Nikolai Vavilov

Nikolai Vavilov
A plant grown in Russia in 1926 from seed Vavilov collected at Gui-Akhen, Afghanistan, in 1924: the neotype of Cannabis sativa subsp. indica var. afghanica (McPartland and Small 2020, fig. 5a, CC BY 4.0)
Born	25 November 1887 Moscow, Russian Empire
Died	January 1943 Saratov, Soviet Union
Nationality	Russian
Occupation	Botanist and geneticist
Institutions	Saratov Higher Agricultural Classes; Bureau of Applied Botany; All-Union Institute of Plant Industry (VIR)
Known for	Collecting expeditions for crop plants; centres of origin of cultivated plants; the cannabis names var. spontanea, f. afghanica and var. kafiristanica
Collector name on accessions	N.I. Vavilov
Botanical author abbreviation	Vavilov

Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov (25 November 1887 – January 1943) was a Russian botanist and geneticist. From 1920 he headed the Bureau of Applied Botany, which became the All-Union Institute of Plant Industry (VIR) in 1930. He led collecting expeditions for crop plants in Asia, Africa and the Americas.^{: 8, 40, 157} He published three names in Cannabis: C. sativa var. spontanea (1922), for wild-type hemp near Saratov; C. sativa f. afghanica (1926); and, with D. D. Bukinich, C. indica var. kafiristanica (1929). The last two came from his 1924 expedition to Afghanistan.^{: 86, 97, 100} A plant grown from seed he collected at Gui-Akhen in 1924 is the neotype of Cannabis sativa subsp. indica var. afghanica (Vavilov s.n., Gui-Akhen (1924)).^: 97 He was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in Saratov in January 1943.^{: 107, 110}

Herbarium databases use the name N. I. Vavilov. His botanical author abbreviation is Vavilov; the International Plant Names Index also lists Vav.

Moscow, Cambridge and Saratov

Vavilov was born in Moscow. His father, Ivan Il'ich Vavilov, was a textile merchant of peasant background and a leader in the Moscow City Council. Vavilov graduated from the Moscow (Petrovsky) Agricultural Institute in the spring of 1911.^: 9 From August 1913 to October 1914 he was abroad, mainly in Britain, where he trained under William Bateson at the John Innes Horticultural Institute at Merton and under Rowland Biffen at the School of Agriculture in Cambridge. He returned to Russia when the First World War broke out.^: 11

In 1917 he became professor of agriculture and plant breeding at the Saratov Higher Agricultural Classes and moved to Saratov that autumn.^: 13 In 1920, after the death of R. E. Regel, he was elected head of the Bureau of Applied Botany.^: 8 The bureau's successor, the All-Union Institute of Applied Botany and New Crops, was formed in 1924 and renamed the All-Union Institute of Plant Industry (VIR) in 1930. Vavilov was president of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL) until 1935 and its vice-president until August 1940. From 1931 he was president of the Geographic Society of the USSR.^{: 26, 40–41} He was elected to the Royal Society and the Linnean Society of London.^: 43

Expeditions

In 1916 Vavilov collected crops in northern Iran, then followed the Russian–Afghan border to the Pamirs.^: 12 Of the Pamir villages he later wrote:

In some villages there are stands of hemp among the fields of cotton and along the fences. At first I thought that this hemp was used for twine. Later it became evident that the hemp was sown to obtain hashīsh.

— Nikolai Vavilov, Five Continents (English translation, 1997), quoted by McPartland and Small (2020)^: 38

Afghanistan, 1924

Permission to enter Afghanistan took about a year and a half to obtain. The agronomic engineer D. D. Bukinich and the breeder V. N. Lebedev travelled with Vavilov, listed as couriers of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. The party crossed the border near Kushka on 19 July 1924 and returned there on 1 December, with an escort of Afghan soldiers. Splitting at times into smaller groups, it covered about 5,000 km, including Kafiristan in the south-east of the country, then practically unknown to Europeans.^: 56–57 The route took in Herat, the Hindu Kush, Badakhshan, Kabul and Kandahar.^: 157 The expedition added about 7,000 accessions to the collection. The Russian Geographic Society awarded Vavilov its Przhevalsky Medal for it.^{: 26, 59} Vavilov and Bukinich published the results in Agricultural Afghanistan (1929).^: 57: 415

