During his long career he won eight Orders of Lenin, three State Prizes, and numerous medals and awards
In 1935 Lysenko was elected a full member of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sci ences (VASKhNIL) and the next year was put in charge of its Odessa institute. Also in 1935, Vavilov was removed as president of VASKhNIL; its two subsequent presidents (A. I. Muralov and G. K. Meister) were arrested in the purges, and in 1938 Lysenko assumed the presidency himself and held it until 1956. With the help of the NKVD, he used his new position to harass and undermine Vavilov’s supporters. In the 1939 elections to the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences. Lysenko was elected a full academician and appointed a member of its governing presidium. In August 1940 Vavilov was arrested, and in subsequent months G. D. Karpechenko, G. A. Levitskii, and other Vavilovites disappeared, all died in prisons or camps in the early 1940’s. Recent evidence provided by Popovsky and Soyfer indicates that Lysenko and his followers were directly or indirectly involved in these arrests. In late 1940, immediately following Vavilov’s arrest, Lysenko left Odessa to replace him as director of the academy’s Institute of Genetics in Moscow, a post he held until 1965.
Despite these events, Lysenko was not yet in control of Soviet biology. After World War II, genetics was resurgent, attempts were made by the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences to create a new institute of genetics, and there was widespread public criticism of many of Lysenko’s views. But in mid 1948, at Stalin’s order, a large number of Lysenko’s supporters became members of VASKhNIL by fiat, and in a surprise August session of the academy Lysenko announced, “The Central Committee has read my report and approved it.” Later Lysenko confirmed that Stalin had personally gone over his text. It portrayed Michurinist biology as a socialist, materialist, proletarian science, a kind of “creative Darwinism” deriving from Darwin, Kliment Timiriazev, and Michurin that united theory and practice, and had mastered the control of heredity. By contrast, genetics was depicted as a capitalist, idealist, bourgeois enterprise linked to fascism, deriving from Malthus, Mendel, and Weismann, and incapable of aiding agricultural production. The report asserted that heredity was a malleable property of the whole organism and that one species could be transformed into another in one generation. It categorically denied the reality of intraspecific com petition and the existence of genes, characterizing the search for any hereditary material as a hopeless philosophical mistake.
In the edicts that followed the August 1948 VASKhNIL session, most Soviet geneticists were fired from their jobs, laboratories and institutions were disbanded or reorganized, degree certification and curricula in the biological sciences fell under Lysenkoist control, and “Michurinist biology” became officially sanctioned government policy. By 1952 Lysenko had embraced a number of extreme theories purporting to have the same philosophical basis as his own, including Ol’ga Borisovna Le peshinskaia’s doctrine that living cells form spon taneously from nonliving matter (thus denying the classic cell theory according to which all cells are produced by other cells) and G. M. Bosh’ian’s analogous doctrine of viruses. The 1953 elections to the U.S.S.R. Academy of Science packed its biological sciences division with supporters of Michurinism. In the following years Lysenko’s prominent allies including botanists N. V. Tsitsin and V. N. Stoletov, “geneticists” I. E. Glushchenko and N. I. Nuzhdin, biochemists A. I. Oparin and N. M. Sisakian, paleontologist L. Sh. Davitashvili, and philosopher G. V. Platonov.
In 1948 and 1949 the massive Soviet reforestation program employed Lysenko’s cluster method of planting; the extensive losses of seedlings that resulted made Lysenko vulnerable, and the first critical articles began to appear in late 1952 in Botanicheskii zhurnal with the support of its editor, botanist and forest ecologist Vladimir N. Sukachev. In 1953 the publication of the Watson–Crick model for the structure of DNA aroused interest in genetics among leading figures in the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences, including such chemists as Academy president Aleksandr N. Nesmeianov, Nobelist (1956) Nikolai N. Semenov, and Ivan L. Knuniants; physicists Petr Kapitsa, Igor Tamm, Igor Kurchatov, and Andrei D. Sakharov; and mathematicians A. N. Kolmogorov, S. L. Sobolev, A. A. Liapunov, and M. A. Lavrentev. These scientists had gained great prestige and influence as a result of their work in Soviet nuclear, space, and weapons research, and over the next decade they proved to be effective opponents of Lysenkoism.
With Stalin’s death in 1953 and the subsequent de–Stalinization, Lysenko was forced to resign as president of VASKhNIL in 1956, and it appeared for a time that his hegemony over Soviet biology was ending. With the strong support of biochemist Vladimir A. Engel’hardt and other academy leaders, molecular genetics began to develop under a variety of institutional and disciplinary rubrics despite Lysenko’s opposition.