After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Soviet Union became communist, different in every way from powerful capitalist nations, like the United States of America, Great Britain and France.
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Last updated
Sun, 30-Jun-2024
Biology and Politics – Trofim Lysenko, Stalin’s Geneticist
After the Russian Revolution of 1917, the Soviet Union became communist, different in every way from powerful capitalist nations, like the United States of America, Great Britain and France.
Capitalists believe that the economy works best when it is left alone and that people only work hard for their own benefit, but communists think governments should control the economy so that everyone gets the advantage, not just the rich who own the factories and have enough money to profit from others. Gradually, communists thought, and perhaps some still believe, people would evolve so that they would become less greedy and more concerned about the welfare of all.
This may seem outdated nowadays, but capitalism looked likely to destroy itself in the 1920s: the Wall Street Crash saw businessmen jumping to their deaths from tall buildings in major American cities; British workers called a general strike so that the Army had to supply essential goods and services to the population; and Germans who were lucky enough to have jobs had to carry their salaries home in suitcases because inflation was out of control.
The communist dream of a different society where nobody had to worry about food, work, housing and health was surely better than the capitalist reality of hunger, unemployment, cold and sickness.
In 1928, the new leader of the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin, launched a government-controlled five-year plan to push Russian industry and agriculture forward. This was necessary to develop the country because it was a long way behind its European neighbours and the USA. Stalin took away the land from small farmers and made huge farms which could supply food for all the people.
Although Stalin’s scheme for industrialisation worked well and saw the Soviet Union quickly become a major manufacturer, it was disastrous in terms of food production and caused hunger – even death – across the Soviet Union. At the same time, individual farmers and agricultural scientists were killed in their hundreds of thousands when they did not reach the targets that their leader wanted. Stalin’s dream of feeding the Russian population was about to collapse.
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was born in Ukraine in 1898, then part of the Russian Empire and, after 1917, just inside the western border of the Soviet Union. His parents were poor farmers. He had little education and was not sorry for it. He often said that he did not need large laboratories to do his biology experiments, just a few flower pots kept in the warm. His working class background was something that he constantly used in his career, so much so that Lysenko became known as the “barefoot scientist”.
When other, more careful scientists were worried about Stalin’s unrealistic goals for food production and suggested to the leader that they were unscientific, Lysenko offered solutions. He quickly became one of the Soviet Union’s most important biologists. His more cautious colleagues, concerned about unrealistic estimates of future growth, were shot.
Yet, what made Lysenko different from other scientists in the Soviet Union was his results. They were promising, quick and simple. Where other scientists did experiment after experiment, slowly building their knowledge through careful research, Lysenko shouted about his success even before he had any results. His first experiment was getting peas to grow in winter. Then, before anyone could check if the peas were really growing as fast as he said, he did the same with wheat. Again, he promised huge crops. This was better than Stalin’s wildest dreams. The only difficulty was that no other scientist could repeat Lysenko’s experiments and get the same happy results.
An example of Lysenko’s schemes to get food on the Russian table was his experiment with raising rabbits. He suggested that these animals were the answer to the shortage of meat and warm clothing and advised the government to give some to each family. Rabbits were famous for the speed that they reproduced and would feed and clothe the people in the icy winter months, when temperatures could fall to minus twenty and thirty and nothing could grow. However, when there was nothing for the people to eat, they gave nothing to the rabbits and so the animals died. Billions were thrown away on this experiment, most of it because no small-scale preparation took place. When failure came, it was at a huge cost.
Nevertheless, when millions upon millions of Soviet citizens were sent to their deaths – often for no reason at all – Lysenko continued at the top of his profession for decades, although one after another of his costly projects failed. How did he manage? The answer is that he successfully confused politics with science.
A contemporary of Lysenko’s, the great Soviet biologist, Vavilov, travelled abroad, sharing his thinking with scientists working in the capitalist west and using their work to improve his own. Lysenko called him an enemy of communism and Soviet people. Vavilov was arrested and sentenced to death in the early 1940s, although he starved in prison in 1943 before he could be executed. Many of Vavilov’s followers shared his end. Plant genetics did not recover from this waste of scientific talent for twenty years in the Soviet Union.
Ideological considerations even influenced science itself. Stalin and Lysenko believed that biological evolution led to progress, just as socialism followed and was, therefore, better than capitalism. In a bizarre experiment in 1948, Lysenko arranged for families in Siberia, the coldest region of the country, to plant seeds of the same type of tree next to each other, even though this meant there was not enough space for them all to grow healthily.
He believed that weaker trees would ‘commit suicide’ so that the stronger ones would survive and grow strong. This was, of course, a lunatic development of Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ theory, that the best examples of a species live, while the weaker ones die. Needless to add, in 1952, nearly all the trees were dead. Yet, Lysenko’s idea was a mirror of Stalin’s belief that the present generation needs to suffer for future ones. Trees commit suicide to enrich later generations of trees.
And then, of course, there was Stalin’s refusal to use science that came from the capitalist west. He ordered a group of nuclear physicists to make the atom bomb without using Einstein’s equations. When they eventually complained that there was no other way to produce them, Stalin agreed but said that they would all be shot later so that nobody would find out how they were made.
In 1948, Lysenko was no longer a scientist, but the Director of the Institute of Genetics at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Even after Stalin’s death in 1953, he managed to keep his job for a decade.
In 1935, Lysenko, the pseudo-scientist, was given the job of destroying harmful agricultural ideas. He sent hundreds of scientists who did not think like he did to their deaths. He is, of course, considered a fraud. By contrast, the name of his colleague, Vavilov, who starved to death in prison, is used for the All-Russia Institute of Plant Industry and his face has appeared on stamps.
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