Oh man, I'm happy to see this here — I've been slowly working my way through various science and engineering done in the Soviet Union since there was some incredible work done that's very poorly known in the West.
Vavilov is definitely a first-class scientist who seemed to have an incredible personality. In some alternative better timeline, Vavilov would probably be as well-known and had inspired as many people as, say, Feynman. Alas.
Anyway, while we're on the topic of Soviet scientists, the whole silver fox domestication research program is infinitely fascinating —
Edit: Soviet pharmacology also very interesting — and even more surprising it hasn't been studied and imported since, like, humans are humans and it works. Probably an unfortunate secondary effect of how trials/licensing/patenting work. Not a bad starting point: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/an-iron-curtain-has-de...
Nikolai Vavilov's younger brother Sergei [0] was a famous physicist who together with Pavel Cherenkov discovered Vavilov-Cherenkov radiation [1]. By the time Nobel committee awared Cherenkov the Nobel price Sergei Vavilov already died (of natural causes). Got me thinking about genetic predisposition to science among Vavilov brothers.
"and of “twenty-one employees of noblesse origin, eight from the priesthood, twelve honorary citizens [code for tsarists], and ten from the merchant class.”
For those not familiar with this part of Russian history, the relevant concept here is "class enemy" - an individual who is an enemy of the people by virtue of being of certain social class.
The echos that we see today of similar class warfare, of similar narratives supplanting real science, and replacing it with activism ... This is the direction we are heading toward. As the joke goes, history doesn't repeat itself. It does rhyme however.
You can see echos of Lysenkoism where a narrative pushed hard by activists, that has numerous problems from a scientific point of view, is rammed down peoples throats. When people can be "deplatformed" or "canceled" for having the temerity to express different opinions than the narrative allows for ... that is, in many ways, modern day Lysenkoism.
It took Russia many decades to recover from this. As it will us, if we allow this to continue.
Class enemy is defined in socio-economic terms rather than purely social (which are even hard to define). Responding to your irony on "virtue" - there are certain pre-defined aspects of one's economic activity on others, for example if you are living off by owning private property and interest from this - your interested are naturally against the interest of people you are dealing with. This simple concept seems very hard to comprehend.
Vavilov was such an extraordinary individual. While he was imprisoned in 1940 for defying Stalin-era leader Trofim Lysenko for his Mendelian beliefs, his collaborators protected the then largest seed bank in the world during the Siege of Lenningrad [1] by Nazi Germany. Most of those "protectors" died, and Vavilov died of starvation in prison - the same thing he was so obsessed of solving for everyone.
"Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End" [2] is the canonical read on this topic!
Starvation was a Big Deal(TM) in pre-ww2 Russia. Many of the best and brightest were drawn toward working on agricultural problems in their niche. Mikhail Kalashnikov got interested in mechanics and engineering because he wanted to help design better farm equipment and improve yields.
He was. Only he was imprisoned for political reasons of being anti-bolshevik, you can even read this in the quote from his sentence in this cold-warish piece of writing in OP. This is biggest scientific myth i know - that soviets/marxism/etc deny science, because they prosecuted Vavilov for it. Like genetics back then was as it is now (search eugenics), and scientific debate about nature vs nurture was settled, and Lysenko was just some boy and didn't get applause in NYC conference on agrobiology. But I'm glad at least in research frontiers people do revisit Lysenko legacy nowadays, in the the light of epigenetic research. For common people it's just another neccesary illusion.
The Soviet denial of science actually went much more beyond relatively minor details like the prosecution of Vavilov.
I have read a large number of school manuals from the sixties, both from the Soviet Union and from a few of the East European countries dominated by the Soviet Union.
All these school manuals were extremely ridiculous, because they always included some pseudo-historical sections where for every useful scientific or technical discovery or invention, or even for every innovation in sports, it was claimed that there was some unknown Russian scientist, worker or even peasant, who had discovered or invented that, much earlier than their well-known discoverers or inventors from West-European countries.
