Speaker 1: Mmm, Hello everybody. This is Robert Evans. I'm the host
Speaker 1: of Behind the Vastards, and this is Behind the Vastards,
Speaker 1: the show where we tell you everything you don't know
Speaker 1: about the very worst people in all of history. This
Speaker 1: is part two of our episode on Trophy and Lushenko,
Speaker 1: the scientists who got everybody killed, and with me today
Speaker 1: as with them. Part one is Max Sylvestry. Max, how
Speaker 1: you doing. I'm doing great. Thank you for having me
Speaker 1: back to talk more death caused by Russian Well, before
Speaker 1: we get into that, I want to tell you something
Speaker 1: I noticed about your last name, which is I enjoy
Speaker 1: saying Sylvestry. But it's one of the rare names that
Speaker 1: I enjoy writing more than I enjoy saying. Really, it's
Speaker 1: because of the t R I I don't know. I yeah,
Speaker 1: I enjoy writing Sylvestry. Oh, I've always felt it had
Speaker 1: a weird rhythm to writing it. I don't I get
Speaker 1: lazy by the end of it. Especially my full name
Speaker 1: is Maximilian, so it's oh my god. I know you've
Speaker 1: got a lot of ground. When I was a kid,
Speaker 1: I had to learn it rhythmically. I still kind of
Speaker 1: tap my foot. I am my l I a n
Speaker 1: um scantrons were not made for the likes of you. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: no no. My nickname is a kid was SMI because
Speaker 1: that's in my preschool. That's where I cut it off, which,
Speaker 1: in hindsight, what kind of school like only allowed six letters?
Speaker 1: That's not many. There's many common first names that hit
Speaker 1: six or more. Yeah, it's not weird. Um, well, thank
Speaker 1: you for saying that. Round. Maximi is a pretty cool nickname, though, No,
Speaker 1: I did like it. It was like my first A
Speaker 1: well screen name I believe in was Maximi with no number.
Speaker 1: I was in early nice. I mean, I feel like
Speaker 1: you had a choice to make there at some point
Speaker 1: as to whether or not to be a hip hop artist,
Speaker 1: and you you could have taken that road. Well, if
Speaker 1: you can believe it. My middle name, and it's Ukrainian,
Speaker 1: actually is Shaft. It's my mom's maid. So there was
Speaker 1: a moment Maxim Shaft, Maximilian Shaft as like, you know,
Speaker 1: some sort of show biz name felt too much. I
Speaker 1: was like, I can't do it. It's going to feel
Speaker 1: like a bit. No one will believe it. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: man it. I went to a family wedding this weekend
Speaker 1: and it was my cousin with the last name Shaft,
Speaker 1: And like I had never thought about the whole other
Speaker 1: side of the family that are the got married into it.
Speaker 1: Just like the joke of all their speeches was like,
Speaker 1: I can't believe that our daughter is becoming a shaft Shaft,
Speaker 1: she's marrying all these shafts. Oh man, Okay, Well that
Speaker 1: was an enjoyable digression and a Ukrainian name speaking of
Speaker 1: people who had bad things done to them because we
Speaker 1: just talked aboutout the starvation of the Ukraine. There we go, man,
Speaker 1: that is a country that has just wound up getting
Speaker 1: screwed over by so many people. It's really it's remarkable.
Speaker 1: Like yeah, there's just these nations in history, the Congos
Speaker 1: and other one of them where it's just like, oh,
Speaker 1: you guys have just been treated really badly by everyone
Speaker 1: for the last three hundred years. It's like, I like,
Speaker 1: like Italy without the art or food, Um, we're not
Speaker 1: as excited by it. Yeah, I mean I like, oh no,
Speaker 1: I mean, I like I like parog. I just made
Speaker 1: like a you know, every street corner doesn't have a
Speaker 1: parogi restaurant right here in America, right, Yeah, not a
Speaker 1: lot of that yet. Yeah, yet we need like a
Speaker 1: good Ukrainian music act to sweep the West the Ukrainian invasion,
Speaker 1: but not from the or one that Yeah. Ok. Anyway,
Speaker 1: we're talking about troph and Leshenko and Um. Where we
Speaker 1: last left off, the USSR had instituted Leshenko's policies, He
Speaker 1: had purged the scientists of the Soviet Union, the genetic
Speaker 1: scientists who didn't agree with Leshenko is um, and of
Speaker 1: course millions of people had starved in Ukraine and in
Speaker 1: other parts of the Soviet Union as a result of
Speaker 1: scientific factory. That's where we wound up last time, and
Speaker 1: this time we're taking a trip over to Chairman mouse
Speaker 1: China to see what happened next with Lushenko is okay? So,
Speaker 1: as you will remember from part one, one of my
Speaker 1: sources for these episodes was the wonderful book Hungry Ghosts,
Speaker 1: written by Jasper Becker. One chapter in that book, which
Speaker 1: focuses on the bad science of Leshenko and his comrades,
Speaker 1: opens with a quote from a Tang dynasty poem that
Speaker 1: I felt was just too appropriate and inspired a choice
Speaker 1: not to include as we start this episode. I never
Speaker 1: think of poems in books as being like this was
Speaker 1: so necessary, but yet this spoke to you in such
Speaker 1: a way that you want to repeat it? Yeah, because
Speaker 1: it happens a lot in the books that I read.
Speaker 1: For this all off and from a poem, and I
Speaker 1: usually don't include that, but epigraph what is what is
Speaker 1: that called at the beginning? Epigraph? Probably right, I don't,
Speaker 1: I'm not. I just always feel like, wow, how cool
Speaker 1: you know a poem? You know, like that is the
Speaker 1: energy that I feel when I read, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And this one is more I think it accurately sums
Speaker 1: up the mood of the people that we're going to
Speaker 1: be talking about. Seeing all men behaving like drunkards, how
Speaker 1: can I alone remains sober? So alright, that's where we're
Speaker 1: getting into. In nine mause Dung became the chairman of
Speaker 1: the Central People's Government. His rise to power had included
Speaker 1: an extensive and wildly successful propaganda campaign. Mao was the
Speaker 1: great Leader, an infallible genius and brilliant Marxist, virtually incapable
Speaker 1: of making a mistake. After decades of war and chaos
Speaker 1: in China, he promised his people that he would make
Speaker 1: their country into a perfect state, a literal heaven on earth.
Speaker 1: I'm going to yeah quote from that book here. The
Speaker 1: nation's poets, writers, journalists, and scientists, and the entire Communist
Speaker 1: party joined him in proclaiming that utopia was at hand.
Speaker 1: Out of China the land of famine, he would make
Speaker 1: China the land of abundance. The Chinese would have so
Speaker 1: much food that they would not know what to do
Speaker 1: with it, and people would lead a life of leisure,
Speaker 1: working only a few hours a day. Under his gifted leadership,
Speaker 1: China would enter the final stage of communism, ahead of
Speaker 1: every other country on earth. If the Soviets said they
Speaker 1: would reach communism in ten or twenty years, Mau said
Speaker 1: the Chinese would get there in a year or two.
Speaker 1: In fact, he promised that within a year, food production
Speaker 1: would double or trouble. It's too much food. That is
Speaker 1: too much food. You know, it's not good to have
Speaker 1: too much food. You know, you're just gonna piles of
Speaker 1: rotting vegetables. They started to worry about that. So one
Speaker 1: of the things that was instituted as a result of
Speaker 1: their worry that they were just gonna be way too
Speaker 1: much food is they institute a program to get rid
Speaker 1: of the pests. Before the pests could eat all of
Speaker 1: the food that they were sure was about to be there.
Speaker 1: And so for like a period of weeks, all of
Speaker 1: the peasants in China were turned out to murder sparrows
Speaker 1: and mass to try to kill all of the sparrows.
Speaker 1: They did the same thing with a couple of bugs too,
Speaker 1: were just like people just be chasing down birds and
Speaker 1: bugs all day. Sparrows could talk. I'm sure they would
Speaker 1: try to just be guys, we're not sure that we're
Speaker 1: going to need to get rid of me. You might
Speaker 1: want the sparrow, you don't know. Yeah, well they had
Speaker 1: them too. Yeah. So one popular slogan at the time
Speaker 1: was worked hard for a few years, happiness for a
Speaker 1: thousand which sounds good, right, that's problem, Yeah, I can
Speaker 1: think of other countries that promised happiness for a thousand years.
Speaker 1: Was the idea that like they had a plan to
Speaker 1: buckle down and that's just that they would be set
Speaker 1: up with abundance forever. Yeah. That was again this idea
Speaker 1: that you saw in the Soviet Union that once we
Speaker 1: perfect our society, we will perfect the people in it,
Speaker 1: and then none of these problems that have been present
Speaker 1: throughout twelve thousand however many years its recorded human history
Speaker 1: will happen anymore. We're just digging ourselves out of a
Speaker 1: hole because you've all been wrong, the people, the wrong
Speaker 1: type of human sow. We figured it out two years
Speaker 1: at most, maybe, Yeah, a couple of years, and we'll
Speaker 1: reverse this twelve year old train. Yeah. Peasants as far
Speaker 1: off as Tibet would never so much as seen an airplane,
Speaker 1: were taught to expect that in the near future. Quote,
Speaker 1: practically everything would be done by machines. In fact, the
Speaker 1: time would come when our meals would be brought by
Speaker 1: machine is right up to our mouths. Wow. So this
Speaker 1: is like fully automated luxury communist taught to expect. Here,
Speaker 1: And as they say in the Simpsons, people will be
Speaker 1: needed to clean and maintain those robots or whatever, you know, Like,
Speaker 1: people will still have a purpose, you know, but they
Speaker 1: won't need to suffer. They won't need to labor miserably
Speaker 1: in the fields, and they won't starve in the winter.
