When you think of the most deadly people in history the names that pop into your mind are typically your power hungry sociopaths... you know... Hitler, Stalin, Mao... Pol Pot. If you turn back the clock or know your history you might toss up names like Gengis Kahn, Tamerlane, Julius Caesar or Ashurbanipal II. You might also consider Leopold II , Charles V, or Ivan The Terrible. Whatever you come up with, its typically a head of state or at least someone who with military power. You don't think of a poor softspoken peasant with little education that has some interesting ideas about plants. Nonetheless... one man... Trofim Lycenko may have been responsible for more deaths than at least half the people on your top ten list... and chances are you probably haven't heard of him. If you have, then you might not know the whole story. This is a cautionary tale of what happens when politics and science become one and the same. Millions of people died directly because of his false ideas. But it's deeper than that. What happens when the idea of "truth" itself is called into question? What happens when a state adopts a view of reality that is contrary to reason itself? What happens when contradicting an "official" narrative guarantees losing your job, your freedom or even your life? Could you stand up to that or would you just look the other way? In the Gospel of John, Pilate famously asks: "What is Truth?" To live in the Soviet Union was to ask yourself that question on a daily basis. The vast majority of people quietly went along with it. Why? After spending nearly a decade in Stalin's Gulag and another twenty years as a "free" Soviet citizen, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote:
"The permanent lie becomes the only safe form of existence, in the same way as betrayal. Every wag of the tongue can be overheard by someone, every facial expression observed by someone. Therefore every word, if it does not have to be a direct lie, is nonetheless obliged not to contradict the general, common lie."
When you think of the most deadly people in history the names that pop into your mind are typically your power hungry sociopaths... you know... Hitler, Stalin, Mao... Pol Pot. If you turn back the clock or know your history you might toss up names like Gengis Kahn, Tamerlane, Julius Caesar or Ashurbanipal II. You might also consider Leopold II , Charles V, or Ivan The Terrible. Whatever you come up with, its typically a head of state or at least someone who with military power. You don't think of a poor softspoken peasant with little education that has some interesting ideas about plants. Nonetheless... one man... Trofim Lycenko may have been responsible for more deaths than at least half the people on your top ten list... and chances are you probably haven't heard of him. If you have, then you might not know the whole story. This is a cautionary tale of what happens when politics and science become one and the same. Millions of people died directly because of his false ideas. But it's deeper than that. What happens when the idea of "truth" itself is called into question? What happens when a state adopts a view of reality that is contrary to reason itself? What happens when contradicting an "official" narrative guarantees losing your job, your freedom or even your life? Could you stand up to that or would you just look the other way? In the Gospel of John, Pilate famously asks: "What is Truth?" To live in the Soviet Union was to ask yourself that question on a daily basis. The vast majority of people quietly went along with it. Why? After spending nearly a decade in Stalin's Gulag and another twenty years as a "free" Soviet citizen, Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote:
"The permanent lie becomes the only safe form of existence, in the same way as betrayal. Every wag of the tongue can be overheard by someone, every facial expression observed by someone. Therefore every word, if it does not have to be a direct lie, is nonetheless obliged not to contradict the general, common lie."
There was a story that broke this last July that got a good deal of coverage (although definitely not enough considering the implications). It involved one of the most important discoveries for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease. Back in 2006 a paper was released in the Journal Nature that ended up being the basis for just about all further research in the field since. The paper in question has been cited 2300 times. Thats nuts btw.. Your average published paper might get less than half a dozen. Every published article on Alzheimer's except for four have cited this paper. The scientist who published it… Sylvan Lesne has spent the last 16 years as a preeminent figure in the field. Guy was a star. Then just a couple months prior to this recording news broke that the piece of research that catapulted this individual to stardom might be completely faked.. So what happened? Well… a junior professor from Vanderbilt named Matthew Shrag was hired to look into the original paper and he found that the original images used to reach the finding had been digitally manipulated. If that were true then all alzheimer's research since he mid 2000’s has essentially been built on false assumptions. If that is the case how many people may have needlessly died? About 100k people die of this every year…. Multiply that over 16 years?? Yeah thats a lot. Now since then the investigation has been ongoing. And there has been plenty of push back. A lot of weight has been put behind Lesne’s work so if you are a cynical person you might say well thats the pharmaceutical industry sort of “circling the wagons.” Whatever the result the amount of trust that we have in these researchers will be less than it was before. Trust is like that. Once its broken its like a shattered vase.. You can glue it back together but it will never be what it had been before. The episode sparked a conversation about scientific research and the ethics that surround it. On one hand you have science… cold hard objectivity.. Almost like an absolute morality. Then you have the other side… the side with actual living people. Ambitious but underpaid and overworked professionals.. Working in almost complete obscurity… Often they work in university settings where if they do not get a paper published they will not get tenure.. And if that doesnt happen they will inevitably lose their jobs. All that work.. Down the drain. According to a recent poll 2% of reachers admit to falsifying data at least once.. That might not seem like much but thats only the people that admitted it. Who knows maybe its 10 times that. Even if it isn't, the fact is that science builds upon science. Its like a sky scraper rising up from the ground.. Story by story.. If every level isnt perfect then the whole structure is compromised… So even if we take that 2% at face value there is a huge multiplier effect As Ive said before we like to think that the people who formulate the drugs and treatments that we blindly put faith in.. every time we go to the hospital… the doctors office or the pharmacy.. We are taking a true leap of faith.. We are telling ourselves that whatever is in this pill or injection or whatever is the final result of a rigorous process which left no stone unturned. The people involved all played by the rules. In the end truth prevailed. Thats what that capsule in front of you is. It’s a physical manifestation of scientific truth. Otherwise wed never dream of putting it in our bodies. Thats a lot of faith.. But we take it without question (in most cases) because we believe there is a system in place that can filter out the bad actors. Our Universities are supposed to be places of independent thought where researchers can simply follow reason and evidence. Our government has whole agencies and department dedicated to insuring that scientific truth is being followed to the letter. When the FDA or CDC makes a recommendation we believe they have ensured that these ideals are being followed to the letter. But what if that were not the case in reality? What if there were “other” factors involved? It’s not outside the realm of possibility. Maybe it’s inevitable. The story we will learn to day is a devastating example of what can happen when scientific thought isn’t just influenced by the world of politics.. but completely captured by it. This is what happens when ideological purity not only becomes a precondition success of individuals within a scientific field but….. even for what larger ideas are considered scientific to begin with. It’s impossible to know with full certainty but the number of people that died due to the school of thought of the man we will learn about today. The number is monstrous. at the very least number in the tens of millions. The death toll may have been greater than the total lives lost in the Vietnam War, Korean War and First World War…COMBINED. and I’m willing to wager that most of you have never heard of it. History’s deadliest fraud.. This time on savage continent
Welcome back to Savage Continent. First off I apologize for the delay of this episode I've had a lot on my plate with work and my Applied Psychology post doc work so I could probably have had something out 2 or three weeks ago but one of my rules as a podcaster is don't release anything that isn't the best it could be. Nonetheless, Im glad you are here. Remember, You can find me on facebook and twitter Stephen@savagecontinent. Also.. again… if you like the show just hit that 5 star button on apple podcasts or whatever podcatching service you are using. Or… if you have time leave a review. All this takes but a few seconds but it really means a lot given the hundreds of hours it takes to make every one of these things.
