Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.
It isn’t darwinian.
Nazis decided to murder the people they declared were ‘unfit’ or “life unworthy of life”. Before they murdered Jews, they murdered cripples, injured war veterans, the retarded. Variation first, then selection. At the concentration camps when they chose people to be murdered they called it selection.
Soviets had the idea that people could evolve on demand. They even produced false science whereby seeds were treated with cold water, and based on that would be resistant to a late frost. Total BS, but they published it, and put it into practice, and when frost killed crops, they covered it up.
In 1928, Trofim Lysenko, a previously unknown agronomist, claimed to have developed an agricultural technique, termed vernalization, which tripled or quadrupled crop yield by exposing wheat seed to high humidity and low temperature. While cold and moisture exposure are a normal part of the life cycle of fall-seeded winter cereals, the vernalization technique claimed to increase yields by increasing the intensity of exposure, in some cases planting soaked seeds directly into the snow cover of frozen fields. In reality, the technique was neither new (it had been known since 1854, and was extensively studied during the previous twenty years), nor did it produce the yields he promised, although some increase in production did occur.
When Lysenko began his fieldwork in the Soviet Union of the 1930s, the agriculture of the Soviet Union was in a massive crisis due to rapid changes in switching from an agrarian-based economy towards an industrial economy leading to mismanagement of collective farms. The resulting famine provoked the people and the government alike to search for any possible solution to the critical lack of food. Lysenko's vernalization practices yielded marginally greater food production on the farms, and he was quickly accepted as the hero of Soviet agriculture.
Lysenko's political success was due in part to his striking differences from most biologists at the time. He was from a peasant family, and an enthusiastic advocate of the Soviet Union and Leninism. During a period which saw a series of man-made agricultural disasters, he was also extremely fast in responding to problems, although not with real solutions. Whenever the Party announced plans to plant a new crop or cultivate a new area, Lysenko had immediate practical suggestions on how to proceed.
So quickly did he develop his prescriptions — from the cold treatment of grain, to the plucking of leaves from cotton plants, to the cluster planting of trees, to unusual fertilizer mixes — that academic biologists did not have time to demonstrate that one technique was valueless or harmful before a new one was adopted. The Party-controlled newspapers applauded Lysenko's "practical" efforts and questioned the motives of his critics.
Lysenko's "revolution in agriculture" had a powerful propaganda advantage over the academics, who urged the patience and observation required for science.
From 1934 to 1940, under Lysenko's admonitions and with Stalin's approval, many geneticists were executed (including Isaak Agol, Solomon Levit, Grigorii Levitskii, Georgii Karpechenko and Georgii Nadson) or sent to labor camps. The famous Soviet geneticist Nikolai Vavilov was arrested in 1940 and died in prison in 1943.
Many other countries of the Eastern Bloc accepted Lysenkoism as the official "new biology" as well; however the acceptance of Lysenkoism was not uniform in communist countries. In Poland, all geneticists except for Gajewski followed Lysenkoism. Even though Gajewski was not allowed contacts with students, he was allowed to continue his scientific work at the Warsaw botanical garden. Lysenkoism was then rapidly rejected starting from 1956 and modern genetics research departments were formed, including the first department of genetics headed by Gajewski, which was started at the Warsaw University in 1958.
Czechoslovakia adopted Lysenkoism in 1949. Jaroslav Kříženecký (1896–1964) was one of the prominent Czechoslovak geneticists opposing Lysenkoism, and when he criticized Lysenkoism in his lectures, he was dismissed from the Agricultural University in 1949 for "serving the established capitalistic system, considering himself superior to the working class, and being hostile to the democratic order of the people", and imprisoned in 1958. In 1963, he was appointed head of the newly established Gregor Mendel department in the Moravian Museum in Brno, the city in which Gregor Mendel pursued his early experiments on inheritance and formulated the laws of Mendelian inheritance.
In the GDR, although Lysenkoism was taught at some of the universities, it had very little impact on science due to the actions of a few courageous scientists (for example, the geneticist and fierce critic of Lysenkoism, Hans Stubbe) and an open border to West Berlin research institutions. Nonetheless, Lysenkoist theories were found in schoolbooks until the dismissal of Nikita Khrushchev in 1964.
Lysenkoism dominated Chinese science from 1948 until 1956, when, during a genetics symposium opponents of Lysenkoism were permitted to freely criticize it and argue for Mendelian genetics.[8] In the proceedings from the symposium, Tan Jiazhen is quoted as saying "Since [the] USSR started to criticize Lysenko, we have dared to criticize him too". For a while, both schools were permitted to coexist, although the influence of the Lysenkoists remained large for several years.
Lysenkoism was promoted heavily by the Japanese Communist Party.
In 1948, genetics was officially declared "a bourgeois pseudoscience"; all geneticists were fired from their jobs (some were also arrested), and all genetic research was discontinued. Nikita Khrushchev, who claimed to be an expert in agricultural science, also valued Lysenko as a great scientist, and the taboo on genetics continued (but all geneticists were released or rehabilitated posthumously). The ban was only waived in the mid-1960s.
Per Wikipedia