Tag #114701 - Interview #102852 (Chaya Sakhartova )

I was really lucky, as our year was the last one, when Professor Karpichenko, one of the best Soviet geneticists, held lectures in genetics. He was repressed later in 1939, as his world outlook and especially the content of his lectures were contrary to the [Communist] Party’s and Stalin’s ideology. The year after that genetics was declared to be a pseudo-science. The Michurin genetics sub-faculty, which propagated Lysenko’s ideas, was established instead. This man [Lysenko] lacked even university education, thus, certainly, his ideas didn’t have any relation to the real genetics. The real genetics didn’t march in step with the ideology of the Soviet Union Party. The main dogma of the current genetics, as a science, is the statement that everything in an individual is founded initially in the genes and all individual potential, including physical, intellectual and moral, doesn’t really depend on the external environment, but rather on inherited qualities. Ideologically it means the following: not all people are equal and the slogan ‘If you cannot – we will teach you, if you don’t want to – we will force you’ doesn’t work. Certainly it didn’t match with the basic statements of Socialism and Communism. That’s why later the genetics in this country was limited to the selection and growing of best plant varieties, advocated by Lysenko. On the whole, we were taught by wonderful scientists and personalities: Dogel [14], Zavarzin [15], Takhtadzhyan [16] and others. After I finished three years of study, the war broke out.