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"In the '20s, scientists worldwide vigorously debated the mechanisms of evolution. On one side were the Darwinians; on the other were supporters of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, an 18th-century French scientist who believed that new physical traits could be willed into existence. According to Lamarck, a change in the environment causes a change in an animal's behavior that leads to greater or lesser use of a given appendage or organ. Those changes are passed on to the creature's offspring. Lamarck could not prove his theory, and by the '30s most geneticists had discarded the idea.

Lamarck's ideas were useless to geneticists but very handy for Joseph Stalin, who rejected any doctrine -- like Darwinism -- that challenged socialism. Willful ideology, not genetic determinism, was the key to his Soviet revolution. Stalin named a crop biologist, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, to champion Lamarckism. Lysenko and his ilk linked "the survival of the fittest" to fascism and accused Soviet geneticists of sabotage, espionage, and terrorism. Supporters of evolution were jailed or shot. Scientific publishing was censored. According to historians, no genetics textbooks were published in the USSR between 1938 and the early 1960s and no evolution at all was taught to several generations of students. Stalin's political solution choked off scientific progress, modern genetics never reached the Soviet Union, and today Russia and the Balkans lag behind other countries in scientific and medical advances. "

http://www.edutopia.org/magazine/ed1article.php?id=Art_1314&issue=jun_05