The censorship of science in the Soviet Union affected scientific research in various fields. All humanities and social sciences were additionally tested for strict accordance with historical materialism. These tests were alleged to serve as a cover for political suppression of scientists who engaged in research labeled as "idealistic" or "bourgeois". In several cases, the consequences of ideological influences were dramatic. The suppression of research began during the Stalin era and continued after his regime. Certain scientific fields in the Soviet Union were suppressed primarily after being labeled as ideologically suspect. Examples Biology In the mid-1930s, the agronomist Trofim Lysenko started a campaign against genetics and was supported by Stalin. If the field of genetics' connection to Nazis wasn't enough, Mendelian genetics was also suppressed due to beliefs that it was "bourgeoisie science" and its association with the priest Gregor Mendel due to hostility to religion because of the Soviet policy of state atheism. In 1950, the Soviet government organized the Joint Scientific Session of the USSR Academy of Sciences and the USSR Academy of Medical Sciences, the "Pavlovian session". Several prominent Soviet physiologists (L.A. Orbeli, P.K. Anokhin, A.D. Speransky, I.S. Beritashvily) were attacked for deviating from Pavlov's teaching. As a consequence of the Pavlovian session, Soviet physiologists were forced to accept a dogmatic ideology; the quality of physiological research deteriorated and Soviet physiology excluded itself from the international scientific community. Later Soviet biologists heavily criticised Lysenko's theories and pseudo-scientific methods. Cybernetics Cybernetics was also outlawed as bourgeois pseudoscience during Stalin's reign. Norbert Wiener's 1948 book Cybernetics was condemned and translated only in 1958. A 1954 edition of the Brief Philosophical Dictionary condemned cybernetics for "mechanistically equating processes in live nature, society and in technical systems, and thus standing against materialistic dialectics and modern scientific physiology developed by Ivan Pavlov". (However this article was removed from the 1955 reprint of the dictionary.) After an initial period of doubts, Soviet cybernetics took root, but this early attitude hampered the development of computing in the Soviet Union. History Soviet historiography (the way in which history was and is written by scholars of the Soviet Union) was significantly influenced by the strict control by the authorities aimed at propaganda of communist ideology and Soviet power. Since the late 1930s, Soviet historiography treated the party line and reality as one and the same. As such, if it was a science, it was a science