Lysenkoism is probably not, is at least partially not a very good fit for the knee-jerk anti-intellectual (science) goof that it’s usually posed as. Mr. Lysenko proposed – and sold – what substantially amounts to Lamarkism, or the transmission of acquired traits. In others words, that grains can be adapted to cold northern climates, simply by subjecting them to colder & colder growing conditions.
Under Lamarkism, when a given plant grows in colder conditions than it would prefer, changes occur in it that make it better-suited to the cold, and those changes are then encoded in its genes, and transmitted to its progeny when it produces the next crop of seed. This is counter to the Darwinian doctrine of Adaptation (and eventually, Evolution) through Selection of the Fittest.
It would appear more than marginally or incidentally feasible that the methodological practices employed by Lysenko could result in an inadvertent process of conventional selection: that given some intial variation in the seed he planted, poorly-adapted seedlings would tend to die or fail to set seed, and the subsequent generations of crops would improve. But the improvements would not actually be due to the mechanism of Lamarkism, but rather to “natural selection”.
And similarly, the leadership that embraced Lysenko’s ideas may well have harbored, on the one hand, a fondness for Lamarkian biology (it had adherents for a long time, and still is not entirely abandoned, even in the West), and on the other hand a recognition that Lysenko would in any event pragmatically improve the crop, whether the effecting mechanism was Lamarkian or Darwinian.
As the years went by, the situation spun out of control; Lysenko was used as a bald excuse for entirely non-scientific goals, and both the scientific community and individual professionals chose (understandably) to go along with the fallacious flow. Much the same happened in the West, in the case of Piltdown Man, except nobody had the excuse that they could end up in the Gulag if they rocked the boat.