There is a quote attributed to Alexandra Orcasio Cortez.. I think it dates to a 2019 interview with Anderson Cooper or something around that time “It’s more important to be morally right than factually correct.” At the time she made the claimed that Pentagon accounting errors could have funded 21 trillion dollars in medicare for all or something like that. What it was really isn't important to our purposes. It sounds kind of like a silly statement but then… you really have to think about it… and then it becomes a bit more profound than meets the eye. A lot of people throw stones at this woman.. And not just conservatives but I have to give her credit. Not easy to break into a “safe seat” congressional district as a political unknown and become one of the best known political figures in America when just a couple years earlier you were a bartender. Theres a lot of skill and ability there… Cant just be luck or some sort of political moment. Of course Cortez lives on the far left of the political spectrum. She is educated.. With several degrees. What makes her interesting is that she is open about being friendly to Socialism. Now of course what we are dealing with here is not a new hard line Stalinista here. I can’t imagine she would want to be in any of Kim Jong Un’s parades or anything. But still… this quote on its own is interesting on its own… Let me explain.
Here’s the Oxford Dictionary definition of Truth
the quality or state of being true.
That which is true or in accordance with fact or reality.
a fact or belief that is accepted as true.
Now.. let us take a look at the definition of “Truth” from the website “marxist.org”
Truth is usually taken to mean correspondence of an idea to the world outside thought. However, following Hegel, Marxists take truth to be something that may be said of a social formation or social practice itself. The truth of a social practice is always relative, since, as Goethe said: “All that exists deserves to perish” – sooner or later, everything turns out to be false. See Engels' discussion of this in Ludwig Feuerbach, and the End of Classical German Philosophy.
Some philosophical currents believe that the truth of an idea can be established by logical deduction from “clear ideas.” In general, each current has its characteristic criterion of truth: for Rationalism it is Reason; for Empiricism it is Observation and Experiment; Pragmatism makes practice the criterion of truth, but like Empiricism, pragmatism knows only immediate, individual action and misses the cultural and historical content of social practice. If the claim that “practice is the criterion of truth” is to have any content more profound than “the truth of the pudding is in the eating,” then it depends on the notion of truth (as objectively inhering in the object itself) and practice (as social-historical practice, within the totality of a given culture.) If insisted upon too stridently, the claim that “practice is the criterion of truth” simply diminishes the value of philosophical reflection. If “practice is the criterion of truth” pure and simply, then the socialist revolutionary must wait for socialism to discover the truth of his practice, since socialism is the objective of his or her practice.
Ilyenkov shows that Hegel in fact, by insisting on the real, sensuously objective activity of man, solely as a criterion of truth, solely as the verifying authority for thought, betrayed his idealism. Indeed, for Marx, practice is far more than a criterion of truth, it is substance.
Lenin explained that while practice should be first and fundamental in the theory of knowledge, “the criterion of practice can never, in the nature of things, either confirm or refute any human idea completely.”
There is a to unpack there… Socialism doesn’t seem to see “truth” as something that is cut and dry like more traditional schools of thought. Instead we continually hear the idea that “practice” or “praxis” is instead the “criterion” of truth. Under this interpretation the rules of logic do not determine reality. Instead, the concept of truth is relative to the viewpoint of the individual. It is something that must be proved through action. Marx would write:
"The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Man must prove the truth, i.e., the reality and power, the this-worldliness of his thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question."
This is not something most of us are familiar with.. Its not a simple correlation with reality. Truth is complicated. This has been something that Socialism has grappled with since its inception. In his book 1984 George Orwell envisioned a dystopian futuristic society in which an all powerful state had the ability to determine truth and they would be able to do it completely independent of “common sense” notions of reality. How far might this idea go??
In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?[24]
In the Soviet Union as we will see just such a thing did happen. The state which is by definition the embodiment of Marxist Leninist ideology will grow so powerful that they will make decisive judgements on truth and falsehood. Its obvious that this might happen in the political and cultural sphere. That ‘you can pretty much take for granted. Obviously… like we saw in our episode on religion it is imperative that the Soviet state either crush or co opt the Russian Orthodox Church they were not afraid to reach definitive conclusion of what tantamounted to metaphysical reality. In so doing they shunted aside the Russian concept of the Divine and inserted Marxist Leninism and the notion of the “Vanguard” communist party that would lead the world to the utopian end of history. While you can argue whether their vision of an elite political leadership class coincided with Marx and Engels ideals their notion of what constitutes a “true” idea seemed to fit very well.
Steven Lukes (British Political Theorist) “Marxism and Morals Today”
When asked what he thought about morality
Marx, according to a visitor, would roar with
laughter.' Moral talk was, he thought, as did
Engels, a great deception. It fostered the illu-
sion that there are eternal moral truths. In The
Communist Manifesto, they scorned the idea
that there are
“eternal truths, such as Freedom, Justice,
etc. that are common to all states of societv.
But Communism abolishes etemal truths,
it abolishes all religion, and all morality,
instead of constituting them on a new
basis: it therefore acts in contradiction to
all past historical experience”.
Marx and Engels here attack the very idea of
"eternal truths" and suggest that the so-called
eternal truths in question-"Freedom, Justice,
etc."~constitute forms of "the social con-
sciousness of past ages." They then state that
this consciousness
“despite all the multiplicity and variety it
displays, moves within certain common
forms, or general ideas, which cannot
completely vanish except with the total
disappearance of class antagonisms.?”
As we talked about in the beginning of this series in the Soviet Union Marx believed he had sort of “cracked the code” to human morality and had discovered a sort of ultimate truth. Before history as we know it. Before capitalism… before feudalism.. Before the agricultural slave societies of antiquity there was a past in which there was no exploitation because there was no private property. He looks around and says “Hey.. capitalism has given us all this productive capacity and stuff. Lets keep that and dump all the exploitation and oppression.” He believed.. And he wasn't the first.. Rousseau a real progenitor in this area that it was the social hierarchy that had developed over the eons that had corrupted society. Get away from that and the perfect world is within reach. Now nested within this idea is the whole idea of “truth.” What is real. What is not. There may be such a thing as absolute truth but how can it be separated from the perception of the individual? To Marx and to everyone that followed his writings the issue was that of power. The people that have power. The people dominating the social hierarchy basically determine what is right and wrong but also what constitutes truth. Its all very cynical when you think about it. Is there such a thing as objective reality at all?? Many Marxists would say no. You can basically deconstruct any seemingly fact based deductive assumption and see how one’s place in the social hierarchy led to the conclusion.. Hence the 2+2=5 thing. In 2020 this very idea was kicked around the internet and when the reference from Orwell’s 1984 became known it went away pretty quick. Now.. as we saw in the last episode about Soviet Psychology the state adopted a view of reality. A theory of mind based on a sort of warped interpretation of Pavlov and determined that was truth. If you came out against that you would lose your career, end up in prison or worse.. They did not believe in the subconscious for the most part. They rejected psychoanalysis as a product of the capitalist west.. You get the idea… but it was a totally top down thing.
