavilov was more accepting of the young barefoot scientist than most, and invited Lysenko to

tour the experimental garden at the Petrovka and to observe for himself the process of Mendelian

genetics at work. Lysenko discounted these observations as coincidence and refused to

contemplate the idea of genes.

As Lysenko’s reputation crumbled with the scientific community, his popularity grew

with the Communist party for his savvy political statements in support of Stalin’s

collectivization, for his reportedly successful breeding of new varieties of wheat in one or two

years rather than ten, and for his proletariat appeal. Lysenko was not the academic ivory tower

type, but rather the hard-working man of the people, who accomplished success through

strenuous observation rather than some theoretical principles concocted by a nineteenth century

monk.

As Lysenko’s star rose, Vavilov’s fell proportionally. By 1933, Vavilov was banned

from travelling abroad. In 1935, Lysenko struck what some deemed to be the coup de grâce,

when he gave a speech laced with references to “bourgeois scientists,” “saboteurs,” and “class

enemies.” After a particularly impassioned claim that the bourgeois academics merely “observe

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and explain phenomena” whereas socialist science aimed to “alter the plant and animal world in

favor of the building of socialist society,” Stalin stood and cheered “Bravo, Comrade Lysenko,

Bravo!” (199). This was the end for Vavilov and the science of genetics in Stalin’s Russia. In

1936, the Party held a show trial pitting genetics against Lamarckian theory, and despite the

powerful scientific arguments made by the Mendelian geneticists, Lysenko scored a total victory.

In 1937, the arrests started, and many of Vavilov’s friends and associates began to disappear.

The NKVD had been building a dossier on Vavilov since 1930, using informants, false

confessions, and plain fabrications piling up evidence of espionage, membership of a fictitious

subversive organization, and purposeful sabotage of collective farms. Vavilov seemed to be the

ideal scapegoat for Stalin’s failed collectivization experiment. Uncharacteristically, Stalin

exercised patience in arresting Vavilov, a man who garnered a great deal of international appeal

and political clout. Hitler’s invasion of Poland proved to be a perfect diversion. In the summer

of 1940, as Vavilov was on a plant-collecting trip he was collected by NKVD agents. It was the

last breath of freedom Vavilov would ever breathe.

c. Imprisonment and Death

Now that Stalin had Vavilov in his grasp, he was prepared to take as long as necessary in

obtaining a full confession and subjecting Vavilov to the most intense physical and

psychological torture. Nikolai’s interrogator was known to be one of the most brutal and sadistic

in the ranks of the NKVD. As the months passed, he extracted confessions that Vavilov actively

worked to sabotage Soviet agricultural production, that he was a member of the fictitious

counter-revolutionary Peasant Labor Party, and that he recruited Western spies to transmit

information to Europe and the United States. In perhaps his most heart-wrenching confession,

Vavilov implicated a friend and close associate, George Karpechenko, whom he had convinced

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to leave California for the important scientific research in Leningrad. The interrogator set up a

meeting between the two, where he allowed Karpechenko to face his accuser while the

interrogator repeated Vavilov’s denunciation. Karpechenko would be executed by firing squad

in 1941, and he was not the only geneticist who was executed on account of Vavilov’s

confessions. Despite his confessions, Vavilov never renounced genetics, although there is no

indication whether that such was the goal of his interrogator. Vavilov was sentenced to death in

1941, but his sentence would be commuted to twenty years of penal labor. Regardless, the

horrific prison conditions coupled with wartime shortages spelled a longer, more drawn-out

death sentence. Vavilov died of starvation in 1943.

d. The Aftermath

Ten years later, Stalin would die of a stroke and Khrushchev would expose Stalin’s cult

of personality that led to the horrors of the purges of the nineteen-thirties. Notable among the

names of rehabilitated victims was Nikolai Vavilov. Lysenko was discredited as a fraud in 1965,

genetics returned as a science in the Soviet Union, and Vavilov’s name was restored to his

institute in Leningrad in 1967. Vavilov’s seed bank survives to this day and is still the largest

repository of seeds in the world.

