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
Wow, amazing story. Thanks for the link.