Now what might be problematic with this line of thinking… not the heavy handed centralism but the very claim at the heart of this philosophy… well the extreme “tabula rasa” or blank slate interpretation nature. People in the 19th century had scarcely the faintest idea of what humanity looked like before the advent of recorded civilization. Marx was only guessing when he reasoned that primitive man lived in a world without social hierarchy and exploitation. Primitive societies in Marx’s day and even our own as a rule boast a murder rate far in excess… sometimes 10 or 50 times that of developed countries. Despite the lack of property there is a very distinct social hierarchy. But thats just the start. During the 20th centuries studies done on primates show that the same sort of social dominance structure that exists among humans exists among ancestors that broke away from the human family 7 million years ago. Jane Goodall was appalled when she conducted research on the great ape populations of Africa. Rather than finding peaceful groups of peaceful primates she found evidence of aggression and even organized warfare. Young chimps would guard the territory of more dominant chimps who in turn had primary access to females. If a chimp from another group strayed into that territory they would quite literally be torn limb from limb. She actually refrained from reporting what she saw for years because she was so shocked. You expect to see the idyllic roots of humanity. You expect to see this perfect ideal that we came from before civilization taught us greed and organized violence. No… quite the opposite. Another primatologist.. Franz De Wall,, actually did a lot of work with a large variety of primates. He found that social dominance structures were endemic throughout primate groups… but what was interesting is that it wasn't all a naked power play. When a dominant chimp exercised too much power over his peers.. Took too many females. Was too abusive… he was literally knocked off. All it would take was two or three younger chimps to murder the more powerful one. Literally tearing the animal limb from limb. If he was too weak another rival would depose him. So social dominance structures… even with chimps were a sort of social balancing act. Just like with humans there is a lot of coalition building involved.
Being both more systematically brutal than chimps and more empathic than bonobos, we are by far the most bipolar ape. Our societies are never completely peaceful, never completely competitive, never ruled by sheer selfishness, and never perfectly moral.
And it goes further than that… Social dominance structures go as far back as 350 million years… older than trees. Older than flowers. This is one of the reason a lot of research is done on lobsters.. Since their nervous system is so underdeveloped it is easy to measure things like serotonin levels in their brains. When two male lobsters fight over territory they can actually measure serotonin levels in the lobster that won and the lobster that lost… The brain circuitry is just the same as two male chimps fighting over a a female or even two teenagers attempting to character assassinate each other on Tic Toc.
So the ambition of Marxism is to undo all that. It wants to turn the tables on nature. Is that what Marx and Engels thought at the time? No.. Not in the least. They admired Darwin. Hell Das Kapital was named in his honor. Engels referenced him at Marx’s funeral. Then again how could they possibly know any better? It was the 19th century after all. Keep all this in mind we will revisit it.
So back to our story… As we have seen… science became a sort of fetish in the early Soviet state. The system Lenin devised was supposed to be absolutely cutting edge. So we talked about how he thought Socialism would sort of “unite the sciences” and how in this Marxist materialist state one day everything would somehow be understandable. He wrote the book “Materialism and Empiricism” to explain himself. Looking back the idea is kind of naive if not ignorant… but it was the guiding force for Soviet Science right up to the end.
So in our last episode we looked at the Soviet theory of mind and how they used psychology to coerce a largely unwilling population to the Socialist cause. This effort included everything from mass propaganda campaigns, to a legal system that hinged upon what many would later call “brainwashing” to a mental health system that would feature the mass incarceration of political dissidents in psychiatric institutions for spurious ailments such as “sluggish schizophrenia.” We covered a lot of ground in the last episode and I certainly dont have time to re hash it all over again.. So if you haven’t listened to the “Mind Control” show I would encourage you to do so if you can.
There was another… one might even say more pressing issue science was called upon to solve. The Soviet Union.. And the Russian Empire that came before it always suffered from food insecurity. While its land mass was vast there is so much tundra, boreal forest dry steppe land and desert that the actual area where you can effectively grow crops is relatively small. Counterintuitively, the farther east.. Not north that you go it gets colder and colder. The coldest places outside of antarctica are not near the north pole. They are in eastern Russia at a latitude near that of Stockholm. Even in areas where crops grow well such as Ukraine, the weather can be erratic. The winters can be brutal. There are devastating droughts.. You name it. As recently as 1892 400 thousand peasants died in a famine. Then during the Civil War the real famine hit and 5 million people died in 1921-1. Still… at the start of the 20th century Russia was the largest grain exporter in the world. This was true despite the fact that for all intents and purposes agriculture was backwards by modern standards. When Czar Alexander II freed the serfs in 1861 most of the peasants organized themselves into agricultural communes. Others went it alone. For the most part people went about farming the way they always had with not much outside interference. When the Soviets came to power this was seen as a problem. As we saw in our episode “Collectiv and the Ukrainian Genocide” there was a real need for peasants to become much more efficient in producing crops. If the country was going to industrialize you needed millions of them to be able to abandon the countryside for the factories that were being constructed in the city. Stalin believed that if all those small farms were consolidated into large industrial ones they would be more efficient and require less labor. This as we have seen proved to be a complete disaster… and it led directly to the Holodomor… but that we have already covered in detail. Another part of this plan was to make peasants actually farm more scientifically. And part of this effort leaned into agricultural science. What if the crops they planted could be genetically engineered to produce better results? Perhaps science could solve the food crisis once and for all. What the Soviets did in this area proved to be the biggest scientific disasters of all time. I’m not exaggerating. This would arguably lead to more deaths than every 20th century war with the exception of World War II. So what happened? This story is a mixture of a top heavy state, fraud, cowardice, ideology and above all a failure to determine objective “truth” despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.
Immediately following the Russian Revolution there was a “brain drain” in the new Bolshevik state. Most reputable academics and researchers decided to get out while the getting was good. Those who stayed had to deal with horrible conditions or even arrest as “enemies of the people.” This was the “war communism” period in which Lenin was executing people… often hundreds at a time on the flimsiest of charges. Scientists.. Because they had so many international connections were held in the highest of suspicion. Alexander Veransky.. Head of the Russian Academy of Sciences narrowly escaped execution. When he was finally allowed to return to his moscow laboratory he found his staff on the verge of starvation. They had taken all their lab equipment and converted it to the production of moonshine to sell on the black market for food. When he caught wind that he would be arrested once more he fled the country. He was one of many scientists that had to go through one indignity after another. Even Ivan Pavlov had his Nobel Prize money confiscated and even the medals he earned from the Russian Academy of Sciences were taken away. Things were rough.
So around this time (1921) a scientist by the name of Nikolai Vavilov took over the Russian Academy of Applied Botany. This is an interesting guy. He’s sort of like an “Indiana Jones” of botany. He almost was killed by tribesman in Afghanistan, he nearly fell to his death numerous times mountaineering. You name it he did it. He was obsessed with finding seed specimens from just about everywhere he could. He was a real go getter. Right around this time what academics left in the Soviet Union were getting pretty fed up with how things are going on and it culminated in a strike among the staff of the Moscow University. Lenin took the opportunity to completely dissolve the university system. Furthermore all non Marxist academics were formally deprived of the right to teach, publish or organize academic societies. Just like that any sort of check on the government by the intelligentsia was eliminated… all in one fell swoop. In its place the Soviet government gave select Marxist academics of their own choosing “institutes' ' where they could run things exactly how they saw fit.. Provided they paid appropriate homage to their betters in Moscow of course. True, they would open universities in the future but these would be “people’s universities,” great places to get indoctrinated but all the important research was done in the institutes. Vavilov will be chosen to take over the Bureau of Applied Botany (one of these institutes). While there he will come into conflict with the main villain of our story Trofim Lycenko. The fallout from this battle is the main subject of this podcast.
