Vladimir Vernadsky

On March 12 (February 28, old style) 140 years ago, the scientist Vladimir Vernadsky (1863-1945) was born in St. Petersburg. His scientific interests were wide ranging: from mineralogy and crystallography to history and philosophy. His life story is in many ways representative of the Russian intellectual of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — a time of wars, revolutions and great scientific discoveries.

Vernadsky started his scientific career in tsarist Russia. He taught at the Universities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, headed the Mineralogy Museum, and wrote books. But he also became a leader of Russia’s democratic movement. Together with Peter Struve, Nikolai Berdyayev, Semyon Frank, Sergei Bulgakov and others, he launched the “League of Liberation” (1903), which later became the Constitutional-Democratic Party [Kadets]. Vernadsky was a member of the State Council, and his signature was among four in the 1917 telegram suggesting that Nicholas II abdicate.

After October 1917, Vernadsky had to go into hiding, as he was among those who had called the Bolsheviks “oppressors.” He went to the Crimea, where he became rector of the Tauride University. He intended to emigrate to Great Britain, but changed his mind when all his colleagues pleaded with him not to leave. Wherever he went, Vernadsky tried to save archives, books and items of cultural value.

Vernadsky was finally arrested by the Cheka in July, 1921. He was soon released through the intercession of his friend Nikolai Semashko, People’s Commissar for Healthcare, who had been Venadsky’s student at Moscow State University. In 1922, Vernadsky managed to escape to Paris, having been invited there by the Sorbonne University. There he taught and studied alternative energy sources. He was especially interested in nuclear power.

Feeling it was his duty to find ways to connect old Russian culture with that of post-October, and sure of the Bolsheviks’ inevitable fall from power, Vernadsky returned to Leningrad in 1926, where he became head of the Institute of Nuclear Power Research and opened a biogeochemical laboratory. In 1936, Vernadsky, who had long seen living things as part of a biosphere encompassing the earth’s natural systems, accepted Le Roaux’s theory of the noosphere — a complex of minerals, plants and animals existing under the influence of a man — as the new state governing the earth’s environment. In 1940, Vernadsky was one of the scientists who initiated nuclear research in the Soviet Union.

From 1927 to 1936, Vernadsky was allowed to travel to Europe, where he was able to work and to see his son Georgy, who had moved to the US in 1927 and became a respected historian and professor at Yale. But Vernadsky did not try to emigrate; he felt that continuing his scientific work was the only thing that could save Russia. He was a great scientist and was untouched by the purges of the Stalin era, yet many of his ideas did not receive official support. Vernadsky died in Moscow on January 6, 1945. His complete works were not published until the 1990s.