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Speaker 1: Mmm, Hello everybody. I'm Robert Evans and this is once

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Speaker 1: again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you

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Speaker 1: everything you don't know about the very worst people in

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Speaker 1: all of history. Now, this is a show where I

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Speaker 1: read a tale about someone or someone's terrible in history

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Speaker 1: to a guest who is coming in cold. And this

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Speaker 1: week my guest is Max Silvestri. He is a comedian.

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Speaker 1: He is a Netflix special as part of the comedy

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Speaker 1: lineup out right now, how you doing. Nice to be here.

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Speaker 1: Thanks for bringing me in from the cold, you know,

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Speaker 1: yeah right right like that before I was alive. Yes, yes,

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Speaker 1: it was a too excellent Yeah. Yeah, but that's me

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Speaker 1: and I'm happy to be here. Well, it's funny Mark

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Speaker 1: you talk about spies because we're not talking about spies

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Speaker 1: or anything related to spies today, but we are talking

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Speaker 1: about something related to the Soviet Union, which is where

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Speaker 1: spies were invented. If my James Bond history let sounds right? Yeah,

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Speaker 1: you know, deceitful people. I don't know. I'm not going

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Speaker 1: to deceitful time. Yeah, every everyone was to seitful in

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Speaker 1: the Cold War. That's what made it fun. Yes, so

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Speaker 1: we're talking pre Cold War and then post Cold War

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Speaker 1: history here I'll just get into it. But the rough

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Speaker 1: title for this episode is the Scientist who Killed Everyone,

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Speaker 1: So that should give you. Yeah, you know, we all

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Speaker 1: have we all have political views in this is a

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Speaker 1: polarized time, right. I think I believe that scientists shouldn't

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Speaker 1: kill people. That's one main views. Yeah, well this is

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Speaker 1: there not gonna be a fun episode for you. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: so everybody's got their own political views. I think my

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Speaker 1: regular listeners of this show will pick up on some

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Speaker 1: of my political views from time to time. They're far

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Speaker 1: from hidden, but I try not to make my my

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Speaker 1: personal politics the center of any given episode. I think

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Speaker 1: it's important to criticize and understand terrible people on all

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Speaker 1: sides of the of the political spectrum um and today's

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Speaker 1: story is I think a good explanation of why. I

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Speaker 1: think that's so important, because this is a tale about

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Speaker 1: where unreasoning devotion to an ideology can lead. It's about

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Speaker 1: what happens when ideas matter more than human lives. Today,

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Speaker 1: we're going to talk about a man who set up

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Speaker 1: to feed the world and wound up starving it. But

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Speaker 1: before we get into that, I'd like to provide some

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Speaker 1: backstory on genetic science in early twentieth century Russia. Don't worry,

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Speaker 1: it's not gonna be boring. It's actually going to start

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Speaker 1: with a story about monkey semen. So, yeah, this is

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Speaker 1: the fun kind of genetic science. Yeah. So it may

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Speaker 1: surprise you to learn that for all the many things

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Speaker 1: rus Russia sucked at, science was actually not one of them.

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Speaker 1: In the late eighteen hundreds, in early nineteen hundreds, most

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Speaker 1: Russians still lived more or less like medieval serfs. Actual

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Speaker 1: serfdom wasn't abolished until eighteen sixty one, and things were

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Speaker 1: still pretty primitive after that. Russia's class structure was stiflingly strict,

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Speaker 1: and science was one of the very few means of

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Speaker 1: social mobility. If you were good enough at science, you

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Speaker 1: could become a member of the aristocracy. So one of

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Speaker 1: these zarist era scientists was a guy named ilia Ivanov,

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Speaker 1: and starting in nineteen ten, Iliyah became a tireless advocate

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Speaker 1: of trying to cross breed human beings and apes. Oh

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Speaker 1: to make like a doctor moreau, I didn't really his hope,

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Speaker 1: No one knew. He didn't know what was going to happen.

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Speaker 1: What are the best parts of monkeys? He was trying

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Speaker 1: to put into humans. It was even more primitive than that.

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Speaker 1: He just thought that it might work. Like he was

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Speaker 1: really just like people were just starting to understand genetics

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Speaker 1: at this point. He was like, I bet humans and

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Speaker 1: monkeys can fuck, and I bet they can give birth

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Speaker 1: to hybrids. So let's see what the reason it hasn't

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Speaker 1: happened yet is because a monkey and human even fallen

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Speaker 1: in love constantly, or the right monkey, the right monkey

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Speaker 1: and human not fallen in love. So yeah, he's looking

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Speaker 1: at like, you know, you've got I forget what you

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Speaker 1: breed together to make mules? Is it like donkeys? And

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Speaker 1: uh yeah, and you get this animal that is sterile,

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Speaker 1: but it's useful, like we we do stuff with meals.

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Speaker 1: So he was thinking like, okay, well maybe if you

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Speaker 1: breed human beings and monkeys together, something useful will come

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Speaker 1: out of it. I heard that like l A, California

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Speaker 1: used to get rid of like fly population problems by

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Speaker 1: basically breeding more of the flies, radiating them so that

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Speaker 1: they were sterile, and then releasing more out so that

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Speaker 1: for like six months or more flies, but they wouldn't

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Speaker 1: make babies and would all die and it would like

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Speaker 1: kill out the population. They're trying something similar with like

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Speaker 1: a disease that they spread through mosquitoes and some South

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Speaker 1: American country to like try to wipe out all the mosquitoes.

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Speaker 1: So like, yeah, that's been tried a couple of times

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Speaker 1: and an easy way to go wrong. I mean, yeah,

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Speaker 1: it seems like, but this was a little bit different.

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Speaker 1: This was um because you're talking, you know, the night

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Speaker 1: early nine, You're talking a really optimistic era of science

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Speaker 1: because because people have learned enough to know that like

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Speaker 1: things are possible that haven't been done yet, but they

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Speaker 1: haven't learned enough to know what isn't really possible. And

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Speaker 1: I'm sure the rate at that time was like a

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Speaker 1: lot of things were being discovered and figured out randomly

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Speaker 1: constantly now that they had like a method, and because

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Speaker 1: they they're just now starting to really understand genetics and stuff.

