Under Stalin, Darwinism was outlawed (they had Lyssenkoism[0]). If the secret police found fruit flies in your house, you were shot or sent to Gulag because one can test Mendel's rules using them. Sarah Palin recently told she wants to stop fruit fly research. And her name rhymes with Stalin. And she can see Russia from her bathroom window. This is all really scary now when we know the connections.
I'm just reading "Weiße Gewänder"[3,5] by Wladimir Dmitrijewitsch Dudinzew[2,6].
The original is "Белые одежды" by Дудинцев, Владимир Дмитриевич, an english translation exists ("White Garments", ISBN 9780091736095, the author's name is spelled "Dudintsev" there).
[0] A crude version of Lamarckism kept alive by police violence (and by publishing fake experimental results or mistaking disease-caused plant deformations for species transmutations).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Dudintsev
[2] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wladimir_Dmitrijewitsch_Dudinzew
[3] Sorry, no Wikipedia page except for the russian one: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8B%D0%B5_%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%B6%D0%B4%D1%8B_(%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%BD) but google-translate gives a readable result (except for the word "shearer" which is the name "Strigalev"[4]). The Belorussians even made a movie from the book: http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%B5%D0%BB%D1%8B%D0%B5_%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%B6%D0%B4%D1%8B_(%D1%84%D0%B8%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BC)
[4] I think google-translate should really start parsing the text now (currently they are only doing a search-and-replace using their huge corpus of texts available in multiple languages). This gives funny results: "начатую Стригалевым" means "begun by Strigalev" (the preposition "by" is silent in russian and requires the instrumental case, ending in "ym") but comes out as "begun Strigalevym".
[5] ISBN 3.353-00508-0, Verlag "Volk und Welt" Berlin, 1990.
[6] "Dudinzew" is the ancient german transcription of Dudincev[1]).
