The Soviet Union sans Lysenko

MrHola

Banned
His experiments didn’t lead to thousands of victims but Lysenko made sure that the Soviet Union would lag decades behind when it came to scientific rechearch. Lysenko was specialised in agriculture and he had the habit of only reporting successful experiments. His results were based on false reports and the like.

He was, in short, a quack scientist and a fraud. 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.

Let’s say Lysenko dies of the Spanish Flu in, say, the late 1910s. What now?
 
Soviet agriculture may have produced better yields through cross breeding but its main problems seem to have arisen from collectivisation which resulted in low productivity. Western agriculture has a distribution problem with food surpluses, the soviet system had problems producing enough food. You can't distribute what you haven't produced.

No doubt other figures would have emerged in his place. Probably the long term effect might have been that Lamarkism wouldn't be instantly dismissed. Lysenko did the theory no favour
 

Stalker

Banned
Probably, Nikolai Vavilov's school of genetics will survive. That means that USSR is ahead of the rest of the world in genetics research.
 
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