Isaak Prezent

Parallel with being a teacher in Zapadnaya Dvina, he helped found a local branch of Komsomol, and was finally accepted as a party member in 1921.

[4] After graduating, Prezent worked on achieving transition from social sciences to biology by acquainting himself to some of the lead Soviet biologists of the time, including geneticist Nikolai Vavilov.

[5] After leaving Vavilov, Prezent started teaching at Herzen Pedagogical Institute, where he quickly rose through the academic ranks and became a docent within a couple of years.

In 1934, Prezent had to leave university, and he moved to Odesa, where he worked with Trofim Lysenko at All-Union Institute of Selection and Genetics until 1938.

[1] In 1939, he became Lysenko's consultant for philosophical issues at Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Science (VASKhNIL) in Moscow, where he became a full member in 1948.

As a representative of Leningrad branch of Communist Academy, he had a role in the organization of the First All-Union Conference of Geobotanists and Floristics Experts.

The conference was sponsored by the Botanical Institute, but Prezent nonetheless managed to overtake "methodological leadership" and put forward his agenda against biocenological botanists.

He considered conservationism a "wrecking theory", holding that it opposed the Stalinist views on progress, understood here as a triumph of working men and their technology.

In 1932, one of the Prezent's anti-Raikov speeches, titled Class Struggle on the Natural Science Front was published in 20,000 copies, which marked the demise of conservationism in ecological education.

Similarly to the tactics he employed in fighting the botanists, Prezent waited until the December 1931 All-Union Faunistics Conference, and navigated its organization into silencing and attacking conservationism.

The proponents of Lysenkoism advocated for the use of these "findings" in agriculture in order to increase yields, and alleviate the consequences of the Soviet famine of 1930–1933.

[2] 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.