INCRIMINATING CIRCUMSTANTIAL "EVIDENCE" CITED BY CRITICS THAT USE THIS TO DISCREDIT THE SCIENTIST LYSENKO’S SCIENTIFIC WORK. AN ANALYSIS BY: T. JANTSANG — Portions that were in the original, of a family-personal nature irrelevant to all of this, were deleted.
The scientific end of this issue will be fully covered in the future.
This portion is not about science despite the fact that the events took place within a scientific setting and establishment. They could have taken place in a clothing factory for all that matters. Scientists are not police detectives - and police detectives are not scientists though they may have to pose as such if they are agents.
So, the two things: 1, the science and 2, the police work, suspicions and charges, are two things, two SEPARATE things that need to be kept separate. If Dr. Salk, the creator of the polio vaccination, turned out to be a spy or a murderer, not only would no one stop taking the polio vaccination, but also the "dirty secrets" would probably be covered up. And if they came out: so what! That does not make the polio vaccination any less "good" nor does it invalidate Dr. Salk’s work. Only the most abject scum would deny the medical validity of the vaccination due to some stupid, moral objection. If Dr. Salk were all these things, then he would be called immoral, or a spy. So what: his vaccination and his work are still good! The following is going to look at the facts, the way detectives would objectively look at all of them. Therefore, this essay is not political at all and it is also not scientific.
Zhores Medvedev was the first, translated into English, to write against Lysenko with limited information regarding the non-scientific activities, but with loads of suspicions, one sided, despite the fact that Medvedev is and was not involved in police work. Valery Soyfer and Mark Popovsky were the two to later write against Lysenko, translated into English, and it is from them that "all the worst dirty laundry" has been said to have been exposed. Neither of them is involved with police work. I repeat, this is not going to address the scientific end of things, which Philip E. Panaggio will cover.
I will present the "dirt" all in one place, to make it "really dirty," and show what these people are saying, and present it in a way that makes the science involved irrelevant. If the reader is balking at the use of the word "dirt" to define this then, keep in mind, it is DIRT that Soyfer and Popovsky, as well as Medvedev were happy to sling first. The only thing they didn’t do was resort to using foul language. They kept it all proper, in an attempt to make it sound like "Academese." As I said, it would not matter if this took place in a clothing factory. I will also put things in perspective, which should be clear to any objective reader. Most of the false accusations leveled against Lysenko have to do with another scientist named Vavilov and also some of the people called "geneticists" at the time (keep in mind, DNA was not yet discovered at this time!) .
First of all, the OGPU (later, NKVD), was a Secret Police organization that our own USA former Head of the CIA, Allen Dulles, in his book on the history of intelligence work (The Craft of Intelligence), has said was the best of its type. So then, the NKVD was the best of its type, according to the Head of the American CIA. The Head of the CIA would know this.
The OGPU-NKVD opened a file on Vavilov, at least as early as 1928 (Case Number 268615) and definitely added to it in 1931. Popovsky has to admit Lysenko had nothing to do with this. However, Popovsky is in no position to know why they opened this file on Vavilov or in any position of knowledge to dismiss their suspicions: Popovsky is not an officer of the law or a detective, nor an agent of the NKVD or the FBI or CIA. Trying, then, to claim that the "authorities" wanted any old peasant (Lysenko) to rise to the occasion of Proletarian Scientist and then writing books disparaging Lysenko’s work is a dirty trick. Vavilov himself refutes these charges and Vavilov was there at the time, face to face with Lysenko’s work. Philip E. Panaggio will cover this part (we will put that up on this website as soon as it is finished).
What follows, as said above, has nothing to do with science. The primary time period covers the years 1936 through 1939. (Interesting note: that’s when Nicolai Yezhov was NKVD Chief.)
This is what Zhores Medvedev knows and writes, 1960’s:
—Vavilov is an important man in the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. He used to be the head. Next, two others, in turn, replaced him. Lastly, Lysenko became the head.
—Lysenko works there and now heads it.
—Shlykov works there, is a Lysenkoite and anti-Vavilov, and is a scientist. He makes a few speeches publicly arguing Vavilov but nothing so direct as a damning accusation.
—Shlykov writes a letter dated March 2, 1938, to the CEC Science Section proposing the appointment of Stepan N. Shundenko.
—Shundenko is then pushed through to get a degree; it is obvious to everyone the man’s not a scientist and is utterly not qualified, but Lysenko hires him to work under Vavilov.
—Shlykov and Shundenko are "seen by all" (who?) to run constantly to Lysenko with "reports on Vavilov," or at least they to talk to Lysenko, for if no one heard what was said, then no one knows what was said.
—Later on, Shundenko is transferred to the NKVD in a leading post. Rumors are that he merely returned to his former job. Just prior to Shundenko quitting his university job and "joining" the NKVD, Vavilov is arrested, August 6, 1940.
One can surmise what one wishes from this. There are other Lysenkoites, that is, people who agree with his line of research, Yakushkin, Ya. A. Yakovlev, Isaac Prezent and other people not connected to real or imagined intrigues, many others including Oparin. As Joravsky (The Lysenko Affair) points out, some folks on both sides got into trouble during the Yezhov years, so nothing is all that clear.
Inferences can be made from all of this; they would all be purely circumstantial and based on personalities and who likes whose research better. This is all that is known, thus far.
Next, most recent, from 1980’s and 1990’s. From Soyfer and Popovsky, the two original, main sources from which all other things are cited unless indicated here, such as news articles or other books. Archives open on Vavilov’s case and much is found in there and in other archives to fill in Medvedev’s information:
—Vavilov works at Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Science. He used to head it.
—Lysenko works there, he now heads it.
—Prezent, the philosopher and Lysenko’s theoretician, comes there to lecture students. Prezent was once fired from a job presumably by Vavilov and he hates Vavilov. Prezent and Lysenko are such great friends that when Prezent was arrested due to having sex a "minor", Lysenko managed to write to the NKVD, or have friends write to the NKVD, and get Prezent out. (More than likely the 16 year old minor helped to get him out.)
—Yakushkin and Kol were arrested in 1931 and gave statements to the OGPU regarding Vavilov’s sabotage, specifically naming him. An OGPU-NKVD file was "started on Vavilov" (Case Number 268615), but the archives show that this file already existed in 1931, prior to the testimony of Yakushkin and Kol. Yakushkin was also previously arrested by the OGPU in 1929 where he was recruited to be an agent of the NKVD as a condition of his release (i.e., spy for us or go to jail).
—Professor Yakovlev (not Ya. A.) testified, in the 1934 Kamenev trial, that Kamenev put him in charge of a terrorist group at the Academy of Science ("The Terror, a Reassessment" R. Conquest, page 96). Vavilov had been a corresponding member of this academy since 1923. He was the Head of it later.
