Stalin's Planet of the Apes

[Ya Sam]

Sorry if posted before.

Stalin's half-man, half-ape super-warriors
CHRIS STEPHEN AND ALLAN HALL

THE 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.

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.

The Soviet authorities were struggling to rebuild the Red Army after 
bruising wars.

And there was intense pressure to find a new labour force, particularly one 
that would not complain, with Russia about to embark on its first Five-Year 
Plan for fast-track industrialisation.

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.

Mr Ivanov was now in disgrace. His were not the only experiments going 
wrong: the plan to collectivise farms ended in the 1932 famine in which at 
least four million died.

For his expensive failure, he was sentenced to five years' 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://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=2434192005

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