First lets get a little background on what the basis for the rivalry was. At the heart of it is this idea of “natural selection.” By the early 20th century most scientists had arrived at the conclusion that certain individuals within species have traits that allow them to reproduce more effectively than others. They pass their genes on and that determines the genetic makeup of the next generation… on and on it goes. There are also dominant and recessive genes. When one parent has a dominant gene and another a recessive it is most likely that the dominant trait will be passed on and the recessive will disappear in the offspring. Change occurs very slowly over countless generations. The environment can effect this change but only so much as it increases or decreases the likelihood of an individual to survive long enough to reproduce. This is “Mendelian” genetics in a nutshell… based on the work of the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel. Most of the world’s biologists had adopted this way of thinking by the 1920’s and for the most part still do today. However there was another idea floating around at the time known as “Lamarckism.” Based on the work of Jean Baptiste Lemark (who did most of his work in the early 19th century about 50 years before Mendel) this school of thought claimed that characteristics acquired during the life of the organism could be passed along to the next generation. So if you hit the gym every day real hard then have a child that child might be more muscular because of all your hard work. The example most often given is that of giraffes. Why are their necks so long? Because all that stretching to get to the top leaves over the generations has made their necks longer and longer. Now a Mendelian would look at those giraffes and say “well. They are like that because all the short ones never reproduced. Maybe the female giraffes aren't interested. Maybe they couldn't get enough food… you get the idea.
Both of these ideas were in open competition in the Soviet Union during this period but it was the fact that the Soviet Union was Socialist that gave Lamarckism an edge. Marx believed that Socialism could actually change humanity… in just a generation or two. Mendelian genetics could deliver no such promise.
Ings p. 117
There would be a “Society of Materialist Biologists” founded in 1926 exclusively designed to promote these ideas. A founding member Solomon Levit declared
Ings p. 120
Over in Europe, at the University of Vienna, another Lamarkist decided to attempt to prove once and for all that acquired characteristics could be inherited. He wanted to prove that a newt “Salamandra maculosa” would lose its yellow spots if raised on black soil or if raised on yellow soil those yellow spots would get bigger. He sincerely believed that this experiment would work if given enough time and even wrote a book “The Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics” in 1924. The book made all sorts of claims how this new science could be used to make the world a better place. Lamarkism would make us “captains of the future” where as Mendelianism woud make humans “slaves of the past.” He became an international sensation. He was written up in the New York Times. Obviously, the Soviets took great interest and got behind him. He was just about to wind up the European tour and head to Moscow when disaster overwhelmed him. A reporter from the journal “Nature” (then and now one of the most reputable in the world) broke the story that the whole thing was a fraud. In this case it was his experimental toads that did him in.
Ings p.122-3
Overnight…. The bottom fell out of Lamarckism in the Western scientific community. It had been discredited. Or had it? The Society of Materialist Biologists went into overdrive. All the state papers ran glowing obituaries. Rather than a fraud he was depicted as a victim of Western Imperialism. There was even a full length movie made called “Salamandra.” The movie featured a Marxist biologist who made stunning discoveries in the labs reproducing the same results Kammerer had. In the movie version however, a devious priest–fearing that this earnest scientist might undermine the power of the church concocts a way to discredit him… The night before the scientist was to announce his breakthrough discoveries the priest (with the help of a local prince… because why not) breaks into the scientist’s laboratory and injects his specimens with ink. Sure enough during the big presentation the next day someone takes out the salamander and dips it in a jar of water… he ink runs out and the hall breaks into laughter. The scientist is kicked out of the university. The next scene has the scientist begging for loose change on a sidewalk.. his only friend a experimental monkey that follows him around. The movie ends with a former student pleading with the Soviet Education minister (Anatoly Lunacharsky) explaining that the whole thing was a set up. The final scene of the movie has the scientist and his student on a Moscow bound train flying a banner that reads “To the Land of Liberty.” The movie was a huge hit and apparently it ran for 6 years or something. So ironically enough… this apparent failure of Larmarkism through clever propaganda is actually turned into a triumph. Gotta love that spin!!
Still. Lots of scientists in the Soviet Union still didn't buy it. Even Pavlov himself was skeptical that learned behavior could be inherited. After 1927 he never published anything on the subject. In fact a lot of them were willing to go waaaay out in the other direction. I know when you hear the word “Eugenics” you probably think Nazis and the 3rd Reich.. Think again.. The Soviets founded their own Eugenic Society in 1921.. Over a decade before the Nazis came to power. One of their first steps was setting up a commission to study the Jewish race. Nikolai Koltsov, Head of the Dept of Experimental Biology was all over the idea. He even published a journal of Eugenics.. “The Russian Eugenics Journal”. This stuff was all over the place and it wasn’t some sinister racist thing. No… lots of people on the left were all over it. The word Eugenics is simply “human genetics” after all. He latched on to the the ideas of an American Marxist Biologist by the name of Herman Muller who was going some groundbreaking work on Drosophila or fruit flies. “Why in the world would anyone care about fruit flies?” you ask. Well. Fruit flies are literally the work horse of genetics. They have very short life spans and breed well in laboratory conditions You can breed dozens of generations of them in just a few months. So this Muller guy did something that turned a lot of Socialists on to Mendelian genetics. Up until now the idea of genes were some sort of lottery one deals with at birth. Genes were unchanging and just seemed to go back forever. By bombarding his fruit flies with X rays Muller was able to show that mutations could be induced and the mutations would be passed down. Genes were physical things. They lay in the chromosome and they could be altered by humans. Perhaps genes could be manipulated for the betterment of mankind? One prominent Lamarist named Solomon Levit went totally over to the other side and tried to reproduce Muller’s results in the Soviet Union. He created an office that would study heritable diseases, using case studies, genealogies and twin studies. This was one of the first serious attempts to map the human genome. Some of the ideas that came out of this movement sound downright sinister to contemporary ears. One Russian Eugenicist named Alexander Serebrovsky proposed a mass voluntary artificial insemination program for Russian women:
Ings p. 153
All of this seems pretty dystopian… and lets face it. It is totally. But you have to realize a lot of people had died in Russia over the past decade. Between World War I and the Civil War and all the famines, political repression and even a spike in aboartion rates. The state needed solutions and well… this science seemed and was legit. The Soviets did all sorts of stuff… They cross bred a zebra with a donkey (zeedonk) an antelope and a yak and even created a new breed of sheep which is still around in Kazakhstan. They got international attention. A New York Times piece on it even prompted threatening letters from the KKK. At one point it really looked like Mendelian genetics would prevail in the USSR as it had elsewhere but things took a turn.
A researcher at the Moscow Zoological Institute Ilya Ivanov actually attempted (unsuccessfully) to impregnate unsuspecting African women with Chimpanzee dna material… and vice versa. Well. It made a big splash but it was a step too far.. And the tide began to turn against this whole genetic engineering thing. In 1932, Solomon Levit, head of the Moscow Medical Biological institute and a big defender of the Russian Eugenics program was replaced by its acting director Boras Kogan and ALL genetics research was halted. Levit fought back in the press.. But by this point any research in genetics was starting to get associated with… you guessed it the Nazis and he was on the defensive
Ings p. 159
Nikoai Koltsov, the head of the Russian Eugenics Society wound disband the organization. WIth the purges going on it was too much risk. Despite all the progress genetics was getting around the world the fact that it was associated with anything anti communist was the deciding factor. It had to be false. Marxist politics wins over science.
