Vladimir Vernadsky

Soil pits with Dokuchaev, crystals in Paris

Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky was born in St Petersburg on 12 March 1863 (28 February in the old calendar). His father, Ivan, was an economist and professor active in the liberal movement; the family moved to Kharkiv when Vladimir was five and returned to St Petersburg in 1876. From 1881 to 1885 he studied natural sciences at St Petersburg University, where his teachers included Dmitri Mendeleev and the soil scientist Vasily Dokuchaev. Dokuchaev mattered most, and took him on soil expeditions in 1882 and 1884. Vernadsky’s first publication, on the geology and soils of a district of Poltava province, was prepared under his direction, and Dokuchaev’s way of treating soil as the joint product of rock, water, plants and animals is the spark that the geochemist Andrei Lapo sees in Vernadsky’s later biosphere.

As a student he joined a circle of idealistic friends around Dmitri Shakhovskoy, the start of a friendship that lasted more than fifty years, and there he met Natalia Staritskaya. They married in 1886, and their son George was born the next year. In 1888 the university sent him abroad to prepare for a professorship: crystallography with Paul Groth in Munich, then Paris, in Ferdinand Fouqué’s laboratory at the Collège de France and with the physical chemist Henry Le Chatelier. In 1889 he represented Dokuchaev at the Paris Exposition, where the Russian soils display won a gold medal. His Paris studio portrait dates from that year.

A Moscow school of minerals, and a walkout

In 1890 the geologist Alexei Pavlov brought him to Moscow University, where he taught mineralogy and crystallography for twenty years, becoming a full professor in 1902. His master’s thesis (1891) on the sillimanite group led him to a theory of how aluminium sits in the silicates; his doctorate (1897) dealt with gliding in crystals. He rebuilt the mineral cabinet with his students and made field excursions part of a mineralogist’s training, taking them to the Urals, Crimea, the Caucasus and Fergana. In his own later description, every student made a crystallographic study and a full chemical analysis of a mineral, chosen so that the result would be new. Minerals, he taught, were not fixed museum objects but products of a particular stage of chemical processes in the Earth’s crust. His favourite student, Alexander Fersman, joined him in 1903.

Politics ran alongside the laboratory. He sat as a zemstvo deputy, joined the Union of Liberation, and in 1905 was a founding member of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) party, serving on its central committee from 1908. The Academy and universities elected him to the State Council, the upper chamber; he left it in 1906 when the tsar dissolved the first Duma and was elected again in 1908. The Moscow security police kept a file on him and, from 1903, read the family’s post.

The break with the university came in 1911. In January the education minister Lev Kasso banned student meetings and empowered the police to close the university. When the rector, Alexander Manuilov, and his two deputies resigned in protest, Kasso had them dismissed and barred from teaching. On 3 February (old style) Vernadsky handed in his resignation with a group of colleagues; by the end of term roughly 130 teachers, about a third of the staff, had gone. He moved to St Petersburg and the Academy of Sciences, which had elected him in 1906 and made him a full academician in 1912.

Radium hunter, then organiser of war science

At a British Association meeting in Dublin in 1908 he heard John Joly on the geological implications of radioactivity, and the subject never let him go. In 1910 he visited Marie Curie in Paris, and on 29 December 1910 he addressed the Academy’s general meeting on “The tasks of the day in the field of radium”, arguing for a systematic survey of the empire’s radioactive minerals. The Academy funded radium expeditions to the Urals, the Caucasus, Fergana and the Tyuya-Muyun deposit, Lake Baikal and Transbaikalia, and the outbreak of war in 1914 found him leading one of them in Siberia. 1914 is also the year the word “biosphere”, coined by the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess in 1875, first appears in Vernadsky’s published work.

The war gave him an institution. In his own later account, it became clear “entirely unexpectedly, in the midst of the war” that Tsarist Russia had no precise data on what were by then called strategic raw materials. In 1915 he proposed, and then chaired, the Academy’s Commission for the Study of Natural Productive Forces, known as KEPS, which pulled academicians, government geologists, mining engineers and students into a rapid inventory of the country’s resources. He chaired it until 1930. After the February Revolution of 1917 he sat on Provisional Government commissions, and in August he became its assistant minister of education, in charge of higher education and science.

