Proletarian science? : the case of Lysenko / Dominique Lecourt ; introduction by Louis Althusser ; translated by Ben Brewster.

  • Lecourt, Dominique. Lyssenko. English
Date:
1977
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)

Credit: Proletarian science? : the case of Lysenko / Dominique Lecourt ; introduction by Louis Althusser ; translated by Ben Brewster. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    34 to the task of assisting the collective farms, machine and tractor stations and state farms in their efforts to secure higher yields of agricultural crops and livestock prodlice' {Verbatim Report, op. cit., pp. 650-51). These practical measures signalled no more nor less than the death sentence to genetics in the Soviet Union : aU teaching of this discipline and aU research w^ere to be prohibited for more than fifteen years. Knowing the developments this science saw in the 1950's, knowing the extent of the applications to which it has given rise in medicine, physiology, agronomy . . ., one can imagine the disastrous consequences of these administrative measures which amazed the whole world. Soviet geneticists on the other hand could not be surprised by the result of the Session; if they had been able to express their positions freely at it, if they had been able to defend their science, they had done so with the energy of despair, for they knew before the session began that all was already lost. Listen to Lysenko once again ; 'In the higher official scientific circles of biologists [in the USSR], too, the followers of Michurin and Vil'yams have often found themselves in the minority. They were a minority in the Lenin Academy of Agricultural Sciences too. But the situation in the Academy has now sharply changed thanks to the interest taken in it by the Party, the Government, and Comrade Stalin personally. A considerable number of Michurinists have been added as mem¬ bers and corresponding members of our Academy, and we expect that more will be added shortly, at the coming elections. This will create a new situation in the Academy and new opportunities for the further development of the Michurin teaching' (p. 30). In other words: however 'open' the discussion, its result was never in doubt. The majority had previously been reversed in Lysenko's favour, at Party instigation. The vote for the final resolution merely sanctioned a decision taken outside the Academy of Agricultural Sciences; independently of the proceedings at the sittings that were to be held in it. For, as the article in Les Lettres françaises put it, this Session marked 'the culmination of a long struggle'. In other words, no more than the Report is the discussion that immediately followed it comprehensible by itself. To understand either, it is necessary to evoke the episodes of this 'long struggle'.