Joseph Stalin Was Very Wrong About Agriculture

Imagine it’s 1935, and you’re a Soviet agronomist.

Not just any agronomist, though. You’re the founder and head of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

And among your many accomplishments, your research had led you to  propose that certain crops… like the rye that helped  feed your fellow comrades… were basically an accident.  Humans didn’t domesticate them.

Thanks to evolution, they domesticated themselves.

Oh, and your reward for all your hard  work? You just lost your job.

One of your academic rivals  has the ear of Joseph Stalin, and neither of them believe  biology works the way you do.

You are Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov. And the next eight years of  your life do not get better.

But decades after your death, scientists totally got your  back, and proved you were right.

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Let’s turn back the clock just a bit,  and establish Vavilov’s credentials.

This was a guy obsessed  with the history of plants.

Or more specifically, the  science of the history of plants.

I’m talking stuff like heredity,  genetics, and natural selection.

He did a lot of research trying to find where important crops were first domesticated, and what happened as they spread  to other parts of the world.

He also basically invented  the concept of a seed bank, and there is a great story about  the one he founded in Leningrad.

But we don’t have time to get to that, today.