---
title: "Lysenkoism"
chunk: 3/5
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T04:30:18.060159+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== Peak ===
From July 31 to August 7, 1948, the Academy of Agricultural Sciences (VASKhNIL) held a week-long session (August 1948 Session of VASKhNIL), organized by Lysenko and approved by Stalin. At the end of it, Lysenkoism was declared as "the only correct theory." As Lysenko performatively spoke at the end, "the Central Committee of the Communist Party has examined my report and approved it". Attendants recognized this as the birth of a new orthodoxy. Of the 8 scientists who advocated genetics during the session, 3 immediately announced repentance.

Soviet scientists were required to denounce any work that contradicted Lysenko, and criticism was denounced as "bourgeois" or "fascist". The Ministry of Higher Education commanded all biological institutes to immediately follow the Lysenko orthodoxy:The Central University Administration and the Administration of Cadres are directed to review within two months all departments of biological faculties to free them from all opposed to Michurinist biology and to strengthen them by appointing Michurinists to them.
Point 6 of the Order No. 1208 (August 23, 1948)For several months, similar central directives dismissed scientists, withdrew textbooks, and required the removal of any references to heredity in higher education. There was also an order to destroy all stocks of Drosophila, a common model organism for research in genetics. Leading geneticists were being monitored by secret agents from the State Security Service.
The same wave of propaganda supported a number of other pseudo-scientific "new Marxist sciences" in the Soviet academy, in fields such as linguistics and art. Pravda reported the invention of a perpetual motion engine, confirming Engels' claim that energy dissipated in one place must concentrate somewhere else.
In 1948, the film Michurin portrayed Michurin as an ideal Soviet scientist, bringing the propaganda to the masses. Published songbooks included songs praising Lysenko, "He walks the Michurin path/With firm tread;/He protects us from being duped/by Mendelist-Morganists."
In Lysenko and his followers' political claim, the "Weismannist-Mendelist-Morganist" theory was reactionary and idealistic, a tool of the bourgeois, while the "Michurinist" theory was progressive and materialistic. The victory of Michurinism was framed as a victory of socialism over capitalism. Some even traced Hitler's racial policies to the genetic theory. 
A prominent promoter of Lysenkoism was the biologist Olga Lepeshinskaya, who attempted to demonstrate abiogenesis of cells and tissues from "vital substance". She delivered a speech in 1950 in which she equated all of the "bourgeois" heresies:

In our country there are no longer classes hostile to each other, and the struggle of idealists against dialectical materialists still, depending on whose interests it defends, has the character of a class struggle. Indeed, the followers of Virchow, Weismann, Mendel and Morgan, who speak of the invariability of the gene and deny the influence of the external environment, are the preachers of the pseudo-scientific teachings of the bourgeois eugenicists and of all perversions in genetics, on the soil of which grew the racial theory of fascism in the capitalist countries. The Second World War was unleashed by the forces of imperialism, which also had racism in its arsenal.
Perhaps the only opponents of Lysenkoism during Stalin's lifetime to escape liquidation were from the small community of Soviet nuclear physicists: according to Tony Judt, "it is significant that Stalin left his nuclear physicists alone and never presumed to second guess their calculations. Stalin may well have been mad but he was not stupid."

=== Effects on scientists ===
Genetics was eventually banned in the Soviet Union. Over 3,000 biologists were fired, and numerous scientists were imprisoned, or executed for attempting to oppose Lysenkoism, and genetics research was effectively destroyed until the death of Stalin in 1953. Secret research facilities such as sharashka were where numerous scientists ended up imprisoned.
From 1934 to 1940, under Lysenko's admonitions and with Stalin's approval, many geneticists were executed (including Izrail Agol, Solomon Levit, Grigorii Levitskii, Georgii Karpechenko and Georgii Nadson) or sent to labor camps. The famous Soviet geneticist and president of the Agriculture Academy, Nikolai Vavilov, was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943. In 1936, the American geneticist Hermann Joseph Muller, who had moved to the Leningrad Institute of Genetics with his Drosophila fruit flies, was criticized as bourgeois, capitalist, imperialist, and a promoter of fascism, and he returned to America via Republican Spain. Iosif Rapoport, who worked on mutagens, refused to publicly repudiate chromosome theory of heredity, and suffered several years as a geological lab assistant. Dmitry Sabinin's book on plant physiology was abruptly withdrawn from publication in 1948. He died by suicide in 1951.
Those who supported Lysenkoism were favored. Alexander Oparin vigorously defended Lysenkoism and was politically favored, although he may have been genuine in his belief, as he continued to defend it even in 1955, after its fall.
Lysenkoism became entrenched not just in academia but in Soviet schools, displacing Darwinism from natural sciences curricula.
Inspired by the success of Lysenkoism and the 1948 VASKhNIL session, other fields of Soviet science experienced brief revolutions, albeit with less success: against "Pavlovians" in medicine, against "reactionary Einsteinism" in physics and quantum mechanics, and against Pauling resonance theory in chemistry.
In addition to the biological sciences, Lysenkoism had an impact on geological sciences, especially paleontology and biostratigraphy in the USSR.

=== Fall ===
At the end of 1952, the situation started to change, and newspapers published articles criticizing Lysenkoism. However, the return to regular genetics slowed down in Nikita Khrushchev's time, when Lysenko showed him the supposed successes of an experimental agricultural complex. It was once again forbidden to criticize Lysenkoism, though it was now possible to express different views, and the geneticists imprisoned under Stalin were released or rehabilitated posthumously. The ban was finally lifted in the mid-1960s.
Lysenkoism was never dominant in the West, and during the 1960s, it increasingly was seen as pseudoscience. Soviet scientists noticed the great advance in molecular biology, such as the characterization of DNA, and even hold-out Lysenkoists were starting to accept DNA as the material basis for heredity (though they still rejected gene theory).