President of Stalin's Academy: The Mask and Responsibility of Sergei Vavilov

T HAS BECOME A CLICHIE, when speaking about Sergei Vavilov , to start with a dramatic comparison of two fates: that of Sergei himself-a high-ranking official, president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences at the apogee of Stalin's rule, 1945Stalin's rule, -1951;; and that of his brother Nikolai-a famous geneticist who became a victim of the purges and starved in prison in 1943.Although the general reader may find it paradoxical, such a pattern was not unusual for that epoch.Participants in political games accepted the cruelty and dangers of that life as inevitable, and even Politburo members-Viacheslav Molotov and Mikhail Kalinin-could have convicts among their closest relatives.Sergei Vavilov proved himself a true politician who both administered the scientific academy and delivered the required political speeches during a time characterized by the cold war, Communist totalitarianism, nationalism (including anti-Semitism), Stalin's personality cult, and ideological purges in culture and science.He managed to perform this job without committing any major political mistakes and died in 1951 in full official recognition; Nikita Khrushchev, speaking at his funeral, called Vavilov a "non-Party Bolshevik," a laudatory term for one who was not formally a member of the Communist Party.' (See Figure 1 .)However, Vavilov did not fit any of the stereotypical images of Soviet officials-the rude and energetic revolutionary, the gloomy apparatchik, and so forth.He was a phlegmatic and solitary intellectual whose hobby was searching for rare books among the heaps in secondhand bookstores and who translated Isaac Newton's Lectiones opticae into Russian.He is also known to have acted in some cases quietly and unofficially against decisions that he himself promoted on the official level.Later changes in politics destroyed the reputations of many of Stalin's heroes.In the perestroika years it would not have been difficult for a zealous journalist to glean from Vavilov's writings as many quotations as