LYSENKOISM.

Lysenkoism is a censorious name for a movement that demands either censure or faith in agrobiology, as Soviet agronomist Trofim Denisovich Lysenko (1898–1976) called his aggressive creation. He also named it Michurinism, in tribute to the plant breeder Ivan V. Michurin, who won fame with claims of improving fruit while scorning genetics. Obscurantist (mrakobes ), the word a geneticist flung at Lysenko in 1935, recurs even when scholars bend over backward to avoid censure. Lysenkoism defies efforts to disentangle claims of scientific knowledge from assertions of practical authority and from the use of state power to achieve progress.

The Rise of Lysenkoism

The movement emerged as Joseph Stalin's "revolution from above" (1928–1932) forced peasants into collective farms, where the dream of a leap to scientific agriculture suffered practical failure. Lysenko saved the dream with a string of recipes for quick solutions of long-standing problems. He was a poorly trained agronomist with great talent for snap judgments, grand claims, and celebrity. "Vernalization," his breakthrough to fame, began as a scheme to moisten and chill seeds for protection against drought and freezing, with tests on a few plots, crude theorizing about stages in plant development and about heredity, testimonials by some agricultural officials, a rush to mass use on collective farms, journalistic hype—and telltale silence on long-term results. Yet the movement thrived until the 1950s.

Farm bosses quietly discarded Lysenko's recipes, but he had new ones, with crude theorizing pitted against standard science to justify mass campaigns for rapid triumphs that could not otherwise be won. Lysenko argued that the Soviet Union could not afford to lose time conducting preliminary small-scale testing, but had to keep moving forward, applying theories to the masses while still working out the methods in the laboratory. His view of theory and practice fit in with Stalin's "great break," a leap from reasoned arguments over planning to furious drives toward blue-sky goals, most famously summed up in Stalin's 1931 speech to business managers: "We are fifty or a hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must race through that distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they will crush us." In 1941 Nazi armies that had subdued Western Europe struck the Soviet Union, winning a victory that proved the wisdom of berserk modernization. Pragmatists who would dispute that logic must confront tyrannical pragmatism in a context of backwardness: willful drive combined with brush-off or jail (or death) for specialists offering reasoned warning. That is how farming by fiat gained the reassurance of science in Lysenkoism, until long-term self-defeat grew obvious to political bosses, who rehabilitated standard science and its specialists, posthumously in some cases.

By 1939 Lysenkoists ruled many institutes of biological science; universal rule was decreed in 1948, at a highly publicized conference where Lysenko announced that the Communist Party's Central Committee endorsed his speech. Stalin himself had edited the speech, but Lysenko was not allowed to boast of that. Long after, when the system fell apart and archives opened, a historian found Lysenko's draft with red lines and marginal notes by Stalin. Stalin deleted, with sarcasm, a claim that science, like ideology, is divided into bourgeois and proletarian camps. In 1950 he published that rule: science is not divided by class conflict. He ignored his own much-publicized urging of practical men to tolerate no caution from specialists, to "smash" what is "old and dying in science." Such zigzags between willfulness and restraint are blips on a Communist trajectory through faith in swift modernization and social justice to frustration and apostasy.

Criticism

The highest leaders started to back away from Lysenkoism in the 1950s, when a recipe for tree planting failed Stalin's "Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature." Saplings in clusters did not thin themselves for the greater good of shelter belts, as Lysenko's "Soviet Darwinism" had predicted. Massive die-off occurred, a practical fiasco that was only hinted at in public, lest faith in authority be shaken. But biologists were allowed to revive their dispute with Lysenko's denial of competition within species. They could even hope for larger freedom implied by Stalin's startling decree of separation between science and ideology.

