Turning the pages back... November 20, 1976 (11/17/96)

Turning the pages back...

November 20, 1976

Twenty years ago, the Soviet regime's leading scientific monster of opportunism and mediocrity died in Moscow. Trokhym Lysenko was born on September 29, 1898, in Karlivka, a village about 50 miles east of Poltava.

Lysenko attended horticultural schools in Poltava (1913) and Uman (1917-1920), then studied agronomy at the Kyiv Agricultural Institute in 1921-1925. Posted to Azerbaijan upon his graduation, he rose to prominence in 1928 after publishing an article in which he suggested that it was possible to produce desirable characteristics in plants by manipulating growing conditions.

In bizarre harmony with a regime that thrived on claims of bending nature to human will, Lysenko began experimenting with winter wheat by burying germinating seeds in snow, and allegedly producing greatly increased yields.

Lysenko was given a laboratory at the All-Union Selection and Genetics Institute (AUSGI) in Odesa in 1929, and two years later the USSR's Agriculture Ministry created two journals to popularize his work.

In 1935, Lysenko joined forces with a lawyer and began to elaborate his agronomic practices into a theoretical framework larded with opaque Marxist jargon. That year, he published pamphlets asserting that the heredity of a plant could be destabilized or "cracked" and the plant thus rendered plastic and malleable. Lysenko declared that Gregor Mendel's approach to genetics was "bourgeois capitalist science" useless to agriculture.

Also that year, Lysenko became member of the USSR's Central Executive Committee and assistant to the president of the Council of the Supreme Soviet Council President, and used his position to hound Nikolai Vavilov, a legitimate geneticist and president of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL), from his post, which Lysenko assumed in 1938.

He became notorious for his network of informers and his use of the dreaded NKVD as an instrument to discredit and arrest opponents. After Vavilov himself was arrested in 1940 (he died in prison in 1943), Lysenko left Odesa for Moscow to take up the directorship of the VASKhNIL's Institute of Genetics.

In 1948-1949, the USSR embarked on a massive reforestation campaign that made use of a theoretical concoction of Lysenko's known as the "cluster method of plant-ing." It was a spectacular disaster, but he managed to keep the VASKhNIL presidency until a brief ouster in 1956, three year's after Stalin's death.

Two years later, Lysenko was in Nikita Khrushchev's good books and exerting influence on the latter's agricultural program, and in 1961, back as VASKhNIL president.

Following Leonid Brezhnev's removal of Khrushchev, Lysenko's Lenin Hills experimental farm was investigated by a joint commission of the Ministry of Agriculture and VASKhNIL, which concluded his work had been improperly tested and that all of his techniques were either ineffective or harmful. He was removed as director of the Institute of Genetics in 1965, but retained control of his experimental farm, where he died, on November 20, 1976.

Zhores Medvedev wrote a searing indictment of Lysenko and the ideological hysteria that gripped Soviet science, titled "The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko," which was published in the West in 1969.

Source: "Lysenko, Trokhym," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 3 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).