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Speaker 1: And so Elia at first in nineteen ten, he doesn't

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Speaker 1: really get many people on board with his research, but

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Speaker 1: he he continues to be an advocate for making human

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Speaker 1: beings and monkeys breed. Uh, well, he does other stuff.

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Speaker 1: And in nineteen twenty four, seven years after the revolution

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Speaker 1: that brings the Bolsheviks into power, ely Is working as

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Speaker 1: a sperm disinfector. I don't know what that job as

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Speaker 1: I couldn't find any detail, but he's disinfecting sperm, the

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Speaker 1: dirty sperm out there. Yeah, it's kind of a dead

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Speaker 1: end scientific job. But the Institute Pasteur in France offers

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Speaker 1: to support his attempt to hybridize man apes um so,

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Speaker 1: according to Russian scientific historian Kirol Russianof, they offered Ivan

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Speaker 1: off free access to animals at the institute's recently organized

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Speaker 1: chimpanzee facility in the village of Kindia, French Guinea, but

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Speaker 1: could not pay for other operational and travel expenses of

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Speaker 1: the project. So fortunately for Ilia, he found someone who

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Speaker 1: did have money to pay for the operational costs of

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Speaker 1: his project, the Soviet Financial Commission. They offered him ten

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Speaker 1: thousand dollars to cross breed human beings and apes. He

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Speaker 1: got approval for his project or just total total. That's

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Speaker 1: a good amount of money. Then it was still kind

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Speaker 1: of a shoestring budget, but it was enough to do

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Speaker 1: some research and he gets official approval from the Soviet

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Speaker 1: Academy of Sciences. Ivan Pavlov the the dog guy. Everybody

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Speaker 1: knows about Ivan Pavlov. He was one of the scientists

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Speaker 1: who signed off on this monkey man come project. So

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Speaker 1: it's like, this could really work. Every time I hear

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Speaker 1: a bell ring, I find monkeys attractive. Yeah, like it's

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Speaker 1: wired into me. Probably something we should talk about with therapists. Um.

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Speaker 1: It's important to point out that this was not seen

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Speaker 1: yet as a ludicrous project. At the time. A number

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Speaker 1: of luminaries in the scientific field had suggested variations on

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Speaker 1: this research theme already. Ilia was just proposing to test

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Speaker 1: several other scientists hypotheses. So he's not the original that's

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Speaker 1: mixed man and monkey together. It was kind of like

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Speaker 1: a race to the moon. But who's like, we're all

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Speaker 1: you need to do it because it's out there. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: we choose to put human sperm inside of a chimpanzee,

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Speaker 1: We'll put a man in a monkey. By nineteen sixty three,

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Speaker 1: you go, uh So, I'm gonna quote from a Scientific

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Speaker 1: American article here that kind of summarizes the early research

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Speaker 1: into whether or not human beings and apes can get

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Speaker 1: it down. One such hypothesis was that of the German

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Speaker 1: scientist Hans Freuden Tall, whose analysis of blood cells in

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Speaker 1: nineteen hundred between chimpanzees guerrillas orangutangs and humans should that

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Speaker 1: they were serologically far more similar than him been previously expected.

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Speaker 1: As a result, Freud and Tall proposed that anthropoid reproductive

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Speaker 1: cells could be similar enough to result in a hybrid

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Speaker 1: between humans and other apes. In the following two decades,

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Speaker 1: other researchers, such as the Dutch zoologist Herman Marie Bernoulet

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Speaker 1: Moans and the German sixologist Herman Reudler, sought to test

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Speaker 1: this prediction by insimidating chimpanzee females with human sperm. However,

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Speaker 1: their attempts never got beyond the planning stage, and in

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Speaker 1: the case of Moans, his research plans resulted in him

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Speaker 1: being fired from his teaching position. So other people have

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Speaker 1: this idea and it's pretty controversial, but the Soviet scientist

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Speaker 1: is going to be the guy who gets to finally

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Speaker 1: test this out, because over in the West people have

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Speaker 1: this idea, but they're like, no, that's fucked up. Is

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Speaker 1: it that? Like there's a sort of more like humanistic

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Speaker 1: morality in the West. That's like, well, there's certain yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 1: and that Russia was just like anything for were not

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Speaker 1: found my tradition anymore. Yeah, we can try anything science.

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Speaker 1: So that it's important to get the idea of the time.

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Speaker 1: So Iliya Ivanov heads off to French Guinea in West

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Speaker 1: Africa and starts his research. The other researchers there don't

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Speaker 1: like him, and Elia claims that this is because the

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Speaker 1: station was a disgusting mess and they were getting their

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Speaker 1: monkeys killed before he could inseminate them. The station had

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Speaker 1: brought in roughly seven hundred chimpanzees from hunters in the

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Speaker 1: year before he arrived, but over half of them had died,

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Speaker 1: so may have had a point there. But he got

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Speaker 1: to work anyway, and he tried to insmidate three juvenile chimpanzees. Tragically,

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Speaker 1: that did not work. Since his funds were limited, This

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Speaker 1: failure or convinced Elia that he needed to try a

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Speaker 1: different tactic. This is like a superhero story, like roll

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Speaker 1: up your sleeves. I've got to test out the antidote

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Speaker 1: on myself, is it? You know? It would actually be

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Speaker 1: better if that had been what he tried. So his

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Speaker 1: original plan was to insimilate three female chimpanzees, and since

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Speaker 1: that didn't work, his next plan is to implant chimpanzee

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Speaker 1: semen into African women without telling them what he was

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Speaker 1: doing worse. Yeah, that's a cartoon villain one that I

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Speaker 1: was suggesting. Yeah, now the really good news. This is

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Speaker 1: the only instance in this podcast where colonial Africa is

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Speaker 1: not as terrible as it could have been, because the

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Speaker 1: governor of French Guinea finds out about Ilia's rape women

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Speaker 1: with chimpanzee, spurn plan and shuts it down, and it's like, no,

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Speaker 1: you can't do that, this is a crime against humanity.

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Speaker 1: So Ilia gets sent home to Russia after one month

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Speaker 1: in Africa, and the Soviet Academy of Scientists finds out

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Speaker 1: that he had essentially tried to do something terrible and

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Speaker 1: black balls him, so he gets pretty much shut down.

