Wow four hours later I'm still reading about Lysenko. The story I'm getting is that he rejected mendelian genetics, developed junk agronomic theories, was appointed Director of the Institute of Genetics of the Academy of Sciences by Stalin, crushed dissent within the academy, caused famine in the USSR by implementing his bunk agronomic theories on a mass scale, then caused even worse famine in People's China. Those last two chapters in the story represent very serious accusations. I don't really care whether he was a good scientist or a ruthless politician. Causing famines is a crime on a different scale. I'm just taking it as gospel for now that he was a fraud as a scientist and that his repression was criminal.

It looks like Lysenko held that Director title under Stalin from 1940-53. The famines I am aware of in Soviet history are the ~1921 famine following the civil war, the ~1932 famine in which Stalin ate all the grain in the Ukraine with a comically oversized spoon, and the ~1946 famine following WWII. So either there is a famine I haven't heard about yet, or Lysenko's agronomics is implicated in the ~1946 famine. I had always assumed that the post-WWII famine was caused by Nazis and drought. The introduction of this Lysenko character complicates the story significantly. What was the nature of his junk agronomics, and how widespread did practices based on them become? Just how much loss of output would farming practices based on his theories cause vs previous practices (if applicable)? This is fascinating!

The biggest tragedy seems come when his ideas are exported to People's China. I've heard of this before, but I can't seem to find the full story. You'd think wikipedia would be able to point me in the right direction, but I'm really striking out over there. The wikipedia page on Lysenko links to eight articles on the Chinese famine of ~1960, but none of them seem to mention Lysenko at all. The only connection between Lysenko and China cited there is an Atlantic article that in turn cites a pop science book called "Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History".

Making matters even worse, Mao had them institute an anti-scientific agricultural program that had sprung from the brain of semi-literate Soviet peasant Trofim Lysenko in the late 1920s.

While it paints a vivid picture of Lysenko, it doesn't really explain to me by what mechanism his dangerously misguided theories made their way into Chinese agricultural policy during the Great Leap Forward. I'll have to look elsewhere for that history.

So now I've spent way too much money ordering two hardbound collections of scholarly articles on Lysenko: "The Lysenko Controversy as a Global Phenomenon" volumes 1 & 2 published by palgrave macmillan. I can look forward to several more sleepless nights learning all the details of Lysenko's egregious crimes against science and humanity once they arrive in the mail.

Damn. Shit you'll never read in an American textbook.