Welcome back to another exclusive sneak preview of the Hue Jackson School of Scam Artistry!

Big news out of the Supreme Court late last week… looks like college sports are gonna be in for a time trying to avoid paying athletes. It was inevitable, really. Some schools were just better than others at scamming the rules in order to get what they wanted. For a school like Tennessee State, we’re going to have an even more difficult time recruiting against bigger fish, especially the SEC. It’s times like these where maybe more money isn’t always achievable, but maybe perks like better facilities and better food might make a difference? I guess we’ll have to take a flyer about feeding hungry athletes from our exclusive sneak preview lesson this week…

TROFIM LYSENKO: BIOLOGIST, STALINIST, MASS MURDERER

BORN: September 29, 1898, Karlivka, Russian Empire (modern Ukraine)

DIED: November 20, 1976, Moscow, USSR

For scientists of all stripes (and for plant lovers and amateur genetics enthusiasts alike), Gregor Mendel is the first and last word in the study of heredity. Thanks to his experiments in the mid-1860s involving pea plants and observing their color changes after cross-breeding the different specimens, modern genetics is built solidly upon the transmission of dominant and recessive genes in virtually every species in the world. With his findings repeated successfully over and over and over, Mendelian genetics should, to virtually anyone with a working brain, be impossible to dispute.

And yet, this week’s Hall of Fame Scammer built his life’s work on doing precisely such a ridiculous action. What’s more is that he ended up being incredibly successful at it, while ruining millions of lives all at the same time.

Trofim Lysenko was born into a peasant Ukrainian family just before the turn of the 20th century. As his parents grew up operating a farm, he took naturally to agriculture, though rather than becoming a farmer himself, he opted to study at the Kiev Agricultural Institute instead, despite the fact that he had hardly any formal schooling. After the fall of the Russian Empire and the rise of the new Soviet Union, Lysenko’s status as a student allowed him to work on a number of new developments, in the hope that the fledgling USSR could successfully increase its farming productivity to feed a gigantic, hungry nation. As a young man, his initial focus was on “vernalization”; i.e. the cultivation of turning winter wheat (planted in the fall and finishes growing in early spring after being covered in snow for a period of time) into spring wheat (planted in the spring and harvested in late summer/early autumn) by gradually exposing seeds to cold temperatures in order to prepare them for harsher environmental conditions. For the Soviets, who were facing food shortages due to several harsh winters decimating crops in the late 1920s, vernalization looked to be an optimal solution to these significant problems.

As Stalin ascended to power and purged Communist Party officials who didn’t agree with his decision-making, Lysenko’s ideas, as well as his proletariat background, caught his attention. By the end of the decade, Lysenko had completely won over Stalin, who appointed him the director of the Institute of Genetics for the Soviet Academy of Sciences – an extremely prestigious position that also allowed him some significant political sway over the direction of science and agriculture of the USSR. For the next twenty-plus years, Lysenko had the complete run of the department, causing agriculture in the Soviet Union to stagnate significantly, despite all outward appearances of competency and authenticity. Lysenko pushed some egregiously incorrect scientific beliefs onto Soviet scientists and population as a whole:

• Mendel was entirely wrong. Genes and DNA weren’t real and didn’t exist. Period.
• As genes did nothing to influence heredity, the environment was the most important factor that determined how plants grew.
•  It is possible to “train” crops to grow at different times of the year, and in different locations, by exposing them sufficiently to elements in order to force them to adapt.
• Beyond basic environmental exposure, any offspring of plants grown in new conditions – whether those offspring are grafted or seeded from parent plants – will also automatically have these traits inherited. (This is also known as Lamarckian heredity, which was disproven well before Lysenko came to power.)
• Finally, through these wild alterations of plant heredity, Lysenko even conducted experiments where he tried to have wheat plants actually produce rye seeds.
• Fertilizers and pesticides – even completely natural ones – were never permitted to be used.

Thanks to Lysenko’s embrace of Communist principles, he was able to rule the Institute of Genetics with an iron fist for decades; anyone who dared to disagree with his viewpoints was removed from their position, exiled or arrested, sent to the gulag, locked in psychiatric hospitals, or brutally murdered. He bragged about being able to grow orange trees in Siberia within a few years of implementing his large-scale plan to revolutionize Soviet agriculture. What’s more, due to the fact that he so ardently supported Stalin and the highest-ranking members of the Politburo, he avoided accountability for for his massive failures for years.

Lysenko was a reactionary at heart. His explicit hatred for genetics research was, in most ways, hatred for Western ideology and the scientific method, which saw American scientists as some of his harshest critics. In particular, he denounced Western scientists who researched heredity using fruit flies, still common in many laboratories today, calling them “fly lovers and people haters.” Virtually none of his experiments ever had findings that could be replicated in the slightest.

As is well-known today, crop failures in the early 1930s resulted in severe famine in many areas of the USSR; in addition, the forced collectivization of farms – and the use of force to put people back to work on these farms – resulted in at least seven million deaths in the two decades following. While many pin this agricultural collapse on Stalin – who deserves full blame for the catastrophe – Lysenko deserves the same amount of credit, if not even more. To demonstrate just how awful his scientific views were, between 1932 and 1936, the Soviet Union increased its amount of available farmland by 163 times over. However, in 1936, the amount of food the country was producing was even lower than in the early years of the famine. In the early 1950s, just after the Chinese Communist Party ascended to power in their own nation, government officials adopted Lysenkoism in order to boost their own agricultural productivity – and suffered even worse than the Soviets in the decade that followed.

Despite his massive, massive failures, and despite being directly responsible for millions upon millions of deaths, Trofim Lysenko kept his position at the Institute of Genetics until 1964 – when Nikita Khrushchev was pushed out of power, and Lysenko fell into disgrace. Even well after Stalin’s death in 1953, Lysenko’s hold on scientific policy was absolute. While Lysenko died quietly in 1976, he was celebrated widely in his life – he was awarded the Order of Lenin eight separate times, and the Stalin Prize three others, plus a collection of other military medals as well. As a result of his complete scam, he singlehandedly set Soviet agriculture back at least fifty years – production didn’t return to normal until the early 1970s. One of history’s greatest assholes built his career on being a con artist of the highest caliber.

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Damn, now I’m hungry. For SUCCESS! You should be, too, though I understand if your stomach is also grumbling. If you order an additional subscription to my exclusive audio cassette lessons about the fine art of scamming, you’ll be eligible for an UberEats voucher* too! Don’t miss this fantastic opportunity to nourish your body and mind – dial 1-900-FAST-BUX now! Until next time – I’m Hue Jackson.

*The voucher is for a temporary 10% tip bonus on all deliveries you make as a driver… they didn’t have any customer vouchers when I was scavenging in the trash.

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Information from this article taken from here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Banner image by The Maestro.