Word: lysenko
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Since 1948 Academician Trofim D. Lysenko has dominated the biological and agricultural sciences of the Soviet Union. His theory that plants can be changed fundamentally by changing their environments was scoffed at by the world's geneticists, but it had a strong appeal to his wishfully-thinking bosses. Backed by political favor, Lysenko gained so much power that his word was close to law. Scientists who opposed him were thrown out of their positions. Some disappeared...
Last week Lysenko himself seemed on the way out. Pravda, speaking with the full authority of the Communist Party, told about a complicated squabble among Soviet scientists. It began when V. C. Dmitriev, an adherent of Lysenko, applied to the Institute of Genetics for a doctor's degree. Pravda printed a letter from a nonparty man, Professor S. Stankov, who testified that Dmitriev's doctoral dissertation was "unsound...
...dragooning the peasants into agrogorods, equipped with tractor fleets, Khrushchev was confident that he could mechanize Soviet farming. He also expected to mechanize the farmers. Soviet geneticists (e.g., Trofim Lysenko) have erected into Communist dogma the notion that man is mere animal, condemned by nature to acquire the characteristics of his environment. Khrushchev tested the theory in his agrogorods. Just as the Soviet factories had produced a "new Soviet man" (e.g., Khrushchev), so he believed that the agrogorod environment would develop a new agrarian robot divorced from the muzhik's "old village backwardness...
Zhdanov & Co., like most Western scientists, recognized Lysenko's theory for what it is: hocuspocus. But the Malenkovites, themselves the archetypes of a new Soviet Man, backed it to the last chromosome. They proved the better maneuverers...
Death of a Rival. Zhdanov's own son, Yuri, was chief of the scientific propaganda section. Malenkov, with Stalin's backing, forced Yuri to publish a cringing letter of apology for his "sharp and public criticism of Academician Lysenko." Three weeks later, Zhdanov Sr. died, presumably of a heart attack. In January the Kremlin shocked the world by asserting that Zhdanov had been murdered by a group of Soviet doctors, most of them Jews...