ABSTRACT
The epithets might not all seem like insults to the man from Mars, but they were genuine cusswords in the murky twilight-world in which Soviet science is fighting its losing battle for scientific freedom. If the man from Mars, or from that scarcely less remote planet, the western world, had wandered into the 1948 Summer Congress of the Lenin All-Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences to listen to the "discussion" on genetics, he would never have imagined that he was at a scientific congress at all. The director of the orchestration of abuse was Trofim D. Lysenko, a thin, broad-shouldered man of peasant origin, with the Order of Lenin on his breast, a protruding, active Adam's apple, blazing, slightly asymmetrical eyes lit with a fanatical gleam of triumph. He stood there supremely confident, for as he repeatedly hinted to his appreciative claque and to the cringing veteran scientists, behind his assault stood "the party of Lenin-Stalin and Comrade Stalin personally."
