While many of Lysenko 's views on agriculture , as well as his prominence , predated his cooperation with Prezent , it was only after 1934 that his debate with the mainstream geneticists became politicized . In that period , and with the full support of Stalin , many of the Soviet geneticists were purged or at least fired . In 1935 and 1936 Lysenko and Prezent brought the debates over genetics to the center of party politics . In those two years , the so-called " Academy Sessions " took place . It was a series of scientific debates chaired by Stalin himself , where Lysenko and Prezent counterposed their views to those of mainstream geneticists . The entire time , Prezent was extremely active in presenting Lysenko 's works publicly as acts of genius . The full triumph came during a conference in 1948 , when Lysenko announced genetics to be a bourgeois pseudoscience , and that the Central Committee supported such stance . After this , any serious engagement with non-Lysenkoist genetics became impossible in the Soviet union until 1964 , especially at Lysenko-headed VASKhNIL , and Prezent-headed MGU Department of Darwinism
purged
Great Purge
Isaak Izrailevich Prezent