while the article is great - saying it as a Russian who finds many writings about USSR/Russia by foreign writers seriously lacking to say the least - it does m

while the article is great - saying it as a Russian who finds many writings about USSR/Russia by foreign writers seriously lacking to say the least - it does miss important piece of the historical context - Michurin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Vladimirovich_Michurin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Vladimirovich_Michurin. Michurin was great Russian agrobiologist of pre-Vavilov generation. He had great experimental success in selection/breeding of plants. It was the time when Lamarckism and genetics were actively developed, and Michurin was naturally developing a theories of his own which also bear a dose of Lamarckism in it. Lysenko exploited the great experimental success of Michurin while using the wrong side of his theories as a foundation for his own. One can say that Lysenko used Michurin as a rootstock on which he grafted himself as seedling. So going against Lysenko, one was looking like going against Michurin's proven success and legacy. It was framed as "Michurin teaching" vs. genetics. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4441886?seq=1 https://www.jstor.org/stable/4441886?seq=1 Btw, cybernetics was also a prohibited "bourgeois pseudoscience" in USSR at those times https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Soviet_Union#Cybernetics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressed_research_in_the_Sov... - the "formal scientific" grounds were that it goes against teaching of another great Russian scientist - Ivan Pavlov (at pop-science level known for "Pavlov's dogs")