Stalin published that criticism of his own system in 1950, challenging specialists to make tests of free thought within their fields, though power remained centralized and violent. The hazards of such boldness within a despotic system kept most specialists quiet and still hinder historians' recognition that Communist bosses learned by bossing, with enormous waste and cruelty. Stalin's efforts to avert self-defeat by calling for criticism from below foreshadowed greater efforts of that sort by his successor, Nikita Khrushchev, and eventually by Mikhail Gorbachev, who pushed criticism of the old system to the limit in the 1980s. The death of Stalin in 1953 set his lieutenants into retreat from mass terror and worship of a "chief" (vozhd' ) as methods of rule and into easing of thought control, with growing confusion over such willful practicality as Lysenko boasted of. Khrushchev helped revive genetics, ordered farm specialists to tell him when he was wrong, and scolded those who criticized his campaign for planting maize all over the country. He had grown it at his dacha. He also rebuked ministers of agriculture for ignoring Lysenko's final recipes: training cows to increase butterfat and composting earth with fertilizer before spreading. "Harebrained scheming" was the laconic explanation that the Central Committee gave out in 1964 for the abrupt dismissal of Khrushchev. Genetics was fully reestablished in research and education, but an exposé of its repression was stifled. A meeting of experts demolished Lysenko's butter and earth schemes, ignoring his angry reminders of past testimonials by practical bosses. He was retired to one farm. Without power, his movement melted away.

Lysenkoism and Human Evolution

Issues of human heredity entered the furor over Lysenkoism in the late 1930s, when the ideological bureaucracy condemned any interest in the topic as racism, if not Nazism. Even medical genetics fell under the ban until the 1960s, when the field revived in defiance of Lysenko's dismissal of genes. The closest Lysenko himself ever came to issues of human heredity was to brush aside the whole topic: "Man, thanks to his mind, ceased long ago to be an animal." That statement was a caricature of the rule that the emergence of Homo sapiens marks a transition from biological to sociocultural evolution. Major issues in biology and historical sociology are entangled in that rule, as Soviet Marxists discovered in the 1920s. In the 1930s ideological bureaucrats stifled further thought about human evolution and about ideas of progress; lifeless scholasticism served a faith that was withering away.

In any case the common tendency of Marxists, East and West, has been to separate social from biological evolution. The human breed is declared equally gifted in all its races and classes, which need only a suitable environment to show the common potential. A contrary faith ascribes social ranking to inherited experience of rule and submission. But an upper-class master-race bias can also make use of arguments denying that acquired characters are inherited; one need only assume that genes determine place in the social hierarchy. Any way one turns it, ideology shapes beliefs and reasoning about winners and losers.

Genetics actually supports apologists of no nation, race, or class. Precise science favors a vague egalitarianism: individual differences in hereditary capacities are far greater than average group differences may prove to be. Lysenkoism had nothing to say on such issues; it simply ignored them. But ideas of progress drove its claim of practicality, its support by Soviet men of power, and their disillusion and return to faith in world science as worked out by autonomous specialists. The presumptive utility of such science, a major reason for its flourishing, involves a dogma of universality, a belief that claims of knowledge which win out in developed contexts are practically useful everywhere. That dogma is weakly challenged by talk of "ethnoscience" or "indigenous knowledge" as anthropologists try to be respectful in studying, say, rain dancing and belief in its influence on weather. The challenge by Lysenkoism was strong, for proponents seized on its boast of superseding the science of advanced countries.

See also Biology ; Eugenics ; Evolution ; Genetics ; Science, History of ; Social Darwinism ; Totalitarianism .

bibliography

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Joravsky, David. The Lysenko Affair. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970.

Lysenko, Trofim D. Agrobiology. Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1954.

Medvedev, Zhores A. The Rise and Fall of T. D. Lysenko. Translated by I. Michael Lerner. New York: Columbia University Press, 1969.

Rossiianov, Kirill O. "Editing Nature: Joseph Stalin and the 'New' Soviet Biology." Isis 84 (1993): 728–745.

Soyfer, Valery N. Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science. Translated by Leo Gruliow and Rebecca Gruliow. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

Steele, Edward J., Robyn A. Lindley, and Robert V. Blanden. Lamarck's Signature: How Retrogenes Are Changing Darwin's Natural Selection Paradigm. Reading, Mass.: Perseus, 1998.

David Joravsky