[haiduc]

You could start by reading the tremendous life of Lysenko.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko

You will see how he used politics to expend his influence on all the soviet agriculture: research, agronomy, industrial production. Not only that lead to a massive agricultural failure but as said Sakharov he was also "responsible [...] for the defamation, firing, arrest, even death, of many genuine scientists".