Vavilov spent five months in the country. He met farmers growing cannabis for nashi or anasha, words he translated as hashish. He sent the seed to his assistant Tatiana Serebriakova, who grew it in Russia and measured the plants.^{: 7, 30}

Central Asia and Xinjiang

In 1925 Vavilov visited the oasis of Khorezm with the agronomist V. K. Kobelev.^: 59 In 1929 he travelled with M. G. Popov through Xinjiang, by way of Kashgar, Aksu, Kucha, Ürümqi, Kulja, Yarkand and Hotan.^: 157 In 1931 he wrote that hemp thickets filled the vacant lots of Yarkand.^: 20

Cannabis

Cannabis sativa var. spontanea (1922)

Vavilov published C. sativa var. spontanea in 1922, in Polevye kul'tury Yugo-Vostoka ("Field crops of the South-East").^{: 423: 112: 186} The name covered the same population of wild-type plants near Saratov that Janischewsky described in 1924 as C. ruderalis. Both men worked at Saratov University and botanised together along the Volga. Vavilov kept to spontanea in his later work.^{: 86: 6–7} Three Soviet texts of 1934–1939 preferred Janischewsky's C. ruderalis.^: 7

Ernest Small and Arthur Cronquist accepted var. spontanea in 1976, choosing it over Janischewsky's name on priority.^: 7 They chose a lectotype at WIR: Antropova 121, grown in 1925 from seed collected near Saratov in 1921. They noted that Vavilov's names are hard to typify because he usually collected seeds or fruits, not herbarium specimens.^: 423

The Afghan names, 1926 and 1929

Vavilov described C. sativa f. afghanica in 1926 from plants he found along the Kunar River, from Gursalik through Chekhosarai to Jalalabad.^: 97: 19 He called it "a morphological link between the wild and the cultivated races of hemp". John McPartland and Small argue that the evidence in the 1929 book points to a domesticated plant.^: 99

In Agricultural Afghanistan Vavilov and Bukinich described the wild plants of eastern Afghanistan as C. indica var. kafiristanica: small, much-branched plants with short internodes and small leaves with tapered, obovate leaflets.^: 415 They moved afghanica from C. sativa to C. indica, calling it a variety on page 380, a form on page 381 and a form of var. kafiristanica on page 382.^: 21 In the same treatment they placed large-leaved plants grown in Afghanistan for drug use in C. sativa.^: 410 McPartland and Small attribute that decision to Serebriakova.^: 30 Small and Cronquist called the 1929 book the last publication in which Vavilov dealt with the taxonomy of Cannabis.^: 410

Types from his seed

Vavilov collected seed. Serebriakova grew it at Russian experiment stations and made the herbarium vouchers.^: 21 The sheets are in the herbarium of the N.I. Vavilov All-Russian Institute of Plant Genetic Resources (WIR) in Saint Petersburg.^: 97: 12

• In 1976 Small and Cronquist made WIR 3952, a plant grown in 1927 from his seed no. 599 from Chekhosarai, the lectotype of var. kafiristanica.^: 428 Chekhosarai (now Asadabad) is in Kunar Province, not Kafiristan.^: 22 In 2020 McPartland and Small treated var. kafiristanica under var. asperrima (Regel), the older name, and designated the same sheet its epitype.^: 100–101
• No specimen labelled afghanica exists at WIR. McPartland and Small chose a plant grown in 1926 at Maikop from his Gui-Akhen seed (WIR 609, 3945) for the neotype, and Schultes 26505 (1971) from near Kandahar for its epitype.^: 97–98 Vavilov saw cannabis grown for hashish at Gui-Akhen.^: 21
• Other WIR sheets from the 1924 seed come from Fayzabad in Badakhshan, Marwa in Herat Province, Sheberghan and Kafiristan; the Kafiristan sheet is labelled C. sativa var. spontanea. A sheet that Lebedev collected at Radam Obe near Wama on 14 August 1924 is in the LE herbarium in Saint Petersburg.^{: 12, 79–81}