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Speaker 1: Was this kind of like in England the royal societies

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Speaker 1: of X y Z, where you kind of couldn't operate

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Speaker 1: if you were like not part of you know. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: it's less formal than that, and we'll get to why

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Speaker 1: in a little bit. It had been previous when the

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Speaker 1: czar was in charge things. We're getting more radical, but

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Speaker 1: Ilia in nine is too radical for the Soviet Academy

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Speaker 1: of Sciences because he's again essentially trying to assault people

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Speaker 1: with Champion. Yeah, but in his mind it's punk rock

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Speaker 1: it's you know, yeah, we just need to try it. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: and this is really the end of of Ilia's tale

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Speaker 1: for today. But I think telling it sets up the

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Speaker 1: intellectual atmosphere of Soviet Russian And then I open your

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Speaker 1: eye sheeple. Also, I want to make cheap all that's

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Speaker 1: the other thing I want to do. It's cheap a man.

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Speaker 1: That would have been less horrifying, right, yeah, you for

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Speaker 1: whatever reason, if you're like sneaking sheep sperm into human beings,

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Speaker 1: that's less awful than monkey spur because there's a cuddly aspect.

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Speaker 1: There's some sort of yeah. Yeah. I also this is

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Speaker 1: very dumb. And if you were to ask me, do

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Speaker 1: you believe that a monkey can bear a human child

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Speaker 1: or vice versa, I would be like no. Otherwise would

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Speaker 1: hear about it all the time. But I don't know why,

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Speaker 1: Like why if you can make a mule, I don't know.

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Speaker 1: We're just too different. Like yeah, I mean I couldn't

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Speaker 1: explain it scientifically, but I mean he did try the

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Speaker 1: Planet of the Apes trilogy. I understand that, like we're

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Speaker 1: it would be cool if we could. If we could,

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Speaker 1: I would support it um, although I would want everyone

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Speaker 1: involved to consent to the experiment, but it would be cool. Yes,

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Speaker 1: And you long asked the question on this podcast, kind

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Speaker 1: of monkey give consents to what I have planned? I

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Speaker 1: asked that question regularly, often on the street corner, just

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Speaker 1: to people passing by. I'd like to scream it at

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Speaker 1: police officers. That's what the Scope's monkey trial was about. Right,

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Speaker 1: as far as I've read, which is the titles from

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Speaker 1: the movie where an actor yelled, now I'm imagining inherit

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Speaker 1: the wind, but with like a guy banging a chimpanzee.

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Speaker 1: Like right, it's going to work anyway. This was all

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Speaker 1: to set up sort of the state of science in

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Speaker 1: the Soviet Union in the nineteen twenties. Anything was seen

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Speaker 1: as possible. Human beings and living beings were seen as

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Speaker 1: very malleable, and in spite of how crazy ilyas plan

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Speaker 1: to crossbreed humans and chimpanzees sounded, a lot of really

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Speaker 1: good science was being done in the Soviet Union in

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Speaker 1: the early part of the Soviet Union, and in fact,

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Speaker 1: for a while the Soviet State was the world center

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Speaker 1: of genetic science. I'm asking this because I'm reading the

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Speaker 1: right stuff right now in the space race and the

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Speaker 1: idea of it being like nationalistic. Was there any element

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Speaker 1: of like they had this attitude in competition with the

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Speaker 1: rest of the world or the West, or is it

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Speaker 1: more just its own like the Soviets own at this

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Speaker 1: point that the Cold War hasn't started, so they're less competitive,

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Speaker 1: although there is still a factor of that, but it

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Speaker 1: is not I mean it bumps up to the nth degree,

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Speaker 1: you know, in the late forties. So in this era,

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Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties and early thirties, the most brilliant scientist

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Speaker 1: in the Soviet Union as a guy named Nikolai v

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Speaker 1: Avalov now Vavilov was born in Moscow in eighteen eighties seven.

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Speaker 1: He came from a bougie middle class family. In nineteen

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Speaker 1: o six he started at the Petrovskaya Agriculture Academy, which

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Speaker 1: had been founded to improve Russian agricultural science after a

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Speaker 1: terrible famine in eighteen ninety two. Vavilov had been five

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Speaker 1: years old during that famine, and its hars were imprinted

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Speaker 1: into his brain. He described his life goal as quote

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Speaker 1: to work for the benefit of the poor, the enslaved

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Speaker 1: classified country to raise their level of knowledge. He wanted

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Speaker 1: to discover better farming methods that no Russian peasant would

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Speaker 1: ever starve again, and he was apparently a pretty great guy.

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Speaker 1: Vavalov just wanted to save lives, so when he graduated

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Speaker 1: from the academy, he traveled around Europe, working with great

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Speaker 1: geneticists all around you know, Western Europe, and then he

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Speaker 1: returned to Russia and got sent out to Persia, where

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Speaker 1: some of the czar soldiers had gotten sick from bad bread.

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Speaker 1: During his downtime, Vavilov hiked through the really deadly mountains

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Speaker 1: of modern day Iran, collecting the seeds of plants that

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Speaker 1: thrived in the extreme cult. His hope was that he

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Speaker 1: could plant these seeds in Russia and grow more food

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Speaker 1: for his people. When he got back from Persian nineteen sixteen.

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Speaker 1: World War One was kind of a thing at that

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Speaker 1: point and not going well. Uh. The Bolshevik uprising happened

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Speaker 1: not long after that, and suddenly Russia was the U

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Speaker 1: s s R. At the beginning, the scene fine for

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Speaker 1: Vavlov's career. Lennon and Trotsky were all about science, and

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Speaker 1: then the years before Stalin took over, Vavolov thrived. He

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Speaker 1: took up a professorship and continued traveling the world in

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Speaker 1: search of plants and farming wisdom that could help the U. S.

