Turning the pages back...

January 6, 1901

Mykola Hryshko was among the victims of the notorious Stalinist quack, fellow Ukrainian geneticist Mykola Lysenko. Hryshko was born in Poltava on January 6, 1901, and graduated from the Poltava Agricultural Institute in 1925, then the Kyiv Agricultural Institute the following year.

In 1932, he assumed the chair of the Plant Genetics and Selection Department at the KAI, in 1933 published one of the first Ukrainian textbooks on plant genetics, and in the 1930s became a professor at Kyiv University.

During World War II, he also headed the Division of Biological Sciences at the All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences (AUAAS, 1940-1943) and its Botanical Institute (1939-1944). Hryshko also founded the Republican Botanical Garden in 1944, serving as its director until 1958.

Following Lysenko's consolidation of control over the AUAAS in 1948, Hryshko was ejected from the faculty at Kyiv University and stripped of a number of directorates. Briefly disgraced in 1956, Lysenko returned to Nikita Khrushchev's favor two years later, and Hryshko suffered again. He was demoted from his remaining post - director of the Botanical Garden.

Hryshko died a year before Lysenko's 1965 comeuppance, on January 3, 1964, in Kyiv.

Source: "Hryshko, Mykola," Encyclopedia of Ukraine, Vol. 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, January 5, 1997, No. 1, Vol. LXV

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