Additionally, all the biology manuals included a pseudo-historical section containing criticism against the "Mendelo-Morganism", where Gregor Mendel, Thomas Morgan and the other people with well-known contributions to modern biology and genetics were presented as a gang of crooks who belonged somehow to some kind of international conspiracy that promoted some kind of pseudo-science for some unspecified but certainly evil purposes.
On the contrary, Lysenko and a few other Russian geneticists were presented as some luminaries who are the only source of truth about biology.
Reading any of those Russian school manuals, which tried to poison the minds of many generations of students in Russia and in the countries controlled by them, is enough to make you understand the relationship between the Soviet Union (and communists in general) and the true sciences.
Sorry, the Soviet Union explicitly advocated for science based on ideology instead of the other way around under Stalin. Wikipedia has numerous examples of this [0]. And no, one person getting applause at one conference in the US does not make a scientific hypothesis valid. Your also either fundamentally misunderstanding what the current research on epigenetics says or what Lysenko was advocating. Lysenko claimed to do things well beyond anything current studies of epigenetics would allow, and the SU went all in on these claims to disastrous effects. (Because they preferred Lamarckism instead of Darwinism for purely ideological reasons.)
Readit News
Vavilov is definitely a first-class scientist who seemed to have an incredible personality. In some alternative better timeline, Vavilov would probably be as well-known and had inspired as many people as, say, Feynman. Alas.
Anyway, while we're on the topic of Soviet scientists, the whole silver fox domestication research program is infinitely fascinating —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_silver_fox
Highly highly recommended.
Edit: Soviet pharmacology also very interesting — and even more surprising it hasn't been studied and imported since, like, humans are humans and it works. Probably an unfortunate secondary effect of how trials/licensing/patenting work. Not a bad starting point: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/16/an-iron-curtain-has-de...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Ivanovich_Vavilov
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_radiation
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-vault/
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/anthropocene-reviewed/e...
For those not familiar with this part of Russian history, the relevant concept here is "class enemy" - an individual who is an enemy of the people by virtue of being of certain social class.
You can see echos of Lysenkoism where a narrative pushed hard by activists, that has numerous problems from a scientific point of view, is rammed down peoples throats. When people can be "deplatformed" or "canceled" for having the temerity to express different opinions than the narrative allows for ... that is, in many ways, modern day Lysenkoism.
It took Russia many decades to recover from this. As it will us, if we allow this to continue.
In our enlightened times, this has been replaced with other categories which make automatic allies - "if you're X, you must do Y."
(But still a "traitor" if you disobey the diktat.)
A Blight on Soviet Science - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26513415 - March 2021 (40 comments)
"Where Our Food Comes From: Retracing Nikolay Vavilov's Quest to End" [2] is the canonical read on this topic!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Leningrad [2]: https://www.librarything.com/work/7565437
I have read a large number of school manuals from the sixties, both from the Soviet Union and from a few of the East European countries dominated by the Soviet Union.
All these school manuals were extremely ridiculous, because they always included some pseudo-historical sections where for every useful scientific or technical discovery or invention, or even for every innovation in sports, it was claimed that there was some unknown Russian scientist, worker or even peasant, who had discovered or invented that, much earlier than their well-known discoverers or inventors from West-European countries.
Additionally, all the biology manuals included a pseudo-historical section containing criticism against the "Mendelo-Morganism", where Gregor Mendel, Thomas Morgan and the other people with well-known contributions to modern biology and genetics were presented as a gang of crooks who belonged somehow to some kind of international conspiracy that promoted some kind of pseudo-science for some unspecified but certainly evil purposes.
On the contrary, Lysenko and a few other Russian geneticists were presented as some luminaries who are the only source of truth about biology.
Reading any of those Russian school manuals, which tried to poison the minds of many generations of students in Russia and in the countries controlled by them, is enough to make you understand the relationship between the Soviet Union (and communists in general) and the true sciences.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Sov...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJHOiQ2uniU