12.20.2005

Stalin's monkeyman militia

The Scotsman reports that Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of a super-army consisting of man/ape cross-breeds. Newly revealed documents in Moscow archives show that Stalin conscripted scientist Ilya Ivanov in the 1920s to, in Stalin's words, create an "invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat." Luckily, the usually successful horse breader Ivanov failed in his endeavor:
[I]n 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.
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