Lysenkoism

Why is Lysenkoism still a name for a warning?

The history of science is full of wrong theories. What makes Lysenkoism special is not that a theory was wrong but that a wrong theory, protected by state power and official philosophy, suppressed a correct one for nearly thirty years. The Russian word lysenkovshchina denotes the practice, in the USSR of 1933–1965, of crushing scientific opponents in the natural sciences by the methods of ideological struggle; in Russian today it is also used figuratively for any administrative persecution of scientists for "politically incorrect" views. In English too, "Lysenkoism" has become a warning word for every case in which politics or ideology dictates the conclusions of science.

This dictionary treats Lysenkoism as a philosophy entry because its weapon was philosophy. Lysenko and his supporters did not beat the geneticists with experimental results; they won by declaring their own doctrine "materialist-dialectical" and their opponents' "metaphysical-idealist". After the debate between mechanists and dialecticians in the 1920s a structure arose in which philosophy stood above science, and Lysenkoism was the greatest damage that structure produced.

What did Lysenko claim?

Trofim Lysenko, an agronomist of Ukrainian peasant origin, made his name around 1928 with vernalization, a technique of treating winter wheat seed with cold and moisture so that it would form ears even when sown in spring. Scientists in the USSR and abroad, Nikolai Vavilov among them, recognised the technique's usefulness. The newspapers presented the peasant's son Lysenko as a genius from the people, and amid the agricultural crisis after collectivisation and the famine of 1932–33 government support flowed to a man who promised quick results.

The trouble came next. From 1933–34 Lysenko, together with Isaak Prezent, later his chief ideologist, launched an attack on genetics. He claimed that when the conditions in which an organism lives change, its traits change, and that traits acquired in this way are inherited by the next generation: the so-called inheritance of acquired characteristics. Genetics in the line of Gregor Mendel, August Weismann and Thomas Hunt Morgan, by contrast, holds that genes in the germ cells transmit traits and that the environment cannot directly change genes in a desired direction. Lysenko called the concept of the gene a "bourgeois invention", and in 1947 he promised Stalin to breed branching wheat yielding 15,000 kilograms per hectare, when the most productive variety under the best conditions yielded about a seventh of that.

How was philosophy mobilised in the dispute?

The report "On the Situation in Biological Science" that Lysenko read at the session of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences on 31 July 1948 translated the dispute into the language of philosophy. The title of its third section was "Two Worlds, Two Ideologies in Biology". On the question whether the properties of organisms change with their living conditions and whether such changes are inherited, Lysenko said: "The Michurinist teaching, materialist-dialectical in its essence, establishes this dependence by facts. The Mendel-Morgan teaching, metaphysical-idealist in its essence, rejects this possibility without proof."

Мичуринское учение, по своей сущности материалистическо-диалектическое, фактами утверждает такую зависимость.

Менделевско-моргановское учение, по своей сущности метафизическо-идеалистическое, бездоказательно такую возможность отвергает.

Where this language came from is clear. "On Dialectical and Historical Materialism" in the Short Course of 1938 taught that dialectics, unlike metaphysics, regards nature as a state of continuous movement and change "where something is always arising and developing, and something always disintegrating and dying away". Olga Lepeshinskaya, a biologist of Lysenko's camp, wrote in almost the same words that "the teaching of dialectical materialism on interdependence and mutual conditioning, on continuous movement and change in nature" had "armed Michurin and Lysenko ideologically". Measured against this textbook sentence, the geneticists' claim that genes pass relatively stably through generations looked like metaphysics preaching "immutability". The statistical character of Mendelian inheritance was also a target; closing the session Lysenko said, "We must firmly remember that science is the enemy of chance."

где всегда что-то возникает и развивается, что-то разрушается и отживает свой век.

Нам необходимо твердо запомнить, что наука -- враг случайностей.

A philosopher spoke too. Mark Mitin, who had led the condemnation of the Deborinites in 1930–31 and become a leader of Soviet philosophy, told the session that "the Michurinist trend bases itself in its methodology on the principles of dialectical materialism". The philosophical leadership backed one side of a biological dispute in the name of the official philosophy.

Мичуринское направление основывается в своей методологии на принципах диалектического материализма

The passages Stalin himself edited are revealing. The draft Lysenko sent him on 23 July used terms such as "bourgeois genetics", "bourgeois science" and "anti-Marxist biology" and asserted that "every science is class science". Rejecting the idea of class sciences, Stalin struck out the whole section "The Foundations of Bourgeois Biology Are False" and changed the opposition "bourgeois science versus dialectical-materialist science" into "reactionary (idealist) versus progressive (materialist, Soviet) science". He in effect exchanged a class label for a philosophical one, and the result was a wider legitimacy: genetics was now rejected not because it was foreign but because it was philosophically wrong.

