In Our Time - Lysenkoism

Episode Date: June 5, 2008

Melvyn Bragg and guests delve into the dark world of genetics under Joseph Stalin in discussing the career of Trofim Lysenko. In 1928, as America lurched towards the Wall Street Crash, Joseph Stalin revealed his master plan - nature was to be conquered by science, Russia to be made brutally, glitteringly modern and the world transformed by communist endeavour.Into the heart of this vision stepped Trofim Lysenko, a self-taught geneticist who promised to turn Russian wasteland into a grain-laden Garden of Eden. Today, Lysenko is a byword for fraud but in Stalin’s Russia his outlandish ideas about genetic inheritance and evolution became law. They reveal a world of science distorted by ideology, where ideas were literally a matter of life and death. To disagree with Lysenko risked the gulag and yet he destroyed Soviet Agriculture and damaged, perhaps irreparably, the Soviet Union’s capacity to fight and win the Cold War. With Robert Service, Professor of Russian History at the University of Oxford; Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics at University College London; Catherine Merridale, Professor of Contemporary History at Queen Mary, University of London.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in 1928, as America heads towards the Wall Street crash, Joseph Stalin reveals his master plan. Nature is to be conquered by science.

Russia is to be made supremely modern at any cost, and the world transformed by communist example. Into the heart of this vision stepped Trofim Lysenko, a self-taught geneticist who promised to turn Russian wasteland into a grain-laden garden of Eden. Today, Lysenko is a byword for scientific fraud, but in Stalin's Russia his ideas became law. They reveal a world of signs distorted by ideology,

where ideas were literally a matter of life and death. To disagree with Sienko, risked the gulag, and he damaged perhaps irreparably the Soviet Union's capacity to fight and win the Cold War. With me to discuss Traffimletenko are Robert Service, Professor of Russian History at the University of Oxford, Catherine Meridale, Professor of Contemporary History at Queen Mary, University of London, and Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics at University College London. Robert Service, in 1928, Stalin launched the first five-year plan. Could you give us a sense

of the context and scope of that undertaking? Well, it was a stupendous ambition, not just to transform an economy, but also to transform a whole. society to modernize agriculture, banking, finance, industry above all, the military, foreign trade, transport, communications, and to do it through a general plan for the entire country. And this was at the time extraordinarily ambitious, and it was a contrast with everything that was happening elsewhere in the world because there was just about to be the Wall Street crash. Capitalism was in crisis around the world. Somehow, one economy at that time was expanding and it was the Soviet economy. So it became a model for an alternative way of organizing an economy

and organizing a whole society. Can you just step back a few years to 1917, just to fill in a little bit of the pre-context? Well, the Bolsheviks came to power with a vision of a new kind of state. It would be a dictatorship of the proletariat. run in the interests of the working class and it would, over time, introduce a wholly new society and it would require a dictatorship that would be of a temporary nature, supposedly, a one-party state.

And that one-party state was going to take hold of everything in the society and was going to mobilize the entire population in the interests of the revolutionary core. for several years, it met all sorts of obstacles. It had a civil war. It then had to make compromises with its peasantry. And then came the great breakthrough in 1928 when the first five-year plan was announced.

And this great transformation started to be attempted comprehensively. But up to 1928, there was a certain amount of give and take, a certain amount of elasticity. I mean, Lenin tolerated intellectuals who were middle class and wore ties and spectacles which Stanley didn't like remand, and that sort of thing. So it wasn't quite business as usual. It wasn't the sort of rush of 1914,

but it was still going on in somewhat similar way. I think that's a bit of a romantic view of what was going on under Lenin. It was a much tighter regime than anything that had existed in Russia before the revolution. The reason we think of it as a rather gentle regime in the 1920s under Lenin is that it became absolutely cataclysmically worse in 1928. So it's contrast, really? A real big contrast.