Speaker 1: You know. It will still be a place for people,
Speaker 1: but it will be in a perfect utopian state. So
Speaker 1: now intoxicated China with his view of what the future
Speaker 1: could be, and it's easy to see why that would
Speaker 1: be intoxicating after decades of brutal civil war and the
Speaker 1: Japanese invasion and basically a genocide being waged in a
Speaker 1: huge chunk of Like they, China had gone through a
Speaker 1: lot of ship It hadn't been a good run for
Speaker 1: them lately, so they were eager for this. Unfortunately for everyone,
Speaker 1: The scientific underpinning of the Brave New World maw envisioned
Speaker 1: was yeah, yeah, See, Mao had spent years fighting as
Speaker 1: a guerilla warlord against the other men who aimed to
Speaker 1: dominate mainland China. In the years before he won, he'd
Speaker 1: become a racious consumer of Soviet propaganda. Much of this
Speaker 1: propaganda had to do with these spectacular record harvests the
Speaker 1: USSR was supposedly but not really having, because remember they
Speaker 1: were lying about that trof and Lushenka was built as
Speaker 1: the greatest scientific mind of the age, and Mao believed
Speaker 1: the propaganda not just because he thought it was literally true,
Speaker 1: but because it ran intoxicatingly in line with what he
Speaker 1: already believed about the world. Seemo was not a big
Speaker 1: scientific reality guy. One of his catch phrases was quote
Speaker 1: we should be like marks entitled to talk nonsense. He
Speaker 1: lectured people about needing to make science more imaginative, saying
Speaker 1: stuff like science is simply acting daringly. There is nothing
Speaker 1: mysterious about it, and there is nothing special about making
Speaker 1: nuclear reactors, cyclotrons or rockets. You shouldn't be frightened of
Speaker 1: these things. As long as you act daringly, you will
Speaker 1: be able to succeed very quickly. You need to have
Speaker 1: spirit to feel superior to everyone, as if there was
Speaker 1: no one beside you. You shouldn't care about any first
Speaker 1: machine building ministry, second machine building ministry, your King Hall University.
Speaker 1: But just act recklessly and it will be all right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: dream big, you know, Baron Munchausen style, just like if
Speaker 1: you will it, come on, just balls to the wall,
Speaker 1: go crazy, like what is science? Is about recklessness? I'm
Speaker 1: not gonna sit down with a notebook and mumbo jumbo
Speaker 1: figure out what all this is, you know, poor ship
Speaker 1: and Beakers, get on with it. Corn should be bigger.
Speaker 1: Do it, do it and make the fucking corn bigger.
Speaker 1: You can see why it would be fun like in
Speaker 1: a world where people have been taught no science is
Speaker 1: about like painstaking research and checking your notes and yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: gradually arriving at truth, chiseling away at that over time.
Speaker 1: Just be like, nah, just fucking try ship man. It's fine, Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're the best. Then we're going to be even better
Speaker 1: if you just listen to me. Don't worry about the
Speaker 1: logistics again. Another thing that unfortunately has no echoes after
Speaker 1: this time. I mean, this was like such a sad
Speaker 1: chapter that closed so abruptly. Yeah, I mean, one of
Speaker 1: the best things about history is that people learn all
Speaker 1: of their lessons from it and never repeat these mistakes.
Speaker 1: Of course, humans change, They change easily, and they change
Speaker 1: a stick I found. So I'm going to guess that
Speaker 1: ma his attitude towards recklessness was probably useful to him
Speaker 1: in his career as a warlord. That could be good
Speaker 1: if you're like running an army, to just sort of
Speaker 1: be daring and bold and stuff. A question was he
Speaker 1: trying to impress Communist Soviet Union with like his adoption
Speaker 1: or was it more just like, no, I also believe
Speaker 1: this and it's worked for them and I admire it,
Speaker 1: or did he want to like get in better. It's
Speaker 1: certainly changed through time, but in this period, in the
Speaker 1: early period of like you know, forty nine or so
Speaker 1: when he gets into power, he's very much trying to impress,
Speaker 1: And I think it's a mix of legitimately wanting to
Speaker 1: impress them and also wanting to be the best at communism, right,
Speaker 1: like that's the like, well, I'm gonna do communism better
Speaker 1: than you fuckers. I was WACAN briefly in seventh grade
Speaker 1: because like some kids that I hung out with, like
Speaker 1: one of them got into it and I didn't really
Speaker 1: believe it. I don't know if any of us did.
Speaker 1: But we went to a magic shop and bought like
Speaker 1: source books or whatever. But I wasn't, you know, a
Speaker 1: teacher's pet type student. And in that brief two month
Speaker 1: period I became like the best at wickanism. I like
Speaker 1: to be like, knew the whole book. I'd like correct
Speaker 1: them and being like oh no, that's that mojo bag positivities.
Speaker 1: It won't work like that, you know, I won't working
Speaker 1: with you buried you know soil. So it wasn't that
Speaker 1: I believed it. If I did like excelling at it,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah you want to memorize everything, yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: oh man, So like seventh grade wiccan uh Chairman Mao
Speaker 1: decided that his extreme knowledge of lashenko Is procedures and
Speaker 1: all of the reading he'd done of you know, Soviet
Speaker 1: agricultural propaganda and whatnot had prepared him to reform the
Speaker 1: agricultural infrastructure of the largest and most population nation on
Speaker 1: the planet. Now, were they going through like I imagine
Speaker 1: their climate is not universally quite as rough as Russia's.
Speaker 1: Were they going through like terrible famine at that point?
Speaker 1: They were, but mostly because they've just been fighting a
Speaker 1: giant civil war, right, so that sucks up the foods.
Speaker 1: So yeah, most pretty much everyone who was alive in
Speaker 1: China at that point had multiple times dealt with famine
Speaker 1: in their lives, so it was like the promise that
Speaker 1: there will be no famines was very powerful. And also
Speaker 1: he was sucking with something really intricate like Chinese agriculture,
Speaker 1: like some of the oldest cis ms in the human planet.
Speaker 1: We're continually operating, and yeah, it's one of those things.
Speaker 1: We saw it an episode on the the East India
Speaker 1: Company and when they came in right and they tried
Speaker 1: to like I saw the first three episodes of Taboo,
Speaker 1: So yeah, I have a pretty clear right, So like
Speaker 1: in Chinese, you've got a very intricate agricultural system and
Speaker 1: they decide to change everything. So like in the Soviet Union,
Speaker 1: Chinese scientists with years of experience and oppressive educations were
Speaker 1: seen as useless bourgeois specialists, too cowardly intimid to make
Speaker 1: great decisions, because again, science requires recklessness. To be a
Speaker 1: great scientist, one had to be a peasant with an
Speaker 1: intuitive understanding of the natural world and a fervent belief
Speaker 1: in the philosophical underpendings of the party. Even children could
Speaker 1: be great scientists. One popular propaganda book from this period
Speaker 1: was called They Are Creating Miracles. It totally. It told
Speaker 1: stories about children in an elementary school who had quote
Speaker 1: developed ten more new crops on its experimental plot. This
Speaker 1: was treated as fact, not fiction. It's a story. This
Speaker 1: is what the story. Schools are basically right, and just
Speaker 1: let the kids come up with new vegetables or whatever,
Speaker 1: and as long and tell them, know, make carrots but
Speaker 1: with tomatoes on the inside. Go do it. Just be
Speaker 1: daring fucking children. Quote it is a story out of
Speaker 1: a science fiction book. But no, my young friends, it
Speaker 1: is not. This is a true story. There are no
Speaker 1: fairytale magicians, no white bearded wizards, have Never Never Land.
Speaker 1: The heroes of our story are a group of young
Speaker 1: pioneers studying in an ordinary village primary school. It's a
Speaker 1: little excerpt from the book there. Yeah, So, the more
Speaker 1: mal read of Lushenko, Williams and Maturing, those those great
Speaker 1: Soviet scientists, the three great luminaries of Soviet agriculture, the
Speaker 1: more smitten with them he became. He would have read
Speaker 1: Lushenkoist journals like Agrobiologia and run across quotes that ted
Speaker 1: Leshenko's ideas to the very mind of Stalin. Here's a
Speaker 1: quote from one of the articles in Agrobiologia. Stalin's teachings
Speaker 1: about gradual, concealed, unnoticeable quantitative changes leading to rapid, radical
Speaker 1: qualitative changes permitted Soviet biologists to discover and plants. The
Speaker 1: realization of such qualitative transitions that one species could be
Speaker 1: transformed into another. So this is the ship Maus reading.
