Javier Benegas (b. 1965) is a Spanish political analyst and writer, co-founder of the Spanish daily Vozpópuli, of which he was opinion director, and founder of the think tank ThinkAct, as well as editor of the political and sociological analysis journal Disidentia.
It was the French philosopher Jean-François Revel who said that Lysenkoism was a success of power rather than of charlatanism, of force rather than imposture. But above all it was the triumph of the lie. The term Lysenkoism refers to Trofim Lysenko, a character of infamous memory who, in the face of Darwinian competition, developed an alternative theory according to which the genetic adaptation of plants to a specific climate was not decisive because plants could adapt to any climate spontaneously.
The nonsense was obvious. However, Iosif Stalin saw this theory as a political opportunity. He supported Lysenko because the science that investigated genetics, geneticism, was a bourgeois and capitalist science. And the communist regime needed to counterpose its own science. Predictably, the application of Lysenko’s ideas in agriculture led to a terrible famine.
A mistake with such disastrous and impossible-to-hide consequences would have been rectified diligently in any country, but not in the Soviet Union. Stalin could not be wrong. To even suggest it carried with it terrible reprisals. It was more than three decades before Lysenko, along with his theory, fell from grace. And his downfall was due more to the death of his protector, Stalin, than to his crackpot theory. Decades after the end of Lysenkoism, it would be the Soviet regime itself that would crumble.
When Francis Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man in 1992, he was convinced that the struggle of ideologies had come to an end with the fall of the Soviet Union and that liberal democracy would prevail in the world. This has not been the case. Today there are twenty one democracies in the world that, according to certain basic aspects, can be considered full democracies; fifty three deficient democracies; thirty four regimes halfway between democracy and autocracy; and fifty nine clearly authoritarian regimes. The remaining countries do not have a defined regime or any kind of order that can be qualified.
Twenty one full democracies, out of a total of one hundred and ninety four countries, does not seem to be an encouraging statistic, especially if we take into account that the fifty three countries with deficient democracies seem to be moving backwards rather than forwards in this form of government. However, the worrying thing is not that one hundred and seventy one countries persist in ignoring Fukuyama’s prophecy, but that the world’s twenty one full democracies are showing signs of fatigue.
Europe, too, seems more inclined to devolve than to evolve, to retrace its steps. Putin’s Russia is perhaps a paradigmatic example, for embracing the old solution of war to expand, of course, but even more so for its attempt to atone for the Soviet regime and its most representative figures. This includes Iosif Stalin, something completely unthinkable not so many years ago, but also the trickster Trofim Lysenko. In recent years, as a study by Eduard I. Kolchinsky et al. reveals, Russian scientists have published several controversial books demanding a rethinking of Lysenko’s role.
These new Lysenkoists claim that Lysenko was a precursor of epigenetics and in this sense aim to rewrite the history of biology. A key element contributing to the rethinking of Lysenkoism is the rise of sympathy for Stalin and Stalinism among the Russian population. The study highlights that, according to Levada-Center (a Russian independent, nongovernmental polling and sociological research organization.), in 2017 47% of Russians tended to view Stalin’s personality and managerial abilities positively (in 2019 the figure rose to 56%). As a result, monstrous concepts, made up of outdated ideologies, prejudices and beliefs, which until very recently were considered past aberrations of the Stalinist era, are resurrected from their graves.
Javier Benegas (b. 1965) is a Spanish political analyst and writer, co-founder of the Spanish daily Vozpópuli, of which he was opinion director, and founder of the think tank ThinkAct, as well as editor of the political and sociological analysis journal Disidentia. He is a regular contributor to various Spanish media, both in the press and on radio and television, and is a prominent contributor to The Objective. He is the author of the essays Sociedad terminal: La comunicación como arma de destrucción masiva (2007) [Terminal Society: Communication as a Weapon of Mass Destruction], co-author of Catarsis. Se vislumbra el final del régimen (2013) [Catharsis. The end of the regime in sight] and author of La ideología invisible: Claves del nuevo totalitarismo que infecta a las sociedades occidentales (2020) [The Invisible Ideology: Keys to the New Totalitarianism Infecting Western Societies] y Vindicación (2022) [Vindication].
