J. B. S. Haldane and ЛысеHкOвщиHа ( Lysenkovschina )

TLDR: It is impossible to understand Haldane’s position on Lysenkoism without first introducing the term Lysenkovschina in English, and I hereby do so.

Abstract: On 7 August 1948, at the end of a week-long session of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Moscow, Trofim D. Lysenko declared he had received the support of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union for his biological theories. Lysenko’s beliefs about heredity and development, which he labelled ‘Michurinism’, consisted of a variety of ideas based upon his assumption that plants could adapt to survive in any climate, and be transformed into different species.1 Lysenko claimed genetics was a ‘bourgeois’ science devised to promote racism and imperialism, and to prove the inherent inferiority of the working class. What followed was a purge of genetics across the USSR that soon spread throughout Soviet-allied states worldwide. When the nations subjected to Lysenko’s dictates finally emerged from the fog of Lysenkoism decades later what they encountered was a genetics that had to a certain extent been formulated in reaction to Lysenko’s opposition to the gene, and belief in the dominant role of the environment in evolution.2 Among the greatest difficulties in assessing J. B. S. Haldane’s response to Lysenko is the lack of the term Lysehkovwiha (Lysenkovschina) in English. In Haldane’s mother tongue the only word used is ‘Lysenkoism’. In Russian Lysenkoism refers exclusively to the content of what Lysenko claimed was true about nature—his theories. ‘Lysenkovschina’ is specific to the politics surrounding how his ideas were promoted up to Stalin, and later Khrushchev, through the web of personalities in between. It is impossible to understand Haldane’s position on Lysenkoism without first introducing the term Lysenkovschina in English, and I hereby do so.3 The derivation of Lysenkoism and Lysenkovschina underlines the cacophony of responses to the Lysenko controversy, and highlights the motivations of its participants. Regardless of what Lysenko said, his prescriptions for rescuing Soviet agriculture from a perpetual cycle of famine and want were inseparable in the West from the collective horror over the suffering of old friends and colleagues who were victims of these years.4 In his 1927 essay Possible worlds, Haldane said the ‘future will be queerer than we “can” suppose’.5 Thirty-six years later, in a self-taped obituary for the BBC, Haldane stated ‘In my opinion Lysenko is a very fine biologist and some of his ideas are right.’6 These two sentences, taken together, precisely articulate Haldane’s position on Lysenko. No one can predict where science is going and it is reasonable to believe that at least part of what anyone said will at some point in the future appear in the column labelled ‘right’. The complicated path between Haldane’s twin assertions has yet to be described.