Stalin Planned Army of Ape-Man Super-Warriors
Created: 20.12.2005 11:20 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 11:20 MSK
MosNews
Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the
Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently
uncovered secret documents, the Scotsman.com reports.
Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding
scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and
animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.
Stalin reportedly told the scientist: "I want a new invincible human
being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of
food they eat."
In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of
Science with the order to build a "living war machine". The order came at
a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world
upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to
industrialization: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society
were being created.
The Soviet authorities were struggling to rebuild the Red Army after
bruising wars.
And there was intense pressure to find a new labor force, particularly one
that would not complain, with Russia about to embark on its first
Five-Year Plan for fast-track industrialization.
Ivanov was highly regarded. He had established his reputation under the
last Russian tsar Nicholas II when in 1901 he established the world's
first centre for the artificial insemination of racehorses.
Ivanov's ideas were music to the ears of Soviet planners and in 1926 he
was dispatched to West Africa with $200,000 to conduct his first
experiment in impregnating chimpanzees.
Meanwhile, a centre for the experiments was set up in Georgia - Stalin's
birthplace - for the apes to be raised.
Of course Ivanov's experiments were a total failure. He returned to the
Soviet Union, only to see experiments in Georgia to use monkey sperm in
human volunteers similarly fail.
A final attempt to persuade Cuba to lend some monkeys for further
experiments reached American ears, with the New York Times reporting on
the story, and Havana dropped the idea amid the uproar.
Ivanov was now in disgrace. His were not the only experiments going wrong:
the plan to collectivize farms ended in the 1932 famine in which at least
four million died.
For his expensive failure, he was sentenced to five years in jail, which
was later commuted to five years' exile in the Central Asian republic of
Kazakhstan in 1931. A year later he died, reportedly after falling sick
while standing on a freezing railway platform.
http://www.mosnews.com/news/2005/12/20/stalinapes.shtml
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