Margaret Peacock

This article examines the Cold War meanings of the Moscow Festival of Youth and Students that attracted thirty thousand attendees in June of 1957. It argues that this festival reflected a pivotal moment in the Cold War where the Soviet leadership embraced the rising importance of culture and youth in their struggle for global consensus. It contends that while the Soviet leadership endeavored to use the festival as a vehicle for the projection of a revised, free, and peaceful Soviet populace, both the western press and the delegates themselves took actions that complicated the meanings of the festival and in turn, complicated the meanings of the cultural Cold War for domestic and international audiences alike.

The demise of Soviet genetics in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s has stood for many as a prime example of the damage that social and political dogmatism can do when allowed to meddle in the workings of science. In particular, the story of Trofim Lysenko’s rise to preeminence and the fall of Mendelian genetics in the Soviet Union has become a lasting testament to the dangers of state power and a seemingly blatant manifestation of totalitarianism in practice. In recent years, historians have begun to complicate this story. The purpose of this article is to examine the extent to which this conventional account of state power in Soviet biology, symbolized by the disappearance of Mendel, still holds true. Using middle school textbooks, encyclopedias, and pedagogical journals that were published between 1934 and 1964 this article argues that despite its efforts, the state apparatus was functionally incapable of eradicating genetics from its schools.