Soviet biology, scientific ethos and political engagement: Belgian university professors and the Lysenko case

Abstract

The Lysenko case has often been singled out as an extreme example of Stalinist ideology during the ‘cultural’ cold war. This Russian plant-breeder gained support from the Soviet authorities by stating that hereditary influences and characteristics of plants could be influenced by environmental factors – the opposite of the assertions of classic ‘bourgeois’ genetics. In the Soviet Union, and also in Western communist parties, scientists were asked to accept and defend Lysenkoism, and thus ‘combine’ their intellectual integrity with their political convinctions. Relations between communist parties and intellectuals have been difficult throughout the years; in Belgium, moreover, the communist party and the workers’ movement in general were among the most ouvriériste in Western Europe, with a very modest theoretical basis or intellectual tradition of dialectics. Political evolutions in the 1930–40s and war experience did however persuade quite a few academics of the Brussels University to join the Belgian Communist Party, in which they were soon to be confronted with their ambiguous intellectual position, as both communists and scientists.