Speaker 1: This is what he's coming to believe. Like you could
Speaker 1: literally change the nature of these plants by like altering
Speaker 1: them physically, like you can change them forever. And by
Speaker 1: what you're saying now is not exactly doing deep dives
Speaker 1: on the science. He's not double checking numbers here, he's
Speaker 1: just kind of like skimming to the last paragraph and
Speaker 1: being like, this sounds fantastic, and a lot of what
Speaker 1: he's reading is tying sort of Stalin's mind and ideals
Speaker 1: directly to the science, which is leading him to think that, like, well,
Speaker 1: a forceful personality can almost change the nature of science
Speaker 1: by like what he understands and believes in the world.
Speaker 1: So Mab began to tell his friends of his exciting
Speaker 1: plans to have Chinese peasants plant seeds close together, saying
Speaker 1: with company, they will grow easily. When they grow together,
Speaker 1: they will be comfortable. Now. Like Ashenko felt that plants
Speaker 1: at the same type could not compete with each other,
Speaker 1: the Chinese Communist Party gained its own Leshenko as scientists
Speaker 1: Lu Tienu, who went on to persecute all of that
Speaker 1: country's experts in genetics throughout the nineteen forties. He mandated
Speaker 1: that Soviet agricultural science and best practices head to be
Speaker 1: used fascist eugenicists. Scientists who accepted heritability were arrested or
Speaker 1: forced to denounce their old beliefs. Soviet science reigned supreme.
Speaker 1: Here's a quote from one Chinese doctor about his experience
Speaker 1: in college at the time, we were told the Soviets
Speaker 1: had discovered and invented everything, even the aeroplane. We had
Speaker 1: to change textbooks and rename things in Leshenko's honor. So
Speaker 1: the Harving Cushing syndrome, a disease of the adrenaline gland,
Speaker 1: became Leshenko syndrome to show it had been discovered by him.
Speaker 1: Since genetics did not exist, we were forbidden to talk
Speaker 1: about inherited diseases such as sickle cell anemia, even the students.
Speaker 1: This meant that all through Mao's lifetime there was no
Speaker 1: policy to stop people in the same family marrying each
Speaker 1: other in passing down their genes. A lot of idiots
Speaker 1: were born as a result his words. Idiot. No, no,
Speaker 1: in the traditional sense of the word. I don't mean
Speaker 1: idiots like they bothered me at parties. I mean they're idiots.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah. What what did China have at that point
Speaker 1: of forty nine or whatever, like, was there a tradition
Speaker 1: of bourgeois scientists that were following a kind of a
Speaker 1: world stage Western style of scientific method or I think
Speaker 1: it was more that scientists in China, like scientists everywhere,
Speaker 1: connected with other scientists around the world to learn what
Speaker 1: they were doing and try to uncover truth better. And
Speaker 1: those scientists probably were not dogmatic about much of anything,
Speaker 1: because good scientists before they died. It must have been
Speaker 1: so annoying to scientists, which was relatively in the scheme
Speaker 1: of history. Yeah, they're like, no, no, none of that,
Speaker 1: and we're not doing magic anymore. Now we got science.
Speaker 1: And then like the new scientists be like, actually, we're
Speaker 1: gonna do some magic. It's pretty magical. It's gonna be magic.
Speaker 1: Children are scientists now. Anyway, you have to die. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Mushenko is theory demolished Chinese agriculture, just as it had
Speaker 1: Russian agriculture. A potato blight hit in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1: Under the Shanko is um, the cause of the blight
Speaker 1: was assumed to be environmental, not the result of a
Speaker 1: stunning lack of biodiversity among the potatoes. Good research that
Speaker 1: was done into the blight was suppressed for decades when
Speaker 1: the findings contradicted scientific or doxy. As a result, maw Era,
Speaker 1: China grew by some accounts, half as many potatoes as
Speaker 1: it should have during this period. I don't want to
Speaker 1: get too deep into the woods and communist botany in
Speaker 1: the mid twentieth I do like the idea that someone
Speaker 1: was like, this is how many potatoes they should have grown. Well,
Speaker 1: you can look like this is how much land they
Speaker 1: dedicated to potatoes and how many potatoes they need to
Speaker 1: make really not die from lack of potatoes. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: talked to the Irish about that. One of the things
Speaker 1: that was really big in communist botany in this period
Speaker 1: was grafting and crossing different species with one another. It
Speaker 1: wasn't useful for mass agriculture, but countless peasant scientists would
Speaker 1: be lauded in the press for like growing grapes on
Speaker 1: a per symmetry or apples from a pear tree, where
Speaker 1: you're just splicing off pieces of trees and so you
Speaker 1: have one tree that grows multiple fruits. Like it's the
Speaker 1: thing you can do in your yard and it's cool
Speaker 1: and we can oh, yeah, I would be like another
Speaker 1: example of magic. That's not true, the idea of having
Speaker 1: two sitters fruits on one tree. And no, you can
Speaker 1: totally do like I don't know with it's like not
Speaker 1: every plant can be done that way, but there are
Speaker 1: a had to burn the guy that I saw that
Speaker 1: had that in his yard you just saw an apple
Speaker 1: and a pair on the same tree and started fire
Speaker 1: his poorhouse. Oh my god, there's nothing but ash. No, Like,
Speaker 1: to an extent, you can do that, but like, it's
Speaker 1: not it's not a solution for production or anything. It's
Speaker 1: a neat thing for your own garden. It's not something
Speaker 1: that is really useful in a mass agricultural scale. Right.
Speaker 1: It takes a lot of time, Right, it's not like
Speaker 1: you might as well just grow a different field of
Speaker 1: apples in a field of per simmons and whatnot. The
Speaker 1: reason not to, but it was cool and it was
Speaker 1: impressive to people at the time, and they were just
Speaker 1: figuring this out. So like that's one of the things
Speaker 1: that would make the news a lot as they talk
Speaker 1: about like look at all these scientists who have crossed
Speaker 1: these two different fruits and whatnot together. I had mesical
Speaker 1: this weekend that had a pair in the bottle, like
Speaker 1: a full pair, and we were trying to figure out
Speaker 1: very briefly and drunkenly, how they got the pair. And
Speaker 1: I was like, well, it's not some sort of ship
Speaker 1: in a bottle type situation where they, you know, had
Speaker 1: a flat pair and then it got fat. I was
Speaker 1: like maybe they put a dried pair in and the mescal.
Speaker 1: What they do is they have the tiny little pair
Speaker 1: in the tree. They hang the tree with the bottles
Speaker 1: so that rose inside. I was like, that is cool,
Speaker 1: but also not the most efficient way to bottle alcohol
Speaker 1: or grow pears. To have a handful of trees or
Speaker 1: perhaps a whole field of them with bottles on the end,
Speaker 1: it seems novel rather than super useful. Well, I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it was delicious, went on so smooth. I
Speaker 1: didn't even need a lime one. Did you eat the pear?
Speaker 1: You know, we didn't drink that much? And luckily, when
Speaker 1: would you break the bottle? I guess? So yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean you have to like get a glass or something
Speaker 1: like a little bit of glass in. I just want
Speaker 1: to drink a mescaled up pair. That sounds delicious, Yes,
Speaker 1: that sounds fantastic. Okay. So grafting and crossing all these
Speaker 1: plants and stuff became something of a meme in Red China,
Speaker 1: and soon the state news filled with fanciful stories of
Speaker 1: pumpkins crossbred with papaya, corn crossed with rice, and other
Speaker 1: such nonsense which you can't do. You can't make corn
Speaker 1: rice corn. You can't make that a year of corn
Speaker 1: has rice and itoked rice on instead of kernels. Unclear.
Speaker 1: It would be kind of cool either way, yes, totally, yeah,
Speaker 1: but it didn't happen. Neither would really fulfill in need
Speaker 1: that I have. You know, I go in for different
Speaker 1: reasons when I'm going for both of those two. Never again,
Speaker 1: will man, you have to go to two different places
Speaker 1: for rice grains and corn cub I'm tired of when
Speaker 1: I eat rice that there's nothing to rotate um, and
Speaker 1: so that would have solved that problem. That's really frustrating.
Speaker 1: So the different districts we compete with each other for
Speaker 1: like claiming wild successes and things that could like go
Speaker 1: in the local newspapers and stuff. Uh, there were stories
Speaker 1: of like a hundred and thirty pound pumpkins and whatnot,
Speaker 1: most of which were complete lies. I feel like that's
Speaker 1: still a thing we're covering in the news today. Yeah,
Speaker 1: somebody grows a really big fruit and you're like, look
Speaker 1: at this big fruit. Yes, and exactly. I mean I
Speaker 1: always feel like it's pre social media. Uh yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: American Heartland Memes was like ten times forwarded emails that
Speaker 1: had just like look at this chiant pumpkin the size
Speaker 1: of a man. This is that, And this is kind
Speaker 1: of how the craze over this new science starts to
Speaker 1: sweep China. You know, at first it's not super negative,
Speaker 1: like yeah, I mean they're definitely not grown as many potatoes,
Speaker 1: but like it's mostly just people being like, well, I
Speaker 1: can be a scientist. Get what I did to this tree.
Speaker 1: Look at it. Look at this photo of my husky
Speaker 1: son next to a potato as tall as he is.
Speaker 1: You know, come on, this will inspired people for a decade,
Speaker 1: a mix of actual, neat little experiments. It just lies. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So we're going to get into the Great Leap Forward next, which,
Speaker 1: um was not a great time for most people, but
Speaker 1: it's called the Great Leap. I know, I know, sometimes
Speaker 1: advertisements are not true, but in this case, the advertisements
Speaker 1: are true because they're the ads for our show, and
Speaker 1: they're great, and we're back. We're talking. When we were
Speaker 1: about to talk about the Great Leap Forward, which started nine.
