ABSTRACT
We are almost ready to start scrutinizing Lysenko’s constitutional rhetoric in his two speeches delivered at two congresses of VASKhNIL, in December 1936 and in July-August 1948. VASKhNIL is the Russian acronym for the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Its establishment in 1929 emphasized the importance of agricultural research in the Soviet Union; Lysenko’s career was closely related to VASKhNIL. In 1935, he became a member of the Academy and was its president from 1938 to 1956 and then again from 1961 to 1964 (Medvedev, 1969; Vlast’ I Genetika: 1917-1964, 1998). VASKhNIL also became the main arena for Lysenko and his followers’ struggle with Mendelian geneticists. Lysenko’s speech at the December 1936 VASKhNIL session inaugurated a distinction between his Michurinist agrobiology and Mendelian genetics and claimed that these two trends could not coexist in Soviet biology. Lysenko’s address at the August 1948 VASKhNIL session was followed by an official ban on genetic science in the Soviet Union. It is thus understandable why I have chosen these two historic speeches for demonstrating the rhetoric that constituted a new science: Michurinism or Lysenkoism.