Civil war: an academy in Kyiv, typhus at Yalta, a Cheka cell

In the summer of 1917, ill with tuberculosis, he stayed at the family’s dacha at Shishaki in Poltava province and began a long manuscript on living matter, not published until 1978. He was back in Petrograd for the ministry, and his diary follows the Kadet party and the Provisional Government through the Bolshevik seizure of power until mid-November. Later that month the Academy sent him south for his health and his research. “In 1917–1918,” he wrote in 1943, “I happened to be, entirely by chance, in the Ukraine, and was unable to return to Petrograd until 1921.” He lectured wherever he landed, in Poltava, Kyiv, Yalta, Simferopol, Novorossiysk and Rostov, and read everything he could find on the chemistry of life. His Poltava diary sets that work beside the pogroms and killings of the revolution.

In 1918 the Hetman government of Pavlo Skoropadsky, through its education minister Mykola Vasylenko, asked him to plan a Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. He led the commission that drafted it and became its first president, lectured at Kyiv University, and for a time worked at a biological station near Staroselye on the Dnieper, where the young Theodosius Dobzhansky was one of his assistants. He declined Ukrainian citizenship. In the same year he left the Kadet party, and the reasons are reported differently: the Encyclopedia of Ukraine says he objected to the Russian chauvinism of its Ukrainian wing, while Jacques Grinevald’s chronology has him feeling “morally incapable of participating in the civil war”. Ukraine and Russia both claim him now; a Russian liberal who built a Ukrainian academy fits neither flag neatly.

In 1919 he travelled to the White command in Rostov on Academy business and ended up in Crimea. Early in 1920, at a dacha above Yalta, he caught typhus and nearly died. When he could write again, on 9 March, he recorded what he had lived through in fever: not a prophetic dream, he insisted, since he never lost awareness of the room, but an intense vision of the rest of his life. In it he went to America, founded and directed an enormous international institute for the study of living matter, retired in his eighties to a house with a garden nearby, and died between 83 and 85 while finishing a book of last reflections. He would in fact die at 81, in Moscow. The vision is a fair map of what he wanted: research institutions on a new scale, aimed at life as a planetary phenomenon.

In 1920 he became rector of the Taurida University in Simferopol, under the protection of Wrangel’s White army. When the Reds took Crimea, George left with the evacuation and went into emigration; Vernadsky, Natalia and their daughter Nina stayed. The new authorities judged it politically unacceptable to leave Vernadsky in Crimea, and in February 1921 the family was sent north under guard. In Petrograd, on 14 July 1921, armed men searched the flat and arrested him. During the search he finished Vasily Bartold’s book on Ulugh Beg; at the Cheka they took away his walking stick and his copy of Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe, and he was taken, he thought, to the Shpalernaya prison. The Academy’s president, Alexander Karpinsky, and its secretary, Sergei Oldenburg, telegraphed Lenin and the commissars, and he was released. Two days later, on a train to Murmansk, he wrote the whole episode into his diary.

Paris lectures and a book finished in Prague

In January 1922 the institutions working on radioactivity in Petrograd were merged into the Radium Institute, with Vernadsky as director until 1939, Fersman as his deputy and the chemist Vitaly Khlopin as secretary. Khlopin had produced the country’s first concentrated radium preparations at the Bondyuga works only weeks before. Later in 1922, on an invitation from the rector of the Sorbonne, Paul Appell, he and Natalia went to Paris. He lectured on geochemistry in the winter of 1922–23, worked at the Natural History Museum with Alfred Lacroix and at Marie Curie’s Radium Institute, and was received by Henri Bergson. The lectures became La Géochimie (1924).

Paris gave him a philosophical audience. The Bergsonian philosopher Édouard Le Roy and the Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin knew the Sorbonne lectures and discussed them with him. What Paris did not give him was a laboratory. He published a plea for a biogeochemical laboratory in 1923 and won a grant from the Rosenthal Foundation in 1924 to measure what he called the geochemical energy of life, but no permanent Western money followed. He left Paris in December 1925, finished Biosfera in Prague, and returned to Leningrad in March 1926. George, now teaching in Prague, and Nina, now a doctor, stayed abroad. Grinevald counts lack of funding, loyalty to his Academy, obligation to friends and patriotism among the reasons; he also notes that the Academy’s bicentenary in 1925 had left Vernadsky’s name out, a likely political warning.