—Shlykov works there (at the Lenin All Union Academy), is a Lysenkoite and anti-Vavilov, and is a scientist. He makes a few speeches publicly arguing Vavilov but nothing so direct as damning accusation. But Shlykov not only makes public speeches countering Vavilov, he also writes letters to the science section of the Party Central Committee coming just short of denouncing Vavilov and implying sabotage. Also, Shlykov writes another secret letter utterly denouncing Vavilov, accusing him of outright sabotage, and sends this to Malinin of the NKVD! In the text of this secret letter, it is evident that Shlykov had been sending Malinin copies of other letters as well, all the while.
—Shlykov writes a letter dated March 2, 1938, to the CEC Science Section proposing the appointment of Stepan N. Shundenko.
—Lysenko, at the start of 1938, issues an order, or is told to issue one, to promote Shundenko to Deputy Director for Scientific Research.
—Shundenko, previous to this, was assigned to do graduate work under Mikhail I. Khadzhinov, a pupil of Vavilov’s. Shundenko was unable to write a dissertation, so Khadzhinov wrote it for him.
—Shundenko is then pushed through to get a degree, it is obvious to everyone the man’s not a scientist and is not qualified but Lysenko hires him to work under Vavilov. Now, it is learned that NKVD Major Shundenko was in the NKVD all the while and he was assigned to the "Vavilov Case!" Shundenko was the leader of the agricultural section of the NKVD investigating the Vavilov Case. The whole while he was "working under" Vavilov, he was really investigating him!
—Shlykov and Shundenko were seen to be pals, they hit it off as friends right away, everyone knows this. They were seen running to Lysenko to tell him things. As before, if no one heard what was said, no one knows what was said!
—Lysenko went to a meeting in the Kremlin along with others; Polit Bureau and Council of People’s Commissars were there discussing pseudo-science, which is seen to have led to:
—Boris A. Keller assigned to investigate the goings on at Vavilov’s Genetics Institute. Keller is seen talking to Lysenko a lot.
—On December 13, 1938, a new file is opened on Vavilov by the NKVD, Case Number 300669 and titled "Genetics." Yezhov is still the Head of the NKVD at this time.
—Six months after the geneticists petition the Central Committee to intervene in the Lysenko-Genetics controversy, the new Head of the NKVD, Lavrenty Beria, writes to Molotov, July 1939, asking that he be allowed to arrest Vavilov. Vavilov had, all this while, been investigated further for trying to defame Lysenkoo, since the time Lysenko was promoted to head of the Lenin All-Union Academy. More is added to the file on Vavilov, Case Number 300669.
—On November 20, 1939, Vavilov meets with Stalin and Stalin says, "Stop fooling with flowers. Do something to raise crop yields."
—After Vavilov is arrested (arrested August 6, 1940) a commission is formed to head Vavilov’s trial. The members of the commission are people who either hated Vavilov or were against his ideas. They were approved by Lysenko and worked under NKVD Major Shundenko.
Now, that’s some very incriminating circumstantial evidence! Why is it merely circumstantial?
Did Shlykov know that his friend, Shundenko, was in the NKVD?
Did Lysenko know this when he hired Shundenko to be Vavilov’s Deputy at the lab?
It is the two of them, Shlykov and Shundenko, that kept running to Lysenko and reporting to him. Shlykov and Lysenko both surely knew that Shundenko was a Major in the NKVD: AFTER THEY SAW HIM IN HIS UNIFORM! But did they know this BEFORE?
If Lysenko did know, was he working for the NKVD in hiring Shundenko to "work under" Vavilov - or - was NKVD Major Shundenko told to report to Lysenko?!
Shundenko and Shlykov went to Lysenko to report things, or at least talk to him, as Medvedev points out, everyone saw it. In other words, they did not try to hide it! Were they reporting things or just chatting?
What did Keller chat with Lysenko about?
Did Lysenko know exactly what the scientists he approved of were going to be asked to do? Or that Shundenko was head of an investigation? (See end of this portion for what I would have done in such an investigation, keeping in mind what Beria said about defaming Lysenko.)
Soyfer admits, while presenting all this and entire copies of the letters and speeches, that there is no direct link with Lysenko. Yes, but anyone can see it is very circumstantial; and if you combine the "very circumstantial" with the "this fellow is my best friend" that was also supposedly "well known to all," well! People can think what they wish based on that. The FACT also comes out loud and clear that all this noise about "Shlykov and Shundenko being tight friends" comes from people who hated Shlykov and Shundenko and who DID NOT KNOW EITHER OF THEM WELL AT ALL! They hated them so much that they even made up nasty songs about their physical appearance, called Shundenko a "dirty little devil" and called them both "shit!" Gossip, gossip..... oh, SUCH reliable sources!
No one compiling this, with details of dates and specific institutes galore, ever thinks to posit a few important questions:
1. Was Vavilov guilty of doing things that were sabotage or as good as sabotage, or doing things that were literally perceived as sabotage or severe obstruction, even if innocently done?
2. Was Vavilov NEGLECTING to do things (as Stalin obviously said to his face) that would be perceived as obstructionism? (Obstruction was a form of "wrecking" in the USSR, a crime)?
3. Most importantly, was Vavilov guilty of writing letters with scientific information in them to people that were not exactly friends of the Soviet Union?
The critics have NO trouble forming such mock-detective-like conclusions when dealing the blow to Lysenko, as they include disparagements of his scientific achievements far out of hand with reality. I’d say that the NKVD had at least the same types of "evidence" to lead to their conclusions, and probably more that no one is aware of, and that the NKVD based their ideas of Vavilov on conclusions they made even BEFORE 1931 when they started a file on him. The NKVD were trained to be investigators: the best ever according to USA (former) Head of the CIA, Allen Dulles!
This can not be looked at objectively by people who are not detectives, by people who know nothing of where Vavilov went overseas or who he knew, by people who don’t have spies looking out for suspicious activity, by people who have no idea what Vavilov may have done that they are not privy to - or what Vavilov may have neglected to do (even though he was critisized for not producing any results).
We think Vavilov was suspicious, even if you don’t consider his foreign contacts and his friendliness to Soviet defectors and White émigrés (pro Czarist Russians) during those dangerous days and can prove it on hindsight by what is known now to be right, versus what Vavilov and the anti-Lysenkoites were saying as regards agricultural planting and botany. I refuse to address anything scientific because this is about the NKVD; not about science. As I said before, even if this all happened in a clothing factory it would amount to the same thing, the same basic undisputable facts: Vavilov had overseas contacts; he embraced and associated with outright enemies of the USSR. This alone would have been enough to ruin him and cause a great deal of suspicion. Vavilov’s visiting these anti-Soviets was not done in a vacuum. These anti-Soviets also knew people in the countries they lived, countries often hostile to the USSR especially in the 1930’s.
