Trofim Lysenko

• 1. Introduction

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  Trofim Lysenko, a Soviet agronomist born on the 29th of September 1898 in the village of Karlovka, managed to hijack the entire field of Soviet biology for more than three decades. He was not a polished academic. He had only learned to read and write at the age of 13. He came from a peasant family in what is now Ukraine, and he never shed that outsider identity. What questions does a life like his raise? How does a man with shaky mathematics and no formal standing in genetics come to control genetics itself? How do flawed ideas move from a breeding station in Azerbaijan to a state-sanctioned doctrine enforced by the NKVD? And what happens to a scientific community when the answer is simply: power.

• 2. The Peasant Who Impressed Stalin

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  Pravda correspondent Vitaly Fedorovich captured his first impression of Lysenko in words that are hard to forget: "If you judge a person by first impression, then this Lysenko will leave you with a feeling of toothache - God bless him, he is a sad-looking person. And he is stingy with his words, and insignificant in face - all I remember is his gloomy eye, crawling along the ground with such an air as if, at least, he was going to kill someone."

  That gloomy figure, working at a breeding station in the city of Ganja in Azerbaijan from October 1925, caught the attention of the Soviet state for a specific reason. The Soviet Union's collectivist reforms had stripped peasant farmers of their land, damaged food production badly, and left the dispossessed farmers either abandoning the farms or sabotaging the effort through poor work and pilfering. Party officials were desperate for someone who could bring those farmers back.

  Lysenko proved unusually effective at motivating peasants to return to work. His own background made him credible to them in a way that no university-trained geneticist could match. The Communist Party was actively promoting workers of proletarian origin into leadership positions in science and industry, and Lysenko fit the profile precisely: born into a peasant family, without formal academic affiliations, willing to promise results. By the late 1920s, the USSR's leaders had given him their support.

  Joseph Stalin approved of Lysenko personally. Stalin claimed to stand with the proletariat, and Lysenko's peasant roots reinforced that self-image. The catastrophic famine resulting from forced collectivization in the early 1930s only deepened Stalin's interest in anyone who offered a path back to agricultural productivity. The political bond between the two men would eventually give Lysenko the power to decide who got to do science in the Soviet Union at all.

• 3. Vernalization and Its Limits

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  In 1928, Lysenko published a large work titled "The influence of the thermal factor on the duration of plant development phases," running to 169 pages, of which 110 consisted of tables of primary data. The research had begun at the Ganja breeding station, where severe cold and a lack of winter snow had destroyed many early winter-wheat seedlings. Lysenko found that treating wheat seeds with moisture and cold before planting allowed them to bear a crop when planted in spring.

  Lysenko coined the term "Jarovization" for this chilling process, later translating it himself as "vernalization," from the Latin word for spring. The method was not new. Farmers had known variations of it since the 1800s, and Gustav Gassner had discussed it in detail in 1918. What Lysenko added was the claim that the vernalized transformation could be inherited: that the offspring of a vernalized plant would themselves be able to withstand harsh winters, without any further treatment.

  Nikolai Vavilov, who had initially sent Lysenko to Ganja and encouraged his early work, saw real potential in vernalization as a tool for synchronizing the flowering of different plant species in the Institute of Plant Industry collection. Vavilov even wrote that vernalization was "the greatest achievement in breeding, because it has made available for use the entire world variety of varieties, which were still inaccessible for practical use." But Vavilov eventually withdrew his support when the method failed to produce the expected results.

  The large-scale introduction of vernalization into Soviet agriculture followed anyway. By 1935, vernalized crops of spring grain were being grown by more than 40,000 collective and state farms on an area of 2.1 million hectares. By 1937 that figure had reached 8.9 million hectares. The data supporting these efforts were collected through questionnaires sent to farms, a method that made it easy to suppress negative results and fabricate positive ones. None of the supporting data was published in any independent scientific journal.

• 4. The Theories Behind the Power

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  Lysenko rejected Gregor Mendel's theory of heredity as too reactionary and idealist. In its place he developed what he called "Michurinist genetics," a mixture of his own ideas, those of Russian agronomist Ivan Michurin, and other Soviet scientists. The core of it held that every part of the body contributes to the germ cells, so that traits acquired during an organism's lifetime can be passed to its offspring. The resemblance to Lamarckism was real, though Lysenko denied it.

  Lysenko did not believe in genes. He stated plainly that they did not exist. He held instead that any living body in its entirety carries hereditary information, with no need for a special element such as DNA. He also argued that plants from the same species never compete with one another, only help each other. This led him to advise farmers to plant seeds very close together, following what he called the "law of the life of species."

  His practical proposals followed directly from these beliefs. He took an interest after World War II in the work of Olga Lepeshinskaya, an older biologist who claimed to be able to create cells from egg yolk and non-cellular matter. By combining both sets of ideas it was possible to argue that cells could grow from non-cellular material and that the predicted ratios of Mendelian genetics were wrong, attacking the foundations of cytology along with genetics.

  Lysenko also claimed that the cuckoo is born when young birds such as warblers are fed hairy caterpillars by their parent birds. He missed entirely that the cuckoos he was describing are brood parasites. British biologist S. C. Harland concluded that Lysenko was "completely ignorant of the elementary principles of genetics and plant physiology." Lysenko responded to such foreign criticism by calling geneticists who studied fruit flies "fly lovers and people haters."

