Like Soviet Union, China was also aiming to improve her agrarian yield (
Lysenkoism, 1958).
This process is known as
Lysenkoism. It corrupts and distorts the marketplace of ideas and information to serve the political ends of those in power.
Their potential for harm was revealed near their start when
Lysenkoism was declared the official scientific orthodoxy in 1948, although the disputes reached their zenith between 1949 and 1951.
Johnston provides other examples of citizens using "little tactics" under late Stalinism: musicians to circumvent the prohibition of jazz, geneticists to exploit the controversy over
Lysenkoism for personal ends, and citizens "re-appropriating" the official peace movement for nonideological purposes.
(25) These include particularly geneticists, who were under pressure to do science according to a dogmatic version of the laws of dialectical materialism, called
Lysenkoism, instead of experimental evidence.
In the Soviet Union, in contrast, the central planning of science exacted an enormous human cost, with Stalin's embrace of
Lysenkoism and the resulting destruction of the country's agricultural sector and its suppression of Western genetics and biological sciences.
Two prominent twentieth-century examples are
Lysenkoism and the racist theories of Nazi Germany.
The final death-knell was sounded by the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which, in 1931, described the ideas proposed by leading scholars in the Soviet eugenics movement as "bourgeois," "fascist," and "Menshevizing idealism." (37) This total rejection of eugenics paved the way in part for the rise of
Lysenkoism in the 1930s.
Learning from Russia:
Lysenkoism and the fate of genetics in China, 1950-1986.
Official Soviet biological doctrine was
Lysenkoism, and Russian Darwinists were denounced as "Trotskyite agents of international fascism" and thrown into the Gulag for their scientific sins,
Their chapter, "The Problem of
Lysenkoism," treats the same failure of the Marxist imposition of ideology onto genetics as does Sagan, but they conclude with the observation that "
Lysenkoism is held up by bourgeois commentators as the supreme demonstration that conscious ideology cannot inform scientific practice and that 'ideology has no place in science'" (191).
Lysenkoism reigned for decades and made a mess of Soviet agronomy until it was finally disproven.
There is a kind of "political
Lysenkoism" in Europe today.