Consider also, what have we NOT been told regarding Vavilov and/or Lysenko? Just based on the statistics the American scientist Richard Lewontin presented, we have not been told a lot, including a lot of the truth: Lysenko fed the people, he did practical work that was excellent and again, HE FED THE PEOPLE! One does not have to blow up a machine factory, derail a train, or destroy a mine to sabotage socialist building of society, though this would be small sabotage. If you fail to feed the people, all of the rest of the society will feel the brunt of this as work performance fails, as people get sick, as people are fed up and strike. If you could stop Lysenko from feeding the people, you could stop factory workers from building the industrial society Stalin needed to build a socialist country; in fact, you could stop the USSR from becoming a world power. So then, we KNOW that the Western powers would have LOVED to sabotage this, especially Churchill whose own genocidal statements damn him. Even when the critics of Lysenko admit that he helped out with the planting of potatos during a critical period, they berate what he did by saying that "anyone would have known that" or some such . Oh? If anyone would have known that, why is it that Lysenko was the one to THINK OF it and explain the methods to prevent people from starving? Great question. Apparently, everyone didn't know that - or they knew it and deliberately withheld what they knew - which is even worse.
I note how the "experts" FAIL to figure this into their half-baked equations. To imagine that the West "merely wanted to help" the USSR increase food production is to lack sanity! The West just got done trying to undo the entire Bolshevik endeavor in the Civil War! Help the USSR? They have to be joking!! Like, duh: was there reason to suspect sabotage? Oh, YES!
Was Stalin like a dictator when it came to feeding the people (agriculture)? Well, if he wasn’t, he SHOULD HAVE BEEN! Actually, Stalin let both schools of thought complete - and hoped that results would come of it, real results. Take, for instance, Hitler who was not an engineer, auto mechanic or car salesman. He took it upon himself to DEMAND a well-made and cheap car and he became like a dictator about "building a people’s car." Well, no one would fault Hitler for doing this, since the Volkswagen was the result: an excellent car and cheap enough for everyone to buy. There comes a time when a country’s leader BETTER take things under his control and DEMAND things: either do that or allow sabotage!
As LeCourt points out (Proletarian Science), and which is not denied by Lysenko's detractors: Lysenko had practical results in terms of practical work, but the geneticists had NOTHING to show except theories about something we can’t even eat: fruit flies and flowers. Transplant this to a clothing factory scenario: Lysenko had well-made types of clothing for naked, cold people while his enemies were wasting time and money sewing a bunch of frilly doilies or talking about HOW to make frilly doilies! The Theory and/or History of Doilies versus real clothing.
However, even if the critics recognize and admit that suspicions are right about Vavilov, the big issue remains on whether or not Lysenko (or some of his followers) was in cahoots with the NKVD. We think he wasn't. Anyone that thinks that he was immune to investigations, or that if he did wreck something nothing would happen to him - is in danger of denying their own "totalitarian paradigm." They can't have it both ways.
But what if he was in cahoots with the NKVD? Let's transplant that to the USA during those days. Does anyone imagine that buying a Communist newspaper during the time of McCarthy would not get J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI on your tail watching you, or your phone tapped, or even end up with you getting arrested if you sent the Communist organization money to buy something from them? The FACT is, it most certainly would end up that way and everyone here knows it! And what if you went overseas to the USSR to visit the Communists, hugged them, and hung out with them? That’s what Vavilov did with enemies of the USSR, hugged them, hung out with them! Does anyone imagine that there were not spies on both sides, especially when the facts are coming out of the closet these days from the CIA’s own mouth? Come on! Some of the most ordinary Americans were not only spies but also sometimes "moles," long term Soviet agents living here as ordinary Americans. Does anyone imagine that the CIA and other such earlier organizations did not have a similar set up with spies and moles? Come on! Does anyone American and patriotic go out of their way to trash another American who was a spy for their own FBI or CIA? NO! Consider that! Thank you very much!
Moreover, in case someone has not caught a clue here: WHO in the USA would call an American citizen that is an FBI informant a "traitor?" Uh...well, lots of Communists would! Criminals would, too! That’s the point! Communists were enemies IN THE USA’s capitalist society and they openly spoke about violent revolutionary overthrowing of the government. OK? OK!
Well? The NKVD was the Soviet version of the FBI. (Technically, the NKGB, later the MGB, became the KGB, often compared to our CIA; the NKVD became the MVD. KGB is State Security. MVD is Internal Security more like our FBI, especially in the early FBI days.) Soviet citizens were expected to be loyal and on guard against suspicious actions and/or to cooperate with their own NKVD, especially during the days of Nazi Fifth Columns and all kinds of spy doings, suspected just based on the sheer hostility of the capitalist nations against the USSR. So then, there is a bit of circumstantial evidence to "prove" that Lysenko was in cahoots with the NKVD, or possibly even had a Major in the NKVD reporting directly to him or vice versa because: Shundenko was a Major in the NKVD; Shundenko at least was seen talking to Lysenko. These are two facts, albeit based on the hearsay of people who hated Shudenko, Shlykov and Lysenko.
The question remains: did Lysenko know Shundenko was Major in NKVD - AT THAT TIME?
Fact is, Shlykov was rumored to be best friends with Shundenko. Fact is, Shlykov also talked to Lysenko a lot . These two facts are based on the same hearsay of people who hated them. Fact is, Shlykov also wrote and mailed his reports to Malinin of the NKVD many times, he was reporting to Malinin, too - that is a hard fact not based on hearsay. But the question is, why bother to do that when Shundenko was right there?
The question remains here also: did Shlykov know his friend Shundenko was in the NKVD - WHEN HE ALLEGEDLY HUNG AROUND WITH HIM? No one can answer that. There is no proof. But based on who he reported to, he evidendently did not know about Shundenko. If you consider the behavior of FBI agents doing the same things, it would be highly unlikely that either Shlykov or Lysenko knew a thing about Shundenko being in the NKVD, let alone the head of an investigation into the "Vavilov Case."
It is easy to befriend an agent or even marry one and be wholly unaware that he or she is an agent. They are secretive people.
Here are some hard facts: Shlykov mailed his reports to Malinin of the NKVD; he did not simply hand them to Shundenko. Why not? If you were friends with an FBI agent and you wanted to make sure the Chief of the FBI got a letter you wrote, wouldn’t you hand it to your FBI pal for him to hand it in and make sure it got read? Sure you would. And did it matter that Shlykov was either still friends or once a friend of someone in the NKVD, whether he knew it or not? No: this same Shlykov, after WWII, sent a foreign American agricultural expert a couple of years old research samples of alfalfa. Shlykov wrote a letter to the American promising to send more researched seeds of great value in the USSR. At this time, Shlykov was the Director of the All Union Institute of plant-growing research. He was caught before he could send what he promised and sentenced to a term in a labor camp in Kazakhstan, charged with subversion and counter-revolutionary activity. No one was immune from breaking the law: The NKVD was GOOD AT CATCHING people! It did not matter if Shlykov was once a friend or still a friend of NKVD Major Shundenko; none of that mattered.