Speaker 1: It was Chairman Mao's big sort of plan to rapidly
Speaker 1: turn China into an industrial and agricultural powerhouse. Now, one
Speaker 1: aspect of the Leap that's probably most famous was the
Speaker 1: creation of countless backyard furnaces and steel smelting plants and
Speaker 1: peasant villages designed to sort of. The idea was like,
Speaker 1: we don't need to all like move into cities and
Speaker 1: make big factories like the rest of the world. We
Speaker 1: can just have our peasants be like producing this sort
Speaker 1: of they didn't make good steel. Turns out farmers don't
Speaker 1: make great steel in their backyards. Well, we are going
Speaker 1: to need that steel for when all the robots do
Speaker 1: all the tasks in the near near future, that we
Speaker 1: might as well start building the steel. We might not
Speaker 1: have the robots yet, Yeah, we'll get the steel ready
Speaker 1: the robots. Yeah. Anyway. It also involved an eight point
Speaker 1: blueprint for Chinese agricultural written up by Mao himself and
Speaker 1: based heavily in the Shanko's theories. The eight points included
Speaker 1: close planting and deep plowing, real deep plowing, two things
Speaker 1: that by nineteen fifty three, the Soviet Union knew did
Speaker 1: not work. Because again they had this data, they just
Speaker 1: weren't sharing it because they didn't want to embarrass themselves
Speaker 1: by admitting that they had starved a lot of people
Speaker 1: and necessarily with bad science, So they hadn't shared it.
Speaker 1: But were they like quietly changing practices they were starting
Speaker 1: to buy the mid fifties or so like. But yes,
Speaker 1: certainly by the late fifties some of this had started
Speaker 1: to change in the Soviet Union, but they weren't letting
Speaker 1: people know, and so China was just like, I guess
Speaker 1: this stuff works, We'll give it a shot ourselves. So
Speaker 1: probably would have told us, would have told us if
Speaker 1: this was killing people. Prior to the Shanko is M,
Speaker 1: one point five million seedlings had been spread per two
Speaker 1: point five acres of farmland in China right in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty eight as part of the Greatly Before where Chinese
Speaker 1: farmers were ordered to plant six and a half million
Speaker 1: seedlings per two and a half acres. So that's one
Speaker 1: point five million seedlings to six and a half million seeds.
Speaker 1: That's a lot more seeds being planted in the same
Speaker 1: amount of dirt. In nineteen fifty nine, the government increased
Speaker 1: the number of seedlings to between twelve and fifteen million
Speaker 1: per two and a half acres. So they're just dowsing
Speaker 1: way too many fucking seeds in the land, and they're
Speaker 1: gonna hoping that these seeds start talking to each other,
Speaker 1: and we're like, you know what, we gotta start growing
Speaker 1: differently like people, seeds are stronger together. Yes, exactly, dynamics.
Speaker 1: I remember something about um. Every important crop in China
Speaker 1: was planted using this method, and across the board, almost
Speaker 1: all of the seedlings died. State propaganda photographers would do
Speaker 1: things like find a field of wheat that was growing,
Speaker 1: hid a bench inside it, and have kids stand on
Speaker 1: the bench so that they could at least claim that
Speaker 1: the wheat growing so dense that children could walk across
Speaker 1: the top of a field of wheat. So like, in reality,
Speaker 1: they're having huge trouble getting stuff to grow, and in
Speaker 1: the areas where it is growing, it's not growing any
Speaker 1: denser than it ever came in before. But they're essentially
Speaker 1: faking it. They're cropping the photos in a way that
Speaker 1: it makes it look like there, you know, potato inauguration
Speaker 1: is far more populated with potatoes than perhaps it actually is. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and many people didn't know this was bullshit. Millions of
Speaker 1: farmers were watching crops die. The propagandists who you know
Speaker 1: stuck benches inside of fields, knew that they were faking yields.
Speaker 1: This was all essentially a play put on for Chairman
Speaker 1: Mao out of what was probably a mix of genuine
Speaker 1: desire to please the Chairman and fear of what would
Speaker 1: happen if their yields didn't match what he'd already declared
Speaker 1: to be reality. One witness to a visit from Mao
Speaker 1: to this inly experimental field outside tan Jin in nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty eight recalled that before he arrived, everyone grabbed rice
Speaker 1: plants from other fields and shoved them together so tightly
Speaker 1: that you really could walk across them. Once Mao left,
Speaker 1: the rice was replanted. Mao's doctor recalled seeing the same
Speaker 1: thing done in a different city the chair and visited.
Speaker 1: He later stated, all of China was a stage, all
Speaker 1: the people performers in an extravaganza from now so, everybody's
Speaker 1: just like, we gotta, we gotta this. This is the guy, like,
Speaker 1: we've got to make it look like this ship is
Speaker 1: working and weirdly like walking on it is the way
Speaker 1: We've all decided that it is weird spread like it's
Speaker 1: gonna grow so dense we can walk across. This is
Speaker 1: the thing that how else can you say? It's growing
Speaker 1: a lot of fucking corn? Were their purges happening. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I know as a thing people were murdered,
Speaker 1: that they were definitely purchased. Oh yeah, yeah, he's purging.
Speaker 1: He's purging during this period. So now also fell in
Speaker 1: love with the idea that that Soviet scientist Williams had
Speaker 1: come up with, basically that planting seeds super deep was
Speaker 1: a good idea. But where Stalin had been content to
Speaker 1: find scientists whose theories agreed with his own theories, Mao
Speaker 1: saw himself as an innovator. So he figured that if
Speaker 1: planting seeds deep was good, planting seeds even deeper was
Speaker 1: even better. Oh my god, yeah, why stopped there? These
Speaker 1: scientists didn't have the ambition of his magic nation planting
Speaker 1: way too deep. Guys, we all know that ground is
Speaker 1: this deep, But what if I'm just saying even deeper? Yeah,
Speaker 1: even deeper, as deep as you possibly clan. Often he
Speaker 1: would have basically whole armies of peasants dig enormous furrows
Speaker 1: in the land, sometimes ten feet deep, in order to seats.
Speaker 1: It's like, how I is a comedian know that wearing
Speaker 1: two hats is very funny, but you know what's even
Speaker 1: funnier than that? Wearing three hats just go bigger, yeah,
Speaker 1: and Maw would be walking into the room with like
Speaker 1: forty or fifty hats, and everyone would also be like,
Speaker 1: we also need to put these. Everybody get on them
Speaker 1: in they hats. How dare you not have thirty hats
Speaker 1: walk across the hats. In one province, five million people
Speaker 1: were ordered to plow for forty five straight days in
Speaker 1: order to prepare three million hectares of land in the
Speaker 1: north where the soil was too frozen to dig into,
Speaker 1: holes were blasted with dynamite in order to help them
Speaker 1: dig deeper. This logic also applied to rice patties, which
Speaker 1: meant peasant farmer women had to weigh deeper into the
Speaker 1: patties than they've ever gone before, often catching infections as
Speaker 1: a result. In at least one province, farmers had to
Speaker 1: tie ropes around their waists to avoid drowning in the
Speaker 1: rice patties because they were just going so deep. Oh
Speaker 1: my god, yeah, just way too deep. Lushenko is to
Speaker 1: agrobiology also meant that Chinese farmers couldn't use chemical fertilizers anymore.
Speaker 1: Mao had the government in all it's spending to build
Speaker 1: new chemical plants, and instead tried the same sort of bullshit.
Speaker 1: Fertilizer recipes the Russians had used, generally a mix of
Speaker 1: ten percent manure and normal dirt. According to Lushenko is
Speaker 1: m the manure would magically transfer all its properties to
Speaker 1: the regular dirt. This practice lead to farmers just mixing
Speaker 1: in random garbage with dirt. Here's a quote from Hungry Ghosts.
Speaker 1: People in Guangzhou took their household rubbish to the outskirts
Speaker 1: of the city, where it was buried for several weeks
Speaker 1: before being put out on the fields near Shanghai. Peasants
Speaker 1: dumped so much broken glass that they could not walk
Speaker 1: across the fields and bare feet. Others broke up the
Speaker 1: mud floors of their huts and their brick stoves, and
Speaker 1: even pulled down their mud walls to use his fertilizer.
Speaker 1: You know Tip MoU's credit. I know that's maybe not right,
Speaker 1: But if I were to put a little of my
Speaker 1: own manure into, say a bowl of mashed potatoes and
Speaker 1: mix it together, I would kind of be like, that's
Speaker 1: all manure now. I wouldn't be like, well, there's still
Speaker 1: there's a lot of good mashed potatoes in there. When
Speaker 1: you are mixing poop with food. Yes, in person poop
Speaker 1: means all. That is a fair point, but it doesn't
Speaker 1: work that way when you're trying to create fertilized soil.
Speaker 1: So Mao's government expected crop yields to triple after all
Speaker 1: of this heroic innovation, but that meant they were also
Speaker 1: going to have to deal with the surgeon pests. As
Speaker 1: I mentioned, So yeah, in nineteen fifty eight, he ordered
Speaker 1: farmers to run around banging pots and pans to exhaust
Speaker 1: all of the sparrows to death. We already went over that. Clearly,
Speaker 1: this is all like a plot from someone inside the
Speaker 1: government that hates sparrows, just the long play to get
Speaker 1: rid of sparrows. How many people starve if we get
Speaker 1: rid of those god damn birds? Get off my roof.
