Introduction

This book features a rhetorical reading of Lysenkoist discourse, which was born out of Lysenkoism, a major agrobiological movement in the Soviet Union. Lysenkoism opposed classical Mendelian genetics and greatly affected Soviet plant breeding and biology from the 1930s to the 1960s. Hundreds of articles and dozens of books on Lysenkoism have been published worldwide to illuminate its historical, economic, political, and scientific aspects. I propose to read Lysenkoism as a rhetorical act of constituting a new science that combined biological and agricultural concerns on the one hand and political and ideological on the other.