A species is a species, a qualitatively distinct state of living form of substance.179
Please note that these are not poor translations from Russian. In Russian, these statements sound as absurd as they do in English.
Also, according to Lysenko, there is no intraspecies competition, that is, there is no class struggle between members of the same species. On the contrary, all members of the same species “help” each other: “There is not, and cannot be, a class society in any plant or animal species. Therefore, there is not, and cannot be, here class struggle, though it might be called, in biology, intraspecies competition.”180 “In nature the life of any individual is subjected to the interests of its species.”181 “All intraspecies relationships among individuals… are directed toward the securing of the existence and thriving of a species and this means, towards the increasing of the number of individuals in a species.”182
Even more disturbing was his belief that one species could somehow transform itself into another. “The transformation of one species into another occurs at a single leap… By means of ‘retraining’… after two, three, or four years of autumn planting [Triticus] durum [i.e., hard wheat] turns into [T.] vulgare [soft wheat], i.e., hard, 28-chromosome wheat turns into various forms of soft, 42-chromosome wheat.”183 Lysenko also believed that wheat can be transformed into rye. According to him, sometimes in wheat plants “small grains of rye plant emerge,” and these “small grains” grow into rye grains. Lysenko also explained how a species of bird can turn into another. The molecular biologist and geneticist Valery Soyfer recalled:
In several lectures and speeches, he [Lysenko] announced that warblers had given birth to cuckoos! I heard him say this myself in a lecture at Moscow State University in the spring of 1955. He described how the lazy cuckoo placed its eggs in the nest of a warbler, and the warbler is then compelled by the “law of life of a biological species” to pay for letting the cuckoo take advantage of it by feeding on caterpillars, and as a result of the change in diet, it hatches cuckoos instead of warblers.184
The geneticist Dobzhansky, mentioned earlier, compared Lysenko’s transformation of Triticus durum into T. vulgare with the birth of a lion by a domestic cat, and the transformation of wheat into rye with the transformation of a dog into a fox, or vice versa.185
In 1934, at the Seventeenth Bolshevik (Communist) Party Congress, Lysenko received the highest recognition of the Party. The commissar of agriculture, Yakov Yakovlev, praised Lysenko in his speech:
Such people as agronomist Lysenko, a practical worker whose vernalization of plants has opened a new chapter in agricultural science, who is now heeded by the entire agricultural world, not only here [in the Soviet Union], but abroad as well… These are the people… who will be the backbone of the real Bolshevik apparatus, the creation of which is demanded by the Party, by Comrade Stalin.186
That same year, Lysenko was elected to the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and became research supervisor of the Ukrainian Institute of Plant Breeding and Genetics. He was appointed director of this institute two years later. Stalin was so moved by Lysenko’s speech at the Second All-Union Congress of Kolkhoz Shockworkers in the Kremlin in February 1935 that he jumped up, clapping, and shouted: “Bravo, Comrade Lysenko, bravo!”187 Of course, after this the whole hall broke out in applause. Lysenko knew what to say. He proclaimed that only the kolkhoz system of agriculture introduced by Stalin in 1929 was “the one and only scientific guiding principle, which Comrade Stalin teaches us daily.”188
Lysenko’s cynicism and pragmatism become clear in his mention of the kolkhoz system. On November 7, 1928, in the Pravda article “A Year of Great Change,” Stalin ordered the creation of kolkhozes (collective farms) to replace traditional small, separate farms. Two simultaneous processes were organized: the creation of kolkhozes and the liquidation of the kulaks, who were the most enterprising, educated, and independent-minded peasants. Millions of kulaks and members of their families were sent to the labor camps or exiled to Siberia and Central Asia.189 In addition, a five-year economic plan was introduced by the government. “Shockworkers” (udarniki) was the name given to those who claimed that they would fulfill the five-year-plan in four years.
Lysenko’s absurdity dominated Soviet biology from the mid-1930s until the late 1960s. There were three significant events during the Lysenko period: Stalin’s personal championing of Lysenko in February 1935, the election of Lysenko to the Academy of Sciences in 1939 (instead of the brilliant geneticist and evolutionist Nikolai Koltsov), and the August 1948 session of the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences, or Agricultural Academy (VASKhNIL), during which Lysenkoism was accepted as a party line. At the 1939 academy meeting, Lysenko was not alone in becoming a member. Stalin and other party functionaries were “elected” to the academy as “honorary members.” Stalin himself was behind the August 1948 session of the Agricultural Academy, which disrupted the development of genetics and evolutionary theory in the Soviet Union for almost thirty years. Stalin looked through the draft of the speech written by Lysenko for the session and made numerous editorial changes beforehand.190
Julian Huxley was among those few Western biologists who understood that Lysenkoism was not a science but rather a party ideology: “A political party has imposed its own dogmatic view of what must be correct and incorrect, and so violated the essential spirit of science.”191 Another biologist, Robert Cook, even compared Lysenkoism to religious faith: “Lysenkoism… is the only scientific discipline in existence today whose validity depends, not on experiment, but on certification as to purity and truth, in content and concept, by government fiat.”192
After Lysenko came to power, the career, freedom, and sometimes even the life of a biologist in the Soviet Union depended on his or her decision to accept or reject Lysenkoism.
Some American historians of biology did not understand the profound role of Communist ideology (which included Lysenko’s “Michurinist biology”) in the professional work of Soviet scientists. For instance, Mark Adams wrote: “I would argue, then, that ideology has played a less significant role than we have tended to assume.”193 Although Adams visited Moscow several times and collected incredibly valuable materials, including priceless interviews with old geneticists, he never worked as a Soviet employee and evidently never understood the whole picture.
Unfortunately, real geneticists at first did not understand the danger Lysenko posed. Academician Nikolai Vavilov, at the time president of the Agricultural Academy, did nothing initially to stop the rising star of “People’s Academician” Lysenko. And this had lethal consequences for him (Chapter 4).
Incredibly, very few contemporaries understood the ideological similarity between Stalin’s regime and the Nazis in the 1930s. The Russian émigré and satirical poet Aminand Shpolyansky, who wrote under the pseudonym “Don-Aminado,” was a rare example: