[3]The politics of the Soviet Union made the idea of genes, particles that decided outcomes in life, as antithetical to the concept of individual freedom.

Marxist ideologues also clubbed geneticists with eugenicists, racists, and fascists while also preferring ideas from Lamarckism as promoted by Trofim Lysenko.

However, "the biochemist Ilya Zbarsky revealed that the unexpected death of Koltsov was a result of his poisoning by the NKVD", the secret police of the Soviet Union.

In 1903 Koltsov proposed that the shape of cells was determined by a network of tubules forming a skeleton[6] which was later termed as the cytoskeleton[citation needed].

US geneticist Richard Goldschmidt wrote about him: "There was the brilliant Nikolai Koltsov, probably the best Russian zoologist of the last generation, an enviable, unbelievably cultured, clear-thinking scholar, admired by everybody who knew him".

[8] Koltsovo, a small municipality in Novosibirsk Oblast, in 2003 obtained the status of the Science town of the Russian Federation and was named after Nikolai Koltsov.