They may have said they were scientific, but they were not. Just using the term doesn't make it so.
Here's a review of a book on the subject:
Book Description
Publication Date: June 1, 1994
In this book, Dr. Soyfer, a former Soviet scientist who had met Lysenko, documents the destruction of science and scientists under the influence of Lysenko. Contrary to numerous opinions, Lysenko was an poorly educated agronomist who happened to have been in the right place at the right time: In the '30s, "Pravda" wrote him up as a pioneering scientist. Recognizing that newspapers and popular support could fuel his rise to the top of Soviet society, he set about making a name for himself as a scientist in non-academic journals and periodicals. His peasant upbringing and miraculous findings--never empirically proven or duplicated--made him a star proletarian scientist, the kind needed to bring about true Communism.
Along his way to the top, he was assisted by many people who thought him a sincere, but ill preparted, scientist; he later had many of these people purged after gaining the almost total support of Stalin and Khrushchev. His grand claims of producing superior cattle and wheat, among other things, consistently failed, yet no one dared oppose or even question his policies. Whether to propel himself upward, bring down the academics he apparently detested, or protect himself and his "science", Lysenko nearly eliminated all serious work in genetics, agriculture, and biology from the '30s into the '60s. Numerous scientists were exiled, fired, or executed during his reign as the people's scientist; according to the author, the effects still linger in Russia.
An amazing story of how, when politics decrees what science is acceptable and how it is going to work in the political paradigm, the results can be tragic.
The attempt to bend science to an ideology had severe consequences in the USSR (as it also did in China). People were executed, millions starved to death, and those countries are still trying to rebuild their science programs. They send students to the US to learn how to be scientists.
I should point out that it does not matter which ideology you try to cram science into. Science simply cannot function as an ideological support tool.
” Dr. Soyfer, a former Soviet scientist who had met Lysenko, documents the destruction of science and scientists “
Spirited: Of course they did. But just as Richard Dawkins, Lewontin, and all such fools who pretend to discover something about mankind by studying slimemold colonies seek not truth and reality but rather personal power through propagation of “second realities” so was this the case with scientific Marxist socialists.
There are some scientists who do not confuse their field of endeavor with philosophy and religion but many more who do. Of this last group are all metaphysicians (i.e. Dawkins) who falsely claim that evolutionism is a fact.
At bottom, the real purpose behind naturalism is keeping God the Father out while the real purpose behind evolutionism is the reconciliation of opposites. Death (matter) with life. Slimemold with consciousness. Man with God.
This is the very particular science of magic.