In the USSR, was there "Lysenkoism" in other fields? i.e., was there a communist version of physics or mathematics?

by trampabroad
restricteddata

Yes, there were various forms of "Stalinization"/politicization in several other fields. It varied depending on the field and the local politics of it. It should be noted that even with Lysenkoism it was more complex than just applying ideology to the science — think of ideology more as a free floating power source that could be grasped, warped, focused, adapted to, and you get something more true than the "heavy-handed" vision that we usually talk about. Lysenkoism was a very extreme case, sitting at a nexus of state quotas, agricultural problems, collectivization, an honest-to-god charlatan, and Stalin's own whims.

In physics, there were anti-relativity theory people who denounced Einstein's work as representative of bourgeois and anti-materialist culture. The physicists who argued in favor of it either tried to show that science could transcend its origins (Boris Hessen famously did this by showing that "good" materialist Newtonian physics came out of an extremely non-Communist, non-materialist origins in the 17th century), or reformulated Einstein's work so that it shed any possible cultural connotations (e.g. Vladimir Fok turned General Relativity into merely "a theory of gravity" and got rid of any possible connection to, say, cultural relativity). The physicists were "saved" in a sense by nuclear weapons — they made them indispensable, untouchable (though at some cost...).

Some fields of research became entirely politicized because they touched too closely on state ideology. There was no independent Sociology or Economics, for example — there just couldn't be. They had to serve to back up whatever the state dogma was at the time.

In Chemistry, the practitioners worked on focusing extremely concretely on practical aspects to avoid the problems that were visited upon the geneticists and biologists. Sciences were safe if they were useful/indispensable (e.g., the way Physics got "safe" once nuclear weapons became an issue), and were vulnerable if not (one of the problems the Mendelians had was that they couldn't translate their theoretical knowledge into crop yields on a scale quick enough for the quotas, and that left them vulnerable to a charlatan like Lysenko, who claimed he could).

Every field was touched by its context; that is the way of practically every context, but especially in a totalitarian society where the state touches everything. The examples given above show various approaches to this, and the fact that these people were aware of their situation and often preemptively adapted.

If you are interested in the history of science in the Soviet Union, the place to start is the work of Loren Graham, who is sort of the "father" of the serious study of the subject. His Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History (Cambridge University Press, 1994) is a great introduction. On Lysenkoism, I am fond of David Joravsky's The Lysenko Affair (University of Chicago Press, 1970), even though it is now getting a bit long in the tooth.