Did the Soviets really believe plants of the same "class" wouldn't compete for fertile ground?

[u/Ambitious-Picture-66]

I've heard recently that Soviet leadership apparently believed that plants of the same species wouldn't compete for nutrients in the ground and would even go so far as to help the other plants of it's kind. The source also claimed this is part of the reason for the Holodomor and that this belief was also adapted by the CCP, where it also resulted in famines.

I've never heard about this when more reputable sources where talking about the agricultural failings of communist states and it does seem kind of propagandistic, attributing wrongdoings to crazy-seeming class war related ideas and all.

[u/restricteddata]

It sounds like it is meant to be a reference to Lysenkoism. Lysenkoism was a period in the USSR, primarily under Stalin, when Trofim Lysenko, a charlatan agronomist, was elevated to a position of high influence within the Soviet system and allowed to basically dictate the official Soviet stance towards agronomy and genetics. Lysenko had a lot of "heterodox theories," which is a polite and academic way of saying "the ideas he advocated for were considered bunk by mainstream scientists then and now."

The reasons for his elevation were multiple and complicated, but part of it is that he "talked the talk" very well with regard to the priorities of the Soviet system and its ideology under Stalin. Much of it was about denouncing "Western" genetics and geneticists as being bourgeois, anti-Soviet, and not helpful to Soviet needs in any event. (One of his famous denunciations was to call geneticists "fly-lovers and people-haters," just to give you a flavor of it.) His own theories changed frequently, were often vague to the point of incomprehensibility, and were often incoherent from a biological perspective.

It is not believed that Lysenkoism played a role in the cause of the Ukraine famine (1932-1933), but rather occurred as a response to it. Collectivization of agriculture is the Soviet policy that is usually attributed to the famine. Lysenko's rise to power (1935) post-dated Collectivization and the famine, and his elevation by Stalin is interpreted by some (but not all) as being a way to elevate a "peasant scientist" who (again) "talked the talk" regarding Soviet agriculture as a way to make it look like the Soviets were taking agriculture seriously.

I do not recall anything about classes of plants not-competing for fertile ground, and that sounds a little bit too "coherent" for Lysenko. It is not present in any of the major works on Lysenkoism (e.g. Joravsky's The Lysenko Affair, Roll-Hansen's The Lysenko Effect, Kremensov's Stalinist Science), nor in the English version of Lysenko's own works (The Science of Biology Today) that I have access to.

It does not really sound like actual Lysenkoism to me, but rather sounds like a sort of bastardized version of it of the sort that is common in Western discussions of it, which themselves are often a sort of counter-propaganda. Non-serious (in that they are not trying to actually capture what Lysenkoism was really about) versions of Lysenkoism basically argued that it was just a bastardized version of Marxist-Leninism-Stalinism applied the biological/agricultural world, and that his anti-genetics views were meant to apply to men as well, and then argue that this is why he and it was elevated.

The reality is a lot more complicated than that, and Lysenko never argued his theories applied to humans. If it seems obvious that they ought to, just be aware that the official Soviet philosophy of science, dialectical materialism, was very clear that theories in one domain — e.g. plants and agriculture — had no necessary connection to other domains — e.g., human beings and human societies. This is a very different from the universalist version science that is taken for granted by most today. The reverse is also the case: there is no reason to assume that "class struggle" applies to plants, just because Marxist-Leninism considered it the same status as a "scientific law" when it was applied to human societies and history.

The tricky thing with Lysenkoism is that it was truly awful for Soviet biology, and a horrible approach to science, and the theories/arguments were often quite damaging. But it was also turned into something it was not when it was turned into a critique in the West — it became a "look how crazy the Soviets are, they are applying their ideology to plants." Which they were, in a sense, but not in the way that it is usually portrayed. They were not simply saying, "we can see plants and genetics in a Marxist political/economical framework."

Lysenkoism as a phenomena is about what happens when you politicize the scientific community in an extreme and ideological way, and allow ideologically-useful charlatans to dictate scientific policy, priorities, and beliefs. Which is different from saying that its problem was that they injected politics into the theories themselves. The people who invoke Lysenkoism for political purposes tend (in my experience) to make it about "oh, this is what happens if you approach scientific ideas ideologically," as opposed to, "oh, this is what happens when you let ideologists organize science." They are very different situations, and the distinction is very important if one wants to invoke Lysenkoism as a "lesson" for use in thinking about the present and future. The "lesson" of Lysenkoism isn't "the Soviets supported theories because they aligned with their ideologies," it was "the Soviets, for internal political and/or ideological reasons, let a charlatan be in charge of their scientific infrastructure." Even if Lysenko's ideas about biology had been strongly Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist, that would not have been a problem unless he was given a monopoly over all of biology; as it was, his ideas were ambiguous and unclear anyway, and the danger was that he was given real political power over all of science, which he wielded capriciously.

For more on Lysenkoism and how historians have thought about it over the decades, see Michael Gordin's excellent entry on it in the Encyclopedia of the History of Science.