When you think of the most deadly people in history the names that pop into your mind are typically your power hungry sociopaths... you know... Hitler, Stalin, Mao... Pol Pot.  If you turn back the clock or know your history you might toss up names like Gengis Kahn, Tamerlane, Julius Caesar or Ashurbanipal II. You might also consider Leopold II , Charles V, or Ivan The Terrible. Whatever you come up with, its typically a head of state or at least someone who with military power. You don't think of a poor softspoken peasant with little education that has some interesting ideas about plants. Nonetheless... one man... Trofim Lycenko may have been responsible for more deaths than at least half the people on your top ten list... and chances are you probably haven't heard of him. If you have, then you might not know the whole story. This is a cautionary tale of what happens when politics and science become one and the same.  Millions of people died directly because of his false ideas. But it's deeper than that. What happens when the idea of "truth" itself is called into question? What happens when a state adopts a view of reality that is contrary to reason itself?  What happens when contradicting an "official" narrative guarantees losing your job, your freedom or even your life?  Could you stand up to that or would you just look the other way? In the Gospel of John, Pilate famously asks: "What is Truth?" To live in the Soviet Union was to ask yourself that question on a daily basis.  The vast majority of people quietly went along with it. Why?  After spending nearly a decade in Stalin's Gulag and another twenty years as a "free"  Soviet citizen,  Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote:

"The permanent lie becomes the only safe form of existence, in the same way as betrayal. Every wag of the tongue can be overheard by someone, every facial expression observed by someone. Therefore every word, if it does not have to be a direct lie, is nonetheless obliged not to contradict the general, common lie."

You’ve heard the phrase “follow the science” or “science is real” over the past several years. Having “science” on one’s side seems to make a viewpoint authoritative if not infallible. The Soviet Union believed this wholeheartedly. Not only that but they believed their whole system of government itself was BASED on science. This was the “Scientific Socialism” of Marx and Engels put into practice on a grand scale. Science or the idea of it permeated every aspect of Soviet life to an extent that we in the West have never known. Socialism was supposed to be hypermodern. It would sweep away all  the social and cultural baggage that had accumulated over the millenia and usher in an era of pure reason and progress. This would be accomplished through the power of science. Through science the Soviets sought to reprogram the individualistic human mind and make it communist to the very core. From the very beginning Lenin was fascinated with the work of Ivan Pavlov. He believed that this physiologist who so expertly conditioned dogs to respond to the stimuli of his choosing held the key to shaping the collective psyche of the entire Russian people. They would be fashioned into obedient Communists through the power of science. A decade later the world got its first glimpse of what these Soviet scientists were up to. During Stalin’s show trials high ranking defendants admitted to fantastic crimes that they had no way of actually committing. Moreover, they pledged absolute fealty to a system and a man they knew would soon destroy them. Had the Soviets discovered a new method of dark persuasion unknown to the west? Even the Nazis were unnerved by the idea. Soon an obsession with Pavlovian “brainwashing” would overwhelm the free world. It was discussed in universities, newspapers, films and even on the floor of the United States Congress. Meanwhile, within the Soviet Union, the scientific optimism and ambition of the 1920’s would give way to repression and fear. Any scientist that dared to question the state approved Pavlovian doctrine would find himself out of a job, in prison camp or worse. The Soviets came to believe the human mind was simply a series of reflexes that could be manipulated to the will of the state. There was no room for any other opinion. In the 1950’s a sinister new figure would come to dominate the field of Soviet Psychology: Andrei Vladimirovich Snezhnevsky. Under his rule, the state devised a new diagnosis for individuals who dared to question the absolute superiority of the Soviet system: “Sluggish Schizophrenia.” Now, if you spoke out against the regime you could find yourself locked in a mental asylum indefinitely with no right of appeal and no correspondence with the outside world. These “patients” were often heavily drugged and made to undergo tortures that many compared with what Jewish prisoners experienced at the hands of Nazi doctors decades earlier. How did a science that promised such a bright and limitless future devolve into a dystopian tool of oppression? Maybe that’s just what happens when politics and science become one and the same under a system that demands absolute conformity.     

Stalin's plan to Collectivize the Soviet Union was finally in full swing. Peasants everywhere were being forced to abandon their antiquated bucolic lifestyles and become modern proletarians on large agroindustrial farms. Marx’s dream of “labor armies” in the countryside was finally coming true.  "The worker's paradise is upon us comrades!!" Well... not so fast. The pushback against this plan was widespread and determined... so much so that even Stalin had to publicly admit it simply wouldn't be possible to forcibly coerce 100 million people to voluntarily become cogs in the colossal wheel of Soviet socialism. It was time for plan B. ``What if we made it impossible for people NOT to join the collective farms? What if we taxed anyone that didn't give in so hard they would be begging for mercy?" As it turned out, plan B did work... sort of... but then a new problem arose. These farms were simply not producing enough food to go around. Socialism wasn't working. Uh oh… So did he back off? Try a different plan? You know that's not how Stalin rolls. It was full speed ahead. “Damn the torpedoes.”  Millions of people might starve but it was all for a good cause right? The Soviet Union had to meet those export targets. They needed a lot of hard cash to build those shiny new factories and there was no other way to get it but by selling grain on the world market. If that meant people at home had to go hungry then so be it. “They should have worked harder,” he would say. Of course, the epicenter of this very predictable disaster would be Ukraine. Stalin had an almost pathological distrust for non Russian nationalities that refused to wholeheartedly submit to Soviet power. And of all the nationalities that had resisted his rule so far, none had been more troublesome than the Ukrainians. What he did there in the years 1932-3 has been declared a genocide by 16 countries (inluding the United States). The man who invented the word "genocide" even declared it a genocide. At the famine’s height, a territory the size of France, consisting of 30 million people would be hermetically sealed off from the outside world and its inhabitants left to die a slow, lingering death. Inside the death zone, to even grab a handful of grain from a field could get one executed or sent to the Gulag for a decade long sentence (which was just as good). Many would go insane. Others would become criminals. Some would even resort to cannibalism. No one who survived these years would ever be the same again.  Stalin once said "It is ideas that matter, not the individual." Well how about 4 to 5 million individuals?  How many eggs do you need to break to make this omelet? Seems like a lot of eggs to me. It would later be called "The Holodomor '' or "death by starvation," and increasingly, historians see it as a deliberate act of a totalitarian regime to break the will of an entire nation. If you want to know why the Ukrainian people of today would be willing to fight with such tenacity to defy the will of a dictator in Moscow, then look no further. After listening to this then you'll get it. Or don’t listen to it. Putin wouldn’t want you to anyways. You know… “fascist” propaganda and all.