T h e Lysenko case has become a symbol of the ideological dictate in science and its damaging consequences. It is often explained that in the years following World War 11, the Stalinist leadership launched an ideological and nationalistic campaign aimed at the creation of a Marxist-Leninist and/or distinctively Russian, non-Western science. Concepts and theories which were found idealistic or bourgeois were banned, their supporters silenced. In no other science was this process completed to the same degree as in after the infamous August 1948 Session of the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Sciences, at which Trofim Lysenko declared the victory of his Michurinist biology over presumably idealistic formal genetics. The August Session, in turn, served as the model for a number of other ideological discussions in various scholarly disciplines. This widely accepted interpretation, however, encounters two serious difficulties. The first arises from a selective focus on one particular debate which best fits the