IV. Ilya Ivanov: The Mad Scientist Intent on Crossbreeding Man and Ape

a. Education and Training

Ilya Ivanov was born in 1870 to a tsarist government official in what is currently the

Ukraine19. He attended the University of Kharkov, received a degree in physiology, and

continued his studies in Paris in the field of bacteriology at the Pasteur Institute20. Upon his

19 Rossiianov at 280.

20 Id.

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return to Russia in 1898, Ivanov worked in the laboratory of the famed physiologist Ivan Pavlov

on the physiology of reproduction21. Specifically, Ivanov began by attempting to understand the

various components of sperm and their role during the fertilization process. For this, Ivanov

needed to obtain experimental data on a large scale. He chose to work with horses on private

and state stud farms outside St. Petersburg22. There, he began experimenting with the novel

procedure of artificial insemination, for which he would soon develop an international

reputation.

b. Advances in Artificial Insemination

At the beginning of the twentieth century, artificial insemination was known but used

only as a last resort in both veterinary and gynecological practice23. Throughout the world, there

existed a particular religious taboo against unnatural reproduction, and as evidenced by the

Roman Catholic Church’s ban on artificial insemination in medicine in 189724. The Russian

Orthodox Church was also very conservative in reproductive matters, and would have likely

opposed any medical implementation of the procedure had it been attempted. Therefore, even

though Ivanov’s pre-revolutionary work was limited to farm animals, he faced a considerable

amount of opposition, even from the scientific community. Nevertheless, Ivanov persisted with

his experiments and made various technological advances, including the use of a special sponge

and rubber catheters to inseminate a large number of mares with a relatively small quantity of

21 Id.

22 Id at 281.

23 Id.

24 Id.

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sperm25. In fact, by 1914 Ivanov had made imperial Russia the world leader in artificial

insemination of farm animals26.

Ivanov’s large scale pre-revolutionary work could not have been possible without the

support and patronage of the royal family, including Czar Nicholas II who provided not only

access to state run stud farms, but also a handsome grant in the sum of 2,500 rubles in 190027.

Using this patronage as well as the support of several notable scientists, including Russia’s first

Nobel Prize winner, Ivan Pavlov (in whose laboratory Ivanov had studied), Ivanov received

funds to open a special laboratory for his work in artificial insemination28. He also obtained

access to a 35,000-acre zoological preserve owned by Friedrich Falz-Fien, home to zebras,

ostriches, kangaroos, camels, bison, and other rare and exotic species29.

Artificial insemination had a number of practical farming applications, but by the early

1900’s, Ivanov had directed his research toward experimental zoological hybridization across

species30. He sought to create new forms of life that did not exist in nature, by inseminating one

species, a horse, for instance, with the sperm of another, such as a zebra (see Appendix A)31. By

this point, there is some indication the Ivanov had begun to contemplate hybridization of humans

and apes, but he made no experimental strides in this direction until after the Revolution.

c. A New Direction

25 Id at 282.

26 Id.

27 Id.

28 Id at 283.

29 Id at 284.

30 Id.

31 Id.

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The sweeping social changes of the Communist Revolution and the utter destruction left

behind in the wake of the civil war affected few social strata as gravely as the scientific

community. The system of patronage had collapsed because anyone wealthy enough to have

been a patron was killed, exiled, or stripped of assets. Scientists who had once enjoyed plentiful

funding and state-of-the-art laboratories were forced to toil in substandard living conditions with

minimal funds and equipment. Some emigrated to Europe and the United States, but Ivanov

stayed; he did not think much of his employment prospects in war torn Europe and he could not

speak English32. Instead, he felt that he should pursue a new avenue of research—one that was

sure to gain him notoriety, and with any luck, government funding. Ivanov indicated in several

letters to fellow scientists, his interest in hybridizing man and chimpanzee33.

In 1924, Ivanov visited the Pasteur Institute in France to perform experiments on sperm

disinfection34. During the trip, he discussed his new research direction with institute directors,

and was given approval to use the institute’s chimpanzee facility in French Guinea35. With

access to chimpanzees, the only missing piece was funding.

