Short answers, pulled from the story.
Trofim Denisovich Lysenko was born on the 29th of September 1898 in the village of Karlovka within the Poltava Governorate of Ukraine. He belonged to a peasant class family and did not learn to read or write until he reached the age of thirteen.
Trofim Lysenko promoted Michurinist genetics which claimed body cells determined offspring quality and denied random fertilization. He argued that plants were self-sacrificing and that environmental treatments could alter inherited traits without genetic basis.
Estimates place deaths between fifteen million and fifty-five million during the Great Chinese Famine from 1959 to 1962 after China adopted his agricultural methods under Mao Zedong. His practices caused huge crop losses through summer potato planting and rotting tubers buried in trenches.
NKVD employee S.N. Shundenko became deputy director of the All-Union Research Institute of Plant Industry in mid-1940 before Nikolai Vavilov was arrested in August 1940. Trofim Lysenko was removed from directorship of the Institute of Genetics at the Academy of Sciences in 1965 following public critiques by physicists Yakov Zeldovich and Pyotr Kapitsa.
Tsitsin noted low grain yield in stubble crops in a letter dated the 2nd of February 1948 while criticizing work on stover as unpromising compared to other methods. This observation highlighted failures in winter crop protection that clogged fields with weeds due to lack of herbicides.