Speaker 1: Wacky as this all was. For a while, things looked
Speaker 1: like they were going great. Nineteen fifty eight was a
Speaker 1: good year for weather, and rampant lying made it look
Speaker 1: like the autumn harvest head quadrupled. Now, when his comrades
Speaker 1: started discussing how to handle the massive food surplus they
Speaker 1: knew they were soon going to have. It was reported
Speaker 1: that fields had been producing less than three d and
Speaker 1: thirty pounds of grain per one of an acre now
Speaker 1: produced forty five to fifty three thousand pounds of grain,
Speaker 1: which if true, would be an amazing eight of income.
Speaker 1: They have too much food. They should just start destroying
Speaker 1: the food they have now, just to make room for
Speaker 1: the new food company. It's weird that you predicted exactly
Speaker 1: what you're going to need that food. So all of
Speaker 1: that information on how much grain they were growing was lies.
Speaker 1: The State Statistical Bureau had been shuttered and replaced by
Speaker 1: good news reporting stations, which just spouted increasingly lurid lies
Speaker 1: about the harvest. And so for a little while, China
Speaker 1: thought it had more food than it knew what to
Speaker 1: do with. So in the autumn of Chinese citizens were
Speaker 1: told to eat like it was going out of style.
Speaker 1: One slogan at the time was eat as much as
Speaker 1: you can and exert your utmost in production. Peasants in
Speaker 1: a village called zeng Do told anthropologists later that quote
Speaker 1: everyone irresponsibly eate, whether they were hungry or not, And
Speaker 1: in twenty days they had finished almost all their rice.
Speaker 1: They had rice which should have lasted six months. Oh
Speaker 1: my god, So I do now feel guilty that that is.
Speaker 1: My attitude to eating three to five times a day
Speaker 1: is like, well, when it starts to hurt, that's when
Speaker 1: you when you step until it hurts, man, And I'm
Speaker 1: not getting out in the fields and doing any labor. No.
Speaker 1: I mean. One of the good rules of thumb with
Speaker 1: life is that if you do whatever you're doing until
Speaker 1: it hurts, about fifty percent of the time, that will
Speaker 1: be the right thing to do. Your body is a
Speaker 1: way of telling you to stop, which is calling a
Speaker 1: physical discomfort. Yeah, so if you work out till it hurts, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's what we're always And the same thing is true
Speaker 1: with eating or with snorting a lot of cocaine. You know,
Speaker 1: do coke until you start to bleed too much to
Speaker 1: do more coke, and then it's time to stop doing.
Speaker 1: Switch nostrils, switch nostrils, switch drugs, you know, move to
Speaker 1: the butt until your veins collapse. Do it till it hurts.
Speaker 1: Advice for all of our listeners. So Way D, a
Speaker 1: survivor of the Great Bleep Forward, later recalled We Lived Well.
Speaker 1: We ate a lot of meat. It was considered revolutionary
Speaker 1: to eat meat. If you didn't eat meat, it wouldn't
Speaker 1: do People even avide with each other to see who
Speaker 1: could eat the most, so they're have an eating contest.
Speaker 1: They are being ordered basically to eat their entire winter
Speaker 1: supply of food in a couple of weeks, just because
Speaker 1: why not, there's gonna be so much food. I know
Speaker 1: it's going to take a hard right turn, Robert, but
Speaker 1: this is all sounding pretty nice to me, right it
Speaker 1: come on, it's coming down from on high, like and
Speaker 1: if you're one of these peasants after years of war
Speaker 1: in privation, we eat as much meat as you can, like,
Speaker 1: you're feeling great. You're feeling like this fucking communism thing,
Speaker 1: there's no downside, up up, up, up. I can't imagine
Speaker 1: the graft changing. Yeah, we got plenty of meat, plenty
Speaker 1: of grain. That's really all we care about, like other
Speaker 1: than the stuff we have that's not meat and grain.
Speaker 1: But anyway, it seems great for a while. People ate
Speaker 1: so much that by the time winter came around, the
Speaker 1: granaries were empty and most of China was running out
Speaker 1: of food. So there's that hard right turn. The States
Speaker 1: still had full granaries, but rather than hand out food
Speaker 1: to the people, mal convinced himself that the peasants were
Speaker 1: hiding grain to be counter revolutionary. It was very important
Speaker 1: to him that communism seemed to be doing well in China.
Speaker 1: He didn't want to look bad to the USSR, so
Speaker 1: he had China double her grain exports and cut down
Speaker 1: on imports. That way it would at least look like
Speaker 1: a success. Now, oh man, this is like a rom
Speaker 1: com where like two characters hate each other or like
Speaker 1: are too afraid to tell the other person the truth
Speaker 1: because they don't want to look bad. But really, like
Speaker 1: if they just came together and had to sit down conversation,
Speaker 1: which they might at the end of this film, they'd
Speaker 1: be like, we have a lot in common. I don't
Speaker 1: have any grain? Do you have any grain? And oh
Speaker 1: my god, I'm trying to impress you this whole time.
Speaker 1: It would be really fun to do a nice romantic
Speaker 1: comedy set during just Is twenty million people starved to death,
Speaker 1: like Stalin and Mao having a meat cute and just,
Speaker 1: oh my god, what a cute movie that would be. Uh,
Speaker 1: Or a Stalin and Mao buddy cop comedy where it's
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties and they both live in Hawaii and
Speaker 1: like they've got to take down a cocaine smuggling rain.
Speaker 1: Maybe a road movie where they're just like going to
Speaker 1: get more grain, to get you know something where it's
Speaker 1: just like they have to spend a lot of time
Speaker 1: in a truck together in a car. Again. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a lot of fun potential. Yeah, Okay. So the collective
Speaker 1: farming system that Maw and you know, his regime had
Speaker 1: induced meant that the farmers were never actually in direct
Speaker 1: control of the food that they grew in hard sted
Speaker 1: It went into communal granaries and was cooked in communal kitchens.
Speaker 1: All this meant that it was under the direct control
Speaker 1: of party functionaries who all wanted to deliver record breaking
Speaker 1: allocations to the government. So food that could have fed
Speaker 1: people was given to the government for the sake of
Speaker 1: individual party members careers, and Mao then shifted out of
Speaker 1: the country for the sake of his own Ego nine
Speaker 1: harvest had been the highest in a decade, but by
Speaker 1: the spring of nineteen fifty nine, more than twenty four
Speaker 1: million people were starving in China. Mao being Mao was
Speaker 1: incapable of attributing his nation's growing problems to his own policies.
Speaker 1: The increasingly evident failures of the Great Leap forward were
Speaker 1: only quote tuition fees that must be paid to gain experience.
Speaker 1: So it's an artful way of putting Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: he does have a similar attitude towards tuition as a
Speaker 1: lot of people in this country today, blenders in this
Speaker 1: country today. Yeah. When his braver Aids brought up just
Speaker 1: how bad things were starting to look in the countryside,
Speaker 1: Mao said, quote, come back in ten years and see
Speaker 1: whether we were correct. China is not going to sink
Speaker 1: into the sea and the sky won't tumble down simply
Speaker 1: because there were shortages of vegetables and hairpins and soap.
Speaker 1: Imbalances and market problems have made everybody tense. But this
Speaker 1: tension is not justified. Even though I am tense myself. No,
Speaker 1: it wouldn't be honest to say I'm not tense. If
Speaker 1: I am tense before midnight, I take some sleeping pills
Speaker 1: and then I feel better. You want to try sleeping
Speaker 1: pills if you feel uptight. So right, that's a real quote.
Speaker 1: That's maus advice. When his guys are like, you know,
Speaker 1: tens of millions of people are starving, and he's like,
Speaker 1: try some drugs. Oh my god. Yeah, I follow someone
Speaker 1: like him on Instagram. I think I am someone like
Speaker 1: him a lot of the time, but I've never tried
Speaker 1: to reform a continent's farming practices just get high. Was
Speaker 1: maw at all like when these things, when he saw
Speaker 1: that they were not going well, did any part of
Speaker 1: him feel like it's the people's fault for not allowing
Speaker 1: the system to change them or to not like forging
Speaker 1: themselves into newer, better, you know versions, Or was he
Speaker 1: just sort of like a bad weather. I don't know
Speaker 1: about him to say what was going on in his
Speaker 1: own internal heart, But the things that he said in
Speaker 1: the practices that he put out as a result of
Speaker 1: like these problems, portray a man who believes that the
Speaker 1: issues and his plan are due to selfish people who
Speaker 1: are not following the plan, who are hoarding grain, who
Speaker 1: were refusing to give up what they owe to the
Speaker 1: government and whatnot. Like that's the issue in the long
Speaker 1: and the long term. If he just like keeps a
Speaker 1: strong hand or a stronger one, they all work out
Speaker 1: because they're not really starving their hiding food because they
Speaker 1: don't want to give it to the government. They're eating
Speaker 1: in secret and stuff like that. That's his what he
Speaker 1: kind of rounding up fat children and just being like
Speaker 1: you're hiding grain and eating. I don't think they were
Speaker 1: fat children. So at this point disaster probably could have
Speaker 1: been averted. The government had a lot of food and storage,
Speaker 1: and if the flaws in the system had been admitted,
Speaker 1: the bad practices halted and changed back to normal, things
Speaker 1: might have been okay for Chinese agriculture. But that would
Speaker 1: have meant Mao and his comrades admitting to flaws and
Speaker 1: their ideologically consistent scientific theories. It also would have meant
Speaker 1: backpedaling on all of the propaganda they put out, So
Speaker 1: rather than admit any error, Maw doubled down. Anyone who
Speaker 1: does not make a great leap is the rightist conservative.
