That’s a misconception. It was actually something we discussed with our group, one of the first topics we had actually.

USSR was not against genetics in general, in fact it has pioneered some of the research. The issue was with biological determinism - the notion (that was peddled by genetists themselves at times) that the sum of one’s genes determine everything. That what you have in your DNA is exactly what you will be. That, rather obviously, goes against dialectic materialism, and as it turned out - against reality of life (who would have thought). However, the idea of “USSR was against genetics” got cemented.

Yup. This is partially why the CPC embraces technological innovation as having a mostly apolitical character that socialist States should learn from, just applying it differently, to benefit the whole people. Strange that the USSR had a ultraleft turn for a few years, despite Lenin and the bolsheviks’ embrace of science and art, which lead to an explosion of innovation in the 1920s.

Yes, but not for that long. In the 20’s and 30’s, a fraud uneducated “biologist” named Lysenko convinced the Soviet leadership that Mendelian genetics were anti-proletariat in order to boost his political, social, and financial standing. He managed to centralize almost the entirety of Soviet biology around him and squashed any and all researchers that were trying to use actual, real, scientific models of biology and genetics.

Lysenko’s power began to slowly wane, however with the Nazi’s fervent devotion to genetics, the topic once again became taboo and almost all genetics research stalled. Not to mention that during the war, most funds allocated to scientific research went to practical applications that could be used in the short term for war, like metallurgy and physics.

However, by the early 50’s the atmosphere was already changing in regards to genetics, and among the few good reforms of the Khrushchev era, Khrushchev removed the bans on genetical research. However due to nearly 2 decades of bans, underfunding, and negligence, Soviet genetical research was severely stunted. Despite which the program rebounded miraculously and discovered several major foundations still used today in modern biology.

I won’t claim to be an expert on the history of soviet science, but learning about it through a project definitely was a contributing factor in my radicalization.

The soviet union also had issues with marxist philosophers criticizing relativity. chief among them was Aleksandr Maksimov, but unlike in biology, where charlatans like Lysenko managed to lead a vast majority of soviet scientists against genetics, soviet physicist Vladimir Fock who was also keenly interested in Marxism tied the two together and defended it from critics who tried to exploit anti-idealism to attack real science.

I learned about this through the book Stalin’s Great Science. It’s written by someone who does admittedly fill the book with libshit(the word “Stalinist” is a must in any Western book about the USSR between 1924 and 1953) but also lived in the USSR and learned physics there, and does seem to have a vague nostalgia for it. It casts a relatively positive view of the role of the USSR in promoting science and provides examples of scientists very contrary to the usual western view of “scientist that didn’t like socialism >:(” which is what happens when the only soviet scientist they know is sakharov(which is exactly who my history teacher told me to write more about - I refused). There are a good number of books by relatively western historians like this(for example, this book was published by “Imperial College Press”) that actually at least partially serve to disprove many Western myths about the USSR. Another example is Mark Tauger on the topic of the so-called “Holodomor”. I really think these are good ways to ease libs into radicalization - just looking at history from a less biased perspective worked wonders for me.