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Speaker 1: S R. Grow more food. According to Gary Navam, an

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Speaker 1: ethno biologist who wrote a book about Vavolov, he traveled

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Speaker 1: to sixty four countries on five continents collecting seeds. He

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Speaker 1: learned fifteen languages. He was one of the first scientists

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Speaker 1: to really listen to farmers, traditional farmers, peasant farmers around

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Speaker 1: the world and why they felt seed diversity was important

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Speaker 1: in their fields. All of our notions about biological diversity

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Speaker 1: and needing diversity of food on our plates to keep

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Speaker 1: us healthy sprung from his work. He was the world's

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Speaker 1: greatest plant explorer. He collected more seeds, tubers, and fruits

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Speaker 1: from around the world than any other person in human history. Wow,

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Speaker 1: sounds great, right, Yeah. You want to hear how he

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Speaker 1: gets sucked over. Is he's trying to breed wheat with

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Speaker 1: a monkey? No? No, no, he's betrayed and dies starving. Um, yeah,

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Speaker 1: that's this tale. Yeah, it's a dark one. Yeah. No,

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Speaker 1: as soon as you hear about someone awesome on this podcast,

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Speaker 1: it's because I'm going to tell you how they get

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Speaker 1: sucked over. Yeah. He's a great guy. He never did

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Speaker 1: anything wrong that I read about. So yeah. By nineteen thirty,

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Speaker 1: Viavalov had assembled a collection of more than two d

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Speaker 1: and fifty thousand different seeds, the largest seed bank in

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Speaker 1: human history. He was made director of the Institute of Genetics,

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Speaker 1: and he immediately he set to work building a network

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Speaker 1: of research institutes and experimental stations all across the USSR.

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Speaker 1: Bavlov's network eventually included more than twenty thousand genetic scientists.

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Speaker 1: One of those scientists was a man named Trophim Lashenko.

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Speaker 1: You ever heard of Tshenka? I have not heard? Okay,

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Speaker 1: Well like the name. It's a solid name. Yeah, it's

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Speaker 1: it's very Soviet sounding, yes. Now. Tropin was born in

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Speaker 1: six and a region of what is today Ukraine. Trophin

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Speaker 1: was a peasant. He didn't learn to read until he

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Speaker 1: was thirteen. He was so low on the cultural totem

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Speaker 1: pole that there probably would have been no chance of

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Speaker 1: him having any career beyond peasant and Czarist Russia, but

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Speaker 1: the Bolshevik Revolution gave him an in road to the

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Speaker 1: scientific community. He was able to gain admittance to several

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Speaker 1: agricultural science institutes and began carrying out experiments into growing

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Speaker 1: vegetables in different climates. Was the state paying for people's education?

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Speaker 1: Was it like, okay, yeah, yeah, so Russia has and

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Speaker 1: this is a World War two spoiler, pretty brutal winters.

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Speaker 1: I don't know if you'd if you were aware of that.

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Speaker 1: I heard that their codes were not good enough. That's

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Speaker 1: what I remember from was the Germans. The Russians had

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Speaker 1: great coats in that water, right, yeah, swords are one

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Speaker 1: and lost in the quality of the coats and boots

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Speaker 1: and ricks. So a. Famines had been a regular part

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Speaker 1: of life for centuries, and the Soviet government was trying

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Speaker 1: to find out new ways to make that not the case.

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Speaker 1: So in newly minted scientists troph and Leshenko wound up

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Speaker 1: in his Gerby Shan trying to breed cold resistant peas.

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Speaker 1: Now Lashinko believed his special winter Peace would turn the

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Speaker 1: Caucasus mountains green in the winter and feed the Soviet

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Speaker 1: people through the coldest months of the year. He also

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Speaker 1: claimed that he had created a new kind of winter

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Speaker 1: wheat using a process called vernalization. Now ver analysis is

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Speaker 1: the Latin word for spring, which basically what he was

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Speaker 1: trying to do is wheat seeds are different in spring

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Speaker 1: in winter because the cold damages the seeds as they're growing.

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Speaker 1: So the seeds that you tend to grow in the

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Speaker 1: winter have reduced yields in the summer seeds. So Lushenko

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Speaker 1: is basically claiming that by soaking seeds in cold water,

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Speaker 1: he could get them ready for cold weather and then

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Speaker 1: they would grow like spring wheat in the winter. Um,

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Speaker 1: you could like prepare them for exactly used to the cold. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: get him used to the cold while their seeds and

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Speaker 1: then it'll be fine. Then they'll grow really really well

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Speaker 1: in the which again, nineteen twenties science something to try,

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Speaker 1: he gotta try, uh, and he got lucky that year.

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Speaker 1: It just so happened the nine was an unusually warm winter.

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Speaker 1: His seeds did very well. Now, there was zero evidence

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Speaker 1: that had anything to do with the vitalization because Trophim

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Speaker 1: Leshenko didn't believe in using control groups. Yeah, why would

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Speaker 1: you do that? And the most fun scientists shoot from

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Speaker 1: the hip. Come on, Yeah, this is a whole episode

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Speaker 1: about scientists who shoot from the hip. Um. So trophim

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Speaker 1: lied and falsified his data to make it look like

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Speaker 1: his methods were the cause of the better harvest that year,

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Speaker 1: and then he kicked off a pr blitz to make

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Speaker 1: sure everyone in the USSR heard about his work. He

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Speaker 1: convinced a reporter from Pravda to cover him. The resulting article,

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Speaker 1: The Green Fields of Winter, started out kind of negative,

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Speaker 1: describing Lushenko this way quote Lushenko gives one the feeling

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Speaker 1: of a toothache. God give him help. He has a

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Speaker 1: dejected me in stingy of words and insignia and get

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Speaker 1: to faces. He all one remembers is his sullen look

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Speaker 1: creeping across the earth, as if at very least he

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Speaker 1: were ready to do someone in which is it's pretty

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Speaker 1: brutal opening, brutal. There's the picture of him from PROFTA.