Obtaining funding would be a two-part process: firstly, Ivanov would have to convince

the communist bureaucrats that his project was ideologically sound and deserving of government

support, and secondly, he would have to convince the Academy of Sciences to approve of the

scientific value of the work. Ivanov wrote letters to the People’s Commissar of Enlightenment,

extolling the anti-religious value of the research36. Indeed, if he were to successfully hybridize a

32 Id at 285.

33 Id at 286.

34 Id.

35 Id.36 Id.

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man and an ape, it would definitively prove man’s genetic closeness to the apes, thereby

undermining religious teachings of creation. Ivanov’s letters struck a chord with the

communists, and one representative of the commissariat wrote:

The topic proposed by Professor Ivanov… should become a decisive blow to the religious teachings, and may be aptly used in our propaganda and in our struggle for the liberation of working people from the power of the Church.37

By September 1925, the government’s Financial Commission allocated $10,000 to the Academy

of Sciences for the realization of Ivanov’s proposal38. Ivanov then presented to the Academy a

different perspective on the social value of his proposal:

[The experiments] may provide extraordinarily interesting evidence for a better understanding of the problem of the origin of man and of a number of other problems from such fields of study as heredity, embryology, pathology, and comparative psychology.39

The Academy also approved of the project and sent him on his mission to Africa. As Ivanov’s

notoriety grew among the public at large, Nikolai Vavilov wrote to him, “Don’t pay attention to

all the gossip and rumors about your trip. To the devil with them!”40

d. Human-Ape Hybridization Experiments in Africa

Ivanov quickly realized that the Pasteur Institute’s facility in the town of Kindia would

not be suitable to meet his goals. The chimpanzees were trapped as infants by the local hunters

and were not of the age of sexual maturity.41 Most never survived much past sexual maturity due

to the poor conditions of captivity and the fact that the institute transported a number of the apes

37 Id.

38 Id at 287.

39 Id at 289.

40 Id.41 Id at 293.

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to France for medical testing (many of which died in transit).42 Ivanov needed to find a new site

to conduct his research, and after a year of searching and fundraising, he arrived in the Botanical

Gardens in Conakry.43

As he arrived in Conakry, Ivanov began to develop a colonialist attitude that he had never

previously espoused. He associated almost exclusively with whites as opposed to the local black

population, believed that the blacks were evolutionarily closer to chimpanzees, and even used the

sperm of black men to inseminate chimpanzees because he believed them to be genetically more

similar.44 Because the local population treated chimpanzees as inferior, and actually ostracized

any woman to have been raped by an ape, Ivanov decided to conduct his experiments in secret

from the curious locals, with only his son assisting him with the inseminations.45 In Conakry,

Ivanov had access to fertile, wild-caught adult females, but found that they would become

extremely agitated when he attempted his experiments.46 He and his son would use force on the

female chimps to hold them down for the insemination, while he inserted his catheters into

them.47 The descriptions give the impression of a brutal rape. In time, failing to achieve any

success with the insemination of female chimpanzees with human sperm, Ivanov sought the

permission of the local governor to inseminate hospitalized human females with chimpanzee

sperm.48 Ivanov noted his intention of performing the inseminations without the consent of the

42 Id.

43 Ivanov was in correspondence with the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism, which promised him $100,000 but never fulfilled on the promise. See id.

44 Id at 297.

45 Id. 46 Id. 47 Id.

48 Id at 299-300.

16

women, under the guise of a regular hospital procedure.49 Disgusted, the governor denied

Ivanov’s request.50

e. One Last Attempt

As his funds ran out, Ivanov returned to the Soviet Union, having failed to induce

pregnancy in any of the chimpanzees. Undaunted, he sought female volunteers to agree to

participate in his experiments—that is, to be inseminated by the sperm of an ape.51 In 1928, a

volunteer simply known as “G”, wrote to Ivanov that her personal life was in ruins and that she

had contemplated suicide, but upon learning of his experiments sought to serve her country by

serving as a test subject.52 Arrangements were made to inseminate her with the sperm of an

orangutan, but the ape died, and Ivanov could not obtain more apes until 1930.53 Before the

insemination could be conducted, Ilya Ivanov was arrested by the NKVD.54

f. Arrest, Deportation, and Death

Ivanov was arrested in December in 1930 for membership of an anti-Soviet organization.

