Encyclopedia of Russian History

He came to have a different attitude toward the General Staff apparatus and front commanders. He was forced to rely constantly on the collective experience of the military. Before deciding on an operational question, Stalin listened to advice and discussed it with his deputy [Zhukov], with leading officers of the General Staff, with the main directorates of the People’s Commissariat of Defense, with the commanders of the fronts, and also with the executives in charge of defense production. His most astute generals, Vasilevsky and Georgy Zhukov included, learned how to nudge Stalin toward a decision without talking back to him.

While serving as a member of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party between 1952 and 1961, Vasilevsky also held the post of first deputy minister of defense from 1953 to 1957. Twice named Hero of the Soviet Union, he was also twice awarded the military honor, the Order of Victory, and was presented with many other orders, medals, and ceremonial weapons. He retired the following year and died fifteen years later. See also: MILITARY, SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET; WORLD WAR I; WORLD WAR II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beevor, Antony. (1999). Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-1943. New York: Penguin Books. Colton, Timothy. (1990). Soldiers and the Soviet State. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

JOHANNA GRANVILLE

VAVILOV, NIKOLAI IVANOVICH

(1887-1943), internationally famous biologist.

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov achieved international fame as a plant scientist, geographer, and geneticist before he was arrested and sentenced to death

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on false charges of espionage in 1940. Born into a wealthy merchant family in pre-revolutionary Russia, Vavilov was renowned for his personal charm, integrity, and international scientific prestige. He graduated from the Moscow Agricultural Institute in 1911, continued his studies of genetics and horticulture in Europe the following year, and in 1916 led an expedition to Iran and the Pamir Mountains to search for ancestral forms of modern agricultural plant species. “The Law of Homologous Series in Hereditary Variation,” his first major theoretical contribution, published in Russia in 1920 and then in the Journal of Genetics, argued that related species can be expected to vary genetically in similar ways.

Vavilov spoke many languages and traveled extensively throughout the United States and Europe to meet with colleagues and study scientific innovations in agriculture. He is best known for The Centers of Origin of Cultivated Plants (1926), in which he established that the greatest genetic diversity of wild plant species would be found near the origins of modern cultivated species. Until 1935 he organized expeditions to remote corners of the world in order to collect, catalog, and preserve specimens of plant biodiversity. In the Soviet Union Vavilov was a powerful advocate and organizer of scientific institutions, and he tirelessly promoted research in genetics and plant breeding as a means of improving Soviet agriculture. Vavilov was director of the Institute of Applied Botany (1924-1929), a member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, director of the All-Union Institute of Plant Breeding (1930-1940) and the Institute of Genetics (1933-1940), president and vice-president of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (1929-1938), and president of the All-Union Geographical Society (1931-1940).

Vavilov’s increasingly vocal and uncompromising opposition to the falsification of genetic science propagated by Trofim Lysenko and his followers culminated in his arrest in 1940. His death sentence was commuted to a twenty-year prison term in 1942; he died of malnutrition in a Saratov prison one year later. Vavilov is considered a founding father in contemporary studies of plant biodiversity. He left an important legacy as one of the great Russian scientific and intellectual figures of the early twentieth century.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Graham, Loren R. (1993). Science in Russia and the Soviet Union. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Krementsov, Nikolai. (1997). Stalinist Science. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Popovskii, Mark Aleksandrovich. (1984). The Vavilov Affair. Hamdon, CT: Archon Books.

YVONNE HOWELL

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