"Best visions of communism"
Lysenko and Russian agricultural fuck-up
After a lengthy and very costly process Lysenko reported to Stalin that he had succeeded in hybridizing an alligator and an abalone and had an "abigator" egg. Stalin waited expectantly for the egg to hatch to reveal the news to the world. Once the egg hatched, however, the entire project was shelved. Instead of an "abigator" they had produced a "crocabalone".
I've always been curious - can someone with a little more knowledge of the subject verify that it was Lysenko's policies that caused the famine, and not the general policies of the Soviet state (or a combination of the two)?
For example I'd always heard that the famine in China was caused by Mao's idealistic notion of integrating the proletariat and the peasantry, when as it turns out it was actually because China was exporting huge amounts of crop in order to pay for the bomb, and they were deliberately calculating that people could live on 1200 cal/day.
Probably Your Class Enemy wrote:
fucking hell.We studied Lysenko in my BSc biology course. If I remember correctly he did a lot of research on cold triggers on various crops......
yeah it was he who advised that Stalin put vernalisation (cold triggers you mention) into mass agricultural use, defying the knew knowledge that genetics was bringing and following a lamarckian model assuming that the benefits of vernalisation would be passed onto future crop generations
OliverTwister wrote:
I've always been curious - can someone with a little more knowledge of the subject verify that it was Lysenko's policies that caused the famine, and not the general policies of the Soviet state (or a combination of the two)?
My knowledge from what I've read (just articles here and there) was that the two (Lysenko's ideas, and Soviet general policy) were pretty much inseparable, so any meaningful explanation of famine can't ignore how Lysenko's 'science' basically backed-up Stalin's general views anyway.
Stalin's lot saw genetics as counter revolutionary because they presumed it meant a fixed/static world less maleable to 'revolutionary change'.
Whereas the Lamarckian model Lysenko proposed fitted in with their version of change and control. Of course if's absurd to assume that this necessarily follows at all, and history proved it was a failure.
There's a new book out I wanna read on the systematic mistreatment of geneticists under Stalin 'The Murder of Nikolai Vavilov'
OliverTwister wrote:
For example I'd always heard that the famine in China was caused by Mao's idealistic notion of integrating the proletariat and the peasantry, when as it turns out it was actually because China was exporting huge amounts of crop in order to pay for the bomb, and they were deliberately calculating that people could live on 1200 cal/day.
where'd you see this? i'd be interested in hearing more... i'd heard the same explanations that you had before, but if they're incorrect, i'd certainly like to know!
was it *totally* due to the export/etc you mentioned, or did the attempted integration of prole/peasant still have a *partial* effect?
Feighnt wrote:
OliverTwister wrote:
For example I'd always heard that the famine in China was caused by Mao's idealistic notion of integrating the proletariat and the peasantry, when as it turns out it was actually because China was exporting huge amounts of crop in order to pay for the bomb, and they were deliberately calculating that people could live on 1200 cal/day.
where'd you see this? i'd be interested in hearing more... i'd heard the same explanations that you had before, but if they're incorrect, i'd certainly like to know!
was it *totally* due to the export/etc you mentioned, or did the attempted integration of prole/peasant still have a *partial* effect?
My main source for this is "Mao: The Unkown Story", by Jung Chang and Jon Holliday. Several leftists have told me that it's biased, but I get the impression that they say that out of a soft spot for Mao (it's pretty critical).
Anyways the capriciousness of Mao was always an aggravating factor, but the primary factor seems to have been that the CCP were trying to arm China as quick as possible, and they could only pay for it with grains.
xConorx wrote:
Probably Your Class Enemy wrote:
fucking hell.We studied Lysenko in my BSc biology course. If I remember correctly he did a lot of research on cold triggers on various crops......
yeah it was he who advised that Stalin put vernalisation (cold triggers you mention) into mass agricultural use, defying the knew knowledge that genetics was bringing and following a lamarckian model assuming that the benefits of vernalisation would be passed onto future crop generations
Right.
This means only 2 scientifically measurable possibilities exist;
1)That you too are a Batchelor of Science in Biological Sciences
2)That I have completely fucked my 3 years at Kings
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml
It's the subject of In Our Time this week for anyone interested:
In 1928, as America heads towards the Wall Street Crash, Joseph Stalin reveals his master plan - nature is 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 ideas 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 damaged, perhaps irreparably, the Soviet Union’s capacity to fight and win the Cold War.
Contributors
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