Soviet agrobiology is infamous for its promotion of the pseudoscientific theories of Trofim Lysenko and their disastrous results. Renato Flores investigates how these theories came to dominate and the social forces that were at play using the framework of Science, Technology, and Society Studies.

Introduction

“Communist Parties, provided by Marx for the first time in history with scientific means of understanding history, which they generally put to good use when analyzing other forces and other times, seem to be powerless to account, as Marxists, for their own history – especially when they have made a mistake.”  — Louis Althusser

Trofim Lysenko. A name known to this day as the person responsible for the worst excesses of Soviet scientific intolerance. The man who, while Stalin applauded, went so far as to ban the study of genetics. A living warning about mixing politics and science, and a supposed symbol of the dogmatism of Marxists. How do we even begin to reckon with his legacy, which we have inherited as communists? 

Soviet Science was hardly an aberration ruled by dogma. It was capable of producing many Nobel prizes like Landau and Kantorovich. Of developing the Sputnik satellite and putting the first man into space. And it was much more similar to the Western system than what we think. Indeed, as the historian of science Loren Graham mentions his interest in Soviet Science comes from the fact that “the most fruitful comparisons are made, however, not between en­tities that are totally different, but between those that are similar enough for some common elements to be found but diverge sufficiently that the variations can be studied. Russian science fits these criteria well. Im­ported initially from Western Europe, it took root and developed in distinct ways.”¹

So how can we begin to understand that a system which produced someone like V. A. Fock who used dialectical materialism in extremely productive manners, also produced someone like Lysenko? For this we must take a page from Science, Technology and Society (STS) studies, which investigate how social, political and cultural structures interact with scientific and technological research, and how this research is reflected back into society. Lysenko must be understood within his context, as a product of an era: a peasant agronomist who offered his services when the Soviet Union needed him most, and a perfect hero for patriotic propaganda. 

In this article, I will compare the careers of two agricultural scientists, one Russian and one Soviet. Although they have gone down in history for eccentric practices, these same practices were sometimes effective and earned them their fame. Because of the social situation in which they found themselves, and also because of their personalities to some extent, they ended up in very different situations. These two scientists also serve as an example for us: that misaligned incentives can have catastrophic consequences for science; and yet, that this should not be reduced simply to the adage that “you cannot mix politics and science,” as this mixing happens whether we want it to or not.

Ivan Michurin in Imperial Russia

The first scientist is Ivan Michurin (1855-1935), a Russian horticulturist who conducted agricultural research on his own estate, or garden, mainly conducted under his own funding. Using hybridization techniques, Michurin succeeded in creating hundreds of varieties of fruit trees, including the Antonovka apple, one of the most widely consumed apples in Russia today.² However, he would not achieve recognition in imperial Russia. Much of his fame would come after the Bolshevik revolution and, above all, after his death.

Ivan Michurin was born in 1855. His father belonged to an aristocratic family but was disinherited because he married a woman without blue blood. The Michurin family moved to an estate where Ivan grew up surrounded by nature. Both he and his father worked in the garden, and Ivan conducted agricultural experiments despite not being a good student, even being expelled in elementary school. When his father grew ill, Ivan took a job at the train station in addition to his work on the farm. This would not be enough to support the family and young Ivan would move to an abandoned farm to supplement his income with farming. Here he would start collecting plants. Money problems would not leave Ivan Michurin for the rest of his life, and he would combine jobs such as fixing watches with his passion for the countryside. All the money that came into the family went to finance his research, something his children do not remember nostalgically. 

Despite this lifestyle, Michurin’s efforts were not in vain. He managed to create an orchard full of apple, pear, and cherry trees, and to the surprise of the local farmers, the Michurin family orchard also glittered with exotic plants such as peaches, apricots, grapes, blackberries, and olives. During this time, he managed to produce his first famous hybrid: a frost-proof cherry, which he called the “Princess of the North.” From his research, Michurin concluded that if different varieties of apples and plums were crossed, he could produce new ones within a couple of years. Even more, the farther away the natural habitats were from the parent cultivars, the easier the crossing was and the more comfortable the hybrids felt in the new environment.³

Michurin continued to research these hybridization processes for decades, acquiring different estates. However, he was ignored by the Russian imperial academy. To understand the reasons for this, one must begin with the history of the Academy. The arrival of scientific research as such in Russia was more recent than in other European countries, and it began with a strong outward focus, inviting foreign scientists, the most famous example being the arrival of the German mathematician Leonard Euler in 1727.⁴ When research was focused inward, it was to carry out large-scale projects to colonize regions in Siberia or the Arctic. In short, to serve the imperial project. The infrastructure to create scientists of its own barely existed and when it began to be created, it would grow very slowly. The Academy itself was founded before there were universities, and because of this its prestige would be disproportionate compared to other countries already even in the Soviet period. 

