Stalin's Super Soldier Experiments - Forgotten History

In the early 1900s, Russia was one of the most impoverished countries in Europe, with an enormous peasantry and a growing minority of poor industrial workers. Much of Western Europe viewed Russia as an undeveloped, backwards society. Then, a population boom at the end of the 19th century, a harsh growing season due to Russia's northern climate and a series of costly wars created frequent food shortages across the vast empire. The Russian famine of 1891 to 1892 is estimated to have killed up to 400,000 Russians. Then, the devastating Russo-Japanese War, followed by World War I, would also prove disastrous for the Russian Empire. The wars would further weaken Russia and the position of the ruler Tsar Nicholas II. Russia suffered heavy losses of soldiers, ships, money, and international prestige in the war, which it ultimately lost. The Russian Civil War would then ensue. Moderates soon joined Russian radical elements in calling for an overthrow of the hapless Tsar. Then, on July 16th, 1918, the Romanovs were executed by the Bolsheviks. The Russian Civil War ended in 1923 with Lenin's Red Army claiming victory and establishing the Soviet Union. Upon Lenin's death, Joseph Stalin would become the newly founded Soviet Union's leader. Stalin would soon embark 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, but Stalin struggled to rebuild the Red Army after the 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 five-year plan for fast-tracking industrialization. And this is where the story takes an insane twist. According to Moscow newspapers, Stalin told a scientist, Ilya Ivanov, I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant, and indifferent about the quality of food they eat. But how exactly was Stalin going to accomplish this? Who was Ilya Ivanov? And what really happened with Stalin's super soldier experimental program? Let's try and find out. Hello, I'm Mike Droberg, a Marine Corps veteran, filmmaker, history enthusiast, and investigator of the supernatural. We will answer these questions on today's episode of Forgotten History. Ilya Ivanov was born in Russia in 1870. He graduated from Kharkov University in 1896 with the equivalent of a PhD in physiology. Ivanov conducted research in bacteriology at Pasteur Institute in Paris before working with the world-famous physiologist Ivan Pavlov. Ivanov utilized the same surgical techniques that earned Pavlov the Nobel Prize and was successfully able to extract animal sex glands to develop techniques of artificial insemination in purebred horses. He perfected the artificial insemination and his process allowed for one stallion to fertilize up to 500 mares, far more than the 20 to 30 by natural means. These results were sensational for their time. He also pioneered the experimental use of artificial insemination to produce hybrids of domestic animals and their wild varieties. He was one of the first scientists to obtain a zorse by crossbreeding a zebra with a horse. Ambitious and confident, Ivanov wanted to continue his hybrid experiments but was out of money, so he made a proposal to the Soviet Academy of Science. In his proposal to the Academy, he stated that he various hypotheses that had been suggested in the scientific literature. One such hypothesis was that of German scientist Hans Friedenthal, whose analysis of blood cells in 1900 between chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and humans showed that they were serologically far more similar than had previously been expected. As a result, Friedenthal proposed that the reproductive cells could be similar enough to result in a hybrid between humans and other apes. Pleased with this proposal, in 1926, Stalin passed a request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a living war machine. Ivanov was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super warrior. Ivanov's ideas were music to the ears of Soviet planners, and he was quickly dispatched to West Africa with $200,000, equivalent to over $3.3 million today, to conduct his first experiment impregnating chimpanzees. With his budget and the use of Pasteur's Institute facility, Ivanov and his son traveled to French Guinea and Western Africa to carry out his artificial insemination experiments in March 1926. Local hunters had kidnapped the chimpanzees from the wild as infants, and all were still juveniles when Ivanov arrived. He quickly attempted to inseminate three females, but no matter what he tried, the experiments would not work, and he was quickly forced to abandon the project as useless. However, desperate to make use of his limited funding, Ivanov then made a horrific decision to attempt the insemination of African women with chimpanzee sperm without their knowledge. He made a proposal to doctors at a local hospital about his experiment, and was ready to proceed when the General Governor of French Guinea, Paul Poiret, rejected the plan. Out of options and funding, Ivanov and his son decided to return home. By the time the two had reboarded their ship, they had been in Africa just over one month. While Ivanov was in Africa, a center for the experiments was set up in Georgia, Stalin's birthplace, for apes to be raised. Ivanov hoped to pursue his experiment again through the use of women volunteers, and he found at least one who was willing to participate. However, when the word got out that Ivanov had attempted to inseminate African women without their consent, he was condemned by the Soviet Academy of Sciences, and all support was eliminated. An investigation concluded that Ivanov's behavior might undermine the trust of Africans in European researchers and doctors and make problematic any further expeditions of Russian scientists to Africa. Thereafter, the Academy did not want to deal with Ivanov and deprived him of any further support. Ivanov was now a disgrace, yet he persisted in trying to get more funding. However, after several additional attempts to receive support for his research without success, one of his scientific enemies, Orest Neyman, accused him of sabotage because some of his artificial insemination farm instruments had apparently malfunctioned. And on December 13, 1930, Ivanov was arrested by the secret police and convicted of having created a counter-revolutionary organization among agricultural specialists. For his expensive failures, he was sentenced to five years in prison, which was later commuted to five years exile in the Central Asian Republic of Kazakhstan in 1931. His main accuser, Orest Neyman, took over Ivanov's position as head of the laboratory, and a year later Ivanov died, reportedly falling sick while standing on a freezing railway platform. This history raises a number of troubling issues and questions. Even though no one other than the scientists involved were hurt by this crossbreeding research, it nevertheless raises serious concerns. When we consider scientific experimentation today, where do we draw the line between sound research and ethical violation? More recently, U.S.-supported Chinese experiments and gain of function on viruses come to mind. Other things to ponder. In what ways are funding decisions based on political considerations unrelated to the direct question a researcher hopes to answer? How does state power influence scientific research, and what relationship do scientists have with those on the receiving end of this power? Programs such as the COVID-19 vaccination plan comes to mind. Ivanov shared in Stalin's belief in evolution. If evolution were indeed true, humans and ape would be closely related enough for his experiments to work. However, in Africa, Ivanov did not use his own sperm, or that of his son who was with him, but that of the local natives. No doubt he believed the widely held Darwinian racist view that Africans were closer to apes in their ancestry than he, a Caucasian, was. From a biblical viewpoint, no such natural human hybrid is possible. God made man in the image of God, not in the image of an ape. People have a spiritual dimension involving our ability to worship God. God does not and will not share his likeness with an ape. But then, what about the case of Oliver the ape? Oliver was acquired as a young animal in 1970 by trainers Frank and Janet Berger. Supposedly, the chimpanzee had been caught in the wild in Congo. Some physical and behavioral evidence led the Bergers to believe Oliver was a creature other than a chimpanzee, perhaps a human-chimpanzee hybrid. Oliver had a flatter face than his fellow chimpanzees, was in the habit of walking bipedally rather than on his knuckles much more often than his chimpanzee peers, and may have preferred human females over chimpanzee females. However, in 1996, a geneticist from the University of Chicago tested portions of his DNA, and he revealed that he had the 48 chromosomes of a normal chimpanzee, disproving an earlier claim that he had 47. Chimpanzees normally have 48 and humans normally have 46. In a separate study, Oliver's cranial morphology, ear shape, freckles, and baldness were found to fall within the range of variability exhibited by the common chimpanzee. Oliver died in sleep on June 2, 2012, and with him any and all rumors of the success of the human-ape hybridization program. Thanks for watching today's episode of Forgotten History. 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