On interviewing Khvat, the NKVD interrogator of Vavilov, Khvat admitted that he did not think Vavilov was guilty of espionage as he was accused due to a heap of suspicions, but he still thought that some of Vavilov’s ideas and actions were very strange and contrary to pro-Soviet practical methods and practical results - tantamount to sabotage: he believed Vavilov was a wrecker. I have to wonder if the FBI formed the same liberal conclusions about people who were "huggy pals" of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg! Any one of those Soviet émigrés that Vavilov was pals with overseas could have been getting information from things Vavilov told them!
The point is moot: Lysenko’s people produced practical results; Vavilov’s people produced theories and mutations of fruit flies. If the DEEDS that result from Vavilov’s glossing over facts, or countering Lysenko when Lysenko is right (which Vavilov admits later and which can be proven now with careful study of the intricacies of botany), or if the deeds don’t produce practical results but instead stagnate in a lab filled with theoretical non-doers - then Vavilov is doing the deeds of a saboteur whether he is one or not. Anyone having foreign contacts at that time in history, especially one such as Vavilov known to embrace "White Émigrés" who were Czarists and other anti-Soviets, was highly suspected - just as a person hanging around with anyone even remotely pro-Communist, or "left-wing," as it was called, would have been spied on from then on by the FBI's J.E. Hoover.
The attention Vavilov received from the Western press, which also criticized the Soviet system, only exacerbated an already very dangerous situation, since it seemed as if these Westerners knew what was going on in the USSR! Was Vavilov a completely suicidal moron or was he just flaunting his actions? He was the son of a millionaire and, despite his politics as they are stated by others, such people tend to think they can just do what the hell they want as if they are immune to the restrictions that bind everyone else in the society they live in. They flaunt the law. Simple as that. No excuses! In the USA, "ignorance of the law" is NO EXCUSE! So?
Another point I wish to make is on Khrushchev, which even Communists who hate him never bring up. He had to have known there is no Corn Belt in the USSR, since he was a farmer himself. He had to have known what Lysenko knew when Lysenko was so fanatically against planting corn in the USSR: any kind of corn. He had to have known that he (Krushchev) was threatening the USA with nuclear war and big talk. So why did he trust the USA and do what the USA told him to do: plant corn? Was Khrushchev stupid? Or part of the CIA!? Does it matter? He did just what the CIA would have wanted to do to wreck not only agriculture in the USSR, but eventually wreck the very land itself. Corn is anathema to land, it is a land destroyer and, even in the Corn Belt, it is not very good to intensively plant it. Corn is also one of those crops that manage to produce stupid and often crazy people: strong corn diet can produce pellagra due to what corn lacks in nutrition. It was well known to the USA’s medical experts what a corn diet can do, since they have studied it. The regulation of what you eat (and you ARE what you eat) is a type of biological warfare. It is a type of biological warfare that can easily pass as "beneficial help to other people." But who would accept and/or expect beneficial help or any kind of good advice from Americans after they threatened to nuclear bomb the USA during a Cold War? I find it amazing that no one else, not even Communists, ever wondered about this.
The fact is that Lysenko wrote to Khrushchev when the "virgin soil" corn project was thought up by Khrushchev. Lysenko told him that this "adventureism" would lead to a few crops at first, but then there would be land erosion and dust storms. It is for this reason that Lysenko was dismissed in 1956. But who were the allies of Khrushchev in this corn planting fiasco? Why, none other than Vavilov’s old friends: Shmalthausen, Zavadovsky and Zukovsky! The pro-Vavilov critics of Lysenko not only do NOT "give credit" to these people for the wreckage resulting from the corn fiasco, but they try to blame Lysenko for it! Rather amazing!
Everyone loves to link Khrushchev’s fall to Lysenko. Not so. Lysenko never lost his position as Head of Lenin Hills laboratory and he retired, at the age of 67, from Head of Genetics Institute. He never lost his position or his degrees, but he was old, he was retirement age. He kept his position at the Lenin Hills lab until his death. His son Oleg worked there when Soyfer wrote his book in 1989. Soyfer, without having ever met Mrs. Lysenko, and who seems to not know Lysenko’s three children well at all, also has much of his own Watsonian deductions to make against them as he calls them bland, vain, arrogant and whatever.
I have heard that Sergo Beria, Beria’s son, wrote a book about his father with a very original, well thought out title: "My Father, Lavrenty Beria." }:-) (It's now translated into English "Beria - Inside Stalin's Kremlin." I have not read it yet.) Much slander was heaped upon Beria, too, especially the sexual kind, which only has meaning to certain types of prurient/prude people. I have no idea what, if anything, Sergo said in the matters regarding Vavilov, Lysenko and his father. If he is "going along with the times," then he would try to show how his father was in favor of Vavilov. Well, archival information shows that Beria personally labeled and handled one of the files against Vavilov involving charges that Vavilov and his gang were trying to ruin Lysenko with slander. Theories be damned: why would ANYONE go against a man who fed the people so well? Analogy: WHO would be against making the Volkswagen in Germany?
Is it all that impossible to believe that the NKVD, called the best organization of its kind by our own Allen Dulles of the CIA, might have been right about Vavilov? Gasp! Shock! "The mere suggestion that the distinguished gentleman...," (Gimme a break).
In this country, the FBI taps telephones; so, the NKVD did this too. However, in this country, a taped conversation from telephone tapping is not allowed as evidence against a person, even if the FBI knows the person is absolutely guilty. The NKVD and Soviet laws did not operate as our laws do. We, in America, present the evidence against the accused to both defense and prosecution lawyers. Much evidence, often a gun with the accused’s fingerprints on it, even an admission by the person arrested on suspicion, is thrown out of court and cannot be used to convict the person. The NKVD method and law was very different. They would accuse you but they’d NOT show you what evidence they had, which would keep you guessing; or they’d show you a little piece of the evidence, or even a fabricated piece of it, a distortion of what evidence they really did have! They’d often use the tactic of confusion and claim they have evidence that the accused must have known was wrong: for instance if a murder was committed with a .45 gun that Ivan gave the accused, the NKVD might claim that they know Boris gave him a .22 gun. This serves many purposes because the accused, if guilty, knows that Ivan gave him a .45. He then begins to wonder who Boris is: does he know anyone named Boris, does someone named Boris know him, did someone named Boris claim to give him a .22 to commit a murder? And so on. There is a method to this. In the American system, the mere showing of the real evidence against a person the police or FBI know is guilty, gives the person and his defense attorney a way to get out of the charge either by having the evidence thrown out of court or finding some other way to squirm out of it. With the NKVD method, whatever lie you think to tell might get you into more trouble. Allen Dulles of the CIA would not have said they were the best at this if they were not. Meanwhile, the critics of Lysenko didn’t even have the "detective ability" to dig as far as Philip E. Panaggio dug to get at the truth about something they should know about. So who are they to say anything? They are liars and propagandists. Why would they bother to continue with this rubbish so long after the fact? They write books, they sell, people pay for them - MONEY. (There is no money coming from this essay).
