ABSTRACT
In summary of my analysis of Lysenko’s two speeches, we may reconstruct the history of Lysenkoism from the point of view of the development of its constitution. This constitution was brought into being by a combined force of its historical situation and the arbitrary wishes of Trofim Lysenko and his followers. Once the Lysenkoist constitution had successfully established itself as a calculus of motivation in which Lysenko’s Michurinist agrobiology was a superior alternative to classical Mendelian genetics, its arbitrariness began to fade away and its terms became part of the historical exigency. In other words, by the late 1930s, Lysenkoism succeeded in establishing itself as an important authority in Soviet biology and plant breeding so that its propositions had to be taken into account in any biological argument. Having become a mandatory point of reference in biological discourse, the Lysenkoist constitution gave Lysenko and his followers rhetorical (hence political) advantages, helping them secure a firm foothold in the hierarchy of the Stalinist scientific community. Yet, although constitutions are at first enacted for the sake of a specific political action, their long-term effect cannot be guaranteed. Despite the fact that the Lysenkoist constitution had originally been enacted with the purpose of eradicating Mendelism from Soviet biology, it eventually provided terms on which Soviet Mendelian geneticists could defend their science and impugn Lysenko’s doctrine. Thus, the Lysenkoist constitution revealed its own logic of development that was independent of the agents (Lysenko and his followers) who participated in its establishment. Scrutinizing this logic sheds light on the nature of Lysenkoism. But what does this study tell us about modern science and the relation between modern science and politics?
