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The Scientist, the Impostor & Stalin: How to Feed the People

This documentary tells the tragic story of Soviet biology from the 1920s to the 1960s. The field was divided by the search for an ideologically acceptable approach, yet one that would also boost agricultural productivity. The struggle pitted the world-renowned Soviet botanist and geneticist, Nikolai Vavilov, against a figure who claimed to represent the genius of the Soviet people, the agronomist Trofim Lysenko. Lysenko, dubbed the “Barefoot Professor” by Soviet journalists, exploited the disastrous system of Soviet agriculture to promote himself as someone in possession of the keys to biology that would solve all the Soviet Union’s agricultural woes.