The same kind of crap goes on right now, right here, with gangs of Dr. Shlockmeister Herrensteins heaping abuse on the likes of Professors S. J. Gould and R. Lewontin for being against the biased half-data written up in "The Bell Curve." At the same time, the Dr. Denialmeisters go insane when any kind of valid proofs come forth to show that groups of people (gene pools) have differences. And what do the talking heads call those who expose their frauds? Lysenko-ites! Nothing changes. Nevertheless, the earth manages to throw out her secrets if one wishes to dig deep enough.
For those who will know what I am saying here, I have this to add. What comes out loud and clear, from the mouths of the elegant and bourgeois defenders of Vavilov, those who personally knew him, and those who speak for him later: it is clear that Vavilov, a man, was like some kind of Muse to his circle of followers and friends. Popovsky paints a revealing picture of Vavilov for those who recognize this: Vavilov didn’t express his emotions, not even those of love for his woman; he hid his deep pain behind an affable face (how akathartic of him!); he loved the Hollywood American idea of "keep smiling," even if he didn’t feel like smiling. He would never "stoop down" to insult back those who insulted him (he being "so above all that"). He was a definite Muse of some kind to his circle of bourgeois friends. What females among his circle have to say has nothing to do with anything objective: they focus on how distinguished he looked, how handsome (he looked quite Western), how well dressed, his deep baritone voice. They also tend to fawn over the Monk Mendel, the total, all-round fraud. However Lysenko, on the other hand, was a peasant, a down-to-earth, brutally blunt and even rude person. He was often ungrammatical and spoke with heavy metaphor, creatively; he also cursed and made vulgar puns, example: "How can those fruit flies be virgins if they are ebony?" Pronounce the word "ebony" with a Russian accent and it means, "How can those fruit flies be virgins if they’ve been fucked." As Soyfer points out to mock him, Lysenko cared nothing about how he dressed or looked. He had deep set, slitty eyes and big cheekbones, a Muzhik (peasant) face - contra the very Western look of Vavilov. Things like this are said in the middle of books supposedly about science, e.g. by Eleanor Manevich who speaks of Vavilov as if he is a Hollywood actor. It never occurs to these female adulators of Vavilov that some women might think Lysenko is cute or a hunk, and consider Vavilov’s looks as bland or stoical. They consider their standards to be "THE standards" not to mention that how a person looks has nothing to do with science!
Some of Vavilov’s female fans went overboard to try to save Vavilov, but at the same time they put Lysenko down, such as Nina Bazilevskaya and Maria Shebalina. Shebalina visited Vavilov’s own brother Sergei who said to her "There is no misunderstanding here. My brother has been arrested on the orders, or at least with the knowledge, of the first person in the land (Stalin). We can hardly hope to do anything about it." Nina Bazilevskaya called Sergei Vavilov to help her meet someone in the Central Committee. Sergei Vavilov promised her a meeting with Andrei Andreyev, a member of the committee and the person in charge of agricultural matters. Andreyev was in a position to know what was happening. She met him and went on about "Lysenko this and that; Vavilov’s arrest is a mistake, etc.," as if this was some valid defense of the accused Vavilov, who had been suspected since 1931 before Lysenko was involved. Andreyev cut her off and told her: "There could be no fatal mistake (in the arrest of Vavilov); there are facts of which you are not aware." That should have been the end of it. Facts of which she is not aware!
Are Vavilov’s own brother and this man Andreyev in cahoots with Lysenko in some paranoid plot-fantasy against Vavilov? Lysenko spoke with passion and often criticized his opponents for being passionless. He spoke from his heart, even to Stalin, which took guts. He was not any kind of Muse to people who liked his views or his practical results and he never tried to be. The earth itself and the plants were his Muse: that almost mystical quality comes out clearly in his writings even though he kept it on a purely materialistic footing and said he cared nothing about theory. He said to his opponents: "One needs hands, not just the head," i.e., to know things. For those who recognize what I’m saying here: grasp what the enmity was about. Vavilov tried to befriend Lysenko, even invited him to come to the USA with him, and always praised his work. Lysenko was cold toward Vavilov - utterly turned off. Apparently many other people were turned off by Vavilov; some hated his guts. Yet, there is no reason anyone can really point to, to say exactly why. Those who understand what I’m saying will know why. For those who do not, this shall remain mysterious.
Nevertheless, slanderers have to keep insisting that Vavilov was arrested merely because he had the courage not to agree with Lysenko. Oh? This is a total lie. Vavilov was agreeing with and praising Lysenko for years and none of that changed the fact that the NKVD had a file on him from 1931! It never occurs to them that the NKVD had information they didn’t know about and the NKVD obviously didn’t feel they owed these fools any kind of explanation. Imagine expecting the FBI to tell you the information in a file of an investigation or, when the guilty party is finally caught, imagine claiming that you know more than the FBI does when they’ve been tailing the person for years! In addition, if the case is expunged or otherwise sealed, such as when the FBI gives you a whole false/new identity because you informed to them against a suspect, then no one would be able to look into the file. Vavilov was surrounded by, or surrounded himself with, the sons of millionaires, sons of clergy and people in Holy Orders, honored Czarists and titled families. He had friends among such people overseas, overtly anti-Soviet people. Does anyone imagine that a person in a similar situation in the USA would not be suspected by the FBI, or even arrested during a time of possible war, if they worked for something similar to the Academy of Science or the Institute of Genetics in the USA?
Not only that, but the USA’s workers were never in the same situation as the Soviets with regards to planting things and eating; we have choice land here and many things to eat. We see Vavilov running around to study Lysenko’s produced varieties and then theorizing on the results, passing judgments or not being fully satisfied with more proofs, while Lysenko and his farmers are planting it and the people are eating the results in vast amounts! The American scientist Richard Lewontin’s honest statistics prove this, but Lewontin is ignored by those who hate Lysenko. Vavilov approved of this or that, but was not happy about it? Why not? Did he eat any of the food? Are the people writing against Lysenko living in the real world? Even if Lysenko’s wheat was not "perfect as bread," the people surely ate it during a time when Stalin knew and demanded that the Soviet people needed food immediately. The Soviet people had to build up a country, they had to industrialize, they needed food to feed workers and peasants had to have a way to grow lots of it in one of the most hostile environments. They didn’t have time for theories!
To quote from the Economic Division of the OGPU (former NKVD) who wrote a 10 page memorandum and concluded with these remarks, please notice the YEAR it started:"For a number of years since 1924, the All-Union Institute of Plant Breeding, headed by Vavilov, has sent numerous expeditions to different parts of the world, including America. It has gathered an international collection of seeds and plants. The collected material has still not been studied, and almost no practical conclusions and achievements have been introduced into the national economy - this work never went beyond the institute’s walls. The OGPU considers the organization of any botanical expedition to America inexpedient." (Krementsov, "Stalinist Science," p. 11) They also did not have tolerance for Kulaks (plantation owners) that would withhold food that their peasants worked for (on the Kulak owned plots) for a higher price! In addition, plainly speaking, anyone who sides with Kulaks is siding with slave owners. The word "Kulak" doesn’t mean "wealthy peasant," Kulak means FIST.