Ings p. 160
The 1930s as we have seen saw the rise of Stalin and all the nastiness that came along with it. When you look at it there was some Academic freedom in the 1920’s. Lenin’s final years and the early years of Stalin were all about political maneuvering behind the scenes among the top brass of the Politburo. What was going on in laboratories could be left aside for the moment. However.. Once Stalin solidified his control on the party and the 5 year plans started coming through things started to change. There was a huge emphasis on conformity of ideas.. Of course “factionalism” was to blame…. And if you got painted with that brush you got thrown in with the “traitors” like Trotsky, or Bukarin or Rykov or Zinoviev or any number of the big wigs that fell from the graces of the regime. Now all scientific fields had to show their Marxis bone fides or risk loss of status imprisonment or worse. There was a new organization VARNITSO or the All Union Association of Scientific and Technical Workers for Active Participation in Socialist Construction of the USSR… yeah thats a mouthful. These are the guys that basically insisted that you choose sides. Are you with us or with them? Everyone fell in line.. No one spoke out.. With a notable exception
Ings p. 181
So had this all ended with some ban on gene research in the Soviet Union.. Well it would not be that important of a story would it? After all… who cares? Acquired characteristics? Maybe they are a thing? Maybe not? Whats it matter to me? Well… if a principal of genetics applies to people and animals might it not also apply to plants? Yeah, that could be important. And as we will see… in a system like the Soviet Union… one in which every idea has to be filtered through a sort of Marxist Leninist lens… the the tendency for one idea… in this instance that of “heritability of acquired characteristics” to be almost universally accepted.. Even in areas where there is little or no evidence of it is extremely high. In addition.. And I’m not going to lay this solely at the feet of the Communist system (it happens in almost all systems of government to some extent) the people ultimately deciding what is true or false in all areas–science included are not the people with the real working knowledge (the scientists) its the dominant political class… The General Assembly… The Politburo… the General Secretary… The Dictator. The main difference with these people though is that at least in a democratic system that political class is answerable to the people… and the people are informed by a free press. Obviously none of that would hold true in the Soviet Union or any other Marxist society that has existed. Under that type of system the idea of “truth” scientific or otherwise is too complex… too nuanced to be left to the masses.
Russia had always had its share of down to earth close to the soil agronomists. Like all those centuries seemed to breed local wisdom when it came to agriculture. As farming methods improved dramatically in the West in Russia things were more traditional. Most of this knowledge… and often it bordered on superstition… farmers have always been superstitious people stayed quite local and remained totally unknown but not always. You have a really interesting plant breeder named Ivan Micurin that fits the fill perfectly. He came from a poor farming family. Parents struggled to hold onto an orchard and lost it. Had a number of odd jobs growing up. All 6 of his siblings died in childhood. He had only one year of elementary school education. On a whim at the age of 33 he borrows enough money to purchase about 40 acres of land and he decides to breed hybrid fruits from seed. He ends up becoming pretty famous and his work inspired a lot of Soviet agronomists. We cannot wait for favors from Nature. To take them from it – that is our task."
What they really liked about him was his seemingly proletarian roots.. And the idea that he seemed to operate outside the scientific norms. He did not conduct by the book.. Repeatable experiments. He believed that nature never repeated itself. If nature changed in the way Micurin thought then who knows? Medelian genetics is so constrained but maybe theres so much else than can be achieved?
Of course it mattered a great deal that Stalin came out as a full scale Lamarkist early on. Something about the idea just clicked with him. He wholeheartedly backed the Society of Materialist Biologists who were attempting to take the concept of acquired characteristics into the agricultural sphere. He backed blatantly Marxist biologists… One of these was Izak Present was quoted to have said
Ings p. 194
And there you have it “Practice is the Criterion of Truth” Truth isn't something that exists it is something you make.
Ok. So lets get back to Nicholai Vavilov. He leads he Bureau of Applied Botany. By the 1930’s he’s well known. Well traveled. Everyone knows him in the scientific community by the end of the 1920’s. Stalin announces his first 5 year plan in Jan 1929. At a big gala event lots of promises and projections are made but Vavilov commits to a 35% increase in grain yields by 1934… An amazing feat
Ings p. 203
But Vavilov is a real scientist. He’s into rigorous science. Collects millions of specimens from all over the world. He is a practitioner of what we might call “pure science.” Also.. and this is very important he seems to be a little on the fence about Lamarckism. So right around this time Yakov Yakovlev, Editor of the “Peasants Gazette” which was a newspaper that was exactly like it sounds like. It was the the new york times or idk Reuters for your basic farmer in the Soviet Union… He starts publishing articles by this new agronomist named Trofim Lycenko. He was the son of a peasant. He had spent 4 years at a small agricultural school and he had taken some correspondence courses from the Kiev Agricultural Institute. While working in the Caucasus he had done some work acclimatizing beans to grow in the region and he got noticed. A writer from Pravda named Vitaly Fedorovich wanted do a write up about a local phenom of beans and Lycenko fit the bill. On his first meeting he wasn't so impressed
Ings p. 207
Still though Lycenko was gold for an aspiring journalist in the 1930s. He depicted him as a “barefoot scientist” who “holds a plow in one hand and a flask in the other.” He would compare him favorably to the Mendelians who liked to “study the hairy legs of flies” while Lycenko did work that would actually help the Soviet people. Soon Vavilov had to pay attention to this new 29 year old sensation. He had mixed opinions about him: He thought Lycenko was fearless and “undoubtedly talented” but also “extremely egotistical” and a man who deemed himself to be a “new Messiah of Biological science.”
Lycenko had this idea… and you can see how this ties in with the concept of acquired characteristics called vernalization. Basically you take the seeds for a crop like winter wheat. You soak them, then you expose them to cold temperatures and you get it to bud or “ear” a little. If you go and plant it he believed that it would grow like crazy (if) you plant it in the Spring. What’s weird about that? Well they call winter wheat winter wheat because its planted…. In the fall… It stays in the ground the whole winter and then it grows in the spring. Vernalization had actually been around for a long time but Lycenko sold it as something new. Of course he kept terrible notes and wasnt all that original
Ings p. 209
What Lycenko actually believed was happening during this vernalization process was turning one plant into another. He actually believed that winter wheat could be transformed into spring wheat. He submitted one paper but when it was sharply criticized he never touched statistics again. Instead he would use arbitrary examples that suited his cause. Whatever energy he kept out of the laboratory he threw into the public sphere. The tale made the rounds that his father facing a bad crop made the decision to vernalize his own seeds… but he did it in secret because he was afraid the other villagers would laugh
Ings p. 210
As you might expect Lycenko was given his own journal “The Bulletin of Applied Botany.” Despite Vavilov’s misgivings he had to play ball with Lycenco. The Bureau of Applied Botany had to cooperate with this huge vernalization scheme.. And right at this time.. We are taling the early 1930’s. Things are getting well… lets just say a little hot. Underperforming under Stalin’s watch at this point could be bad for your health. He was getting constantly attacked for his connections with western scientists. Then you have Yakov Yakovlev… who got a real boost from his star writer Lycenko publishing articles in Pravda saying that with Lycenko’s new method new wheat varieties could be engineered in 4 years rather than 12. The politicians by this point all got behind it and just like that these new ideas… that you can actually engineer new plant varieties in just a few years became widely accepted.