28 was a big, big change. But it was already a very, very authoritarian one-party state. And you say in your book, you said this is the biggest undertaking ever by a world-class power and economy? It was. It was absolutely staggering at the time to people who were living in foreign states. And many people who were not communists in Europe and North America were positively impressed because this was a state, the USSR, that was offering something totally different

from what all the other advanced economies were offering to the rest of the world. Now let's come towards agriculture. Stalin proposed the notion of collectivization. Can you tell you briefly what it meant and how he went about it? Most people in the Soviet Union, most of the population, was constituted by a peasantry that used pretty old-fashioned methods of cultivation based on household units. The idea was to aggregate these household units into large farms

to transfer essentially the ownership of those farms to the state to introduce collective farm chairman who would run these farms for the benefit of the state and who would control the methods of production and the trade with the products that came out of the farming. Steve Jones, can you take us on from there? What effect did this have on the existing agriculture? organisation and structure. The Kulax, the better-of peasants,

who were sort of let us call them low middle class, and the peasants, some of whom had their own bits of land. What effect did it have? Well, the immediate effect was catastrophic. I mean, large numbers of Kulaks were shot. But the longer term effect, in some ways, was worse because the model of Soviet agriculture, which was a scientific model,

had one small flaw, which is that the science was complete nonsense. And in spite of all the evidence that the science, which Lysenko, as I would pronounce him, came out with was wrong and catastrophically wrong. They pressed on with that, and so they really suffered two-fold blow.

I mean, I think we tend to figure, the first of all, the economic cost of collectivization, which I think were inevitable. People didn't need to be shot, that's for sure. The same thing happened, of course, in the United States. They didn't call them collective farms, but people left the land, the large farms emerged.

And they weren't shot or sent to the law. Indeed, but, I mean, the economics of farming was much the same in the two. but the crucial difference was that the American model of science was correct and the Russian Lysenkoist model of science was catastrophically wrong. Let's just go. I come back to that concept in one moment, but what we're talking about is most people are working on the land in Russia

at the time that Robert Serf is talking about. They are told to drop all traditional methods. They're told the peasants are not given even enough to feed themselves. They have little patches behind their huts and science and patches of landmahing. They can't not adequate to feed themselves. the whole system is being changed radically and the people who have really been running the system for better and for worse sometimes, very much for better,

are driven out basically. All of those who now do it are, as you say, shot in great numbers are sent away to Leibcombe. That's right. It wasn't simply true of the peasants themselves or the Kulax, the small landowners. It was also true of the agricultural scientists, which in some ways was even worse.

So it really was catastrophic. In some ways, I think in many ways, people see in the end the collapse of the Soviet Union, starting at just that time because of the collapse of agriculture. So we're talking actually to pinpointed about an idea, both a social idea, this is how it would work, like they did very successfully with some factories and manufacturing areas like the arms industry, for instance, applying this to land. But we're also talking about an idea of how this could be done, a scientific idea.

Could you tell us about that? Yes, I think the central problem was the lethal mixture of science and ideology. and my own subject, genetics, even in the animal and plant breeding end, has always stumbled into that morass, and it still does to a degree. And the difficulty was that the model which the Soviets had was partly a scientific model. You could observe certain things that if you gave a cold shock, for example, to maize, then they were burst into flour. And that's true. But added on to that was the belief that somehow there was what they called the law of necessary progress,

that biology had an end in view, that things were bound to get better, And that fitted perfectly with the Soviet view that one generation of suffering possibly would generate Homo Sovieticus, a new kind of human being, which through their parents, having gone through torment, would live in this biological, this genetic or this eugenical universe and everybody would live happily ever afterwards,

but they didn't. Because when Robert was talking at the beginning of the program, mentioning all the areas that Stalin attacked, outside that it was going to change human nature. Human nature is going to be different because they were going to transform that too, and this was part of it? This was absolutely part of it. It's in some ways

a mirror image of the Victorian view and the 1920s view in the West, which the eugenical view, that you couldn't change human nature. That was actually set in the way you were born, and people were born to rule, people were born to be poor, and this was a law of nature.

