Word: trofim
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Trofim Lysenko is an egregiously indestructible plant breeder from the Ukrainian black-earth belt who long ago won world notoriety, scientific contempt and Stalinist favor with his attempt to rewrite nature to suit Marx. A weird cross between sinister charlatan and seedy fanatic. Lysenko used his political influence, based on Stalin's favor, to wreak ruthless vengeance on his critics, the scholars who had made genetics-until his rise-the pride of Russian science...
...they landed in New York, the seven visiting Soviet strongmen began to wonder whether weight lifting in the U.S. is a sport or a sideshow. Dutifully they drank Cokes and made muscles for Manhattan photographers: dutifully they helped hoist "Miss Body Beautiful" aloft for enterprising Chicago newsmen. Light-Heavyweight Trofim Lomakin let one publicity man con him into posing on horseback until a comrade muttered: "Cossack!" Bantamweight Vladimir Stogov, an army chauffeur, took a turn behind the wheel of a new Ford, fled in terror when he pushed a button and the retractable hardtop began to fold. By the time...
...Soviet Union's famed Geneticist Trofim D. Lysenko, currently out of favor with his bosses, has tried hard-perhaps too hard-for a comeback. At a conference on farm problems, he backed a "new Russian agricultural discovery": plowless farming. Despite Booster Lysenko's proprietary enthusiasm, the technique (loosening soil with a disk harrow instead of plow-turning it over) is old hat to Western experts, has been tried experimentally in various parts of the U.S. for more than a decade...
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...
...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...