Keep in mind, this all happened before the discovery of the DNA by Watson, Crick and Franklin. Lysenko is "accused" of holding genetics back in the Soviet Union. Well: what did he actually hold back? A science that has gotten good at identifying genes, or explaining old farm methods "in a genetic manner," but that can’t, to-date, even give us a viable blue rose or one helpful thing that they have been promising since Vavilov’s time? Analogy: geneticists can tag and identify every letter on this typewriter, but they cannot type out one single word! Lysenko held back people who wanted to get almost mystically dizzy about "genetics."
During the war, with Nazis destroying everything in their wake, these theoretical laboratory monks played with fruit flies, literal fruit flies! Is it any wonder that Lysenko denounced them as "fly lovers?" Geneticists have not even grasped just how heredity works; they all miss something despite their categorizing and cataloguing genes. E.g., there are some plants (e.g. tropical grasses like sugar cane) that have reached a "quantum leap" in photosynthetic production. They have a separate and superior system of photosynthesis known technically as the C4 system (the "C" standing for carbon) - these plants have a way of protecting their products from being oxidized, whereas other plants lose much of what they produce through oxidation. If geneticists could produce something like this - then they would have done something. All they can do is theorize and maybe identify what is going on, "tag things" in the plant, and then claim credit for it when they had nothing to do with the plant’s ability to do this, nor did they have any interactions with the practical breeders who bred such plants who used the same ancient methods always used to breed plants or animals. That system of photosynthesis evolved somewhere and somehow. No one tinkered with the genes of the plants.
If these fools listened to what Lysenko said and understood it when he did rarely theorize, they’d know that if they could figure out just what forced these plants to evolve this way they might be able to "break the heredity" of other plants and force them to evolve in a direction they want them to evolve in, based on the same kind of ENVIRONMENTAL stress (NOT gene tinkering in a lab devoid of environment) that causes everything to evolve. That is what Lysenko was talking about: the environment, the environment of supreme stress - stress enough to "break heredity" and make the next generation of organism come out unlike the previous! The trick is, will the next generation revert back (showing there is no genetic change, but only a "norm of reaction" difference) or will it never be able to go back (showing there is a genetic change)? Lysenko was trying to do this, but he also was producing practical results.
This is not Lamarckian at all and to use "Lamarckism", as a critique is so patently WRONG it’s not even worth being called a critique. LeCourt (Proletarian Science) clearly pointed it out, unfortunately only in a footnote. Raissa L. Berg, in her hyper-polemical book "Acquired Traits," who was a Lamarckian amidst many in the USSR at the time, makes it more than perfectly clear that the Lysenkoites were hard core Darwinians and utterly ANTI-Lamarckian. Yes, Lysenko used the phrase "acquired" after Stalin insisted on it and personally edited what Lysenko wrote to say that (as shown by Rossianov with the actual hand-written document)) but I can use the phrase "inheritance of acquired traits" to mean "the way you have inherited your peculiar behavioral eating habits due to how your Victorian parents raised you..." The phrase would mean something like this to any non-scientist and any scientist could use it in such a way if he had to. When Stalin rewrites your sentence, then you have to use it that way. It could also be used to mean strict genetic inheritance, since no one is specifying "where" or "how" the traits were acquired. You can acquire genes from parents just as you can acquire inheritance (i.e., the family estate and money)! This is a semantic problem, not a scientific one!
These people have made this entire history into a war between Vavilov and Lysenko when it was not this at all. Nor is it any matter of politicking pro or con Stalin. To eat or not to eat: that was Lysenko’s concern. It is others who have made an issue of this: a fantastic drama of their own invention; others who have connected Lysenko to Vavilov. Nothing happened to others who criticized Lysenko and ONLY did that - without the other non-Lysenko-related suspicious activity!
Lysenko also wrote theory on evolution, heredity, and environment. Loren Graham is playing the blind man when he fails to see why Western pro-racists recognize this when, e.g., they call the UNESCO program or the more modern anthropological schools, or any other anti-racist opponents, "Lysenko-ist." These so-called "Lysenko-ite" schools are in direct conflict with would-be geneticists such as Shockley and Rushton. Same old conflict. And, come to think of it, what did the first Lysenko-ites claim about all this genetic hogwash? That it lent itself to racist theory? The 1990’s has proven them to be right on target with all the racist literature out there using genetics to back it up right now, available to read. Fact is, it's not so simple as "the genes" at all.
The gene was not a known thing back then during the Lysenko/Vavilov times and, even today, what one can see of the "gene" is fuzzy under a microscope. What "genetic theory" consisted of, during the 1930’s when Lysenko and others were against the nucleus of the gene as the sole explanatory mechanism for heredity, can be seen clearly right "next door" to the USSR: Nazi Germany. Lysenko happened to be right - you have to consider the entire cell, not just its nucleus. He was right. Does anyone credit him for being right? No. Genetic theory of this type, normal for that time, was the central dogma of Nazi theory. The Nazis did not invent this, nor did Hitler. Such "crack-pot" views were born in Anglo America and England and they were not considered the theories of crackpots, but of respected university professors! Lysenko, in speeches and in writing, was highly aware of Goebbles’ Ministry of Propaganda and of how this theory of heredity was used in the USA against those of African or Native American (American Indian tribes) decent to justify slavery and ethnic cleansing and by the British to justify colonization of non-whites. The Nazis considered the Slavic people and others to be sub-human. The well-known Nazi plan for the Slavs and others was to invade their area, colonize them after exterminating the more rebellious elements and then rule over them like masters. Every German child was taught this in school; this is well documented. Shockley, e.g., would claim to be a kindly, humanitarian eugenicist when he offers to sterilize people with lower IQ’s while he manages to show statistics to "prove" that blacks have, on average, lower IQ’s! Yet he doesn’t advocate inviting Chinese here to intermarry with whites to RAISE the white IQ when his colleagues show that Chinese average IQ scores are higher than white ones! Why not? He never manages to produce other data, as do S. and H. Rose, which show other conclusions from other samples. People who attacked Shockley for his eugenics plan were called Lysenkoites: this was 1960s-1970s USA.
Lysenko never said he did not believe genes or chomosomes existed and he even addressed this charge against him specifically; he was countering the THEORIES ABOUT genes that were well known and rampant during those days. This "common" view is so ingrained in American culture that I personally have run into otherwise very nice and friendly white Christians that think that the very recent behavior of African Americans in inner cities is due to the "genetic nature of their breed!" They do not realize that, not too long ago, their kind believed that the "genetic nature of blacks" was to be docile, tolerant, friendly and timid! Somehow, it never occurs to the "very nice white Christians" that social factors had anything to do with the recent (violent) inner city behavior, not to mention the drugs that were dumped into such neighborhoods!