That was equivalently foolish. But fortunately, the machinery of capitalism was much quicker to see through the scientific errors than the machinery of communism was. Well, let's just go back to this scientific idea, then this wrong scientific idea. It can me track back. It has some

sort of inheritance, doesn't it? And can you bring in Lamarck here? Yes, it has some sort of inheritance, and people, everybody knows or perhaps thinks they know about Lamarck. Lamarck was the inheritance of the quiet characters man. Famously, that giraffes would stretch up to get the leaves of the top, and then their offspring would have

longer necks as a result. And that was beneath for a long time. There was a brilliant scientist at University College London in the 1920 who spent many years cutting the tails off mice to see if he could get a generation of mice with no tails. I think it was a bit depressed when it was pointed out that Jews had been doing the same experiment for

2,000 years. But it was a logical possibility, and many people believed it. Darwin believed it, but Darwin hated Lamarck. And you can see it, Darwin was the gentlest and kindest of men. But he hated Lamarck because of this notion that somehow, in life, in biology, there was a

direction set to get better and better. Samuel smiles every day in every way. get better and better. It's not like that. Can I turn to you now, Catherine Merrifeld, about Lysenko himself. What was he doing in 1928 when Stalin put this into motion? Can you give us some idea of his background or who he was and what he was up to? Okay, well, Lysenko was a peasant. He was the son of peasants. He came from Ukraine. And he wore a peasant blouse. He always looked the part, as opposed to the agricultural

scientists of the 20s, who always looked to me like sort of Dr. Watson figures. You were their Victorian collars in their starch shirts. And he trained in Kiev very briefly. He didn't have much formal education. And in 1927, he was in Azerbaijan in the Caucasus. And his first great breakthrough, which he was very good at publicising, was to get peas to grow in the winter in the Caucasus. And he said that he could actually produce a desert that was green through the winter so that the camels would have something to eat. His next big move was to go into this science of vernilization, the idea that if you, got grain to go through a chill period before you sowed it, you would actually get winter wheat to grow within one season as opposed to having to go through the winter and suffer the consequences, which often were the killing of the entire crop. And he did his first experiment by getting his father

to bury 48 sacks of pre-soaked grain in a snowdrift, somewhat in secret because the rest of the village wouldn't have approved. And he declared that spring that the experiment had been a success, so he didn't wait for the results. Lysenko was always, yes, Lysenko in my case too, was always very good at producing results before he'd actually finished the experiment and declaring a success.

And his first success was the peas, but the second was crucial for collectivisation because he goes on to such incredible power that it's interesting these beginnings. He could do that and get away with it. As he did for the rest of life on bigger and bigger and bigger and more and more destructive. But he started in his village,

with his father out there in the caucuses. Nobody knew he was. He hadn't been university. It was sort of self-educated. And he's getting away with it already. He's burying sex, telling nobody and saying he's succeeded. He was brilliant at self-publicity. He was much better at it once he was adopted by a couple of people

who were very good at pushing him for political reasons. But he really had three characteristics that made him successful. And one was that self-publicity combined with an extraordinary intolerance of criticism. So anybody who said, you know, Comrade Lysenko, this isn't right, they might very well find themselves being attacked verbally by him and then attacked in other ways by the state later on when he became more powerful. It was very intolerant. He was also very good at getting the establishment to adopt him.

Very peculiarly, the established scientists who were actually very good. The Soviet Union was one of the world leaders in plant biology in the 1920s. Semi-adopted Lysenko. They encouraged him. How is that? I think some of them were socialists and believed it was important to encourage the next generation of new men. Some of them were intrigued and I think some of them were actually frightened. Here's somebody who does represent the new generation, whose course, who's outspoken. If we speak out against him, we're going to look very bad.

And I think that was the mistake that the establishment made, in fact, in the 1920s, to tolerate and accommodate with this new culture. And the third thing that Lysenko was very good at was always moving on to the next thing before the previous thing had been shown to be a total failure. So once he'd failed with winter wheat but he didn't admit it, he went on to spring wheat and once he'd failed with getting the wheat cold and wet,

he decided to make it warm and wet. And once the wheat was rotting, he moved onto potatoes and onto maize. So he was always shifting the ground and always declaring victory, and it was quite difficult to keep up with him. There's another psychological connection when he eventually hitched up with Stalin, I've got this from reading what you've all written,

was that Stalin was looking for people who were peasants, people who had learned on the ground and from the ground, people who were not, let's say, bourgeois had not been to university, on the whole, despised these people, and so Lysenko fitted that pattern perfectly. He did indeed. He was called a barefoot scientist. He was working with peasants in the countryside.

