ИСТИНА

Teaching a school subject is usually closely related to the development of an scientific discipline. However, various non-scientific factors often interfere with this process. In Russia and the USSR it was especially difficult. After the October Revolution (1917) all the obstacles, religious and political, burst and natural science became one of the main school subjects. The first post-revolutionary years teachers in Petrograd sought to bring school textbooks closer to the real development of biology, even the basics of genetics were taught. But in the middle of twenties the “complex¨ programs appeared and the natural science was replaced with the agronomy classes. During that time evolutionism existed in school as a general idea only because it was very convenient for the political situation. As soon as the era of Lysenkoism began, textbooks immediately reacted to this. In 1938 curriculum along with a detailed description of the basics of genetics one can see the description of Lysenko's work. In 1948 the scientific foundations of textbooks merely disappeared and were replaced by "fantastic knowledge" on the basis of Lysenko's ideas. After the fall of Lysenko and the rehabilitation of genetics, new textbooks had to be prepared urgently. Otherwise, the ideas of Lysenkoism lasted much longer in the minds of students. The book by Yuri Poliansky and his colleagues was prepared in a very short time. None of the authors was a schoolteacher, although almost all of them actively participated in the life of the secondary school of that period.