Ly

Lyakhov, V. P. (1869-1919)

A colonel of the tsarist army, led the Russian troops which put down the bourgeois revolution of 1908 in Persia. By "Lyakhov's policy" Lenin means the suppression of the revolutionary and national liberation movements by the tsarist government.

Lysenko, Trofim Denisovich (1898-1976)

Soviet agronomist and biologist who led a campaign from the 1930s up to the mid-1960s claiming that the science of genetics was a false “bourgeois” science, promoting instead a bogus theory of inheritance of acquired characteristics. He was supported by Stalin, and his scientific opponents were victimised. As a result, Soviet biology lagged many decades behind the West by the time he was refuted under Khrushchev (though Khrushchev also supported him for a time). During the 1930s, Marxism had won large number of scientists and other intellectuals to its side; Lysenko’s ignorant line and the official support he received from the Soviet government helped turned many intellectuals away from Marxism.

Lysenko came from a peasant family in Ukraine and attended the Kiev Agricultural Institute. In 1927, at the age of 29, he was credited Pravda with having discovered a method to fertilize fields without using fertilizers or minerals, and that he could “turn the barren fields of the Transcaucasus green in winter, so that cattle will not perish from poor feeding.” The winter crop of peas, however, failed in succeeding years. But Lysenko remained a hero.

See Lysenko Archive.