Waning Gibbous

In Memory of a Good Russian

The New Moon recedes from its fullness, the visible part of its face decreasing with each day. And the face of the man in this photograph is visible in the dim, half lit darkness of the gulag where it was taken. This is a mugshot (to be exact), the year of his birth and Russian name written just above the point at which the first button on his suit fastens his lapel. He wears no jumpsuit, holds no prisoner number save his eyes—two, dimmed, confronting the camera in a stare of defiant confusion. His eyebrows are turned like apostrophes without words to possess what is happening to him.

It’s clear that a particular Soviet hunger is working his skin like a growing seed works a fresh soil—displacing, burrowing, plunging tap root and rhizome through the matrix of dark matter, groping for nutrients, for minerals, for moisture. Even though, at the time of year this was taken, chlorophyll from the sun was meager.

If we take the year of his birth (1887), double it and add two zeros, we have a good estimate of the number of seeds this man saved: 377,400.

Saratov Gulag prisoner Nikolai Vavilov tramped the world to identify them, to gather them, to catalog and save them in his St. Petersburg seed bank, the first of its kind in the world. His work was concerned with a concept he created—genetic erosion—which sought to protect the loss of diversity within seed varieties. Recognizing that declining diversity in our seeds threatened the entire human race, Vavilov saved millions of lives by protecting precious germplasm from extinction. He sojourned five continents, traveled tens of thousands of miles, spoke six languages, and filled his bank with species which keep our bellies full today: each time we bite an apple, shell a walnut, or chew a crust of bread, we are eating his work.

That man is now dying in this portrait of hunger—look, his eyes are open but his mouth is closed. His face is round, though not fully illuminated, and the photograph, really, is two—what he sees when looking at us is different than what he sees when looking away.

In both photographs each eye looks to me like a seed—perhaps flax, perhaps sesame, maybe melon, maybe Lima bean—elliptical, half illuminated, waning gibbous like the moon on the night of his death, waning gibbous like the moon will be tonight, as if all the light of a full moon could not, would not, open them further.

After a full lunch in the Kremlin Stalin, wiping bread crumbs and pork fat from the hem of his mustache, condemned Vavilov to death. Look, he said, starve this man who brought us seeds but not food. So while on a collection trip in the Ukraine, the NKVD hoodwinked Vavilov, his pockets full of seeds (did they spill when they split his head with a zinc pipe? did his cracking ribs make the same sound of roots being pulled?), and brought him to prison for a rich diet of beatings, confessions, and apologies. For what? For looking too closely at the Earth, for speaking English, for not aligning the dialectic with rapid harvests, for believing too much in Mendel and not in Marx.

Genetic erosion begins.

It is January 26, 1943. 236 miles upriver from the Battle of Stalingrad, where the Russians are starving themselves and the Nazis, Nikolai Vavilov dies of hunger in the Saratov Gulag with that look on his face. And I can’t take my eyes off his eyes—their hardness, their hunger—which are planted in his huge forehead as if in soil, as if in a soil which will not yield, soil which won’t release the roots of something it worked so hard to grow. And that look on his face, a curse, a prayer, from the silent seeds of eyes, his eyes, asking that will someone, will please just anyone, remember to water our garden?

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Vavilov in the field, 1920s.

When much of the world seems to be falling apart, I look for stories about those who try to keep it together.

For more information about Nikolai Vavilov, these two books are great explorations of his explorations: Parkin and Nabhan. And this podcast tells the story of how colleagues of Vavilov protected his bank in St. Petersburg during its Siege in the Second World War. Nearly thirty of them died: though surrounded by 187,000 different varieties of seeds, they chose hunger in order to protect genetic diversity.

From a recent textbook: “Biodiversity provides the food we eat. Throughout our history, human beings have used at least 7,000 plant species and several thousand animal species for food. Today, industrial agriculture has narrowed our diet. Globally, we now get 90% of our food from just 15 crop species and 8 livestock species, and this lack of diversity leaves us vulnerable to crop failures. In a world in which 800 million people go hungry, we can improve food security (the guarantee of an adequate, safe, nutritious, and reliable food supply) by finding sustainable ways to harvest or farm wild species and rare crop varieties.” This is what Vavilov was doing all along.

Keep in mind that each time a seed is planted, a new story is told.