A laboratory of living matter, under watch

Back in Leningrad he set up a Department of Living Matter within the Academy, which in 1928 became the Biogeochemical Laboratory and after his death the Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry. Its job was to measure what The Biosphere had argued. In 1926 he wrote instructions for determining the geochemical energy of annual flowering plants and of groups of insects. The laboratory analysed the elemental make-up of species, and he came to argue that their atomic composition is “as characteristic a feature as their morphological form”, varying less between samples from Kyiv and Leningrad than a mineral’s composition does. In 1933 he reported, with B. Brunovsky and G. Kunasheva, mesothorium concentrated in duckweed. He led the Academy’s heavy-water commission from 1934 and argued that organisms sort the isotopes of an element; his editor credits him with first proposing isotopic fractionation by life in Russia.

The politics closed in. From 1929 the Communist Party moved to take over the Academy, and Grinevald describes Vernadsky as leading an unsuccessful resistance. In 1930 the history-of-science commission he had founded was turned into an institute under Nikolai Bukharin. His friend and collaborator Boris Lichkov was arrested and deported in 1934; they kept writing. His general writing became hard to publish: Scientific Thought as a Planetary Phenomenon, written in 1938, waited until 1977. In July 1940 he noted that two of his books had just appeared “disfigured by the censor”, one after a year and eight months in the hands of Glavlit.

The diary records the Terror from inside the Academy. On the night of 26–27 July 1938 the NKVD arrested Dmitri Shakhovskoy, the friend of his student years, a former Kadet leader and minister in the Provisional Government. Vernadsky wrote letters, and on 20 December 1938 he went to see Andrei Vyshinsky, the prosecutor of the show trials. He noted the portraits on the office wall, Lenin, Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov and Yezhov, adding his own “(sic!)”, and that Vyshinsky was “emphatically courteous” and promised to soften any sentence. The family was later told that Shakhovskoy had died in “distant camps” in January 1940. The editors of the diary record that he was shot on 15 April 1939, a fact released only in 1991.

A New York Times clipping and the uranium commission

In June 1940, at the Academy’s rest home at Uzkoye outside Moscow, he received a clipping from the New York Times of 5 May, sent by George from America, about the new atomic energy of uranium-235. There was not a single copy of Physical Review in Moscow. “I never thought,” he wrote, “that I would live to see the use of intra-atomic energy posed as a real problem.” On 25 June he and Khlopin proposed to the Academy’s geology division that the country’s uranium ores be studied urgently, and a three-man group was formed under his chairmanship with Khlopin and Fersman. On 12 July the three sent a note to Nikolai Bulganin, deputy head of the Soviet government.

On 15 July Vernadsky put the case to the Academy’s presidium. It was, he wrote, “not a very successful report, but the result is achieved”, and “the vast majority do not understand the historical significance of the moment”. Offered the chair of the new Commission on the Uranium Problem, he declined on grounds of age and pressed for Khlopin, director of the Radium Institute; by 30 July the commission had Khlopin as chairman, Vernadsky and Abram Ioffe as his deputies, and Igor Kurchatov and Pyotr Kapitsa among its members. Grinevald’s chronology, which names Ioffe as chairman, is contradicted by the diary.

This was not yet a bomb programme. Grinevald writes that Vernadsky and his colleagues knew the military implications but cared chiefly about humanity’s long-term energy needs. The work stalled. On 17 June 1941, five days before the German invasion, he and Khlopin were still petitioning against a ministry plan to mothball the Taboshar uranium mine in Central Asia, which he blamed on “the routine and ignorance of Soviet bureaucrats”. The Soviet atomic project proper began in 1942–43, led by Kurchatov, without him; the historian Kendall Bailes suggests the government did not fully trust a man with family ties in the West and a liberal past, and found no evidence that Vernadsky ever met Stalin. In August 1940 he had also signed, with the other academician-geologists, a petition to Lavrentiy Beria asking that the crystallographer Anatoly Boldyrev be allowed back to scientific work.