When 'Genetics' Became the Enemy of the People

The term 'imperialist tool', 'aligned with fascism', 'reactionary', and 'anti-revolution' were among the words used to describe genetics during Stalin's regime. A government that claimed to be scientific and whose leader was called 'the greatest genius of sciences among all nations' banned genetic research. Geneticists, if lucky, were merely purged from research centers, and if unlucky, were sent to prison or exile. The fight against genetics began in the 1930s, and in 1949, Stalin's government officially labeled genetics as 'bourgeois pseudoscience' and purged specialists in this field. Although the ban on genetic research was lifted 15 years later, the struggle against genetics rallied supporters of the communist regime even in the West, with the famous French poet Aragon becoming a 'praiser' of this struggle. Many consider this period to be the strangest era of the fight against science in modern times. The stench of decay, alongside drought and the wrong policies of the communist government, including the expropriation of private property from peasants, worsened the agricultural situation in the Soviet Union, which was already lagging behind many European countries, leading to famine in many areas of the country. The communists, who promised to improve the lives of workers and farmers under the guise of scientific governance, faced a completely different reality. During this time, Trofim Lysenko, the head of one of the Soviet agricultural centers supported by the ruling party, claimed to have found a method that could quickly eliminate the agricultural crisis in the Soviet Union and increase wheat production. Contrary to genetic scientists and biologists who supported Darwin's theory and even Lamarck, Lysenko believed that living beings could transfer traits acquired from the environment within a short period, such as two to three years. For about two decades, with the backing of Stalin and Khrushchev, Lysenko became the 'dictator' of biology in the Soviet Union but never achieved any miracle or revolution in the agricultural world. Zharis Medvedev, a famous Soviet biologist whose writings on 'the rise and fall of Lysenko' were secretly smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in the free world in the late 1960s, wrote that the statistics and figures presented by Lysenko were fraudulent and that his claims were only supported by the political force of the Communist Party. Lauren Graham, a professor of the history of technology at Harvard and author of the book 'Science in Russia and the Soviet Union', told Radio Farda that 'Lysenko did not deny the existence of genes but believed they were of no importance... Lysenko insisted that living beings acquire traits during their lifetime and can pass them on. This can happen in some cases. However, Lysenko was a poor researcher and did not understand statistics, and it had no practical application for him. Therefore, his teachings are not accepted.' Many, like Lauren Graham, believe that Lysenko's experiments lacked scientific value. David Joravsky, an American historian, believes there is no doubt about the unscientific nature of Lysenko's views, and any resemblance between Lysenko's theories and a real scientific theory is coincidental. The debates between genetic scientists and Lysenko and his supporters quickly became political. Government newspapers, including Pravda, supported Lysenko. After Stalin's famous speech in 1937 against Trotsky, the fight against geneticists became synonymous with a war against the enemies of the people. The label of idealist and bourgeois, which today can be compared in Iran to fighting against God and overthrowing, was placed on genetics and its scientists. Nikolai Vavilov, president of the Genetics Congress in Moscow and a staunch critic of Lysenko, along with his like-minded colleagues, was purged and imprisoned. Nikolai Vavilov, a geneticist, resisted the Communist Party's pressure to align with Lysenko's theories in March 1939, stating, 'You can burn us alive, but you cannot force us to abandon our beliefs... Denying a reality simply because someone in a high position has made such a decision is impossible.' A year later, one of the greatest genetic specialists in the Soviet Union was arrested and died in prison three years later. One of Stalin's tricks to discredit geneticists was to link them with Goebbels and Nazi Germany and racist ideologies, while the Nazi regime itself had conflicts with geneticists, many of whom had left Hitler's Germany. Lysenko became the biological dictator of the Soviet Union, received titles like 'Great' and 'The Great', and his statues were sold in art shops. Communists from various countries, who considered Stalin's line and the Communist Party sacred, defended Lysenko in many countries. One of the battlegrounds of thought among communists regarding Lysenko's ideas was France. In France, the Communist Party had significant power and support. The Lysenko affair occurred just four years after the end of World War II, and the Soviet Union still had considerable prestige among French communists due to the Battle of Stalingrad, so Stalin's mere support for Lysenko was sufficient for many, requiring no further proof or argument. Lysenko's speech in 1935 in the presence of Stalin and senior members of the Communist Party, in front of Aragon, Stalin's praise singer who supported Lysenko, saw some Communist Party supporters, including biologists like Jean Rostand and Jacques Monod, openly oppose this political line of Stalin. Jean Rostand said, 'Do not politicize chromosomes' and asked Lysenko's supporters to provide evidence and proof; an occurrence that happened neither in France nor in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, some biologists attempted to choose a third way, maneuvering between ideology and science to avoid explicit positioning. Some of them were ashamed of their decision years later. How Lysenko Became a Giant Although the ineffectiveness of Lysenko's theory and the failure of Soviet agriculture, Stalin's failures in agriculture hidden behind Lysenko's slogans and lies, and the ousting of Khrushchev (his supporter) in the early 1960s put an end to this 'dictatorship', many still wonder how a charlatan like Lysenko rose to power in a country that had advanced military and space technology. One opinion is that the radical beliefs of Soviet leaders, who even wanted to politicize agriculture and create a utopia for peasants, had no place among real scientists, thus paving the way for someone like Lysenko. Another view is that Lysenko's claims about the heritability of acquired traits meant that an ideal and revolutionary human could be created over several generations by establishing a revolutionary environment. In other words, Lysenko's views fit within the framework of the revolution. Lauren Graham states that Lysenko never expressed any opinion about human genes. Stalin, who hid his agricultural failures behind Lysenko's slogans and lies, used him to purge biological and agricultural institutions. At other times, similar events occurred for scientists and artists in other specialized fields to complete Stalin's control over the Soviet intellectual community. Although during Lenin's time, the attack on 'bourgeois science' had begun, the leader of the October Revolution prevented the politicization of laboratories and science. Stalin, however, took a different path and used dialectical materialism to intimidate. Among the victims of the hammer and sickle regime, it was not only genetics that suffered, but also psychoanalysis, which was highly favored by Trotsky, faced a similar fate. Even quantum theory, evolution, and the theory of relativity were severely attacked. Graham states that many in the West thought that Marxism was limited to changes in economics, politics, and society, but for many communists, dialectical materialism was a new interpretation of science and knowledge, something that had not existed in any revolution until then. When Lysenko died in the mid-1970s, there was no sign of his genius and magic. Yet, to this day, whenever politics tries to trample science, the name Lysenko and the strange Soviet experience comes to mind, a name and experience stranger than science fiction.