• 5. Crushing the Genetics Community

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  Vavilov's name appears early in Lysenko's story as a supporter, but by the late 1930s it appears as a warning. Vavilov had been among the first to recognize promise in vernalization and to encourage Lysenko's early work at Ganja. He headed the All-Union Institute of Applied Botany and New Crops, an institution of real importance in Soviet agriculture, and his endorsement had helped Lysenko gain a foothold.

  By August 1936 the two men were publicly debating at a session of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Omsk, where Lysenko denied both Vavilov's theoretical positions and his practical methods. The debate moved from science into politics. The journal Yarovizatsiya, which Lysenko founded and edited, published articles in 1937 accusing geneticists of Trotskyist and Bukharinist sympathies. Vavilov was named a reactionary saboteur. The 7th International Genetic Congress, planned for Moscow in 1937, was cancelled and relocated to Edinburgh in 1939.

  By mid-1940, Lysenko arranged for an NKVD employee named S. N. Shundenko to be appointed deputy director of Vavilov's own institute over Vavilov's categorical protest. In August 1940, Vavilov was arrested. His colleagues Georgii Karpechenko, Grigory Levitsky, and others were also arrested and died in custody. Vavilov himself died in prison in 1943.

  At the week-long VASKhNIL session from the 31st of July to the 7th of August 1948, Lysenko's colleague Isaak Prezent declared: "We are encouraged to debate here. We will not discuss with the Morganists, we will continue to expose them as representatives of a harmful and ideologically alien movement, brought to us from foreign countries, pseudoscientific in its essence." After that session, Lysenkoism was formally declared the only correct theory in Soviet biology. Soviet scientists were required to denounce any work that contradicted it. Those who refused faced dismissal, imprisonment, or execution. Izrail Agol, Solomon Levit, Grigorii Levitskii, Georgii Karpechenko, and Georgii Nadson were among those killed.

• 6. The Long Unraveling

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  In 1955, more than three hundred scientists signed a letter sent to Nikita Khrushchev asking that Lysenko be removed from power. The letter prompted a temporary resignation, but Khrushchev restored Lysenko to his position. The two men had a relationship that echoed the earlier alliance with Stalin: Khrushchev, like Stalin, found Lysenko's peasant-roots approach to agricultural science politically useful.

  The critical shift came after Stalin's death in 1953, when scientists began to find more room within Soviet institutions to speak. In 1962, three of the most prominent Soviet physicists, Yakov Zeldovich, Vitaly Ginzburg, and Pyotr Kapitsa, formally presented a case against Lysenko and proclaimed his work pseudoscience. They also condemned his use of political power to silence opponents. In 1964, physicist Andrei Sakharov addressed the General Assembly of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR directly: "He is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo-scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists."

  After Khrushchev's dismissal in 1964, the president of the Academy of Sciences declared that Lysenko's immunity to criticism had officially ended. An expert commission examined records kept at Lysenko's experimental farm and revealed his secretive methods. In 1965, Lysenko was removed from his post as director of the Institute of Genetics at the Academy of Sciences and restricted to an experimental farm at Moscow's Lenin Hills. The Institute itself was soon dissolved.

  Lysenko died in Moscow on the 20th of November 1976. The Soviet government refused to announce his death for two days after the event and gave his passing only a small note in Izvestia. He was buried at the Kuntsevo Cemetery. Atlantic writer Sam Kean's assessment captures what he left behind: Lysenko "gutted" the Soviet genetics community and "by some accounts, set Russian biology and agronomy back a half-century."

• 7. Consequences Beyond the USSR

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  Lysenko's influence did not stop at Soviet borders. From the establishment of the People's Republic of China in 1949 through 1956, when a genetics conference in Qingdao prompted China to resume genetics teaching and research, Lysenkoism held sway in Chinese agricultural science. Atlantic writer Sam Kean argues that Chinese agricultural methods in the late 1950s were inspired by Lysenko's ideas, and that those methods contributed to the Great Chinese Famine of 1959 to 1962.

  In the Eastern Bloc more broadly, Lysenko's ideas and practices found political and academic influence from the late 1940s through the mid-1950s. The damage to Soviet potato yields is one specific example of how the distortions played out in practice: by banning research into plant viruses, Lysenko's doctrine prevented scientists from identifying potato leafroll virus, potato virus X, and potato virus Y as the real causes of the degeneration of potato plantings. The result was the spread of those viruses across wider regions of the Soviet Union and a sharp drop in potato yields.

  After Lysenko's monopoly ended, the sciences he had controlled took many years to recover. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, writing their 1965 satirical science fantasy novel Monday Begins on Saturday, based the character of Professor Vibegallo on Lysenko directly. They described their model as someone who "put all of Russian biology on all fours, spent more than thirty years doing nonsense" and "destroyed our entire biological science, trampling everything around, destroying (physically, with the help of the NKVD) all the best geneticists of the USSR, starting with Vavilov."

  During the late 2010s, Lysenko's ideas attracted a renewed following in Russia, linked to a strain of Russian nationalism that views mainstream Western science with suspicion. Scientist Peter Gluckman's summary remains apt: Lysenko's work "wrecked the lives of many and destroyed the reputation of Russian biology" before it was finally recognized as fraudulent.