October 11, 1955. Nearly three hundred of the Soviet Union’s top scientists sign a secret letter demanding the removal of one man: Trofim Lysenko. For decades, Lysenko had Joseph Stalin’s ear, ruling Soviet biology with an iron fist—banning genetics, rewriting textbooks, and sending dissenting sc...
October 11, 1955. Nearly three hundred of the Soviet Union’s top scientists sign a secret letter demanding the removal of one man: Trofim Lysenko. For decades, Lysenko had Joseph Stalin’s ear, ruling Soviet biology with an iron fist—banning genetics, rewriting textbooks, and sending dissenting scientists to prison or worse.
How did a peasant-turned-agronomist convince Stalin that wheat could turn into rye, and that ideology mattered more than evidence? And when politics replace science, what—and who—gets destroyed?
Special thanks to William deJong-Lambert, author of The Cold War Politics of Genetic Research: An Introduction to the Lysenko Affair; and Nikolai Krementsov, author of Stalinist Science.
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