Although science in nineteenth-century Russia was already beginning to produce its own talent, and there were some brilliant Russian scientists, such as Mendeleev, the creator of the table of the elements, they were still lagging behind the rest of Europe. Russia’s geographical isolation, at the eastern end of the European continent, also contributed to this. At the end of this century, Darwinian theories began to reach Russia, and acquired great academic prestige, as they presented supporting material for scientists who were trying to reform science and exclude the influences of the Orthodox Church. In particular, agrobiological research was inspired by Mendel’s experiments, which showed very simple relationships between genotype and phenotype and postulated very precise models of genetic inheritance. In the face of this, Michurin’s complex hybridization experiments seemed to make little scientific sense. The simple genetical explanations used at the time could not account for what Michurin saw in his garden. Because of this, Michurin came to believe that natural selection had nothing to do with genes, and that only the concept of natural selection should be taken from Darwin. The job of horticulturists was to aid this natural selection by experimentation. His position placed him well outside the academic consensus, and therefore, outside the scientific community. 

The changes of the Bolshevik revolution

In 1915, a flood destroyed Michurin’s farm, and his wife died shortly after. He continued to be ignored by the Academy, which refused him financial support, even though he had exhibited his plants in several exhibitions. Imperial science was not going to admit Michurin into its ranks, but this would not continue. The Bolshevik revolution would bring profound changes to the structure of science, and of research in general, and this would affect Ivan Michurin. After the Bolshevik revolution, his farm was nationalized but he was allowed to continue his research. Moreover, the Soviet government began to support him, hiring him workers and adding more land to his supervision. 

In 1921, Michurin’s apples appeared at an exhibition and attracted the attention of the Kremlin. Lenin thought that Michurin could be an excellent propaganda example for the Soviet government, being a Russian scientist, of humble origins, who had been ignored by the imperial academy. Michurin would be grateful for this support, repaying it with speeches full of admiration for the Bolsheviks. In return he would receive a larger allocation of state workers to direct, and even the Order of Lenin in 1931. But if Michurin was recognized as a great practical experimentalist, he would never cease to receive scorn from more established theoretical scientists. The criteria for admission to scientific life had been slightly modified after the revolution, but was not sufficient to admit someone like Michurin into the scientific community. 

The great change in the techno-scientific structure of the Soviet Union would come in the late 1920s. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks tried to rule with a technological and scientific policy that would allow the country to recover from the Civil War, while at the same time fulfilling a political program that would satisfy the workers and peasants who fought and won the war alongside them. Both the Bolsheviks and the workers and peasants were quite suspicious of the old Russian intellectual class, most of whom had been Mensheviks, the political enemies of the Bolsheviks. However, their expertise was needed to maintain the economy. This uneasy peace began to break down in 1928, with Stalin already consolidated in power. Programs to develop a new class of “red specialists,” people of proletarian origin and loyal to the party, were accelerated at the same time as major purges of scientists such as the Shakhty Affair (1928) and the trial against the Industrial Party (1930). Scientific credentials changed rapidly: now, apart from education, the scientists’ origins mattered. In 1936, Stalin went so far as to declare the existence of a third class, the workers’ intellectuals.⁵

Along with the new class of red specialists, the criteria of usefulness in science changed, and more significantly, the criterion of scientific truth. In the Soviet Union of the 1920s, there was still a belief in supporting scientific research, and that the investment would eventually yield returns. There was no demand for immediacy. A clear example of this time horizon is the research of the biologist Nikolai Vavilov. From his position as Director of the All-Russian Research Institute of Plant Industry (which today bears his name) he financed expeditions to collect seeds in order to research ways to end hunger. However, with the advent of the five-year plans, and the acceleration of “socialist construction,” science began to be evaluated with a question: is it useful, or not useful, in helping us to fulfill the goals of the plan?

The five-year plan called for a massive increase in agricultural production. Vavilov’s research promised very distant returns, and thus would soon cease to be funded. Instead, other methods were promoted that would both mobilize the masses and be effective in the short term. In 1929, the newspaper Bednota began to organize a campaign to create laboratories in the countryside, in which farmers could experiment with their own techniques, whatever worked, in order to achieve the desired crops. Within this practically popular science movement, the idea of modifying seeds to increase yields became popular. It is worth mentioning that the rather hostile Russian climate caused many to experiment with unconventional techniques, mostly out of desperation.

Because of these changes, two camps in agrobiology emerged in the late 1920s: the scientists of the Academy and the peasant scientists. While the former could accept some experiments of the latter as innovative, they remained suspicious of popular figures such as Michurin because, according to them, they did not conform to the scientific criteria of consistency and rationality. And the latter, seeing themselves excluded from a community they considered elitist, despite helping with the agricultural successes called for by the five-year plan, began to develop an intense hatred for the former. 

Here the name of Trofim Lysenko (1898-1976) appears for the first time. In 1927, at the age of 29, Lysenko found himself working at an experimental station in Azerbaijan. He is mentioned in the Soviet press as one of the scientists who discovered a way to increase yields and conquer geography and other adverse conditions. In 1928 he published an article on vernalization, which received wide attention for its practical consequences. The cold and lack of snow had destroyed many plants that were planted in the winter. By a technique of moistening and cooling the seeds, Lysenko made these plants suitable for spring planting (hence the name vernal-ization, from the Latin vernum, spring). 

Although Lysenko is known for the wildest of his theories, it should be mentioned that this first technique he calls vernalization is effective in achieving his ends, and was already known to some farmers previously. It had been studied by the German Gustav Gassner in 1918.⁶ Like many of Lysenko’s other future techniques (of varying degrees of effectiveness), they were probably customs or tricks that were in the popular and pre-scientific knowledge of Russian peasants. There are indications that some techniques were used by his father, a Ukrainian peasant.⁷ 

Understood in this way, Lysenko’s success is easier to rationalize: he gave results to the Soviet state when it needed it most; it came from the famine of 1927-8 due to collectivization and crop failure in Ukraine that caused the loss of five million hectares of wheat one year and seven the next. For his help in time of need, he was recognized. In 1934, he was appointed a member of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, and soon after, of the Moscow Academy. With the new Stalinist scientific criteria, the doors of the scientific community were opened for him, unlike those such as Michurin.

The rise of Lysenko and agrobiology

Lysenko can be compared to the role of the entrepreneur in technoscientific change in Joseph Schumpeter’s theories. According to Schumpeter “It follows that in a rapidly changing environment there will not be time enough for ‘rational conduct’ to become fixed, and even should this happen, it would soon cease to be rational. Incremental adaptation – to anticipate – can at most achieve local maxima, and even these will be unattainable in a rapidly changing environment.“⁸ In this case, reasonable behavior, to seek repeatable, slowly evolving experiments was not rational. Instead, Lysenko takes the figure of the Schumpeterian innovator, a unique historical figure of supernormal strength and will,⁹ and marches forward, proclaiming a new era of biology in which vernalization will provide the solution to everything. 

Jon Elster, paraphrasing Schumpeter, states that the motives that move the entrepreneur are threefold: “the dream and the will to found a private kingdom; the will to conquer, to succeed for the sake not of the fruits of success, but of success itself; and finally the joy of creating, of getting things done.“⁹ In Lysenko, these motives become more apparent over time, especially when Lysenko gets mixed up in politics. Although Schumpeter will conduct his study primarily on capitalism, he states that of these three motives, “Only the first of these is directly linked to the acquisition of private property, although pecuniary gain is also a very accurate indicator of the extent to which the other desires are realized.“⁹ So, we can use this frame of reference even if we refer to the Soviet system, where pecuniary gains were not very correlated to success.