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Speaker 1: I feel like that like reads like one of those

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Speaker 1: celebrity profiles now where they focus too much on like

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Speaker 1: how many French fries they ate. At the beginning, it's

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Speaker 1: just like, oh, this doesn't feel like what they should

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Speaker 1: be about. You should be nicer. Yeah, well it did

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Speaker 1: get like Elizabeth Holmes. I feel like of an earlier time,

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Speaker 1: this is exactly like that. Actually, So the article starts

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Speaker 1: off talking about who he's kind of a dour, gross

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Speaker 1: looking guy, but as it goes on it gets more

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Speaker 1: praiseful because the provat the guy bought into what he

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Speaker 1: was saying about his seeds. So it famously dubbed Lushenko

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Speaker 1: the barefoot Professor, which was a compliment in Soviet era Russia,

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Speaker 1: and it noticed, loves the barefoot contessa exactly exactly, and

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Speaker 1: you would trust him to reform your nation's agricultural processes

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Speaker 1: for her, I don't know anything about. Her name is

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Speaker 1: Eina Garden. She was like the head of nuclear policy

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Speaker 1: and now she is a food network person and really, yeah,

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Speaker 1: she had a nuclear policy. She like worked under Reagan

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Speaker 1: as like one of the top policy writers. And then

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Speaker 1: like her husband, who I believe is a dean of

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Speaker 1: a school at Yale, Like, she moved up to New

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Speaker 1: York after that part of her career, and she like

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Speaker 1: opened a grocery store called Preful Contests on Long Island

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Speaker 1: and the Hampton's and it became a thing. And then

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Speaker 1: cookbooks and then now she's you know, okay, well, I

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Speaker 1: guess maybe let her set agricultural policy. I don't know,

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Speaker 1: she seems she seems great. Uh. Lushenko was not so.

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Speaker 1: But the article, yeah, called him the barefoot Professor and

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Speaker 1: and noted that his experimental fields were often filled with

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Speaker 1: agronomic luminaries, eager to shake his hand and witness the

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Speaker 1: miracles of his creation. So in that interview, Leshenko claimed

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Speaker 1: to have invented vitalization, which was a lie. The process

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Speaker 1: was about forty years older than he was, and vitalization

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Speaker 1: does actually work to make plants flower earlier, so you

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Speaker 1: can it is a useful tactic. You can change basically

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Speaker 1: how quickly a plant flower. It's more about timing than yields. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: it doesn't make it better winter wheat, It just changes

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Speaker 1: when it flowers and stuff. So Leshenko's really work on this, though,

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Speaker 1: had resulted in some promising findings, so Vavilov, had had

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Speaker 1: funded him at first had been like, Okay, maybe this

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Speaker 1: guy's onto something. Um. Over the last next couple of years,

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Speaker 1: it became increasingly obvious to Vavalov that Lushenka was wrong

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Speaker 1: and faking his data. Unfortunately, in the Soviet Union during

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Speaker 1: this period, scientific accuracy was not the most important question.

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Speaker 1: Ideology was the most important concern, and Leshenko's theories just

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Speaker 1: happened to gel with communist political theory. To understand why

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Speaker 1: we have to talk about the concept of the new

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Speaker 1: Soviet man so I'm going to quote from an U

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Speaker 1: n T publication called Recreating Mankind that talks about what

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Speaker 1: we mean when we talked about the New Soviet Man,

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Speaker 1: which was like a big buzzword at the time. Lennon,

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Speaker 1: taking into account the benefits of a unified national order

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Speaker 1: outlined by Marx and Engel, saw the immediate allure of

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Speaker 1: creating an objective, utopian vision on which it could base

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Speaker 1: his politics, and he also recognized the foundation of this

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Speaker 1: new ideal community could quote only be maintained if the

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Speaker 1: very nature of man can be changed to conform to

424
00:19:54,880 --> 00:19:58,080
Speaker 1: the requirements of this new order. After the Revolution, through

425
00:19:58,119 --> 00:20:00,919
Speaker 1: this purely idealistic vision that was taken from Marx and Engles,

426
00:20:01,000 --> 00:20:03,520
Speaker 1: Lennon and his party carried out their utopian reforms in

427
00:20:03,520 --> 00:20:07,040
Speaker 1: the hopes of recreating the perfect citizens. Some academics maintain

428
00:20:07,119 --> 00:20:08,960
Speaker 1: that this idea of the new Soviet Man bordered on

429
00:20:09,000 --> 00:20:11,280
Speaker 1: eugenics a lot like what the Nazis we're talking about,

430
00:20:11,600 --> 00:20:13,560
Speaker 1: and there is definitely more than a hint of Nietzsche

431
00:20:13,600 --> 00:20:16,240
Speaker 1: in this quote from Leon. Trotsky man will make it

432
00:20:16,320 --> 00:20:18,679
Speaker 1: his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his

433
00:20:18,720 --> 00:20:21,760
Speaker 1: instincts to the heights of consciousness to create a higher

434
00:20:21,760 --> 00:20:25,080
Speaker 1: biological type or if you please, a superman. So it

435
00:20:25,119 --> 00:20:27,960
Speaker 1: wasn't about making a new Soviet man that like did

436
00:20:28,000 --> 00:20:30,640
Speaker 1: one of a few tasks. They had like a singular

437
00:20:31,200 --> 00:20:33,800
Speaker 1: kind of vision of what the proper Soviet. They had

438
00:20:33,840 --> 00:20:36,760
Speaker 1: a vision that the proper culture could create better people

439
00:20:37,359 --> 00:20:40,119
Speaker 1: by creating a better society, you could change the character

440
00:20:40,160 --> 00:20:43,560
Speaker 1: of the people inside the society the society. First, are

441
00:20:43,560 --> 00:20:45,479
Speaker 1: going to change the human beings so that we have

442
00:20:45,520 --> 00:20:47,399
Speaker 1: a better society. No, we're going to change this and

443
00:20:47,440 --> 00:20:49,760
Speaker 1: it's going to improve the people in our society. And

444
00:20:49,800 --> 00:20:52,480
Speaker 1: that's going to like yeah, so, And that's why Lushenko's

445
00:20:52,520 --> 00:20:54,600
Speaker 1: ideas were so popular because he was basically saying that

446
00:20:54,640 --> 00:20:58,320
Speaker 1: plants could be improved permanently by altering their physical surroundings

447
00:20:58,359 --> 00:21:00,960
Speaker 1: and circumstances, which was essentially the same thing the U S.

