Lysenkoism

In 1928, a Soviet agronomist named Trofim Lysenko claimed to have developed a method through which crop yields could be massively increased using a collection of discoveries and techniques he'd perfected.

One such technique, vernalization, involved keeping wheat seeds in high-humidity, low-temperature environments, while another involved using grafts to attach pieces of one plant to pieces of another species to change the stock—the rooted—species to that of the one that was attached.

Both of these approaches, and the claimed science that underpinned them, were entirely baseless pseudoscience.

Lysenko rejected the science of genes and natural selection, and favored another, earlier explanation for evolution and trait transference between generations—Lamarckism—and that led to this misunderstanding of what he would sometimes witness in his experiments, which in turn fed his misguided belief that he could solve the Soviet Union's most pressing food-related issues with homegrown scientific solutions.

That homegrown-ness was fundamental to what happened next.

The Soviet government latched onto the idea that Lysenko was a genius, brought up within the system that they created and were sustaining (and was himself an ardent supporter of that system), and promoted him as such through their propaganda.

His claims thus became unquestionable truths, and these purported revolutionary discoveries and techniques were spread throughout the Union, alongside a fluffed-up resume and mythologized history for Lysenko, himself.

This had the net-effect of making any other model for how traits are transmitted across generations of plants pariahs within the Soviet Union, as they conflicted with the government's chosen model. 

The field of genetics was marked as heretical within the Union, its most notable geneticists were executed or sent to labor camps—some managing to escape to other countries before being caught, with all their knowledge and know-how intact, but more than 3,000 of them were either outcast, forced into silence, or killed over the course of less than two decades—and it was forbidden to criticize the concept and tenets of Lysenkoism until the 1960s.

Cleaving to this pseudoscience and making it a state-backed tenet, rather than one idea of many, left the Soviet Union far behind other nations in the burgeoning and increasingly vital field of genetics (including the US, to which many of those biologists who managed to escape fled).

It was a useful narrative that gave the Soviet higher-ups something to trumpet about, a way to claim their nation and culture's superiority over all the other nations and cultures that failed to generate their own answers to fundamental, natural questions, but because they locked it into place, punishing those who saw its flaws and dared voice their concerns, Lysenkoism became an enforced ideology—a dogma with teeth—rather than a scientific theory or practice.

Lysenkoism reduced crop outputs across the Soviet Union rather than increasing them, but Lysenko's failures were concealed, edited, and replaced with more favorable, glowing versions of the same. Lysenkoism thus failed to demonstrate its claimed results again and again, but it only achieved more support over time as government leaders, censors, and supporters wove it into their creed.

Lysenkoism has popped back up in Russian government propaganda in recent years, positioned as a stepping-stone to contemporary biological thinking and (once again) as evidence that Russia and Russian thinkers played a vital role in bringing about the modern world with its brilliant minds and a system that supports them.

When non-scientific leaders control what is "true" in science, putting their thumbs on the scales of exploration and experimentation, our hypotheses and theories are prone to being hardened and implemented on scale before they're proven or ready.

They also tend to become unfalsifiable—flying in the face of what scientific theories are meant to be, by definition—because it would be inconvenient or embarrassing to those who have adopted them into their platform to ever back down or change their allegiance to some other, perhaps previously criticized, theory.

We see this repositioning of hard science theories (like biology) primarily in authoritarian regimes, but it's also common in softer sciences (like the humanities, urban planning, and sociology) when politicians and other leaders in democratic societies carve ideas about things like crime, immigration, drugs, and other such issues into their platforms (and in some cases into the public consciousness), converting theoretical issues into (difficult to back down from) ideological and polemical positions.