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Hello, in 1928 as America heads towards the Wall Street crash, Joseph Stalin reveals his

master plan. Nature is to be conquered by science.

Russia is to be made supremely modern at any cost and the world transformed by communist

example.

Into the heart of this vision stepped Trophim Lusienko, a self-taught geneticist who promised

to turn Russian wasteland into a grain-laden garden of Eden.

Today Lissenko is a byword for scientific fraud, but in Stalin's Russia his ideas became law.

They reveal a world of science distorted by ideology where ideas were literally a matter of life and death.

To disagree with Zenko risked the Gulag, and he damaged perhaps irreparably the Soviet Union's capacity to fight and win the Cold War.

With me to discuss Drophim Latenko, our Robert Service, Professor of Russian History at the University of Oxford,

Catherine Merriddell, Professor of Contemporary History, Queen Mary, University of London,

and Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics at University College London.

Robert Service, in 1928, Stalin launched the first five-year plan.

Could you give us a sense of the context and scope of that undertaking?

Well, it was a stupendous ambition,

not just to transform an economy,

but also to transform a whole society to modernize agriculture,

banking, finance, industry above all, the military, foreign trade, transport, communications, and to do it through a

general plan for the entire country.

And this was at the time extraordinarily ambitious and it was a

...