perfidy

From the "So weird, it has to be true" files comes this report that Uncle Joe Stalin attempted to breed half-man, half-ape super warriors.

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.

According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin 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 industrialisation: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created.

Along with the red terror, and just around the corner the engineered famine in the Ukraine and the purges.

Mr Ivanov was highly regarded. He had established his reputation under the Tsar when in 1901 he established the world's first centre for the artificial insemination of racehorses.

Mr 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.

Mr Ivanov's experiments, unsurprisingly from what we now know, 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 a Cuban heiress to lend some of her monkeys for further experiments reached American ears, with the New York Times reporting on the story, and she dropped the idea amid the uproar.

When all of his experiments failed utterly, Ivanov was sentenced to five years in prison, though he was merely exiled to Kazakhstan. He was lucky it wasn't the gulags or a bullet, but in any event he died not long after, falling ill from standing on a freezing rail platform.

Bizarre experiments and programs were a near constant in the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was renowned, often unjustly, for pushing back the frontiers of science. We remember Soviet successes in the space race, and their ability to construct a large and well-equipped war machine. But the failures were much more the rule than the exception. Aside from the tragic failures of forced collectivization and the industrial programs, Soviet science was a morass of bad ideas and programs inspired by ideology rather than rational inquiry. Lysenkoism was only the most obvious wrong turn. Further, most Soviet successes were the results of individual genius rather than a system that produced results. The T-34, the AK-47, and most of the Soviet Space program were the achievements of individual geniuses working despite the system. The Soviet Space program largely collapsed after Korolev, the chief designer, died as a result of the inefficiencies of the Soviet medical system.

Still, reading that article made me think: if the program had succeeded, what would the effect have been on Nazi attitudes toward race? Confronted with super soldiers invulnerable to pain and privation, and derived from, literally, sub-human stock, would they have initiated their own program?