Short answers, pulled from the story.
Lysenkoism was a pseudoscientific Soviet biological theory that began to rise in the 1920s after Trofim Lysenko claimed wheat seeds could be transformed into autumn varieties. The movement gained official state power starting from July 31 to the 7th of August 1948 when the Academy held a session approved by Stalin.
Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet agronomist who claimed that environmental changes like humidity and low temperature could transform plant species and alter heritable characteristics. He dismissed genes as bourgeois inventions and stated that science should reject random mutations while claiming grafted trees permanently change stock heredity.
The Soviet Union banned classical genetics research through Order No. 1208 on the 23rd of August 1948 which commanded all biological institutes to follow Lysenko orthodoxy. Over 3,000 mainstream biologists were dismissed or imprisoned during this campaign including Nikolai Vavilov who died in prison in 1943.
Lysenkoism caused direct food shortages across the Soviet Union and contributed to the Great Famine in China through loss of yields despite promises of 15,000 kg per hectare wheat. The government supported these methods even though they lacked scientific validity and prevented any correction of agricultural failures during the height of the movement.
Communist Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and China accepted Lysenkoism as official biology with varying degrees of support from 1949 until the mid-1960s. Schoolbooks contained Lysenkoist theories as late as Nikita Khrushchev's dismissal in 1964 before the ban was lifted in the mid-1960s.