Why was the study of genetics suppressed in the Soviet Union?

[Rafiq]

Supposedly, at least.

I don't buy that it was because they were 'Bourgeois' or 'Idealist', as they didn't imply that a child is born with inherit knowledge and understanding of the world.

Or was it simply a bullshit claim that they suppressed it?

[Ocean Seal]

Supposedly, at least.

I don't buy that it was because they were 'Bourgeois' or 'Idealist', as they didn't imply that a child is born with inherit knowledge and understanding of the world.

Or was it simply a bullshit claim that they suppressed it?
No they did actually suppress it. There are multiple reasons why they did this, but ultimately none of them are valid.
Among the reasons was the fact that genetics was the trump card for fascists and racists and gave rise to a bunch of claims about who was superior and who wasn't. A lot of really horrible ideas came about with reinvestigation with genetics such as eugenics. Also Lysenko a powerful and well connected Soviet biologist proposed an anti-Mendelian approach and a lot of people listened to him.
So in short, yes a lot of terrible social conclusions came from genetics but it was ultimately scientific opportunism which led the Soviet union to take its anti-genetics stance, and it was a really terrible decision. I can't imagine how much could have been gained if the SU pioneered genetic engineering.

[MarxSchmarx]

This is a curious case of ideology actually trumping materialist views, at least for a few years.

What happened actually is quite complicated. Lyesenko (or at least someone very familiar with his work) managed to argue that Lysenko's theory of the transmission of traits was far more in line with how "dialectical materialism" was supposed to operate than classical genetics, and therefore was considered the sounder of the two hypothesis.

It is important to understand that in the days before Watson and Crick, and even to this day, the molecular foundation of many key agricultural traits like crop yield are very controversial. Lyesenko's experiments actually have to some degree been replicated in the west, and the evidence that the applied results of different breeding programs in capitalist countries, particularly Canada which invested enormous public and private capital into the question, with wheat at the time, for example, were any more successful than Soviet attempts at the time which were based on Lysenko's theory, is strikingly limited.

I think Lysenko's theory was ultimately proven wrong, but the key point to understand is that genetics before around the late 1950s was still very much a science of inference - that is , a science that focused on predicting rather than explaining, patterns, and it is IMO quite likely that so-called "mainstream" genetics had no more claim to material reality than "Lysenkoism". Biologists were looking at patterns, and it was their job to come up with explanations that were consistent with the patterns, but it was not incumbent on them to explain any material foundation to these patterns. "Genes" were in a very real sense postulates (and arguably still are) rather than discrete material units. Lyesenko's hypotheses operated in this mileu.

Going forward, While it is true that the mainstream genetic theories at the time were vindicated by later 20th century science, it is also very, very likely that their approach too can only explain a relatively small fraction of the observed phenomena in biology more generally.

one more point. The supposed "triumph" of lysenkoism was said to have "set soviet genetics back a generation". Although it is probably the case that soviet science failed to accommodate classical genetics adequately, this is not so much an indictment of supposedly less skilled "political" inteference in "pure" science, as it is critique of a culture where scientific pluralism cannot operate. It is important to understand that many of the harshest critics of "Lyesenkoism" decry it not because it is created a stifling scientific atmosphere, but because it was an example of how non-scientists dared to interfere with the self-appointed guardians of "objective truth."