His sentence was a five-year exile to the Kazakh Republic.55 Ivanov’s accuser was a younger

proletariat who was eager to take his position as head of the laboratory.56 This was a common

occurrence during the Cultural Revolution; the young Communists indoctrinated with Party

49 Id at 300.

50 Id.

51 Id at 306.

52 Id.

53 Id.

54 Id at 307.55 Id.

56 Id.

17

propaganda replaced the “bourgeois specialists” as part of a cleansing cycle. In exile, Ivanov

became exceedingly ill, in part due to the harsh Kazakh climate.57 In 1932, when Stalin put an

abrupt end to the Cultural Revolution, Ivanov was pardoned and allowed to return to Moscow,

but he died before he could board the train.58

g. Legacy

Ivanov was not the last scientist to attempt human-ape hybridization, however all subsequent

attempts also failed. [Discuss this further] Perhaps the most significant legacy of Ivanov’s

experiments surfaced in the 1990’s when a computer analysis of the nucleotide sequence of the

HIV-1 virus (responsible for the AIDS pandemic) found that the virus likely emerged in

approximately 1931 in west equatorial Africa, when it was transmitted from a chimpanzee to a

human host.59 It is unclear whether Ivanov ever inseminated a human female with chimpanzee

sperm, but the evidence shows that it is a distinct possibility. Thus, it is possible that Ilya Ivanov

introduced the HIV virus into the human population.

V. Contrasting State Sanctions against Vavilov and Ivanov

The stories of Nikolai Vavilov and Ilya Ivanov present a fascinating dichotomy that helps

illustrate the incongruity of the Soviet repressions against scientists during the Cultural

Revolution and the Great Purge. Each was a well-established pioneer in his field prior to the

Communist Revolution, each was a biologist who worked in experimental genetics, each traveled

abroad and was sponsored by foreign capitalist states, and each was persecuted for his scientific

work. But that is where the similarities end. Vavilov’s work had a tangible application for the

betterment of society; his genetically manipulated crops could potentially survive harsh Siberian

57 Id at 308.

58 Id.

59 Id at 300.

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winters and severe droughts and decrease the incidence of famine by vastly increasing the

available grain supply. Ivanov’s work, if successful, would do no more than provide evidentiary

support for Darwinian theory and Marxist atheism. There was no practical application of

human-ape hybridization that would improve life conditions for the Soviet peasant. It was,

however, morally and ethically questionable work. Not only would a human-ape hybrid be

objectified as a scientific oddity, it would be denied the right to live freely in a community of

either apes or humans. Furthermore, regardless of one’s attitude toward Ivanov’s purpose, his

methods clearly constituted egregious abuse of his position. Ivanov attempted to impregnate a

non-consenting human subject with chimpanzee sperm, acted with cruelty toward captive

chimpanzee females by forcefully inseminating them, and attempted to experiment on an

emotionally unstable human female who was likely incapable of giving informed consent.

Despite the disparities in the social and ethical value of their work, the state tortured Vavilov and

sentenced him to death, whereas it merely exiled Ivanov.

Perhaps the difference in punishment was merely a product of the varying political climates

of 1930 as opposed to 1937 and beyond. It is difficult to imagine that Ivanov would have

survived the Great Purge given his status as a “bourgeois specialist” and the potential association

of his work to Nazi eugenics. However, I posit that the theory of immutable genes was so

counter-Marxist that the Party viewed Vavilov as more of a danger than Ivanov. Where was

there room for the rise of the proletariat and socialist egalitarianism in a science that taught of

unchangeable dominant and recessive traits? If organisms could not inherit acquired changes

brought on by environmental factors, then how could the proletariat of today give rise to the

socialist Utopia of tomorrow? Such questions were disquieting to the Party, and likely sealed

Vavilov’s death sentence.