Lysenko cherished fame and proclaimed that he was transforming Soviet agriculture for the good of socialism. He began to surround himself with people who used his techniques in more questionable ways, reducing the control groups and the number of samples. An example of this is his 1937 experiment (almost a decade after he rose to fame), which showed success in converting a Kooperatorka winter wheat variety to spring wheat.¹⁰ The experiment was conducted with two samples, one of which died. But this was enough for Lysenko, who had no patience to answer the criticism that only controlled experiments with genetically pure plants could really give reproducible results. He announced his success and went on to investigate another subject.

However, this does not answer the problem of how a lax scientist, who sometimes achieves positive results, becomes dictator of a scientific field. Once he was already a member of the Academy, in 1935, he gave a speech at a luncheon at which a now-powerful Stalin was present. Lysenko mentioned that the debates in biology and around the validity of his experiments reflected a class conflict, and that the enemies of his research are class enemies. He explicitly puts class origin as a scientific criterion, something to which we will return.

In this year, Lysenko also began to cooperate with the lawyer-philosopher Isaak Prezent, a member of the communist party and an experienced political operative. Together they shaped a philosophy from Lysenko’s experiments, which they would call “Michurinist,” after Michurin. They defined this biology as authentically proletarian, and based on peasant knowledge, as opposed to the more established “bourgeois genetics” in academia in its “Mendelist-Morganist” or “Weissmanist” variants. Their argument about proletarian genetics was timely, standing in stark opposition to the race science being promoted in Nazi Germany. However, it should be noted that Lysenko never believed that his theories could be applicable to human beings. 

Lysenko’s rise would also be greatly helped by the Great Soviet Purges. However, it should also be mentioned that although many of Lysenko’s enemies would be imprisoned or even executed in the purges, being a supporter of Lysenko did not guarantee that one would emerge unscathed from the purges.¹¹ Joravsky mentions that all three of Lysenko’s mentors did not survive the purges. One cannot reduce Lysenko’s rise to the winnowing of the field alone.

Nor was his rise to the position of dictator of biology all-encompassing. Although from the late 1930s the Soviet state would promote Lysenko’s biology as official doctrine, Lysenko did not control the scientific community. There continued to be abundant debate in biological journals about genetics. Even in 1948 it seemed at one point that Lysenko was going to lose his influence. However, Lysenko’s political astuteness not only saved him from his downfall; this is the moment when he gained his maximum influence. Writing a letter to Stalin to reiterate the points about the necessity of class struggle in science, Lysenko made a pretense of renouncing his positions. Stalin then met with him, asking for Lysenko’s support so that Stalin could continue to develop agricultural techniques necessary to recover the USSR from the travails of World War II. In particular, Lysenko agreed to develop a wheat variety that would bear Stalin’s name. In return he was given an almost dictatorial position on biology and in August 1948, the infamous report was approved by the Central Committee which would ban the study of genetics in the Soviet Union.⁹

Lysenko behaved as a political operative, taking any option to increase his power, and wanting to succeed just for the sake of succeeding. In this opportunism he coincides, and very much so, with the figure of the entrepreneur mentioned earlier. Shortly before his death he left some revealing words for Loren Graham, one of the few Western researchers who managed to talk to him. Lysenko blurted out that he had always [been] an outsider, and acknowledged that he was always motivated by recognition: 

I came from a simple peasant family, and in my professional development I soon encountered the prejudices of the upper classes. Vavilov came from a wealthy family, was as a consequence well- educated, and knew many foreign languages. When I was a boy I walked barefoot in the fields and I never had the advantage of a proper education. Most of the prominent geneticists of the 1920s and 1930s were like Vavilov. They did not want to make room for a simple peasant like me. I had to fight to be recognized. My knowledge came from working in the fields. Their knowledge came from books and laboratories, and was often mistaken.¹²

The fall of Lysenko and scientific credit

Although in the 1940s Lysenko’s political dominance reigned supreme, in practical agriculture his miraculous methods were already being progressively abandoned. Despite constant praise for Lysenko’s methods, local bureaucrats increasingly began excluding his miraculous vernalized solutions from practice and returned to effective techniques.¹¹ This marks the moment in which Lysenkoist agrobiology began to be eliminated from the Soviet Union: first in its practice, where it was born, and then also science would gradually return to normal.