It is interesting to note (if you have the guts to note it) that the Anglo Christians succeeded in doing to the Amerindians and Africans exactly what Hitler wanted to do to the Jews and Slavs, when they SETTLED in America. The Anglo Christians wiped out the indigenous people and dragged blacks here to build the country by using them as if they were cattle! That is exactly what the Nazis wanted to do in the vast lands of the USSR and this is widely known, "the norm" of German thinking, and any Communist would have known this back then. This, in terms of SOCIETY AND BEHAVIOR, was what "genetic thinking" amounted to! One must take things into the time period and KNOW JUST WHAT the Lysenkoites and Marxists were battling against.
What I would have done with investigating scientists chosen and approved of by Lysenko, if I were Lavrenty Beria, the Head of the whole NKVD: I’d not only have let them look at Vavilov’s work, but I’d have given them something Lysenko wrote and put Vavilov’s name on it. I would have rewritten the non-scientific portions in my own writing style to disguise the style itself. Then I would have let them evaluate that. Also, I would have had secretly, and in isolation from each other, chosen scientists that hated Lysenko and, if possible, I would have picked them from a group that did not know about the intrigues. Then I would have had something written by Vavilov that was not well known and I would have taken that and rewritten the non-scientific portions in my own writing style just to disguise the style itself. Then I would have put Lysenko’s name on it as if he was its author. Then I would have asked his enemies to review it and comment on it. Now, do I think Beria did this? I think it is highly probable that he did because he was cunning, smart: "the best."
These genetics advocates who had done not one deed for agriculture in terms of practical things, were putting down and defaming the man who gave the Soviet people the food that Lewontin’s unbiased statistics show that he gave. They insisted, even after the war, on believing that Lysenko was responsible for Vavilov’s death when that 1931 NKVD file proves the opposite. They insist on believing the rubbish today. They have tried to make Trofim Lysenko into a Red Devil. Fine! It is better than being the fools that Vavilov and his would-be defenders are. Lysenko fed people. Vavilov fed no one except the rats that ate his stored up samples of seeds during the Nazi siege of Leningrad.
"Keep Smiling" Western style. That was what Popovsky said Vavilov did. In an odd quirk of Fate or Fortune, when Vavilov’s idolaters sought to have a bust of him made to put on a mass grave he was buried in, the statue came out looking nothing like Vavilov - but it had a big smile on its face. Talk about mockery? Many may think this is all so cruel on my part. Is that an understatement? Ha! If you can’t take it, then stop dishing it out. (Don’t go looking for a food fight in Hell’s Kitchen..., you might get burned.)
Additional facts to consider when trying to see if Lysenko had "higher-up connections" and/or NKVD connections. He WAS a higher up, himself! Also: In 1942, Trofim Lysenko was called upon to be on the "Soviet Commission on Nazi Crimes in Russia" (Current Biography, 1952). In this capacity, he would have HAD to have been cooperating with the NKVD and Beria. However, this was after Vavilov was already deceased.
From Krementsov:
1935: Lysenko was a member of the Ukrainian Central Executive Committee.
1936: Lysenko was a member of the All-Union Central Executive Committee of the USSR Soviet of People’s Deputies and was a delegate to the Eighth Congress of Soviets which adopted the new Constitution (Stalin’s Constitution).
1938: Lysenko became a member of the USSR Supreme Soviet. He was a Deputy Head of the Soviet of the Union, the highest legislative agency of the USSR.
And from Soyfer:
1936: Lysenko participated in the work of the Extraordinary Eighth Congress of Soviets and was a member of the editorial commission that drafted the final text of the "Stalin Constitution."
1937: Lysenko became a member of the USSR Supreme Soviet.
1938: Lysenko was appointed Vice-Chairman of one of the Supreme Soviet’s two chambers, the Council of the Union. Thus: Lysenko held nominal rank higher than Stalin himself for Stalin was a member only of the executive body, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, which had no legislative power. When the Supreme Soviet met in the Great Kremlin Palace, there were three levels of platforms. On the lowest were seated the Party and governmental leaders, including Stalin; the rostrum for speakers was positioned a little higher; and at the very summit were the chairpersons and vice-chairpersons of the two legislative chambers. Thus, Lysenko for many years sat in the Kremlin above Stalin. As vice-chairman of the Council of the Union, Lysenko presided at meetings that had nothing to do with science or agriculture but did extend Soviet repression (Soyfer’s subjective word for "influence") in other directions. In the steady stream of front-page photographs of the Supreme Soviet, every citizen of the country could see Lysenko, seated, standing, applauding, but always towering above Stalin, Molotov, Beria, Voroshilov, Khrushchev, or Vyshinsky. There was no higher place of honor. Lysenko also took an active part in the meetings of the Party Central Committee and at Party congresses. (This rather puts a hole in the theory that Stalin was a dictator! What this means is that the Kremlin’s seating arrangement had 3 tiers, each higher than the first as in a football stadium, and Lysenko was on the 3rd or top tier while Stalin and others were in the front row or bottom tier. That could be called the lowest tier but it’s still the front row.)
Additional reading material on these issues:
Conway Zirkle is actually the first one with a book in English, but his book is so poor and so filled with errors that it’s not even worth mentioning as being against Lysenko. He even went so far as to deliberately change a technical botanical fact, the color of a plant, in Lysenko’s text in order to make it come out nonsense. His book is so filled with paranoid fantasies about who is or is not a Marxist that it is not worth reading, even if you want "dirt" against Lysenko
The Rise and Fall of T.D. Lysenko: Zhores Medvedev (Anti-Lysenko)
The Lysenko Affair: David Joravsky (Anti-Lysenko) Ill-informed.
The Vavilov Affair: Mark Popovsky (Anti-Lysenko)
Lysenko and the Tragedy of Soviet Science: Valery Soyfer (Anti-Lysenko)
Lysenko Is Right: James Fyfe, 1950. Full details written by a botanist who had accurate facts. Excellent.
Stalinist Science: Nikolai Krementsov, 1997, with much newly released archival material. Oddly, this book does not even mention NKVD Major Stepan Shundenko and the rest of the people directly involved with him. Odd since NKVD Major Shundenko was put in charge of an investigation of Vavilov and ended up working directly under Vavilov in the same building as Lysenko! Nor does this book mention the Shlykov letter to the NKVD, which Soyfer reproduces in his book! He does mention that Vavilov was writing letters and giving information to the British geneticists, including Darlington (Darlington had the view that human races are separate species!) and that Vavilov did this right in the middle of the war when Britain was the enemy and Germany was a temporary ally of the USSR. Also of major importance: Archival material he presents clearly shows that it was not Lysenko or Lysenkoites who tried to involve the top party bosses in both the 1939 Scientific debate, and again in the 1948 debate, as Lysenko's critics claim: it was the geneticists! The geneticists demanded governmental intervention! Well? They got it! This one fact is the "mind-blower" of the book and that makes assumptions about Lysenko and possible involvement with the NKVD meaningless. Also is shown that while the geneticists did laboratory work with "useless things" (fruit flies, butterflies) the Lysenko group did practical work with things like tomatoes, beets and wheat: things people ate. While the geneticists worked in laboratories, the Lysenkoites worked on the actual collective farms with real foodstuffs. (Not pro or con - objective and archival.)