448
00:21:01,040 --> 00:21:03,000
Speaker 1: S I was trying to do with tens of millions

449
00:21:03,000 --> 00:21:06,080
Speaker 1: of former peasant farmers. So we're going to get into

450
00:21:06,119 --> 00:21:10,080
Speaker 1: what exactly happened after this and how Lushanko's ideas spread

451
00:21:10,119 --> 00:21:12,639
Speaker 1: for the U S. SR and what the consequences of

452
00:21:12,640 --> 00:21:14,600
Speaker 1: that were. But first, if you really want to be

453
00:21:14,640 --> 00:21:18,199
Speaker 1: a superman, the only way I know is by listening

454
00:21:18,240 --> 00:21:26,520
Speaker 1: to these products and services that support our show. And

455
00:21:26,640 --> 00:21:29,120
Speaker 1: we're back. We just finished talking about the new Soviet Man,

456
00:21:29,160 --> 00:21:33,800
Speaker 1: and Howshenko's ideas about changing seeds by nimping them in

457
00:21:33,840 --> 00:21:37,400
Speaker 1: cold water basically really jelled well with what communist theory

458
00:21:37,440 --> 00:21:39,639
Speaker 1: at the time said about human beings, and so that

459
00:21:39,680 --> 00:21:41,680
Speaker 1: if we dipped them in cold water for a little bit, yes,

460
00:21:41,720 --> 00:21:44,320
Speaker 1: exactly better. Yeah, a lot of cold baths and the

461
00:21:44,840 --> 00:21:47,800
Speaker 1: and the early Bolshevik era. So now, one of the

462
00:21:47,840 --> 00:21:50,680
Speaker 1: first major sets of reforms once Stalin came to power,

463
00:21:50,720 --> 00:21:53,399
Speaker 1: it was a policy of collectivization in rural Russia. The

464
00:21:53,400 --> 00:21:55,760
Speaker 1: government called it consolidation of land and labor, and what

465
00:21:55,840 --> 00:21:57,639
Speaker 1: that meant was that tens of millions of farmers had

466
00:21:57,680 --> 00:22:00,480
Speaker 1: their land taken from them and smushed together into gigantic

467
00:22:00,520 --> 00:22:03,560
Speaker 1: collective farms. A lot of people did not like this

468
00:22:03,680 --> 00:22:06,200
Speaker 1: because it was lane they'd been farming for generations, and

469
00:22:06,280 --> 00:22:09,359
Speaker 1: some people resisted. So in estimated ten million peasant farmers

470
00:22:09,440 --> 00:22:12,520
Speaker 1: and their families were exiled or imprisoned from nine nineteen

471
00:22:12,560 --> 00:22:16,000
Speaker 1: thirty three for fighting against the collectivization policy. Now, Stalin

472
00:22:16,040 --> 00:22:19,480
Speaker 1: had expected us mass and sudden collectivization to increase food yields,

473
00:22:19,480 --> 00:22:22,440
Speaker 1: so he levied increased grain taxes and all farmers these

474
00:22:22,480 --> 00:22:24,439
Speaker 1: taxes came off the top, which means a lot of

475
00:22:24,440 --> 00:22:27,440
Speaker 1: farmers wound up with no food to eat. This, combined

476
00:22:27,480 --> 00:22:30,439
Speaker 1: with the disruption of collectivization, led to a famine that

477
00:22:30,480 --> 00:22:33,399
Speaker 1: started in nineteen thirty. Now a major factor in all

478
00:22:33,440 --> 00:22:35,880
Speaker 1: of this with Stalin's obsession with destroying the rich landowning

479
00:22:35,880 --> 00:22:39,280
Speaker 1: peasants or kulaks, and the wilful starvation genocide of the Ukrainians.

480
00:22:39,440 --> 00:22:41,879
Speaker 1: There's a lot of factors in this, this famine because

481
00:22:41,920 --> 00:22:43,800
Speaker 1: a lot of decisions are being made at this point

482
00:22:43,800 --> 00:22:45,639
Speaker 1: in time. But like one of the key points is

483
00:22:45,640 --> 00:22:48,120
Speaker 1: that Stalin just changed the way everyone in Russia had

484
00:22:48,119 --> 00:22:50,359
Speaker 1: farmed for the last couple of thousand years, like the

485
00:22:50,400 --> 00:22:53,440
Speaker 1: actual agriculture of like how they were doing it day

486
00:22:53,440 --> 00:22:55,560
Speaker 1: to day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's something similar. We

487
00:22:55,640 --> 00:22:57,840
Speaker 1: just had an episode on what the East India Tea

488
00:22:57,880 --> 00:23:01,520
Speaker 1: Company did in India where it was very basically very similar,

489
00:23:01,560 --> 00:23:04,040
Speaker 1: where they just forced everyone in these giant collective farms

490
00:23:04,040 --> 00:23:06,200
Speaker 1: thinking that would improve yields, and what it actually did

491
00:23:06,280 --> 00:23:10,240
Speaker 1: was destroy these networks of like local insurance policies and

492
00:23:10,280 --> 00:23:12,200
Speaker 1: stuff between different villages. So there was a lot of

493
00:23:12,240 --> 00:23:13,840
Speaker 1: that going on. It's kind of an all in type

494
00:23:13,880 --> 00:23:16,240
Speaker 1: thing and larger pieces of land that yeah, when it

495
00:23:16,240 --> 00:23:20,040
Speaker 1: didn't work, and it was not just that, uh, he

496
00:23:20,160 --> 00:23:22,760
Speaker 1: was forcing everyone onto these farms, he was also changing

497
00:23:22,800 --> 00:23:26,399
Speaker 1: the way that they farmed. Now, the first part of

498
00:23:26,400 --> 00:23:29,200
Speaker 1: the famine seems to have been intentional because he wanted

499
00:23:29,240 --> 00:23:30,720
Speaker 1: to get rid of all these rich coolocks, and he

500
00:23:30,720 --> 00:23:33,000
Speaker 1: wanted to get rid of Ukrainians. And in fact, one

501
00:23:33,000 --> 00:23:35,879
Speaker 1: of Stalin's lieutenants in Ukraine noted that the force starvation

502
00:23:35,920 --> 00:23:38,040
Speaker 1: had shown the peasants, quote who was the master here?

