
SOURCES: The World Factbook 1997. Central Intelligence Agency, 1998. A Geolinguistic Handbook, 1985 edition, by Erik Gunnemark and Donald Kenrick. Country data are the most recent available as of early 1998. Ethnicity is defined on the basis of language used at home, on race or on religion, as seems appropriate to the country. Scientific American, September 1998


|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
"Stop
annoying Mister President with impertinent questions, Junior." --
Death Race 2000 
brutalities,
so Stalin had his Lysenko. A low-born Rasputin-like character, Trofim Denisovich
Lysenko rejected the idea of heredity through genes. With a couple of polytechnic
agricultural courses under his belt, Lysenko insisted that minerals could
be turned into organic matter, wheat crops could be turned into rye, sugar
beets could be planted in summer rather than winter; and the predictable
thing happened. Farmers forced to follow his dictates watched helplessly
as their crops failed and famine ensued. Academics who resisted the new
Soviet "science" were accused of "sabotage, wrecking, espionage,
terrorism, Trotskyism, [and, more familiar to us] fascism and racism".
A corollary to this was that, if Stalin actually believed that organisms
passed on characteristics acquired not through heredity, but through environment,
he was free to liquidate opposition without regard for what he was doing
to Russia's future. The genetic cost to us of two World Wars is as nothing
compared with Uncle Joe's deliberate campaign to rid the state of "trouble-makers".
Whether seven or ten millions were deliberately starved in the Ukraine
mattered not. However many millions more were killed or broken in gulags
and insane-asylums (where resistance was proof of the need for more "treatment"),
or simply dispatched with a bullet (as were 14,000-plus of the Poliah elite
officer corps at Katyn Forest) was of no consequence; malleable peasants
would simply build better nurseries, and all would be well with Mother
Russia. But it wasn't (and isn't) is it? 