The Radicalisation of Science, Edited by H. Rose and S. Rose: Chapter Two: "The Problem of Lysenkoism" by Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins: for the real statistics and the real growth in agriculture with Lysenko at the helm with the situation regarding planting and Soviet environment fully explained. Not pro or con, just an objective expose in short. (See on this website: Mao and Lewontin's Error. Some Crucial Misconceptions that Lewontin had in his Essay on Lysenko where he correctly stated the actual amounts of wheat produced but where he launched into what he thought was Lysenko's "error.")
Race, Intelligence, and Bias in Academe: Roger Pearson. (The genetic view in simple terms and views against Lysenkoites in the USA.)
Political Economy in Science: by S. and H. Rose, Chapter 7, "Scientific Racism and Ideology: The IQ Racket from Galton to Jenson." Contrast the above Pearson book to this one chapter. Guess what they call the Roses who present the missing facts left out by the the people with their racist agendas? They call them Lysenkoites! Nothing has changed.
The Nazi Primer: Official Handbook for Schooling the Hitler Youth; N.Y., Harper and Brothers, 1938. If not able to obtain the first then: Education in the Third Reich: Race and History in Nazi Textbooks, Albany: State University of N.Y. Press, 1985.
Hitler’s Willing Executioners: D. J. Goldhagen, for an in-depth view of what the "genetic theory outlook" can produce in a society where people become like madmen and the NORM is to have an hallucinatory world view. The extreme genetic view is to completely dismiss culture as irrelevant to the "type of character" various humans have. This view even excludes prenatal care or nutrition, something fundamental to the still-growing brain of a child after he/she is born. (It is odd that such people never get statistics on the numbers of Down’s Syndrome people born and check to see which population group has the most of them!) Reading this book and fully understanding it is a MUST if anyone wishes to grasp why so many others are against the "genetic theory of heredity." This theory has nothing to do with DNA, strictly speaking. It is the theory that "all you are" is solely genetic, your likes, dislikes, your behavior, and your temperament - ALL YOU ARE. It utterly denies the effects of environmental factors, which includes cultural factors. The book is not about Hitler or about Nazis. It is about ordinary German, Christian people with this genetic world-view.
Lysenko, Views of Nature and Society: Hari Kumar, unpublished manuscript. Anti-Lysenko in the political sense but pro-Stalin and anti-Khrushchev, but this lacks much of the information needed to form a clearer picture, i.e. that Lysenko was not anti-Stalin at all and that Stalin did, indeed, back him for obvious practical reasons. This manuscript clearly shows that this issue of "bourgeois versus proletarian science" or environment versus genetics, or nurture versus nature, was not an issue of Western versus Soviet science by showing the Western people’s scientific work which is at odds with the hard genetic determinationist line. In this sense, the Kumar book is pro-Lysenko and shows where Lysenko’s scientific views were correct.
Race and Human Evolution: Milford Wolpoff and Rachel Caspari, 1997. Mentions the "Lysenkist" view as being the environmentalist view. This book shows the same argument carried over into the field of paleoanthropology, with the geneticists as the adversaries, the subject being human evolution! The book also shows where geneticists make false claims against Wolpoff’s multiregional view of evolution by trying to slander it as "polygenetic," which oddly used to be the genetic view! His main opponent is Professor Stringer who advocates the "Killer H. sapiens recently out of Africa" view of evolution: (see, it’s normal to commit genocide, our ancestors did it!....) Stringer’s views are going out the window with more actual digging and finds of human ancestors, whereas Wolpoff is being slowly vindicated. It is said that these two men can’t sit in the same room and have a conversation! Wolpoff never slandered Stringer. As more and more if found out about the actual human genome, both sides tend to get bonus points for being right.
The Mismeasure of Man; Expanded, Revised Edition: Stephen J. Gould. The same argument with Gould going up against the geneticists and their racist arguments!
Reinventing Darwin: Niles Eldredge. The same argument with Niles Eldredge going up against the Dawkins geneticism school. An excellent book on the subject of speciation!
Most recent rehash of the whole Mendel fiasco (only Mendel, no one else) can be found in the article: Mendel's Opposition to Evolution and to Darwin: B. E. Bishop in the JOURNAL OF HEREDITY, 1996; 87; 205-213. 0022-1503/96/$5.00 The most recent rehash of the whole Mendel fiasco (only Mendel, no one else) can be found in the article with copious references to past articles on Mendel.
READ ANYTHING by Lynn Margulis: All on symbiogenesis and evolutionary biology. She is a Prize winner who was mocked prior to being able to prove her theories to be facts. Symbiogenesis is a whole paradigm shift away from even the Darwinian paradigm. Amazing! She is the woman who discovered mitochondrial DNA!
See also: THE REAL GENETIC VS. LYSENKO CONTROVERSY - nothing more/less. A summary. The Three Main Bones of Contention regarding the things TD Lysenko REALLY said. The writer OWNS every single thing T. D. Lysenko ever wrote! What Lysenko said, and where he DENIES what enemies "claimed he said," can be verified.
It is clear to all that have studied this subject in its widest forms that the genetics group has a definite political agenda. First it was used to support colonization of non-whites; next it was used to prove white superiority and carried to extremes by Nazis and RESPECTABLE professors in USA UNIVERSITIES. Now, these same geneticists would back track, call their own past views the "crackpot views of cranks" and try to adopt a politically correct line: but it is still clear that it is THEY who have used politics in their science and theories in science to back political agendas of the most odious kind - NOT THE OTHER SIDE! And it was THE GENETICISTS who demanded Stalin and the Polit Bureau get involved regarding Lysenko, and it backfired!
The way anti-Lysenko people make it sound, it comes out vice versa. It is always the environmentalist side that looks at data and lets data tell them about life. Geneticists come up with theories, they make declarations and then always have to revise what they say, even going so far as to take credit for ancient plant breeding practices by explaining them in a "genetic manner." And true to form, the most extreme of the genetics fans would call someone like Gould a Lysenkoite! An even more extreme view is the Dawkins view, and sure enough, the debate goes on, as Niles Eldredge points out in his book "Reinventing Darwin." Dawkins’ view is dualistic, akin to the soul/body view: the body is the mere, mortal vehicle for the genes, which are immortal! Classic dualism! It’s almost comical since Dawkins rails against Christianity: he is still SUCH a Christian-type dualist himself! To boot, the only real "selfish gene" is an oncogene - and we are not walking oncogenes.
© Copyright by Philip E. Panaggio P. O. Box 85, Lehigh Acres, FL 33970-0085, USA