503
00:23:38,080 --> 00:23:40,679
Speaker 1: It cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system

504
00:23:40,720 --> 00:23:42,160
Speaker 1: is here to stay. So it's a little bit about

505
00:23:42,160 --> 00:23:44,439
Speaker 1: breaking them, Yeah, a little. It was like early on

506
00:23:44,480 --> 00:23:47,080
Speaker 1: it was about breaking them. But the famine continues after

507
00:23:47,119 --> 00:23:49,439
Speaker 1: the point where any kind of resistance is really broken,

508
00:23:49,880 --> 00:23:51,719
Speaker 1: to the fact that it starts to become a problem

509
00:23:51,760 --> 00:23:54,280
Speaker 1: for the Soviet state because this has gone further than

510
00:23:54,320 --> 00:23:56,520
Speaker 1: they had intended. So there was some amount of people

511
00:23:56,520 --> 00:23:59,119
Speaker 1: they planned to starve to death, but um, it just

512
00:23:59,160 --> 00:24:01,040
Speaker 1: turns out you can't can troll that thing as much

513
00:24:01,080 --> 00:24:03,120
Speaker 1: as you might. That's why I'm always saying you shouldn't

514
00:24:03,119 --> 00:24:05,240
Speaker 1: plan to starve anyone to really because it just kind

515
00:24:05,240 --> 00:24:07,320
Speaker 1: of it. It always spins out of control. You know,

516
00:24:07,359 --> 00:24:08,760
Speaker 1: you set a number and the next thing you know,

517
00:24:08,920 --> 00:24:11,560
Speaker 1: you go over budget. Go over budget. Let's not throw

518
00:24:11,680 --> 00:24:15,320
Speaker 1: starving the baby out with the backwater like that feels unreasonable.

519
00:24:15,320 --> 00:24:17,399
Speaker 1: A lot of good people that deserve to be starving.

520
00:24:17,440 --> 00:24:23,240
Speaker 1: There's good people starving people on all sides. Yeah, yeah,

521
00:24:23,320 --> 00:24:26,240
Speaker 1: good hungry people on both sides. So yeah. The devastation

522
00:24:26,280 --> 00:24:28,320
Speaker 1: grows beyond what Stalin had planned for, and as the

523
00:24:28,320 --> 00:24:31,440
Speaker 1: worst famine in Russian history starts to really bite, Stalin

524
00:24:31,480 --> 00:24:35,080
Speaker 1: calls on both Vlov and Leshenko to offer solutions. Vavelov,

525
00:24:35,200 --> 00:24:37,480
Speaker 1: using actual science, says that he can breed wheat and

526
00:24:37,520 --> 00:24:39,600
Speaker 1: other crops that will do better in the Russian climate.

527
00:24:39,640 --> 00:24:43,480
Speaker 1: It will take around twelve years. Lashenko, using lies, promises

528
00:24:43,520 --> 00:24:47,639
Speaker 1: to do it in three. Can you guess that was

529
00:24:47,680 --> 00:24:50,440
Speaker 1: the famine just because the new farming system didn't work

530
00:24:51,280 --> 00:24:55,399
Speaker 1: or was he actually changing It's partly that you're just

531
00:24:55,440 --> 00:24:57,040
Speaker 1: fucking with sort of the way things have been done

532
00:24:57,080 --> 00:24:59,000
Speaker 1: for ever by forcing people on these collective farms but

533
00:24:59,040 --> 00:25:01,359
Speaker 1: there's also there was there was enough food that they

534
00:25:01,400 --> 00:25:03,720
Speaker 1: could have stopped mass numbers of people from dying, but

535
00:25:03,760 --> 00:25:06,159
Speaker 1: they refused to hand it over, like they were taking

536
00:25:06,200 --> 00:25:08,880
Speaker 1: food away from people who were growing it in like Ukraine,

537
00:25:09,160 --> 00:25:11,119
Speaker 1: because they wanted to starve a lot of those people

538
00:25:11,280 --> 00:25:13,560
Speaker 1: and they were So it was a mix of things

539
00:25:14,440 --> 00:25:17,760
Speaker 1: because they literally didn't have access to that's was a

540
00:25:17,800 --> 00:25:19,760
Speaker 1: lot of the family. Like there still would have been

541
00:25:19,840 --> 00:25:21,720
Speaker 1: some problem as a result of this, and there had

542
00:25:21,760 --> 00:25:24,200
Speaker 1: been famine, you know, a few years earlier as a

543
00:25:24,240 --> 00:25:27,400
Speaker 1: result of the civil war too. But I'm half Ukrainian

544
00:25:27,440 --> 00:25:29,720
Speaker 1: and I knew my ancestor had come to this country

545
00:25:29,720 --> 00:25:31,040
Speaker 1: because he killed someone in a bar fight. But it

546
00:25:31,040 --> 00:25:33,680
Speaker 1: also seems like there were other bad things coming on. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

547
00:25:33,720 --> 00:25:36,480
Speaker 1: The Holodomor is what the Ukrainians call, and it was

548
00:25:36,480 --> 00:25:39,240
Speaker 1: probably between three and five million Ukrainians starf to death,

549
00:25:39,280 --> 00:25:43,240
Speaker 1: and most of those deaths were intentional. Um but again

550
00:25:43,280 --> 00:25:47,560
Speaker 1: it it quickly goes beyond that. So Stalin d acts Leshenko.

551
00:25:47,720 --> 00:25:51,600
Speaker 1: There's some debate as to why he liked Lushenko so much.

552
00:25:51,720 --> 00:25:55,160
Speaker 1: Some of the sources say that Stalin just liked ideologically

553
00:25:55,160 --> 00:25:57,440
Speaker 1: what with Lushenko was saying and didn't never really talk

554
00:25:57,520 --> 00:25:59,240
Speaker 1: to the guy very much. And there's other sources that

555
00:25:59,320 --> 00:26:02,840
Speaker 1: say Leshenko and Stalin worked closely together and Lushenko basically

556
00:26:02,920 --> 00:26:05,000
Speaker 1: charmed him. Someone to read a quote from book Stalinist

557
00:26:05,080 --> 00:26:08,600
Speaker 1: Genetics that takes the attitude that Lushenko was buddy buddy

558
00:26:08,640 --> 00:26:10,760
Speaker 1: with Stalin and convinced him to sort of back his

559
00:26:10,880 --> 00:26:14,919
Speaker 1: science by being a charming motherfucker. So, although a mediocrity

560
00:26:14,920 --> 00:26:17,600
Speaker 1: and scientific questions, Leshenko was highly talented in the art

561
00:26:17,600 --> 00:26:19,760
Speaker 1: of leading an ideological fight and of surviving in the

562
00:26:19,840 --> 00:26:23,640
Speaker 1: midst of Stalinist terror unerringly divining the boss's wishes and anxieties,

563
00:26:23,880 --> 00:26:27,040
Speaker 1: Leshenko came to the four thanks to his considerable natural talents.