Now again you may ask “who cares?” so this guy has farmers fiddling with seeds and maybe they think they are transforming one kind of crop into another and somehow there will be some miracle bump in productivity… well… this whole “vernalization” process is actually way more tricky and laborious as it sounds. First you have to soak the seeds in a shed for several days.. And for a large farm we are talking “tons” of seeds which only get heavier when you make them wet. You have to spread them out on trays on the floor and constantly turn them over and over and over. The seeds have to be kept at just the right moisture and the right temperature… not to hot.. Not too cold. And this is in winter… in friggin Russia mind you. Most of the time there was no heat or electricity to aid this process. If its done wrong the seeds might germinate too soon (or not at all) and they might fall prey to fungi and diseases. Finally… spreading the seeds in the spring was twice as difficult because the seeders would have to go over the same fields twice because the seeds would be swollen and wet. Literally a million things could go wrong. And the worst part.. If something did go wrong what would you do? Blame Vernalization?? Thats tantamount to blaming Stalin himself!! Uh oh. If you got labeled an “Anti Vernalizer” you would be sent to a labor camp with the kulaks or worse.
Lets think back to those episodes we did on the Ukrainian famine of 1931-2. One of the reasons the crop yields came in as low as they did was in addition to the privations the peasants already had to face they had to implement this senseless practice on top of it. How many of the 5 or so million deaths in the Holodomor alone can we chalk up at least in part to vernalization?? Who knows?
So by 1934 it is clear that Soviet agriculture is not keeping up its end of the bargain. Millions had starved. The collectivization effort had been a costly failure. Who to blame? Lycenko?? No. How about Nikolai Vavilov. Yes, it was Vavilov who had been touring the world searching for rare seeds and visiting with members of the scientific community while ordinary Soviet citizens starved. Lycenko (who always had the ear of Stalin) set him up. The Vodge himself accused Vavilov and the Bureau of Applied Botany of “letting the nation down.” Lycenko blamed him for importing corn seeds from the United States which yielded poor results among other things. He attacked him viciously in the press.. Basically blaming everything on Vavilov. But Vavilov hit back. He accused him of using “elementary” genetics or just misunderstanding the whole thing altogether. What gave Lycenko the advantage was that he knew how to make grandiose claims and promises and Vavilov… he was a by the book scientist.
Ings p. 231
And on the front page of the Dec 1935 issue of Pravda was Lycenko sharing the rostrum with Stalin himself.
And there was good reason for Stalin to want someone like Lycenko. There are all these “hero projects” like the white sea canal (wonderful useless canal to connect the arctic ocean to the Baltic.. It was too shallow) that cost like 30k lives, there was Magnitogorsk (Soviet version of Pittsburgh) There was Dnieprostroi (worlds largest hydroelectric power plant). You have the Stakhanovite campaign.. Apparently there was this one coal miner Gregorovich Stakhanov that dug 102 tons of coal in 5 hours (with a small crew)... and then he doubled it 2 weeks later. Guy even made the cover of time magazine. American psychologist Richard Schultz described how factories had categories labeled “bird, deer, rabbit, tortoise or snail” to gauge worker productivity. Of course yeah… forced labor… gulags… you know where this goes… Stalin wanted quick fixes. Like any dictator with limitless power. Lots of people rose and lots of people fell.. But as long as you seemed to spout the party line than you’ll be ok. Lycenko learned that quick.
So right at this time the Nazis start to become a thing. If you remember from our Collectivization episode early in the 1920’s the National Socialist party was not considered a threat to the Soviets. They were much more concerned with Social Democrats or any other left leaning party that might peel votes from the Soviet backed Communist parties of Europe. They would even campaign against avowedly Marxist parties just because they didn’t tow the Moscow line. Well… by the mid 1930’s the Soviets had seen the error of their ways. Now anything remotely hinting of Nazism was verboten. If you remember there was a Soviet Eugenics program. One noted eugenicist Herman Mueller wrote:
Ings p. 266-7
So now the science had become political. If you believed in genetics you risked being labeled a “fascist.” If you went down the Lamarkist path you had to follow a science that the world scientific community had rejected. And by this point it was getting wacky. Lycenko even went so far as to deny the existence of genes:
Ings: p. 273
Lycenkoists openly accused geneticists of having “fascist links.” Its not hard to see why. Nazis believed in a sort of biological determinism. Not only did genes exist but they were everything. And of course they believed they were the ones with the best genes… and oh… they are openly hostile to communism. There could be no middle ground. Like any destructive relationship they take this “your either with us or against socialism” type of line. Are you a fascist or not?? All of this rhetoric was kicked into overdrive by Stalin’s purges in 1937/8. Vavilov and the geneticists had a choice to make and they knew what was at stake. They had been demonized for doing useless things like studying fruit flies. Lycenko labeled them “fly lovers and people haters.” Now they were lumped in with the worst enemies of the regime. Before going into a conference in which he knew he would be attacked by Lycenko and his followers Vavilov said:
“We shall go to the pyre. We shall burn but when shall not retreat from our convictions.”
By this point Lycenko… the peasant with just a couple years in community college was Presidents of the Lenin Academy of Sciences, member of the Academy of Sciences and its ruling presidium, and a Deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union (sort of like a member of congress). The attacks against Vavilov were so base that at one point he lost his temper
Ings p. 291
Then in absolute desperation he appealed to the “big guy.”
Ings. p. 292
He didn't ask Vavilov to sit down. It was like talking to a brick wall. Within a month Lycenko actually sent Vavilov to the Caucasus on some pointless expedition and while he was gone he dismissed the entire board of the Bureau of Applied Botany. He was arrested six months later. He was tortured. He was interrogated for 900 hours. He confessed to being a wrecker and a spy. He was sentenced to death but the sentence was commuted to 20 years hard labor.
Ings p. 301
He died of starvation in a Saratov labor camp in January 1943. Vavilov is remembered as perhaps the greatest scientific martyr of the 20th century… and for good reason. He stood up for objective truth in the face of withering persecution. However… under the Soviet system the truth was a complicated thing.
So World War II happened. The Soviet Union was brought to its knees in every way imaginable but it still managed to pull off a victory. But… after all that devastation there was a real issue of how to feed people. Lycenko is still all powerful in the Soviet Scientific community and as we have seen his ideas were not good under the best of circumstances… but now? Yikes. There is going to be another famine in the years 1946-7. Big time food shortage in Europe for obvious reasons. 2 million Soviets died of starvation related diseases. 1 in 3 children born died in infancy. So the Soviets decided to put Lycenko’s ideas on the back burner for now and play it safe with their food production……… haha I had you there didnt I. No of course they didnt. They went all in on everyone’s favorite “barefoot scientist.” Lycenko found this new crop known as “branching wheat” which produces a very large number of seeds per plant but other than that is pretty crummy. It tasted terrible, it was prone to diseases. It had never been tried as a major production crop. There’s evidence that the Ancient Egyptians tried planting it but gave up on the idea. But Lycenko was super tight with Stalin at this point and he gave Lycenko the go ahead to breed a crop that could perhaps solve the food crisis.
The situation again made Stalin favor Lysenko, who had promised new high-yield cultivars for the country, this time with the help of branching wheat bred from 200 g of seeds that Stalin had personally given him in late 1946 (Figure 1). Knowing that previous attempts to introduce branching wheat into agricultural production had failed, Lysenko promised to solve the problem in 2 or 3 years by retraining.
