Science & Tech Quote by Trofim Lysenko

“Close contact” is doing the real ideological work here. Lysenko wraps a political demand - science must serve the Soviet agricultural machine - in the language of collaboration and discovery. The sentence flatters the state by implying that collectivized farms aren’t just productive units; they’re laboratories so rich they can generate “inexhaustible” theory. That adjective isn’t scientific, it’s devotional. It promises endless yield, not only of grain but of truth.

The subtext is a quiet demotion of the independent researcher. Knowledge, in this framing, doesn’t primarily come from skeptical method or open debate; it comes from proximity to state-run practice. The farm becomes both evidence and validator. If results are poor, the implication is not that the theory is wrong, but that the contact wasn’t “close” enough, or the practice wasn’t properly aligned. It’s a rhetorical loop that immunizes the claim against falsification.

Context sharpens the stakes. Lysenko rose in Stalin’s USSR by attacking “bourgeois” genetics and championing a politically convenient, quasi-Lamarckian vision of heredity that suggested environments (and by extension policy) could rapidly reshape life. Collective farms were the showcase where socialism would prove itself; tying scientific authority to them made dissent look like sabotage. The line’s upbeat tone masks its coercive function: it converts a system under pressure to feed millions into a story where ideology and biology march in lockstep, and where the state’s needs become the measure of what counts as knowledge.