Although this process accelerated following Stalin’s death in 1953, in 1950 Stalin himself opened the door to criticism when he wrote against tyranny in science and criticized some prominent Soviet philosophers in the field of linguistics. In 1951, two events signaled the loss of support for Lysenko and his disciples among the agricultural bureaucrats: first, the largest agricultural science conference in the USSR ignored Lysenko’s ideas, and second, the director of the agricultural institute, a disciple of Lysenko, was replaced by an opponent of his. 

At the same time, Lysenko took great responsibility for implementing Stalin’s grand plan to transform nature, a plan to terraform large regions of the Urals and steppes. To achieve this, he implemented a new technique for planting trees that would “cooperate” with each other. This predictably led to great failure. Although the successes were constantly proclaimed in the newspapers, Lysenko was soon removed from positions of responsibility. Stalin’s death in 1953 finally brought this great plan to an end. Lysenko became less and less untouchable: in 1954, he was ordered to stop forcing his collaborators to put their names on articles that they considered to be unreliable. Criticism grew, both from Soviet scientists and from new members of the scientific community in the Communist bloc, especially those in East Germany.⁹ 

Although Lysenko’s loss of influence increasingly accelerated after Stalin’s death, Khrushchev still consulted him on new agricultural plans. Khrushchev inherited much of Stalinist Prometheism, and continued to dream of bending nature to human desires. Lysenko continued to promise miraculous results with little work even though fewer and fewer intermediaries took his plans seriously. It was not until Khrushchev was replaced by Brezhnev in 1964 (among other reasons for his failures in the field of agriculture) that Lysenko could finally be deposed. In 1965 he was removed from his post as director of the Institute of Genetics at the Soviet Academy, and put in charge of an experimental farm in Moscow. Soon after this, public denunciations of his theories appeared.

Lysenko, who had risen to fame for his ability to realize practical techniques to help crops, fell in the same way: by losing the support of the bureaucracy that only wanted practical results. In this account, and following Lecourt[bote]Lecourt, Dominique. Proletarian science? The case of Lysenko. Humanities Press, 1977.[/note], the extremely anomalous period for Soviet biology, where the “normal” rules of science were suspended, occurred between 1948 and until 1952, when Turbin, Dean of Biology at Leningrad University, presented the first public critique of his ideas on species. I am not trying to minimize the damage this state of exception brought about by Lysenko to Soviet biology, which fell decades behind their Western counterpart. Scientific practice is a fragile institution, and an individual can manage to do plenty of damage to scientific institutions, which, even if they continue to function to the point of eventually getting rid of him, never recover to the same level. Soviet biology would never produce theories on the level of those produced in other fields, especially physics or mathematics. 

To analyze Lysenko’s rise and fall, one can turn to the system of scientific credits postulated by Latour and Woolgar in Laboratory Life.¹³ According to these authors, all scientists first start with a period of training, which gives them the necessary credentials to engage in scientific activity. In the case of Lysenko (and Michurin), we saw how the change in Soviet scientific structure meant that the credentials needed to enter the investment “game” also changed. Once scientists enter the “game,” they resemble investors, who have a certain credit, which they can invest in getting additional funding or support, and with this they have to deliver results, which give them a “credibility capital.” This capital, or scientific credit, in turn can be reinvested in the system. Thus goes the life of the scientist, accumulating rewards until he or she retires, or a series of bad investments makes him or her leave the field. 

Despite the distortions introduced into the system by Stalinist policy, it can be seen that Lysenko’s cycle does not differ much from that of an ordinary scientist. He began by achieving success at a station in Azerbaijan. This earned him a rapid accumulation of scientific capital because his technique was original and solved an important problem. But as Lysenko reinvested his credit, the lack of practical results gradually caused him to lose influence until the heads of the agricultural bureaucracy regarded him as a charlatan and just ignored him. This happened despite his rising political stature, because he was unable to produce scientific results. In Latour and Woolgar’s terms, by the end of the 1930s, Lysenko was no longer a scientist to be trusted, and as a result, he ran out of credit, despite all the additional credit deposits he earned from Stalin and Khrushchev. 

