“BTW, the Soviets arrested people and worse for teaching Darwinism.”
You have some examples of this? It would be passing strange since according to the book, “Landmarks in the Life of Stalin”, young Stalin thought highly of Darwin.
That Stalin, or Hitler, or Charles Manson, or Osama bin Laden may have read, agreed with, or have thought highly of Darwin is irrelevant to the nature of his research and its conclusions, or to the reproducible veracity of them.
It is almost impossible to distinguish between the eco-centric writings of Al Gore, and those of the Unibomber. Does that mean that Al Gore should be locked up to prevent him from causing mischief?
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Okay, bad example.
Things change. The communist government championed a horticulturist named Lysenko, who embraced a form of Lamarckianism. Before Darwin Lamarck supposed that creatures changed by the inheritance of acquired traits. If you spend a lot of time running and develop strong leg muscles and lungs, then Lamarck thought that your baby would inherit these traits developed during your lifetime. This idea was in direct opposition to Darwin's theory of evolution, which said that populations contain a lot of variation and this variation is passed on to the offspring without modification. The change over time comes from natural selection filtering the variants, resulting in higher reproductive success for some variants than others.
Of course in Darwin's time the details of inheritance were not known. Mendel published his work on inheritance then, but it was not well known until after his death. When Mendel's work was rediscovered geneticists realized that inherited traits were passed on in genes (although at the time they still didn't know what genes were!) Geneticists started working with plants, breeding them and studying their chromosomes.
It's hard to say why the communist government found Lysenko's ideas so appealing, perhaps because he was their representative of the "common man" who had arisen and thrown over the ideas of bourgeois foreigners. At any rate Mendelian genetics went far far out of favor, and geneticists who didn't abandon their evolutionary ideas and embrace Lysenkoism were imprisoned and even killed.
Of course it isn't true. One of the most "eminent" darwinians, Haldane, Darwin Medalist and co-founder of the Modern Synthesis, was a shill for Lysenko. It's kind of hard to reconcile the fact that the architect of the modern theory of evolution was a useful idiot for Stalin, with the notion that the Soviets were anti-Darwinian. In fact Haldane mentions (Science Advances) that Vavilov (the guy who ended up in the Gulag) was alledged to have had anti-Darwinian views.