Speaker 1: Some people think that a leap is far to adventure risks.
Speaker 1: It is new, it may not be perfect, but it
Speaker 1: is not an adventure. All must have revolutionary optimism and
Speaker 1: revolutionary heroism. So y'all are just too scared of the future. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's why this is having some growing revolutionary We
Speaker 1: all go a little. We all got to be revolutionaries.
Speaker 1: Those growing pains might feel a lot like hunger pains,
Speaker 1: but it's growing, I mean, not for me or the
Speaker 1: other cadres, the members of the Communist Party in China,
Speaker 1: because we all are eating well, because disgusting amount of grain.
Speaker 1: If I seemable of grain, I am done. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: threw up more than I eat. My dog was like
Speaker 1: a king. So the autumn of nineteen fifty nine harvest
Speaker 1: was thirty million tons lower than the nineteen fifty eight
Speaker 1: harvest had been. Officials, however, reported that the harvest was
Speaker 1: the highest ever. This saved them from reporting failure to mount,
Speaker 1: but it also meant that the government based its taxes
Speaker 1: that year on the expectation the country had grown more
Speaker 1: food than ever, and so in nineteen fifty nine, a
Speaker 1: year of famine, the Chinese government levied the highest taxes
Speaker 1: in recent history. Peasants were required to turn over their
Speaker 1: total output, and since that total output was a fake
Speaker 1: number calculated via nonsense math, they were basically ordered to
Speaker 1: hand over all of their food, and in many cases
Speaker 1: more food than they actually had. So well that those
Speaker 1: numbers just aren't gonna work out for anybody. Know. They
Speaker 1: don't know, And I bet they get all mad and
Speaker 1: they don't pay their taxes. Yeah, they sure do. I
Speaker 1: didn't pay my taxes for five years. I didn't file
Speaker 1: and it took five years for me to hear anything
Speaker 1: about it. I bet that's not what the case was then. No, no, no, Actually,
Speaker 1: I will say this. Everybody winds about the I R S.
Speaker 1: Like I grew up in a pretty conservative part of
Speaker 1: the world. They're always talking about how horrible it is.
Speaker 1: As someone who's been late on his taxes a few times,
Speaker 1: they're actually pretty easy to deal with. Yeah, they try
Speaker 1: to find a solution. They really want you to give
Speaker 1: them something in the work with you. Look at us
Speaker 1: just defending the I R S here, and they're reasonable
Speaker 1: of policies. I mean I like rhoads. Ye like aces. Okay,
Speaker 1: speaking of something else, I like products and services that
Speaker 1: support the show. And let's let those products and services
Speaker 1: advertise to us and irritate the ghost of mouse dung
Speaker 1: and we're back. Boy, those were some good products, Oh
Speaker 1: my god. I mean, for the for the ones that
Speaker 1: meet my needs. I'm definitely gonnao about exchanging goods or
Speaker 1: money for them. Oh yeah, goods or money. They'll take both.
Speaker 1: Usually trades. Big trade is a bit barter. I'm all
Speaker 1: about barter. Oh my god. Waited to see these clamshell
Speaker 1: necklaces that I make. Oh my god. Okay, so we
Speaker 1: just talked about the autumn harvest, which was thirty million
Speaker 1: tons lower than it had been the year before, and
Speaker 1: the fact that they calculated the taxes based on sort
Speaker 1: of nonsense math of what they hoped it would be,
Speaker 1: and so they wound up essentially taxing most peasants more
Speaker 1: than they had actually grown. I'm going to read another
Speaker 1: quote from Hungry Ghosts. Here. In many places the entire
Speaker 1: harvest was seized. Sometimes officials reported a harvest so big
Speaker 1: that even after taking away everything they could, including all livestock, vegetables,
Speaker 1: and cash crops, they still continue to search from house
Speaker 1: to house. Mal had ordered officials not only to deliver
Speaker 1: the grain quotas, but also to set quotas for pigs, chickens, ducks,
Speaker 1: and eggs. Party leaders went from village to village leading
Speaker 1: the search for hidden food reserves. It was a brutal
Speaker 1: and violent campaign in which many peasants were tortured and
Speaker 1: beaten to death. So again, I r S. Isn't sounded
Speaker 1: so bad now, So this is a real dumb question.
Speaker 1: But like money, taxes pay for the state needs. You
Speaker 1: give the you give the government dollars and they use
Speaker 1: the dollars to pay a guy to make sure the
Speaker 1: roads on for all them. Absolutely, that's my understanding. So
Speaker 1: when they're taking the food and on principle, on principle
Speaker 1: that like, well, we're all afraid of saying that what
Speaker 1: the truth is, um, Is it just so that the
Speaker 1: capital has a ton or are they selling it? Is
Speaker 1: this is their global trade going on where it's somehow
Speaker 1: like benefiting. The idea is both that you know, the
Speaker 1: state is supposed to take care of everyone's food needs,
Speaker 1: so you give all your food to the state, and
Speaker 1: then it redistrict is that it's supposed to perfectly work.
Speaker 1: And of course also they're not just exporting to the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union. They're exporting suporting North Korea at this point
Speaker 1: because it's this idea that like the food that we
Speaker 1: produced will be used, you know, some of it we
Speaker 1: will have to sell for resources that we can buy
Speaker 1: things that we can't yet make ourselves, and we can
Speaker 1: continue to expand and eventually create this wonderful socialist blosh
Speaker 1: that can compete against the decade and you know, the
Speaker 1: terrible West and whatnot. Um, with our spread out seeds
Speaker 1: with our spread out. They're fucking horshly spread out seeds,
Speaker 1: much corn, much soil around them. God damn fertilizer swimming
Speaker 1: in it. Oh boy, Okay, So obviously, willful denial of
Speaker 1: reality can only last for so long as we in
Speaker 1: the West learned with a little war called all of
Speaker 1: the wars we fought in the last seventy years. Eventually
Speaker 1: it became clear that even the heavy handed methods used
Speaker 1: by the government weren't turning up as much food as
Speaker 1: they ought to have. Since Russian agricultural science was obviously flawless,
Speaker 1: Maw came to the conclusion that the peasants were just
Speaker 1: bearing their grain underground to hide it. He accused them
Speaker 1: of eating turnips and pretending to starve by day, and
Speaker 1: eating rice secretly at night. In reality, most people were
Speaker 1: subsisting on gruel served in communal kitchens that was made
Speaker 1: mostly out of grass and inedible plants. Yeah, well, what
Speaker 1: else you gonna do? I think those are now called
Speaker 1: grain balls in l A. Yeah, well, now you would
Speaker 1: pay fourteen dollars to have one of those out of
Speaker 1: a truck, can't. I guess that's the food of this
Speaker 1: city at the end of the year, while tens of
Speaker 1: millions of people starved, the People's Daily newspaper advised peasants
Speaker 1: to quote, practice strict economy, live with the utmost frugality,
Speaker 1: and only eat two meals a day, one of which
Speaker 1: should be soft and liquid, which again sounds pretty much
Speaker 1: like California. Right, come on the run. You know you
Speaker 1: will be glad to know that while tens of millions
Speaker 1: of people were starving, mel gave up meat. Oh that's good,
Speaker 1: you know, follow the leader exactly. Everybody give up meat.
Speaker 1: Oh you we took all the meat, and we beat
Speaker 1: half of you to death because you didn't give us
Speaker 1: your chickens. Life's funny. Sometimes. The Great Famine would last
Speaker 1: until nineteen sixty one and go down as the deadliest
Speaker 1: peacetime disaster in Chinese history. During this entire time, Mao's
Speaker 1: government continued to export grain to North Korea, the Soviet Union,
Speaker 1: and elsewhere as a result of their desire to hide
Speaker 1: the famine and put on a successful face. The provinces
Speaker 1: that grew the most food during the famine where the
Speaker 1: provinces where the most peasants starved. Oh god, yeah, So
Speaker 1: the people who are actually making the most food are
Speaker 1: the people who are most likely to die in the end. Conservatively,
Speaker 1: twenty five to thirty million people died from the famines
Speaker 1: that came from the Great Leap Forward. You will hear
Speaker 1: higher numbers as well. It is very politicized death toll,
Speaker 1: both because people conservatives in the West have a vested
Speaker 1: interest in making it seem higher, so sometimes here fifty million,
Speaker 1: sixty million, and also people who are you know, further
Speaker 1: to the left or even maoist today have a desire
Speaker 1: and downplaying the famine. Twenty five to thirties, maybe thirty
Speaker 1: five million seems like a very fair estimate based on
Speaker 1: what I've read, which is obviously a nightmare. It's a
Speaker 1: big range, but it's all bad. It's probably roughly half
Speaker 1: the death toll of World War two starved to death
Speaker 1: during this famine that didn't need to happen. Oh my god.