Small and Cronquist also cite a sheet Kafiristan, Vavilov 5667 at LE among the specimens of var. kafiristanica, in the same list as Singh 48 and Koelz 1666.^: 428

Cannabis specimens

Accessions collected by Vavilov:

	Country	Collected	Grown	Repository
Vavilov s.n., Chekhosarai (1924)	Afghanistan	1924	1927	N.I. Vavilov All-Russian Institute of Plant Genetic Resources
Vavilov s.n., Gui-Akhen (1924)	Afghanistan	1924	1926	N.I. Vavilov All-Russian Institute of Plant Genetic Resources
Vavilov s.n., Kafiristan (1924)	Afghanistan	1924	1925	Komarov Botanical Institute

Accessions filed under names Vavilov published:

	Name	Country	Collected	Repository
Koelz 1666 (1931)	Cannabis sativa var. kafiristanica (Vavilov) E.Small & Cronquist	India	7 March 1931	New York Botanical Garden
Lansdell 630 (s.d.)	Cannabis sativa var. spontanea Vavilov	South Africa		KwaZulu-Natal Herbarium (NH)
Larionov 65 (1876)	Cannabis sativa L. subsp. sativa var. spontanea Vav.	China	26 June 1876	Moscow University Herbarium
Schultes 26505 (1971)	Cannabis sativa subsp. indica var. afghanica (Vavilov) McPartl. & E.Small	Afghanistan	December 1971	Harvard University Herbaria
Singh 48 (1928)	Cannabis sativa var. kafiristanica (Vavilov) E.Small & Cronquist	India	1928	New York Botanical Garden
Trofimov s.n., Hotan (1940)	Cannabis sativa L. var. spontanea Vav.	China	4 October 1940	Moscow University Herbarium
UMS-KOR-UNK-0019720001-R2	Cannabis sativa var. kafiristanica (Vavilov) E.Small & Cronquist	Korea		Harvard University Herbaria
Vavilov s.n., Gui-Akhen (1924)	Cannabis sativa subsp. indica var. afghanica (Vavilov) McPartl. & E.Small	Afghanistan	1924	N.I. Vavilov All-Russian Institute of Plant Genetic Resources
Zamatkinov 103/11 (1927)	Cannabis sativa L. subsp. sativa var. spontanea Vavilov	Mongolia	15 August 1927	New York Botanical Garden

Centres of origin

In 1922 Vavilov published "The law of homologous series in variation" in the Journal of Genetics. In a letter of 1923 he wrote that the centres of origin of cultivated plants lay in mountain regions, not along the valleys of the great rivers as he had thought. He set out the concept in 1926.^: 84 In 1935 he named and mapped eight centres of diversity. Two of them, the Central Asiatic and the Indian, were his centres for Cannabis indica.^: 103

Arrest and death

Mark Popovsky, who read Vavilov's NKVD file in the 1950s, found that a covert investigation of him began in 1931. Denunciations increased after 1937, when Vavilov's relations with Trofim Lysenko broke off.^: 107 In the summer of 1940 Vavilov led a collecting party in the western regions of Ukraine and Belarus. He was arrested at Chernovtsy on the evening of 6 August 1940 and charged with sabotage and spying. The Military Collegium of the Supreme Court sentenced him to death on 9 July 1941.^: 106–110 On 24 October 1941 he was moved to the prison at Saratov. He died in its hospital in January 1943 and was buried in a common grave in Saratov. He was rehabilitated in 1955.^{: 110, 117}

See also

• Cannabis taxonomy
• Cannabis ruderalis
• Cannabis indica
• Feral and ruderal Cannabis
• Richard Evans Schultes