He was credited in, with restoring the confidence of a lot of peasants, because collectivisation was such a blow, and there was such demoralisation and famine in the countryside. Here's a man who actually works with peasants in their villages. He always talked about doing science in five pots in the corner of his greenhouse. You didn't need expensive laboratories. You didn't need nasty bourgeois scientists whose morals and relationships

to the revolution were questionable. You could have real sons of the soil with dirty fingernails doing this. And of course it would be done quicker because classical science requires maybe 10 years to develop a new strain of wheat, for instance, maybe longer. Lysenko was promising Stalin three years, two years, partly because he said, fertilisation will speed the process,

and partly because he said we don't go in for multiple experiments. Why do 1,000 experiments when 1,000 is enough? This was always his attitude. And so we come to Stalin, Robert's service. Now, he took up Wysenko, was taken in by Lisenko, give us your verdict on that. But just behind that, Stalin was convinced of the efficacy of science,

that sign was the great solver of all problems, from human nature to army uniforms. And up comes Lysenko after the disaster of collective irejadion saying, I can fix it. Is that sort of the size of it? Well, yes, he was a massive believer, as all Bolsheviks were, all communists were. in the efficacy of modern technology.

I mean, he believed that Soviet modernity would be a superior one to American modernity. He was utopian. He picked out from the peasantry and the working class, lightly lads, they were usually lads rather than lasses, who would then enhance the possibility of transforming society, really rapidly. The thing for Stalin was not to proceed by gradualist science, but to set the goals in advance, and then could Joel encourage and intimidate people into finding ways to meet the goals. And if they couldn't find them, to fake them?

If they couldn't find them, you arrested them. And that induced scientists like Lysenko to say that they could do things that they really couldn't do. The thing about Lysenko that was different from the other scientists was that he came to Stalin with apparently solutions. So he said, I've got your objectives already for you. The others said, well, it might be difficult, it might take a year or two. It might have to be the second five-year plan, not the first five-year plan. not the first five-year plan when we do all this, but Lyschenko was someone who was in science,

the Stalinist science. He was the man who said, I can even give you the objectives, and I can also get to those objectives. Can I just carry on a moment or two more with you, Catherine, Marlissel. Can you give the list of some idea of Lysenka's other various notions of how to solve things, the rabbit idea, and they're clad in Siberia.

The rabbits were somebody else's, I'm afraid. But they're worth mentioning just briefly. This was typical of the Bolshevik solution to the famine. And the notion that was started during the worst years of the first five-year plan was that breeding rabbits would actually solve the shortage of meat. And so all factories and all bureaucracies, including the secret police, were given a number of breeding pairs of rabbits and a target for the number of rabbits that they were supposed to produce

at the end of the period. and also the amount of fur as well as meat that they were going to get from these rabbits. So this was typical planning utopian. It's not that stupid an idea. Rabbits do, in fact, breathe very fast, and there is meat and there is fur at the end. The trouble is in the Russian winter there's nothing green for the rabbits to eat. So they starved, and the rabbit campaign was a failure on the quiet. Lysenko's other ideas, he had plenty of them.

He wasn't the only crank, in fact, around at this period. Yeah, but let's stick to him. Sticking to him. If we have too many cranks, you'll get around. I just like heating up to... Tell us about the clouds in Siberia, then we'll move on, but it's too good to be true. Well, this was actually later. This was when Lysenko was already the king of Soviet biology.

And this was to take up Robert's idea that he went to Stalin with solutions. He didn't produce problems. He said to Stalin, amongst the things I can do for you, is I can change the climate of Siberia. And he proposed that instead of planting trees, specimen trees, one at a time, what one should do is plant trees in clump. because within a species you won't get competition between the individual trees. They will actually voluntarily commit suicide

so that the best tree in the clump can survive. So peasants were supposed to put hundreds and thousands and millions of bunches of acorns into the Siberian soil, which they did in 1948. And by 1952, the great Siberian forest was supposed to have happened. Shostakovich actually wrote some music, the song of the forest, to celebrate the future Stalin forest. And of course, by 1952, 4% of the trees were still alive.