Genetics. 2019 May
As you might imagine this branching wheat was never “retrained” in the way Lycenko hoped. The scheme failed and the USSR continued to suffer from crippling food insecurity. So much so that they were had the embarrassment of having to receive grain shipments from the capitalist west… And this problem would not go away it would get worse with time. And as we are going to see you can lay that blame at the feet of Lysenko.
A lot of people inside the Soviet scientific community were beginning to say “enough is enough.” This guy is a rank amateur here. He’s like a community college graduate and he has almost unlimited power over literally what is true or false in a scientific sense at least and its all because what he was selling seemed to jibe with Marxist orthodoxy. I really cannot stress this enough. But it was getting to the point that even the most die hard Marxist scientist (if they were honest) knew that what he was spouting was garbage. The idea that crops can be “trained”... its like biological re education. He also honestly believed that plants and animals of the same species would NOT compete with each other in any way that might interfere with their evolution. It got really weird. And another thing… and this must have really aggravated Soviet scientists… was that in this immediate post war period (before the Cold War and after the defeat of fascism) there was a ton of back and forth communication amongst scientists. You might even call it a “thaw.” It was in this new open environment that many in the west got their first peek at what the Soviets actually believed. And the reviews?? Not good!! In June of 1945… just a month after the end of the war in Europe 122 delegates from 18 countries went to Moscow to commemorate the 220th anniversary of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Among the delegation was an Australian botanist named Eric Ashby and a and a friend Julian Huxley.
Ings p. 341-2
At this time.. Probably starting in 1945/6 you start to see another “anti Lysenko” campaign. This guy’s writings were starting to get translated into English and people were aghast:
Ings p. 343-4
It really seemed that this time Lysenko’s goose would be cooked. If you read a narrative of this guy’s life and you get to this point.. And you don’t know how the story ends?? Yeah this should be the end of the line. Stalin is getting old and sort of withdrawing (the war did take a lot out of him) and he’s spending an increasing amount of time with the Elderly Andre Zhdanov. Stalin really did start to decline right about now. When you read the biographies of him.. Early on he make everyone around him drink to excess while he moderated.. So he could figure them out. By the late 1940’s he was hitting it pretty good too. He’s surrounded by yes men. He stays up late until 4 or 5 am watching movies with his inner circle. If you ever have seen that movie “Death of Stalin” I cant reccommend it more. Really what matters is how close you are to this inner circle. And to get close you had to go through the Party… and that really determined everything. The actually in the late 1947s resurrected the idea of “honor courts” from czarist times. The original system was sort of like if you were in the military and you did something to dishonor your unit (cheating at gambling) your commander and several other members of the unit could do an investigation and issue a sentence. You might be drummed out of service… etc. They also existed in universities if someone was suspected of plagiarism. The Politburo now resurrected this practice for people in the intelligentsia for their “reeducation.” Not showing sufficient socialist zeal? Communicating with western scientists? Now you can be brought up on strictly political charges. And the result would be a 20 year gulag sentence.
And at the very top… at the place where science and politics touched.. There was Trofim Lycenko. Cross him and you risked everything. Did Lycenko realize his science was fraudulent? Probably.. But did it matter? When there was a monevemt in 1947 to replace him as head of the Lenin Academy he wrote directly to Stalin himself. In the letter he writes off all the prevailing ideas of western biology (the ones his political opponents were trying to bring back) as being mere subterfuges for the enemies of Socialism.
“Mendelism-Morganism, Weissmanist neo-Darwinism... are not developed in Western capitalist countries for the purposes of agriculture, but rather serve reactionary purposes of eugenics, racism, etc. There is no relationship between agricultural practices and the theory of bourgeois genetics”
At this point in his life Stalin is seeing enemies everywhere. There is a lot of evidence that he was planning another major purge of the party even now and had he lived longer who knows… One of his close friends and possible successor Andre Zhdanov died. Stalin would later blame the doctors (who were Jewish) and there would be a near anti semetic genocide known as the “doctors plot.” Coincidentally Zhanov was weary of Lycenko and tried to limit his ever widening control over Soviet Science. After he died in 1948 though Stalin was all in for Lycenko. At this point the barefoot scientist had decided to dig in to the work of the famous (conveniently dead) Vladmirovich Michurin. He basically said that Michiurin had believed in this idea of acquired characteristics all along and he was building on his work. Stalin was right there with him on that count:
He wrote to Lycenko saying:
“As for theoretical concepts in biology, I think that Michurin’s concept is the sole concept that is scientific. Weissmanists and their supporters, who deny inheritance of acquired properties, do not deserve that we go on about them for long. The future belongs to Michurin.”
Stalin and Lycenko (although you never know with a fraud) believed that capitalist geneticists had conspired to keep this special knowledge of acquired characteristics from the proleteriat to keep them down.
Nonetheless, some people were brave enough to confront Stalin on the matter. Oddly enough one of these individuals was a Lycenko follower and “honor court” judge Nikolai Tsitsin. He wrote Stalin a 30 page letter in Feburary 1848 and went as far as asking for an “open discussion” about Lycenko.
Ings p. 357
In addition to evicerating Lycenko’s theories he claimed that he had surrounded himself with unscrupulous characters and turned the Lenin Academy into a “vacuous bureaucracy” where everyone was excluded aside from Lycenko’s “yes men.”
Ings p. 357
Then the son of Stalin’s right han man Andrei Zdanov, Yuri (who was actually engaged to Stalin’s daughter Svetlana) accused Lycenko of outright “wrecking.” This was a serious threat for him. Yuri may have been just 29 but he had a degree in chemistry and had enough experience in genetics to make him a mendelian. This was all very public and people were starting to whisper that perhaps Lycenko’s days were numbered after all.
Then Lycenko makes a clever political move. He offers his resignation as Predident of the Lenin Academy of Sciences. Now according to the way the Soviet government worked that resignation would have to be approved by the Politburo. But the Politburo was petrified of Stalin and most of them were friendly to Lycenko anyways. When Stalin sat down with the text of Zdanov’s denunciation of Lycenko he wrote
Ings p. 359
Stalin starts to get heated
Ings p. 360
Stalin was a man that knew how to harbor grudges. He had endorsed Lycenko. He had endorsed the adoption of Michurin. While he was willing to go along with the world’s consensus in other scientific areas like physics for instance (he was busy building a nuke right then) genetics was different. It was “cosmopolitan.” Thats a code word for “Jewish” btw. Instead of distancing himself from Lycenko like most leaders would he gets super tight. At this point he is hand editing his speeches with those colored pencils he loved so much checking to see if Lycenko had made any political gaffes or even scientific errors. That could have been the end of it. If Stalin and the Politburo wanted something who would stand against them? No one who valued their necks. But Stalin wanted something more definitive More public even. He worked closely with Lycenko to deliver a speech that would silence the anti Lemakists once and for all. There would be a session.. More like a convention that would run from July 31 - Aug 7 1948. It would be held in All-Union Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Moscow. This would be a big event. There were a large number of speakers as you might expect. Some of them were hostile to Lycenko but they were few and they got heckled the whole time.
Ings p. 365-6
The effect on Soviet science was chilling. One by one every last opponent of Lycenko issued a public apology. Some of them turned on fellow geneticists and accused them of outright treason. It got to the point where they were actually editing out mendelian genetics with ink.