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VI. The Galileo Paradigm

a. The Trope of the Persecuted Scientist

The theme of knowledge versus authority consistently appears throughout the story of

Galileo, particularly as told by Brecht and Sobel, and is echoed in the accounts of both Vavilov

and Ivanov’s lives. Particularly, one finds the scientist as a bearer of the flame of human

curiosity and rational thought, which powerful state institutions threaten to snuff. These

institutions, the Roman Catholic Church and the Communist Party, are threatened by any attempt

to dispel dogma with knowledge. In Galileo’s case, the idea of a sun-centered solar system so

fundamentally undercut the hierarchical structure and religious teachings of the Church, that his

conviction for heresy seemed inevitable. Likewise, Vavilov’s opposition to state-endorsed

Lamarckian theory and his non-Marxist theory of the undying gene threatened to weaken the

ideological dogma of the Communist Party. Lastly, Ivanov, though ideologically in-line with the

Party, represented the Western-educated scientist with no Marxist indoctrination, and thus had no

place in a society in which the Party held a monopoly on “Truth” and “Knowledge”.

b. The Importance of Patronage

Galileo was truly free to pursue his work only with the financial and political support of

the Medici family. Biagioli discusses how patronage was essential for scientists, as for other

skilled specialists, and that it encouraged a great degree of creative freedom. Vavilov and

Ivanov both enjoyed patronage from both domestic and foreign sources: Vavilov had his British

and French connections, which may have protected him if not for the outbreak of World War II,

and Ivanov had Czar Nicholas II, Friedrich Falz-Fien, and the Pasteur Institute. As noted by

Biagioli, political change often leaves the artisan unprotected and without a patron. In one fell

swoop, Ivanov lost his two major patrons—one was executed and the other was exiled. It is

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rather remarkable that Ivanov survived the revolution and was able to reestablish himself as a

valued member of the scientific community. However, Ivanov’s connections at the Pasteur

Institute were not nearly as powerful as his pre-revolutionary allies. Like in Vavilov and

Galileo’s cases, when the time came for Ivanov’s supporters to stand to his protection, nobody

spoke up.

c. Atheism as a Religion

In comparing the Roman Catholic Church to the Communist Party, one cannot help but

conceptualize atheism as a religion. Marxist socialism fed off atheism just as the Vatican fed off

Catholicism. By positing a godless world, Marx was able to characterize world religions as the

“opiate of the masses” and as vehicles of feudal and capitalist ruling classes. The existence of a

Biblical God would shatter Marxism by underscoring that the natural state of man is to be a

servant to a higher authority. Whereas the Communists departed from strictly Marxist doctrine

by implementing a social order not unlike a class system, they needed atheism to create a

spiritual vacuum which could be occupied by “The Party” or by Comrade Stalin. Vavilov,

though not a religious man, had discovered a theory that potentially threatened atheism. If a

gene could perpetuate itself eternally unchanged, would this not lend credence to the concept of

an eternal and unchanging God? This was yet another reason for the Party to silence him. At the

same time, the Party applauded Ivanov for the anti-religious potential of his human-ape

hybridization experiments. Perhaps Marxist-Communist atheism is actually a misnomer because

it is not the absence of religion, but rather a new religion which is inextricably intertwined with

political ideology.

VII. Conclusion

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The Galileo Paradigm provides insight into the conflict between individual thinkers and state

institutions, into the patronage relationships entered into by those thinkers for protection and

monetary support, and lastly into the role of religion as the backbone of an oppressive state

institution. In analyzing the lives of two Soviet biologists persecuted by the Communist Party,

one can find repeated themes and parallels to the Galileo story. In the end, despite the fact the

Church and the Party succeeded in the short term, knowledge would spread like a virus, choking

off their stranglehold on political and social power.

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Appendix A

One of Ivanov’s successful hybrids between a zebra and a horse.

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