So it costs billions and came to nothing. Can I come back to the science, Steve Jones? There was a parallel, obviously, intellectual orthodoxy in genetics involving Darwin and Mendel. Why did Lysenko object to that so much? And why did Stalin objected it so much? And why did the Russians have nothing to do with an idea that was proving itself and sweeping the rest of the world? Yes, they called it Mendel Morganism, and Morgan was the guy atoposombe Morgan,

who came up with the notion that genes are born on chromosomes, on physical structures, which are passed down the generations. And the Soviets really hated chromosomes. I'm not quite sure how, why, but they really did. And one of the reasons they didn't like it that if you had a physical structure you could see down the microscope, which you certainly could, then that suggested it wasn't changeable. I mean, the whole point of lysanquism,

you had this vague sort of nexus of goodness and badness which you could alter the environment and what was bad would become good. But if you had a great lump of protein and DNA, as we now know what chromosomes are, then somehow that was fixed. And they made alarming statements about Morgan, the American scientist, who was the most unassuming and gentle of men. He was painted as a complete devil. And this was because they hated the notion that things could not be changed by the environment.

and at the time they seemed to be entirely wrong, the Soviets and later the Russians. However, nowadays, I have to say, some of that view is beginning to have some truth beginning to emerge. I'm not saying Lysenko was right, but he wasn't entirely wrong, which is pretty embarrassing for us geneticists. We can talk about the Dutch family at the end of World War II as an example of Dutch. Can you just throw that in, then I'm going to come back to what you were saying? I mean, the rule of genetics, really, what Mendel did was the disdust. was to note that the way that the peas looked, round and wrinkled and so on,

was that did actually control by something hidden inside the DNA, the genes, as we now say. And whatever you did to the peas, you grew them in good or bad soil. That made no difference in the genes. Well, in the last five years, that's really begun to change in the most startling manner. The first hint, which sounds less startling than it is,

was that at the end of the Second World War, 1945, 46, there was a great famine in Holland. and many pregnant women and their babies were very poorly nourished and they grew up, they were born, they were small and that seems obvious, it's not very exciting, but their grandchildren were small too. And we now know that isn't just because of

a difference in size of the mothers, it has to do with the DNA. And there's some extraordinary results have come out in the last few weeks from Sweden where they have very good records of good and bad agricultural years going back to 1800. And it turns out that if you look at, grandfathers, children and grandsons,

tens of thousands of people. Grandfathers who grew up at a time of famine, their sons and daughters are no different from anybody else. But their grandsons, and not their granddaughters, are very good at dealing the shortage of food. So somehow the DNA has been marked, as we would say, by this experience, by this environmental experience, to ready itself almost for the expectation

that food will be short in the next generation but one. Now, that's bizarre. It sounds like Sankoist. We don't know how it works, but the evidence is overwhelming. But the evidence was overwhelming at the time, that what worked was Darwinianism and not Lysenkoism. So, I mean, you're talking about present developments, very important. But actually, they were wrong at the time.

We've got to keep a steady course here. Swedish examples, very interesting. But not affecting the main issue. No, not at all. I mean, Lysenko was a fraud. I mean, I have to say that the description we've seen of him as a scientist would guarantee him success in British science today, that's for sure. And in fact, if you're talking about the Sovietization of science, look around you.

We don't do with the presents. We leave that to other programs. But no, I mean, he made the fundamental mistake that he was wrong. Now, if he'd been right, we'd have forgiven him. But he was wrong, and so he's doomed. Would you take up, Sir Robert, you're Robert's service. I think that connects up with something that is true generally of the way that the Soviet Union was ruled. that if you have this general plan

which prescribes what's going to go on in the economy and in society, then the ruling group have to take decisions on everything or else it can start falling apart, as it did under Brezhnev in the 1970s, early 1980s. In that case, the ruler or the ruling group have to be the ultimate arbiter of biology as well as of military technology.