Speaker 1: You know, so these bets were the result of many
Speaker 1: different bad policy decisions. You know, the idea to like
Speaker 1: make steel in backyard furnaces and stuff was not great.
Speaker 1: And I'm just I've tried, you know, amateur, you know,
Speaker 1: you go online, you watch these videos, you set it
Speaker 1: up in your backyard, you melt down your plowshares, of course,
Speaker 1: the liquid, and then you let it cool into the
Speaker 1: shape you want. I tried. It never works. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: it's not great. Um. So, there were a lot of
Speaker 1: factors in the Great leap forward and why so many
Speaker 1: people starved, but Lushenko wasn't was maybe the number one
Speaker 1: contributing factor to this fan The blame for many of
Speaker 1: these deaths then must land on the head of Lushenko. Uh,
Speaker 1: it is very likely, although impossible to prove certainty, that
Speaker 1: Lushenko was responsible for more death than any other scientist
Speaker 1: in human history. Um. Although there's still time for the
Speaker 1: guys who made the atom bomb to take that, you know, come,
Speaker 1: but right now it's probably Leshenko. Where is he right
Speaker 1: now again? Oh, he's back in the Soviet Union. That's
Speaker 1: about what we're about to get back to. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So Trophim's dominance in the Soviet agricultural science started to
Speaker 1: degrade in nineteen fifty three after the death of Stalin.
Speaker 1: Some of this was due to the millions of people
Speaker 1: who had starved, but a lot of it had to
Speaker 1: do with some very public post World War two failures.
Speaker 1: Right after the war ended, Lushenko launched the Great Stalin
Speaker 1: Plan for the Transformation of Nature. He believed that he
Speaker 1: could change Russia's climate and make it warmer by growing
Speaker 1: millions upon millions of trees. That might work, if you
Speaker 1: could do it. I don't know, it seems like it
Speaker 1: might actually work. But because he was Lushenko, he ordered
Speaker 1: all of the seeds and saplings to be planted incredibly
Speaker 1: close to each other, and all of the plants died.
Speaker 1: You know, I feel like if you're trying to grow things,
Speaker 1: the essential thing is to grow them, right. He has
Speaker 1: all these other big ideas but can actually now just
Speaker 1: it's like people from growing trees for forever, like we know,
Speaker 1: we know there's forests everywhere you look. Come on, you
Speaker 1: don't need to change that up. So yeah, he tries
Speaker 1: to plant millions and millions of trees really really close together,
Speaker 1: but the plants all died. Of course. Um of course
Speaker 1: they didn't die before The composer Shashkovic had written his
Speaker 1: coral symphony The Song of the Trees, and Bertold Brecht
Speaker 1: had pinned this poem about the forest that was supposed
Speaker 1: to happen but never wound up actually growing. Because anyway,
Speaker 1: don't put your poem before the forest is what I
Speaker 1: always say, you know, let the forest grow in then, right,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of wisdom there. Don't put your poem,
Speaker 1: but well, I'm gonna read the poem for this non
Speaker 1: existent forest anyway. So let us, with ever newer arts,
Speaker 1: change this Earth's form and operation gladly measure thousand year
Speaker 1: old wisdom by new wisdom, one year old dreams golden
Speaker 1: If let the lovely flood of grain rise higher, so
Speaker 1: all the more tragic beauty wasted on science. Yeah, bad science.
Speaker 1: If only he just known, he just needed to like
Speaker 1: have cars with not catalytic converters instead of trees or whatever,
Speaker 1: he probably could have accomplished. Oh yeah, that would have
Speaker 1: the same thing. And I don't know, warming Russia, just
Speaker 1: to have everyone polluted a lot. Yeah, well they're getting
Speaker 1: that anyway. So the way to Chinese eight Rice, we
Speaker 1: just needed to drive pointlessly in Russia. Come on, everyone,
Speaker 1: it's your duty. Just go in circles on the one road.
Speaker 1: In nineteen sixty two, the first generation of post Purge
Speaker 1: Soviet scientists began to carefully try to dismantle the myth
Speaker 1: of Lushenko. Nikita Khrushchev Stalin's successor protected Leshenko for a
Speaker 1: little while, but Kristjev lost his job in nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: and that same year physicist Andrei Sakharov denounced Lushenko to
Speaker 1: the Russian Academy of Sciences. Quote, he is responsible for
Speaker 1: the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics, in particular,
Speaker 1: for the dissemination of pseudo scientific views, for adventurism, for
Speaker 1: the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest,
Speaker 1: and even death of many genuine scientists. So Sakarov is
Speaker 1: spent in some Fireshenko, Yeah, that's that's pretty damning. In
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty five, Lashenko was removed from his position as
Speaker 1: the director of the Institute of Genetics and forced onto
Speaker 1: a tiny experimental farm where he was allowed to continue
Speaker 1: his mostly live based research alone. That same year, the
Speaker 1: president of the Academy of Sciences declared that lushenko wism
Speaker 1: was no longer immune to criticism, because it had been
Speaker 1: legally immune to criticism since sending forty six. An expert
Speaker 1: commission was sent to look into Lushenko's experimental farm and
Speaker 1: study his methods. They found that he was an obvious
Speaker 1: and tremendous fraud. These results were published permanently demolishing Leshenko's
Speaker 1: career and reputation. I mean, I have truly no sympathy
Speaker 1: for this man who killed but the image of you
Speaker 1: know this deeply fallen from Gray's scientist on a small,
Speaker 1: little experimental farm, trying to make imagine whatever with this
Speaker 1: tea should be even more seas. Maybe we just maybe
Speaker 1: the problems we're not digging deep enough. You guys, give
Speaker 1: me too few seeds and now everything's growing, okay. So
Speaker 1: um Trovim attempted to defend himself from this attack. He
Speaker 1: wound up in a six hour debate with the expert's commission,
Speaker 1: where he basically argued that what he fed his animals
Speaker 1: and how he altered his compost for different experiments, his
Speaker 1: utter lack of control groups, all of that was meaningless.
Speaker 1: The details of his experiments shouldn't matter. What should matter
Speaker 1: was his results, which he reported, and they should basically
Speaker 1: just trust what he reported as the truth. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, why would you like as a scientist exactly,
Speaker 1: he's a scientist. Let's go to the last page. Yeah,
Speaker 1: tell make me show my work. The point is whether
Speaker 1: of a calculator or not a calculator. The answer is right.
Speaker 1: I'm going to quote from a book called the Lushenko
Speaker 1: Affair here. He had never troubled himself to be precise,
Speaker 1: and he insisted that precise data were not essential. Shrillly,
Speaker 1: he called attention to biological theory to the progressive biological
Speaker 1: theory that had been developed quote in unity with the
Speaker 1: practice of collective and state farms, and that had always
Speaker 1: enjoyed the support of the party in state. Basically, he
Speaker 1: whined that his theories were correct with communism, and the
Speaker 1: party had always supported him. So why were they suddenly
Speaker 1: being so mean and asking for proof? Which, if you're Lushenko,
Speaker 1: this has got to be confusing. Yeah, you're like you
Speaker 1: guys like me so much. It was crazy. Some of
Speaker 1: the times I'm like, well, they're not gonna like this one,
Speaker 1: and then they're not going to hurt even more. Seeds clostedgether, Okay,
Speaker 1: well they yeah, here's another quote from Loshanko Affair. The
Speaker 1: specialist stuck to their narrow task with devastating effect. For
Speaker 1: Leshenko and his colleagues were simply incapable of sustained reasoning
Speaker 1: with facts and figures. Their favorite device, as the chairman
Speaker 1: of the Investigating Commission put it, was to quote to
Speaker 1: say a single thing and hush up all the rest,
Speaker 1: as long as everything looks good. This was a perfectly
Speaker 1: obvious and deadly accurate characterization, and would have been with
Speaker 1: respect to any of Lushenko's recipes at any time, beginning
Speaker 1: in nineteen twenty nine when he first became prominent with
Speaker 1: his scheme for vernalizing grain. But that perfectly appropriate response
Speaker 1: to Lushenko is m was thirty five years overdue. Which
Speaker 1: we know what happened now in those thirty five years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like forty million people die, so many about a million
Speaker 1: people a year maybe, Yeah, it's hard to out of
Speaker 1: that was Stalin wanting to kill the Ukrainians and the
Speaker 1: cool locks and stuff like there was other ship wrapped
Speaker 1: into that. But it's an impressive sustained production. You know,
Speaker 1: Like I feel like a lot of the big death
Speaker 1: tolls ascribed to one person or like in a bit
Speaker 1: of a tighter window in this it just like to
Speaker 1: just keep pumping out debts. Yeah, because you look at
Speaker 1: like the Nazis and they were murder sprinters, you know.
Speaker 1: Most of the killing they did was like forty two
Speaker 1: to forty five, and then they were sort of out
Speaker 1: of gas. Rushenko is killing people for a really long time.