Conclusions

Here I have analyzed Lysenko’s career as that of a failed scientist-entrepreneur placed in a rapidly changing system. Lysenko’s aberration occurs in a period of scientific and cultural patriotism driven by the Zhdanov Doctrine, which proposed to mobilize all the forces of the working and peasant classes for the victory of communism, and this also included the forces in the scientific fields. The study of genetics would not have been banned without these three factors: this doctrine that elevated the practical and traditional knowledge that drove Lysenko, the widespread crisis in Soviet agriculture caused by collectivization, and Lysenko’s personal ambitions. 

This conclusion can be supported by the fact that several other scientists attempted similar campaigns to get rid of their competitors with political stratagems, but they all failed. Although Zhdanov attacked other fields, such as Einstein’s special relativity or Big Bang cosmology, this had little effect, especially when Soviet physicists mentioned that without “bourgeois” quantum mechanics one could not have the atomic bomb.¹⁰ In the end, what mattered was the practical criterion, and in this Lysenko distinguished himself, as he did manage to provide adequate results at one time. To this day we do not remember figures parallel to Lysenko in other fields, such as the chemist Gennadi Chelintsev, who tried to proclaim himself dictator of his field with a theory on the structure of aromatic molecules such as benzene, while rejecting the study of molecular resonance as an idealistic and bourgeois deviation.¹⁴ In Chelintsev’s schema, the “Pauling-Ingoldists” were equivalent to Lysenko’s “Mendelist-Morganists” or “Weissmanists”. With a resolution at a scientific congress in 1951, he tried to eliminate the study of these authors. But he was the lone vote in favor of his resolution, and it did not gain any support. In 1961, ten years later, Chelintsev had to endure watching Linus Pauling deliver lectures at the Moscow Institute of Chemistry.

The moral of the story cannot be reduced to “science should not be mixed with politics,” a separation that STS studies rightly declare impossible. The fall of Lysenko and the fact that Chelintsev never achieved anything similar is a vindication of Merton’s system and its four ideal norms: Communism, Universalism, Disinterestedness, and Organized Skepticism.¹⁵ The disinterestedness of many scientists, who continued to argue with Lysenko even though it cost some, like Vavilov, their very lives, and organized skepticism, in which Lysenko’s miraculous results continued to be questioned as not being reproducible and universality, in which East German scientists, free from the political pressures of the Zhdanov doctrine, contributed new results, ensured that his downfall would eventually occur. It only took time, and patience to progressively remove the political protection Lysenko had.

Returning to the Graham quote with which we began, which mentioned that the most fruitful comparisons are made between systems that have a lot in common, but also plenty of differences, the Soviet system indicates to us that the ideas of Elster, Latour, Woolgar and Merton have much to tell us about how science as such is organized, regardless of whether we live in a liberal-capitalist world. And even though we can sense how science is changing more and more every day, some maxims seem universal. This does not mean that we should not take care of scientific institutions, like those of any other human activity, but it does allow us to be optimistic that science is like a forest, that even if it burns, it can flourish again, even if it takes years to do so. 

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1. Graham, Loren. Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
2. Goncharov, N. P., “Ivan V. Michurin: On the 160th Anniversary of the Birth of the Russian Burbank”, Russian Journal of Genetics: Applied Research, 6 (1), (2016): 105-127.
3. Joravsky, David. The Lysenko Affair. University of Chicago Press, 1970.
4. Graham (1973)
5. Fitzpatrick, Sheila.The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia. Cornell University Press, 1992.
6. Chouard, Pierre. “Vernalization and its relations to dormancy”. Annual Review of Plant Physiology, 11 (1) (1960): 191-238
7. Joravsky (19800
8. Elster, Jon. Explaining Technical Change: A Case Study in the Philosophy of Science. Cambridge University Press, 1983.
9. Ibid.
10. Graham (1993)
11. Joravsky (1970)
12. Graham, Loren. Lysenko’s Ghost: Epigenetics and Russia. Harvard University Press, 2016.
13. Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts. Princeton University Press, 1979.
14. Briefly, Pauling’s molecular resonance theory postulated that molecules could exist in a superposition of possible states. For this he relied on concepts of quantum mechanics, whose “relativism” was easy to attack in the Soviet Union.
15. Merton, Robert K. (1973) [1942], “The Normative Structure of Science”, in Merton, Robert K. (ed.), The Sociology of Science: Theoretical and Empirical Investigations, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 267-278.