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[Josh Greenman <josh.greenman AT gmail.com>]

http://news.scotsman.com/international.cfm?id=2434192005

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.