In Joel Garreau’s book, Radical Evolution, he credits Raymond Kurzweil with predicting the fall of the Soviet Union based on its selective suppression of science. In today’s Picture from the Past, we present a portrait of Trofim Lysenko, the one-time head of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences of the Soviet Union.

According to Wikipedia,

Lysenko was a Soviet biologist who, during the 1930s, led a campaign against agricultural genetics now known as Lysenkoism, which lasted until the mid-1960s in the USSR. Lysenko's actual ‘science’ was nonexistent. He… practiced a form of Lamarckism, insisting on the change in species among plants through hybridization and grafting, as well as a variety of other non-genetic techniques… Lysenkoism caused serious, long-term harm to Soviet biology. It represented a serious failure of the early Soviet leadership to find real solutions to agricultural problems, allowing their system to be hijacked by a mere charlatan—at the expense of many human lives.