The interesting thing here is that Stalin by and large took the correct decisions about what were the best tanks, what were the best military airplanes, was the Kalashnikov rifle any good? The decisions were correct. In agriculture, and this was a man who read science textbooks, he read popular science textbooks, he forced them on his children,

who were demoralized already, but then had this reading list thrown at them by this demon of a dictator. In science, he got things wrong. And yet, when that type of thing happened in military technology, the scientists were shot. But they weren't shot in agriculture. And I think this indicates that much as he took agriculture seriously, he didn't take it as seriously as he took.

Waging war. But he got, sorry, can I just bring Catherine in here? Because in 1940, Lysenko was made director of the Soviet Academy of Science

Institute of genetics, and that made him gave him a position of unassailable orthodoxy. Can you tell us the consequences of that, Catherine? So we have this man now with his wrong signs

explained by Steve and disaster in the countryside, disaster in agriculture, and now he's become the head of this. He, if you oppose him in any way, way, you've come to a bad end. Well, let's talk about Vavilov, who opposed him, a very serious geneticist, and quite

friendly disposed Lysenko. And so what would Lysenko's powers from 1940? What he did to Vavilov was he systematically denounced him. Vavilov was the great geneticist of the 1920s, or the plant biologist of the 1920s. He was a collector of plants. He was somebody who traveled a lot. He did something Stalin really didn't like, which was to travel abroad a lot

and have a lot of contacts with foreign scientists. And he collected plants, and he looked at plants in their natural environments very much with the same sorts of view. You know, how can we adapt plants to our own cold, dry, very inhospitable conditions. But he and Lysenko clashed on a series of occasions. And finally, he was arrested in 1940.

He was sentenced to death in 1942, and he starved to death in a prison in the middle of the war in Saratov in 1943. That was a great tragedy. And all his supporters also disappeared. Some committed suicide, some lost their jobs. It was 1948, really, that Bysenko finally becomes the unassailable king of all agricultural science, with his new science of agrobiology and his position unassailable from all directions. And it's at that point that several hundred thousand scientists lose their job.

forever. Genetics becomes almost impossible to carry out in the Soviet Union until the early 50s. It does seem extraordinary. Agriculture is lumbering away, a total failure. They're now in the late 40s having to take grain from America. And nobody's saying, have you got this wrong? Or if they do, they're sent a prison. It's power of terror. I mean, it's ironic. Vavilov was indeed a great biologist. He's frequently spoken of today. He hybridized plants together, which they didn't like at all, because the Prants were pure. You don't want to mess with pure plants. And we still do that today. There are expeditions now going all over the world to try and file wild plants with genes for cold resistance and so on, cross them into crops.

So Vavilov was dead right. It's ironic that the plant hybridization institute in Russia now is called the Vavilov Institute. So he's actually back in absolutely in favor. It is quite bizarre. I mean, when I was learning genetics, there were a number of Soviet emigres who had been through that, who had fled to the States. and to Britain, and they still were terrified to talk about it. It was an appalling business. And the irony is that people always talk when they're talking about the Soviet-American clash about the arms race, about oil and so on.

It wasn't that, it was agriculture. That's what finally killed them off because they had to import grain from the United States. They did that because of the only well-known genus is called Jones, two of them, Eastern Jones, who discovered that if you crossed lines, of maize together, you've got this fantastic improvement in yield. I mean, breathtaking improvement.

We still don't understand what this heterosis, as we call it, how it works. But the effect was stunning. So suddenly the United States was the breadbasket of the world, and like everybody who hands out the food, it has a polite hand on the throat of those who are buying it. We see it today, of course. I just, yes, wanted to say that one of the even more shocking things

about Lysenko's rise in 1948 is that this is three years after the war. And at the end of the great patriotic war, Russia and America were allies, and Russian scientists actually had access to American science. And for a very short time, not only did they experiment with genetics, but they also could see the results for American agriculture, most noticeably selective weed killers that they very much needed, and they thought was some terrible capitalist trick. So, Wysenko in 1948, is actually going backwards on what is already known

in the Soviet Union to have been a mistake pre-war. Robert Service, the reign of terror then sort of played into the five-year plan, really. And did this, was this, just for one moment, can we broaden it from Lysenko and agriculture? Is this going right across Soviet society? It is indeed. I mean, you mentioned a few minutes ago, Melvin, that professional people were being arrested in the early 1930s. So even before, and that included scientists, there was a, there was a, there was a, deep suspicion in Stalin's USSR of anybody who had a toehold in the old pre-revolutionary society.

