note that the U.S.S.R. was ruled for almost thirty of its first thirty-seven years by dictator Joseph Stalin (died 1953), a man equal to Adolf Hitler in terms of atrocities committed. Several of those atrocities were the direct result of policies comparable in effect to those of the British government's in 1840s Ireland. In 1940, for instance, the Soviet government decreed that the "revisionist science" of bio-geneticist Gregor Mendel would henceforth be replaced in practice by the "Marxist biology" advocated by Trofim Lysenko - thus rejecting 20th Century agricultural science. As a consequence, the Soviet agricultural base was nearly destroyed in the 1940s and 50s (Heller and Nekrich 482-484)
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