Ings p. 368-9
Thousands of people lost their jobs or went to the labor camp. Most took menial jobs like clerks or translators. One even became a pianist in a bar. Meanwhile the victors gloated
Ings p. 373
Outside of the Soviet Union people were aghast. Herman Muller went as far as to compare the Soviet Academy to the Nazis. Most just shrugged it off. As we have seen in the last episode. The Soviets cut themselves off from the world intellectually.
Now at this point you might say to yourself… Well… Ok… this is a dictatorship. Its all Stalin’s fault. If it weren’t for him none of this would have happened. Fair enough. You cant understate a guy that big but if that were the case how do you explain what happened to Lycenko after his completely unexpected and untimely death from a stroke?
So in the years following the infamous 1948 Session Lycenko did not take a breather… oh no. He just racked up more very predictable disasters. One of them was called the “Stalin Plan.” This plan.. And the ambition here is breathtaking… was to create 7 belts of forests that would stretch across the central USSR. 15 million acres. Thats like all the forests in Europe put together. The idea is that these forests would block the cold Siberian winds and dampen the semi arid south part of the country. While the plan wasn’t entirely Lycenko’s brainchild he played a huge role in ensuring it was a failure. Like I mentioned earlier he believed that plants of the same type have a sort of “class solidarity.” Say you plant an oak tree. Then you plant a several other oaks around that middle oak… in the beginning the oaks will help each other fight weeds. Eventually, the oaks on the outside will “sacrifice” themselves for the one in the middle. He had people build entire forests on this principle. One tree in the middle and 4 on each side. Like a + sign. Of course this was nonsense but who was going to contradict him? Within 4 years all the forests had failed. Two were complete losses. Then he got caught faking an experiment where he claimed to have actually transformed to have transformed a hornbeam tree into a hazelnut tree. Apparently the hazelnut branch had just been grafted in.. To make matters worse a major scientific paper publicized the incident. In shame, Lycenko stepped down from his Presidency of the Lenin Academy.
With all this very fresh in people’s minds Nikita Khruschev wound up replacing Stalin in 1954. Did he put Lycenko out to pasture? Need you ask? No… of course not. Khruschev, unlike most of the Soviet top brass was a man of little education. He was the son of a simple peasant and he never let anyone forget it. To him Lycenko was a sort of kindred spirit. Plus he just admired the guy’s ambitious plans… and lets face it. Trofim Lycenko was ambitious to be sure. And traditional scientists just left him confused. They made him feel stupid. Now Khruschev had a thing for corn. Corn is a staple here in the US. It’s literally in everything. Even if we don't eat it the animals we eat eat it. That was not the case in the Soviet Union. The weather there wasn't good for it. Not enough growing season. Not enough moisture. Its a problem.. .but.. What if you could come up with a way to plant “hybrid maize” a type of American crop that did really well… in North America in the USSR? Lycenko believed that if the plants were planted in the “square cluster” method it would accumulate and preserve moisture in the soil. They would do well even in areas were little was grown… like east of the Volga River. This plan to cultivate a whopping 30 million acres was known as the “Virgin Lands” campaign. The size and scope of this plan’s failure would rival that of vernalization. Instead of being food independent the Soviet Union would face starvation were it not for grain imports from North America. This would be true all the way until its collapse in 1991. The only thing that kept them afloat by the 1970’s was selling oil on the world market. Despite having the some of the finest farmland in the world in Eastern Europe.
But…. amazingly that STILL wasn’t the end of Lycenko. The thing that finally did him in was a scheme having to do with milk output. Khruschev had been super eager to have the Soviet Union become a world leader in that area. Bigger than the US. Lycenko rose to the challenge. He believed that if you cross Jersey bulls with ordinary cows.. Something thats never done… milk production would increase generation on generation. And again…. This is Lycenko here… acquired characteristics… you just need to feed the cows really well during gestation.. Later generations of these cross bred cows would just produce more and more milk. That failed… well not immediately. The first generation seemed to do well but the new cross bred cows were no good at all The idea led to a massive loss in the country’s milk production. After 10 years the average milk yield per cow went from 7,000 to 4,500 kg annually. In 1965 Lycenko finally lost his Agrobiology Journal. He still kept a bit of a cult following amongst peasants but little more than that. In 1971 after he had fallen from grace an American professor was able to track im down
Graham p. 74
The effect this guy had is much wider than just the Soviet Union. His methods were adopted my Mao’s China in the 1950’s and 60’s and as many as 30 or even 50 million people died. Thats amazing. Obviously you cant chalk all those fatalities alone but Lycenko is getting up in Genghis Kahn territory. He’s certainly deadlier than nuclear weapons. He’s deadlier than Covid by a long shot.
Although it’s impossible to say for sure, Trofim Lysenko probably killed more human beings than any individual scientist in history. Other dubious scientific achievements have cut thousands upon thousands of lives short: dynamite, poison gas, atomic bombs. But Lysenko, a Soviet biologist, condemned perhaps millions of people to starvation through bogus agricultural research—and did so without hesitation. Only guns and gunpowder, the collective product of many researchers over several centuries, can match such carnage.
This is a lesson from history. Definitely an example of what happens when politics supersedes science. In the Soviet Union a system was created where one had to follow an ideology to get somewhere in the world. Id say the question should not be how could such a thing happen but how would someone like Lysenko not be a sort of inevitability? But as weve seen at the top of the show when a system makes the definition of truth so relative… so obscure… How else could it all end
DAVID JORAVSKY
The
method of determining truth by authoritarian trial and
error was justified by Stalin's doctrine that “practice”
is the supreme criterion of truth. In more precise
language, one learns by bossing.
Practice… what you do.. The life you live. What you are able to project on the world. What you can coerce others into professing. In time that becomes its own truth. But of course… you can call things true.. many people might buy in but inevitably reality creeps back in… and then you are left in a world of lies.
Gulag Archipelago II p.646-8
And I apologize for the length of that quotation but if there is one writer you absolutely have to read about his period its AS. After serving through some of the worst fighting of wwii he was overheard making some sort of minor complaint about the government and he would end up spending nearly a decade in the soviet penal system. Initially he believed in the system but his experience made him willing to speak out.. At great risk to himself and his friends. He was of the opinion that a dictatorship isnt just the leadership… no… it goes all the way down to the lowliest child. It permeates and saturates society with falsehood to the point where people are so disoriented they have no idea what truth is anymore. Its hard to imagine… but then maybe a little bit less so in recent years… I mean how many words have literally been redefined in just the past 5 years.
Still…You can only keep that going for so long. People cant live in such a state before seeing the inherent absurdity of it all. You can keep the charade going… for years.. Maybe decades even… until even the most stalwart believer no longer believes any longer. Its the type of scenario F Neitzche predicted with his madman allegory
In the gospel of John Pilate asks “what is truth?”
36Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”
37“You are a king, then!” said Pilate.
Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”
38“What is truth?” retorted Pilate. With this he went out again to the Jews gathered there and said, “I find no basis for a charge against him. 39But it is your custom for me to release to you one prisoner at the time of the Passover. Do you want me to release ‘the king of the Jews’?”
40They shouted back, “No, not him! Give us Barabbas!”
We don’t know what Jesus said in response. We’d like to believe he said something pithy to counter Pilate’s relativistic nihilism. Maybe he said nothing at all.