Оппозиция «буржуазная наука» — «диалектико-материалистическая наука» была заменена противопоставлением: «реакционная (идеалистическая) и прогрессивная (материалистическая, советская) наука».

What happened at the August 1948 session?

As late as spring 1948 Lysenko's position was shaky, because Yuri Zhdanov, head of the science department of the Central Committee's Propaganda Directorate, had criticised him. In April Lysenko wrote to Stalin complaining that it had become hard to work, and Stalin took his side. On 15 July the USSR Council of Ministers appointed 35 new full members to the Academy of Agricultural Sciences, mostly Lysenko's supporters, and on 27 July Lysenko was received in Stalin's office. The session ran from 31 July to 7 August.

On the last day, before his concluding speech, Lysenko announced: "In one of the notes I have been asked what the attitude of the Party Central Committee is to my report. I answer: the Party Central Committee has examined my report and approved it." The stenographic record notes: "Stormy applause turning into an ovation. All rise." With this sentence the scientific dispute became a matter of obedience to a party decision.

Я отвечаю: ЦК партии рассмотрел мой доклад и одобрил его. (Бурные аплодисменты, переходящие в овацию. Все встают.)

Self-criticism by scientists on the genetics side followed the same day. The botanist Pyotr Zhukovsky confessed that his speech two days earlier "was unworthy of a member of the Communist Party and of a Soviet scientist", and that same day Pravda carried a letter in which Yuri Zhdanov withdrew his criticism. Only the geneticist Iosif Rapoport defended genetics as a science to the end and refused to accept the decision; he was expelled from the party.

было недостойно члена коммунистической партии и советского ученого.

After the session a purge swept universities and institutes. On 23 August the Minister of Higher Education Sergei Kaftanov ordered by Order No. 1208 that university biology curricula be rebuilt around "Michurinist biology", and on 26 August the Presidium of the Academy of Sciences took the same line. Prezent took charge of the biology faculties of Moscow and Leningrad universities. Russian researchers estimate that about 300 geneticists suffered administrative persecution at this time; counting the whole period from the 1930s, more than 3,000 biologists were dismissed or imprisoned. Earlier, in the late 1930s, several geneticists had already been executed, and Vavilov was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943. In 1950 a session invoking Ivan Pavlov's legacy attacked physiology and cytology in the same way.

How did Lysenkoism end?

From the end of 1952 newspapers began to print criticism of Lysenko, and in 1955 some 300 physicists and biologists demanded the normalisation of biology in the "Letter of Three Hundred". But Nikita Khrushchev still prized Lysenko as a "scientist from the people", and criticising Lysenkoism was forbidden again. Meanwhile genetics survived in an unexpected place: physicists building atomic bombs and reactors set up radiation genetics laboratories inside their closed institutes. Stalin had not interfered with his nuclear physicists' calculations; the historian Tony Judt remarked that "Stalin may well have been mad but he was not stupid".

When Khrushchev fell in October 1964 the situation changed. The Central Committee plenum of March 1965 was the turning point, and commissions of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences and the Academy of Sciences officially concluded that Lysenko's work had been conducted in breach of scientific procedure and was unreliable. Lysenko was removed from his leading posts, but he is said to have remained an opponent of classical genetics until his death in 1976.

How should Lysenkoism be read today?

In the Cold War West Lysenkoism was often used as proof that communism cannot coexist with science; inside the Soviet Union after 1965 it was filed away as an aberration of the personality-cult era. Both accounts are too simple. Lysenko's vernalization was once a technique whose "great value" even the British Marxist geneticist J. B. S. Haldane acknowledged, and Marxist biologists in the West later took pains to distinguish what dialectical thinking might offer biology from Lysenkoism. The problem was not the word "dialectics" but that questions which experiment and peer review should settle were settled by sentences of official philosophy and by party approval.

Other entries in this dictionary cover other sides of the affair: "Vernalization (Yarovizatsiya)" the technique itself, "Letter of Three Hundred" the scientists' resistance, and "Zhdanovshchina" the ideological control of culture in the same years. This entry focuses on how philosophy was used as an umpire in a scientific dispute. In the debate between mechanists and Deborinites in the 1920s philosophical issues were already being translated into questions of political loyalty; the textbook of 1938 fixed the conclusions; and in 1948 the textbook's sentences became grounds for banning genetics. That philosophy may put questions to science but must not pass judgement on it is often named as the lesson of this history.