And so through the 1930s, these people suffer persecution. They are deported from the towns. Eventually, in 1937, in the Great Terror, they're named as groups which are to be eliminated and either thrown into the Gulag camps or shot. We're talking about 100,000, even millions. We're talking about millions of people. And the Goulag is kept top-top with new victims as the slave labourers die off.

And that's going on right through to the death of Stalin in 1953. So the background to all of this is that there is a reign of terror against any specialists, any teachers, any opinion formers in society, who step outside the lines of orthodoxy as set by the ruling group led by Stalin. So it's a period of enormous utopian feeling and aspiration combined with enormous, huge, intense trepidation. No wonder Soviet people in the 60s and 70s found it hard to unlock themselves from the mental box. of Stalinism.

We told Steve Jones, I mean, scientific community ideas ring around the world and so and so forth, what was the rest of the world doing when this was going on? What about the Americans and the British and other Europeans and so on and saying, look, you've got it wrong here? Ideology still played a considerable part. I mean, an awful lot of scientists then and to some degree now,

well, left wingers, JBS Holden, who was a famous geneticist, he really blotted his copybook. until, actually until 1996, by going along with Lysenko. He kind of wished that Lysenko was right. He kept saying pro-Lysenko things,

even though he himself was a towering genius in science. And a lot of Brits, quite a few minutes, went to Russia in the 30s and came back and said, they're onto a good thing, and they're setting us all an example. In some ways, as Robert So this has said, in some ways they were. I mean, the industrialisation program behind the Urales and so on was very successful.

But in the end, the interesting thing about science is in the end the truth will out. I remember just two or three years ago when these bizarre new findings about the effects of the environment on the DNA, everybody mocked at it and said this is ridiculous, you're not doing your experiments properly. Well, it's true.

And we may not like it, but we have to swallow it. And that was the problem. They didn't like it, so they didn't swallow it. And that really was the difference between Soviet science, Soviet biology and Western biology. Can I bring Catherine in a moment, Robert? How did the Soviet... How did the Soviets

present Lysenko, was he their great hero figure to the outside world? Inside Russia he could do no wrong. He was the great genius. It's still strange, isn't it? As Robert said, the mind lock you get into, you're calling him a genius, you go out of your hut in the morning and we face a barren land.

But nevertheless, there he is. Anyway, that's a sign. How is he being presented? He's being presented exactly as Steve described as the great leader of a new kind of agrobiology, a new discipline, is going to transform not only the Soviet Union, but ultimately the world, because, of course, the Soviet Union will teach the world how to do this new science. And all these people who are

messing about with little particles, I mean, Lysenko's attitude to that was, you know, there's nothing beyond the body that we can all see, and this genetics just hinders us. And ultimately, this will be overturned, and we'll all be doing agrobiology, and the Soviet Union, as ever, will lead the world in science. Robert Scheld. Well, picking up from what Steve was saying, earlier, the Soviet Union attracted people from the West who wanted to believe there was an alternative to the, the ruination of their economy in the 1930s following the Wall Street crash. So not just scientists, but political commentators, philosophers went out there, George Bernard Shaw, the webs. And they willed themselves into thinking that this web. of planning everything from the top, from the centre, was a better way of running things than the rather messy, chaotic contours of capitalism.

So it was this distorting effect of the mirror. There's an irony there because, in fact, in science, forgetting the ideology for the moment, actually running through the centre can work rather well. I mean, the atom bomb, which is a little thing, but it was a great science, was done absolutely from the centre. The Human Genome Project, the idea of sequencing the whole of DNA,

was entirely a product of the ego of James Watson, the great geneticist. And when he set it out, everybody with the squabbling masses of whom I was won, said, this is ridiculous. You're going to take our money away with this absurd, you know, Stalinist scheme, and we looked rather foolish when it worked. So, you know, don't be too rude to the central planners, comrade. I'd like an addendum to that. When the Soviet atom bomb project was set up,

it was not Stalin's idea that Einstein's physics worked, and they weren't allowed to use the equations. They were not allowed to use Einsteinian physics. The secret police chief, who was in charge of the atom bomb project, Beria, came back to Stalin and said, these boys say they just can't build you an atom bomb unless you let them use Einstein. And Stalin replied, and this shows the both,

His cynicism and his devotion to his own version of science, he said, okay, let them use the equations. We can always shoot them later. They're going to pay for Einsteinianism. Did he? No, he didn't shoot them. In fact, they were the barriers of this whole thing because it was Sakharov who denounced Lysenko much later on.

