The idea that all branches of scientific knowledge will someday unite to create a single, logical explanation of the universe has been captivating scientists and philosophers for generations. In the mid-19th century, Karl Marx made this “scientism” an important thread of his materialist philosophy, and the impulse behind it is still apparent today in efforts to develop a “theory of everything” in physics. In the first half of the 20th century, however, this dream bore bitter fruit thanks to Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin, whose devotion to Marx’s “one science” contributed to the deaths of millions of ordinary Russians.

How this happened is the subject of Stalin and the Scientists: a History of Triumph and Tragedy. In it, author Simon Ings, a science writer and arts editor at New Scientist magazine, sets out to cover “more or less the whole of scientific life” in Russia and the Soviet Union between 1905 and 1953. For much of the book, though, the tragic story of Soviet genetics takes centre stage. As Ings explains, the theories of Charles Darwin and Gregor Mendel dictate that change takes place over many generations and heritable characteristics are passed down more or less unaltered. However, these ideas were anathema to the Bolsheviks: the revolutionaries who overthrew the Russian tsar in 1917 wanted to change society overnight, while talk of inherited qualities smacked of support for the aristocracy. Naturally, they preferred an alternative theory in which organisms change in response to their environment and pass down these changes to the next generation.

In recent years, this “Lamarckian” theory (named after the early 19th-century French scientist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck) has been partially rehabilitated by the emerging science of epigenetics. However, the version promulgated by Stalin’s favourite geneticist, the charlatan Trofim Lysenko, had nothing at all to recommend it, and its widespread application worsened the famines that struck the Soviet Union during the 1930s and 1940s. Despite this, geneticists who persisted in Mendelian views were liable to be demoted, sent to the gulag or (at the height of Stalin’s purges in the mid-1930s) shot.

In comparison, Ings notes, Soviet physicists got off lightly. Although many of them also spent time in the gulag, there was never a physics equivalent of Lysenko, and the contrasting fates of Soviet biology and Soviet physics make interesting (and sometimes troubling) reading. Covering the entirety of Soviet science is an ambitious task, but Ings tears into it with gusto, ably recounting the careers of dozens of biologists, agronomists, physicists and Communist Party officials during one of the most tumultuous periods in world history.

• 2016 Faber and Faber £20.00hb 528pp