Lysenkoism influenced by Lamarckism
Rise
Isaak Izrailevich Prezent brought Lysenko to public attention, using Soviet propaganda to portray him as a genius who had developed a new, revolutionary agricultural technique. Lysenko's resulting popularity gave him a platform to denounce theoretical genetics and to promote his own agricultural practices. He was, in turn, supported by the Soviet propaganda machine, which overstated his successes, cited faked experimental results, and omitted mention of his failures.Lysenko's political success was mostly due to his appeal to the Communist Party and Soviet ideology. Following the disastrous collectivization efforts of the late 1920s, Lysenko's "new" methods were seen by Soviet officials as paving the way to an "agricultural revolution." Lysenko himself was from a peasant family, and was an enthusiastic advocate of Leninism. The Party-controlled newspapers applauded Lysenko's "practical" efforts and questioned the motives of his critics. Lysenko's "revolution in agriculture" had a powerful propaganda advantage over the academics, who urged the patience and observation required for science. Lysenko was admitted into the hierarchy of the Communist Party, and was put in charge of agricultural affairs. He used his position to denounce biologists as "fly-lovers and people haters," and to decry the "wreckers" in biology, who he claimed were trying to disable the Soviet economy and cause it to fail. Furthermore, he denied the distinction between theoretical and applied biology and concepts such as control groups and statistics in general:
We biologists do not take the slightest interest in mathematical calculations, which confirm the useless statistical formulae of the Mendelists … We do not want to submit to blind chance … We maintain that biological regularities do not resemble mathematical laws.
Lysenko presented himself as a follower of Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin, a well-known and well-liked Soviet horticulturist, but unlike Michurin, he advocated a form of Lamarckism, insisting on using only hybridization and grafting, as non-genetic techniques.Support from Joseph Stalin increased Lysenko's momentum and popularity. In 1935, Lysenko compared his opponents in biology to the peasants who still resisted the Soviet government's collectivization strategy, saying that by opposing his theories, the traditional geneticists were setting themselves against Marxism. Stalin was in the audience when this speech was made, and he was the first one to stand and applaud, calling out "Bravo, Comrade Lysenko. Bravo."Joseph Stalin personally edited a speech by Lysenko in a way that reflected his support, despite his skepticism toward Lysenko's assertion that all science is class-oriented in nature. The official support emboldened Lysenko, and gave him and Prezent free rein to slander any geneticists who still spoke out against him. After the appointment of Lysenko as head of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences, classical genetics began to be publicly called "fascist science" and many of Lysenkoism's opponents, such as his former mentor Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov, were imprisoned or executed because of their denunciations, although Lysenko wasn't directly responsible for this incident.On August 7, 1948, at the end of a week-long session organized by Lysenko and approved by Stalin, the Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL) announced that from that point on Lysenkoism would be taught as "the only correct theory." Soviet scientists were forced to denounce any work that contradicted Lysenko. Criticism of Lysenko was denounced as "bourgeois" or "fascist," and analogous "non-bourgeois" theories also flourished in other fields such as linguistics and art in the Soviet academy at this time. Perhaps the only opponents of Lysenkoism during Stalin's lifetime to escape liquidation were from the small community of Soviet nuclear physicists: as Tony Judt has observed, "It is significant that Stalin left his nuclear physicists alone and never presumed to second guess their calculations. Stalin may well have been mad but he was not stupid."