Speaker 1: You know. You you kill a man's fish, he starts
Speaker 1: for a day. You teach a man to kill his
Speaker 1: fish accidentally, then you've gotten multiple generations of people with
Speaker 1: no fish. Think of the long game. So finally, at
Speaker 1: least the Soviet Union's agricultural scientists were able to do
Speaker 1: actual science again. Quote. The confusion of political and technical
Speaker 1: authority was now declared to be a mistake. Specialists were
Speaker 1: to resume their laborious efforts to distinguish really worthwhile methods
Speaker 1: from those that only seemed so. Period. The thirty five
Speaker 1: year error was not to be examined or analyzed. So
Speaker 1: they understood lushenko wism was wrong. They didn't ounce Leshenko,
Speaker 1: but they weren't willing to look back and really analyze
Speaker 1: how many people had died or how fucked up things
Speaker 1: had gotten because of their belief because that was still
Speaker 1: you know, post Stalin Soviet Union was a bit more open,
Speaker 1: but they still weren't willing to like dig into just
Speaker 1: how fucked up things for sure, and other people were
Speaker 1: you know, shared some responsibility. Yeah, you know, a lot
Speaker 1: of people responsibility. It has been suggested by some historians
Speaker 1: that Trophin Leshenko maybe the single individual most responsible for
Speaker 1: the fall of the USS are. The true extent of
Speaker 1: the damage he did demand kind is incalculable. Lushenko died
Speaker 1: in Moscow in nineteen seventy six. The government waited two
Speaker 1: days to even announce his death, so in the end
Speaker 1: he died obscuring, discredited, But the politicians and officials who
Speaker 1: enforced his shitty science and praised him while he was
Speaker 1: Stalin's favorite were not punished, Nor were the people who'd
Speaker 1: helped export his bad ideas to China after nineteen fifty three,
Speaker 1: when the Soviets knew damn well rushenko Wism did not work.
Speaker 1: But now, as yet another mark against our benighted modern
Speaker 1: age of conman and bastards, troph And Lushenko is enjoying
Speaker 1: a renaissance. I barely got to relish. That was like
Speaker 1: four minutes of him living in obscurity. Yeah no, and
Speaker 1: now he's back to I mean, it's the trophy the
Speaker 1: tro finish trifinissancesheninnis right. They can't all be the Mecanissance,
Speaker 1: all the words the right way. No, it looks better
Speaker 1: on paper, like finishedance on. I can't even pronounce. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: it looks it looks like it should pronounce, but I'm not.
Speaker 1: It's not coming out right anyway. Record yourself trying to portmanteau,
Speaker 1: troph and renaissance and send it to us on Twitter. So,
Speaker 1: according to an article in Current Biology, over in Russia,
Speaker 1: the work of Lushenko has been picked up by quote
Speaker 1: a quirky coalition of Russian right wingers, stalinists, a few
Speaker 1: qualified scientists, and even the Orthodox Church. So it's coming
Speaker 1: back a little bit now. One of the reasons for
Speaker 1: this is epigenetics, which is sort of a new finding
Speaker 1: and genetic science. We've basically learned pretty recently that certain
Speaker 1: things that happen in the environment, like living through a
Speaker 1: bad winter or a war, starving for a period of time,
Speaker 1: can be passed down from parents to children, meaning that
Speaker 1: to a tiny extent, some of the ideas of Lamarckian
Speaker 1: genetics are not wrong. This has been seen by some
Speaker 1: as evidence that lushenk Go was right all along, even
Speaker 1: though epigenetics has to do with changes in genes and
Speaker 1: Lushenko didn't believe genes existed. The other factor is that
Speaker 1: these changes always revert after a couple of generations or something.
Speaker 1: They're not permanent, but like if you live through a
Speaker 1: famine and you have a kid, like right around that time,
Speaker 1: you can pass on certain things as a result of
Speaker 1: the fact that you were in that extreme state. Wow,
Speaker 1: I mean in this, I feel like the simple grade
Speaker 1: school version of genetics and evolution I learned did not
Speaker 1: take that into account, and I probably got answers marked
Speaker 1: wrong that perhaps I feel like that's someone recent. Yea,
Speaker 1: genetics is prettyeah, definitely pretty recent that we've really gotten
Speaker 1: an understanding of it. I don't claim to be an
Speaker 1: expert on genetics. People are still figuring this out. But
Speaker 1: like Lushenko didn't believe in genes, so it's wrong to say.
Speaker 1: People who are attacking the Shengo weren't saying nothing has
Speaker 1: passed down like as a result of environmental changes. They
Speaker 1: were saying you can't reliably control for that when you're
Speaker 1: trying to figure out how to grow better grain. Right,
Speaker 1: And in fact, Lushenko had declared the entire science of genetics,
Speaker 1: to be quote, an expression of the senile decay and
Speaker 1: degradation of bourgeois culture, so crediting him for epigenetics is
Speaker 1: a little bit irrational. Are the people though, that are
Speaker 1: like giving rise to it again doing it out of
Speaker 1: the ideological principle of it. That is a little bit
Speaker 1: of it. I think some of it is because and
Speaker 1: I'm not near I'm not an expert on modern Russia,
Speaker 1: but like, there's this because obviously Russia right now is
Speaker 1: not the Soviet Union, is not anything close to a
Speaker 1: communist state. But there is a lot of longing for
Speaker 1: that period of time for a variety of reasons, some
Speaker 1: of which there are things that we're better back then,
Speaker 1: and some of which is just obviously the same way
Speaker 1: that people long for the nineteen five. Don't think about
Speaker 1: the fact that, you know, water fountains were segregated and stuff.
Speaker 1: So it's it's a complicated thing I think why certain
Speaker 1: groups are starting to come back to these ideas. But
Speaker 1: it is definitely scary because that means that there's the
Speaker 1: possibility that troph and lushenk go is very very very
Speaker 1: very very dumb science has the chance to kill somebody. Which, guys,
Speaker 1: if you're listening at home, spread Joe seeds, um, just
Speaker 1: spread your seeds. Don't plant them too deep. You should
Speaker 1: be able to see him, but not too was together.
Speaker 1: I've known a lot of really good farmers in my life.
Speaker 1: None of them planted millions of seeds breaker like, oh man,
Speaker 1: it's not It's like one of those gross things you
Speaker 1: buy at a state fair that's got like a little
Speaker 1: bit of like molasses and it's just kind of like
Speaker 1: sesame seeds. It's almost like a candied apple. There's like
Speaker 1: a weird I feel like southern dessert that's just like
Speaker 1: seeds and goo and a ball and you know what,
Speaker 1: it's gross. And I wouldn't plant at my ground and
Speaker 1: expected to feed my family. I had a seed gooball.
Speaker 1: I mean maybe it's just a weird thing that I
Speaker 1: was given that I was somebody just put some seeds
Speaker 1: and goo together. Like it wasn't yankee some seed goog
Speaker 1: I didn't buy it at the state fair. It was
Speaker 1: just handed to me by a man at the front
Speaker 1: desk of a motel. I was staying, I shouldn't have
Speaker 1: eaten that seed googall. I'm still digesting it. You just
Speaker 1: got poisoned by someone. What state were you in? I
Speaker 1: just remember like as a kid that it was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, this is not a thing that I'm now
Speaker 1: I would be responsible to turn down a seed gooble. Now, child,
Speaker 1: I was like, this is a dessert. This feels I
Speaker 1: can say as a child in Texas, we have played
Speaker 1: many a good game of poison the Yankee. That was
Speaker 1: everybody's favorite game growing up. On a hot day. No
Speaker 1: better way to pass the time than to kill a
Speaker 1: traveling Northerner. We just love making carpet bags, sick, grinding
Speaker 1: up glass, putting it in their grips, being doing slowly
Speaker 1: until their insides played out. The South those are better times.
Speaker 1: Oh boy, all right, well that's that's our episode on
Speaker 1: trophrom Lushenka. How you doing, Max? I mean, I know
Speaker 1: that's not your style, nor is it the style of
Speaker 1: human history, but I wish the ending had been a
Speaker 1: little more uplifting rather than quietly covered up and now
Speaker 1: surgeon resurgence. It would be nice if people ever learned
Speaker 1: lessons from history. But if there's one thing we've learned
Speaker 1: from history, it's that we don't. Thanks for having me
Speaker 1: on and depressing. Yeah, thanks for coming on and being
Speaker 1: depressed by this. Do you want to plug some plug doubles? Sure?
Speaker 1: I have a fifteen minutes stand Up special on Netflix.
Speaker 1: Go to the Comedy Lineup Part two and yeah, I
Speaker 1: I don't know how to farm. Also, um seed googballs
Speaker 1: dot com use promo code shaft, but I now sell
Speaker 1: these balls. Um They're not good, but they are heavy,
Speaker 1: so yeah, yeah, if you need a heavy snack, if
Speaker 1: you need a heavy ball, Shaft is your man. And
Speaker 1: I Margaret Evans. You can find me on the internet
Speaker 1: at I Right Okay. On Twitter, you can find this
Speaker 1: podcast website at behind the Bastards dot com. You can
Speaker 1: also find us on Twitter and Instagram at Bastards pod.
Speaker 1: So check us out, follow us, tweet us your best
Speaker 1: attempts to Portmanteau and Renaissance. I really feel like there's
Speaker 1: a way. I'm just not getting its finish now. I'm
Speaker 1: not I'm not gonna try it anymore. I don't know
Speaker 1: that's closer. We're good, alright, alright, alright, you have a
Speaker 1: good day. We'll be back next Tuesday talking about someone
Speaker 1: else terrible And until then, I love about you.