Word: lysenko
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Moscow. To do that, the CIA officials insisted, the Russians must honor a previous promise to cut the number of their spies operating in the U.S. by half and identify their top intelligence officers in New York City and San Francisco. Most important, Moscow would have to recall Alexander Lysenko, its chief spook in Washington, voluntarily...
...front has no coherent program -- except to undo what Yeltsin has done -- only skill at demagoguery. Nationalists like Nikolai Lysenko shift the blame to old enemies: "The U.S. planned and engineered the collapse of the Soviet Union." Front leaders call on the citizenry to "rise in defense of the Russian state" and force the President out. "Their strategy," says a U.S. official, "is to invoke slogans in an attempt to excite the baser political instincts." But in championing causes like the troubles of Russian nationals in the other republics, front leaders have potent emotional issues with which to stir...
...great disease of the 20th century was the politicization of life. The totalitarians, left and right, showed the way, politicizing everything: economics, education, art, religion, family life. Not even genetics could escape politics. One remembers with disbelief not just Hitler's eugenic lunacies but also Stalin's designation of Lysenko's crackpot genetics as official truth, enforced by secret police...
Earlier in this century, Soviet geneticist Trofim Lysenko severely damaged Soviet agriculture by forcing on his colleagues a pseudoscientific theory of heredity that was ideologically pleasing to the ruling Stalinists. Dissenters were dismissed, disgraced and even sent to the Gulags...
Right-wingers may be correct in claiming "a very significant victory." In a pale but disturbing analogue of the Lysenko affair, scientific judgments have been alloyed, if only slightly, with politico-religious dogma, creating / an unwelcome precedent for a nation that needs to stay even -- in some cases to catch up -- with its competitors. The camel's nose is now in the tent...