Let's take Lysenko up of 1948. He's King of the Heapen makes a huge speech which Stalin, which he denounces Mendel and Darwin and Stalin is very, very pleased by that. So on his sails, more and more lunacies and destructions, and Chris Schoft comes in, and he convinces Christchop. Well, he's actually already convinced Christchof, because when Krushchev was Party Secretary in Ukraine,

which is where he came from too, he'd adopted one of Lysenko's earlier schemes for chicken breeding. And so he was... What was that? Don't ask. So he was tired with the Lysenka. It was what he fed them on. But he was therefore tired already with the Lysenko. brush. And the problem with Khrushchev

is that he was already one of the previous regime. So to announce that the emperor has no clothes would actually be to leave himself naked too. So although Lysenko did very cleverly persuade Khrushchev as leader that he could still be the great head of science, and although by this time

Watson and Crick have actually won the Nobel Prize, so it's very clear that something interesting is going on in the West, it's very hard for Khrushchev to go for him. So by the 50s, the late 50s and the early 60s, There is a growing interest in genetics in the Soviet Union behind Lysenko's back, as it were, or parallel with Lysenko.

But it's taking place in Novosibirsk, not Moscow, and it's not being given as much state patronage as it should be. But Lysenko, although now still the king, is the king with a successor ready with a knife to put in his back. Clearly, and obviously we've concentrated on an agriculture, but is the failure of the crop, is the fact that most of them, for most of the century, eating cabbage, potatoes,

is that failure drawing away at the strength of the Soviet Union inextriple? First of all, Steve, and then Robert? I think yes, because if you look at the balance of payment situation between the Soviet Union and the United States in particular, and to a certain extent places like Argentina,

Soviet Union became a massive importer of food. And if you need to import food, the producer can set the prices. That's happening now. And so it really sapped away at the economy. I think that has changed. There is now Good genetics in the Soviet Union. It's taken a long time.

But the astonishing thing to me about Lysenko, as you say, is how long he lasted. He lasted after the double helix. You know, it's quite amazing. It's a bit like Newton lasting until Einstein. I think Newton was right. But it's amazing how much the inertia of this kind of mindset is. People talk a lot about paradigm shifts in science

that suddenly everybody changes their mind. It happened in physics in 1905, when quantum physics came. and they didn't have the paradigm shift, but it was quick when it happened. I think there's a structural reason for this. If you have this way of running a society, if you have a general plan,

if you have a centralised politics, where the politicians take the big decisions about everything, there can be a tendency towards ossification, bureaucratization, just getting through the day and just pretending to get along with the plan. So you have to have a leadership that, stirs things up, and the leadership has to stir things up. So how do you do that? In each sector of society, of the economy, of politics, you find someone who will set the cat among the pigeons

or the large rabbit among whatever lower animal you can find. And Lysienka did that for Khrushchev. He would have willingly done it for Brezhnev, but Brezhnev finally said, I'll go for Rosification. I'll go for bureaucratization. I'll go for the quiet life. 18 years later, the Soviet Union collapsed. This kind of society and state can't work without agitation, and Lysenko was a great agitator. Finally, Catherine, was he died in 74, was he? Was he ever denounced in the Soviet Union? Sakharov overturn his ideas in the mid-six years, but was, very briefly, was he ever denounced. He was not made

the figure of vilification that he should have been during the Soviet period in his lifetime. He was given a little farm in Moscow for a few years at the end of his career, which eventually was shut down, but he was not attacked as he had attacked others. Well, thank you very much, Robert Service, Steve Jones and Catherine Meridale.

And next week I'll be discussing the great decline in Anglo-German relations across the 19th century. And thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programs about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.