Vadim Birstein - The Perversion of Knowledge

Evidently, in the Vavilov case, Khvat used materials that the OGPU/NKVD had been collecting since 1931. These materials had been kept in special secret Operational File No. 268615, opened by the OGPU on Vavilov. In 1931, a special Instruction on the Registration of Anti-Soviet and Counterrevolutionary Elements (No. 298/175) was issued by the OGPU. 115Two types of registration were introduced: Group A for persons who had already been under secret surveillance and Group B for persons for whom information was received for the first time. A special card was created for each person, but secret reports on them were kept in the files of informants. With some changes, this system existed until the end of the Soviet Union. For simplification, I use here the name “operational file.” Such operational files were created by the OGPU-NKVD-MGB-KGB on individuals who attracted the attention of the secret service. By the time of Vavilov’s arrest, there were seven volumes of NKVD reports in his operational dossier. 116

There were NKVD informers in the VIR. Academician Ivan Yakushkin started to provide the OGPU/NKVD with secret information on his colleagues in 1931. 117A noble by origin, Yakushkin tried unsuccessfully at the end of the Civil War to escape from the Crimea to Turkey with the retreating White Russian Army of Baron Pyotr Wrangel. He was arrested in 1930 as a member of the fictitious Labor Peasant Party (TKP) but was released from imprisonment after he agreed to work for the OGPU as an informer. The above-mentioned KGB textbook directly pointed to the role of secret agents (informers) in the creation of the TKP case: “A group of members of the counterrevolutionary ‘Labor Peasant Party’ (TKP) with a center at the Narkomzem [Commissariat of Agriculture] was disclosed and unmasked with the help of [our] agents.” 118

Aleksandr Kol, head of the Department of Plant Introduction of the VIR agreed, as Yakushkin had, to be a secret NKVD informer after he had been arrested in 1933. 119However, others voluntarily wrote secret reports on Vavilov and his closest coworkers to the NKVD—among them were VIR employees Fyodor Sidorov, Fyodor Teterev, and the inspector of VASKhNIL, Kolesnikov. 120

Moreover, the NKVD secretly assigned its officers to the VIR. From the late 1930s, NKVD major Stepan Shundenko worked at Vavilov’s institute as a scientist. As A. Zubarev, a member of the NKVD expert commission that decided Vavilov’s fate, recalled in 1955, Shundenko based his work on the “Michurin-Lysenko view.” 121The level of his professional incompetence in biology was well known in the institute, and his example is an illustration of how deep the NKVD-KGB penetration of an academic institution could be. Geneticist and Communist Party member Dr. Mikhail Khadzhinov recalled later:

On one occasion [in 1937] I received a reprimand from the party committee [of Vavilov’s institute] because my [graduate] student, Shundenko, had not submitted his thesis to the examiners. I replied that Shundenko was simply not capable of writing a thesis and he had neither the necessary theoretical knowledge nor the experimental data. “Nevertheless he must receive a degree,” I was told. “If you can’t teach him, write it for him yourself.” And, however ashamed I am to admit it now, I did in fact dictate a thesis for Shundenko for which he very soon received his doctorate. 122

This was a common practice during the Soviet years. In this way secret service officers and party functionaries (including members of the Central Committee) became scientists and even academicians. After Shundenko left the KGB in the 1960s, he abandoned his biology “career” and became an assistant professor specializing in the history of the Communist Party at Leningrad State University. 123

In the spring of 1938, despite the protest of director of VIR Vavilov, the half-educated Shundenko was appointed deputy director in charge of science. 124Immediately after, he declared that he did not share Academician Vavilov’s “incorrect” views on genetics and plant breeding and started talking about the “enemies” at the institute who would soon be exposed by Academician Lysenko.

Just as Vavilov was dismissed from the VIR, Shundenko disappeared from the institute. As he wrote in 1988 in a letter to the Russian magazine Ogonyok , “following the decision of the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik (Communist) Party [which meant the involvement of Stalin himself], [in 1939] I was transferred from the VIR Deputy Director position to the State Security [NKVD] organs, where I worked irreproachably for 40 years.” 125While at VIR, he pretended to be a loyal supporter of Vavilov and one of his closest friends. In fact, in 1941, Shundenko reappeared at the VIR in the uniform of a NKVD major, heading the commission that investigated imprisoned biologists and agronomists.

Another NKVD secret agent and a graduate student, Grigory Shlykov, continued Shundenko’s work at the institute, actively helping the new director, the agronomist Eikhfeld, who was a devoted Lysenkoist, to destroy the scientific staff. He was arrested after World War II, sentenced, and spent several years in labor camps. He was released after Stalin’s death in 1953. In 1962, he submitted a Doctor of Agriculture Sciences dissertation to the Georgian Agricultural Institute (Tbilisi) for defense. In it, he spoke about Vavilov almost as a personal friend, 126completely ignoring the role he had played in his destruction.

As mentioned in Chapter 1, according to secret service procedures, an investigation file was started after a person had been arrested. It contained the materials that reflected the investigation and supposedly supported the accusations, including original transcripts of interrogations signed by the arrested person. This file was closed before the trial. One more file, a prisoner file, included documents connected with the imprisonment—the movement of the prisoner through different cells in the same prison and between prisons, investigator’s warrants for interrogations, and so on. This file was sent together with the condemned person after the trial to the labor camp (the usual way of punishment) where the prisoner was assigned to serve his or her term. It was kept at the administration of the camp until the end of the prisoner’s term. All documents connected with the life of the prisoner in the camp, including records about work, confiscated letters from and to the prisoner, and so on were put in this file.

Evidently, a undated letter addressed to Stalin written approximately from the end of 1933 until the beginning of 1934, long before Vavilov’s arrest, was moved from his operational (prior to arrest) to his investigation file. 127It was signed by the head of the Economic Department and deputy chairman of the OGPU, Georgii Prokofiev, and head of the OGPU Economic Directorate Lev Mironov. The letter accused Vavilov, Tulaikov, and Director of the All-Union Institute of Animal Breeding E. Liskun of counterrevolutionary activity. Practically everything Vavilov was accused of later during his trial appeared in this letter: the membership in an anti-Soviet organization, anti-Soviet political views, “wrecking,” unapproved contacts with “foreign and emigrant groups,” connections with the French minister of education, who supposedly was close to the French military headquarters, and so forth. In the letter, the two Chekists referred to the testimonies of persons arrested who had been interrogated between February 1932 and March 1933 in connection with the fictional TKP. The authors concluded:

Therefore, on the basis of the data given above, it was discovered that VAVILOV and TULAIKOV had been members of the counterrevolutionary organization in agriculture, the so-called Labor Peasant Party (TKP) which was destroyed by the OGPU in 1930. After the consolidation of counterrevolutionary groups, [they] became active leaders of the counterrevolutionary plot against the Soviet leadership in agriculture.