564
00:26:27,160 --> 00:26:29,200
Speaker 1: He fought for position to top the pyramid of power

565
00:26:29,240 --> 00:26:30,840
Speaker 1: and won it not by chance or by a whim

566
00:26:30,880 --> 00:26:33,040
Speaker 1: of Stalin's but by his skill in waging the kind

567
00:26:33,040 --> 00:26:36,199
Speaker 1: of battle that was necessary. He outfoxed even Stalin and

568
00:26:36,280 --> 00:26:38,560
Speaker 1: was able to pull the wool over his eyes even

569
00:26:38,560 --> 00:26:41,240
Speaker 1: when other party leaders already had seen through Lushenko, thanks

570
00:26:41,240 --> 00:26:44,000
Speaker 1: to his courtiers, intuition and his shrewdness. Thanks to his

571
00:26:44,040 --> 00:26:47,199
Speaker 1: ability to divine Stalin's secret designs, he always struck the

572
00:26:47,280 --> 00:26:50,760
Speaker 1: right chord with the Great Helmsman, never arousing his irritation.

573
00:26:51,359 --> 00:26:53,879
Speaker 1: They called Stalin the great Helmsman, and yeah, which at

574
00:26:53,920 --> 00:26:56,280
Speaker 1: this point, he's like ramming rocks just to see what

575
00:26:56,359 --> 00:26:59,680
Speaker 1: happens when the boat hits them right right, and it

576
00:26:59,720 --> 00:27:01,920
Speaker 1: seems to be working. What's Vavilov feel at this point

577
00:27:01,960 --> 00:27:04,520
Speaker 1: about Lushenko? I mean, he knows the science isn't Vavilov

578
00:27:04,720 --> 00:27:06,919
Speaker 1: does not like Lushenko, but it's also he has to

579
00:27:06,920 --> 00:27:09,040
Speaker 1: be very careful about how he goes about opposing him,

580
00:27:09,080 --> 00:27:12,880
Speaker 1: because Lushenko is ideologically correct. Yeah, and it's also really

581
00:27:12,880 --> 00:27:15,399
Speaker 1: worth noting that Vavolov is is bougie. He comes from

582
00:27:15,440 --> 00:27:18,359
Speaker 1: an upper middle class background and that is toxic in

583
00:27:18,680 --> 00:27:21,919
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union's period. Lushenko is a peasant, so that

584
00:27:22,080 --> 00:27:23,679
Speaker 1: counts for a lot as well. And most of the

585
00:27:23,760 --> 00:27:26,440
Speaker 1: actual talented scientists in the U S s are are

586
00:27:26,520 --> 00:27:28,879
Speaker 1: people who had grown up well here because they were

587
00:27:28,920 --> 00:27:31,080
Speaker 1: able to afford to go to college and stuff and

588
00:27:31,119 --> 00:27:33,320
Speaker 1: to like study science as young men rather than having

589
00:27:33,359 --> 00:27:36,160
Speaker 1: to support their families. So these are the best scientists

590
00:27:36,200 --> 00:27:37,919
Speaker 1: in the U S s R at this point, But

591
00:27:37,960 --> 00:27:40,439
Speaker 1: they're also bougie, which means they're not trusted by the

592
00:27:40,520 --> 00:27:43,560
Speaker 1: Soviet leaders. There's not a lot of hard scrabble scientists

593
00:27:43,600 --> 00:27:46,480
Speaker 1: like Leshenko. Yeah, you know, yeah, unless she's not really

594
00:27:46,520 --> 00:27:49,520
Speaker 1: a scientist. He just calls himself a scientist. Yeah, he's

595
00:27:49,520 --> 00:27:52,080
Speaker 1: just a bullshit artist. But he's got the right background,

596
00:27:52,200 --> 00:27:55,520
Speaker 1: and so that puts him above these guys who actually

597
00:27:55,520 --> 00:27:57,800
Speaker 1: know what they're doing and have decades of experience doing

598
00:27:57,920 --> 00:28:01,680
Speaker 1: real science. There's definitely no echoes of that never later

599
00:28:01,720 --> 00:28:04,720
Speaker 1: in history. You know, people have never supported someone who

600
00:28:04,720 --> 00:28:07,960
Speaker 1: doesn't know anything because they wanted to stop supporting the

601
00:28:08,000 --> 00:28:10,359
Speaker 1: people who were experts. And it's like that, that's not

602
00:28:10,440 --> 00:28:13,960
Speaker 1: something that's every only happened in Russia this one time,

603
00:28:14,040 --> 00:28:17,199
Speaker 1: thank god, thank god. Uh So, yeah, in in that

604
00:28:17,240 --> 00:28:21,040
Speaker 1: first profile article in Pravda, had praised Lushenko for working

605
00:28:21,040 --> 00:28:23,399
Speaker 1: for the people rather than study and quote the hairy

606
00:28:23,480 --> 00:28:27,000
Speaker 1: legs of flies. Um, yeah, this is a reference to

607
00:28:27,000 --> 00:28:29,520
Speaker 1: fruit flies, which were then in our today the number

608
00:28:29,520 --> 00:28:32,520
Speaker 1: one workhorse critter for genetic research because they breed so

609
00:28:32,600 --> 00:28:35,000
Speaker 1: quickly you can test a lot of different genetic stuff.

610
00:28:35,000 --> 00:28:37,240
Speaker 1: I'm not a geneticist, but they're they're very important. You

611
00:28:37,280 --> 00:28:41,360
Speaker 1: can't have a lot of really crucial genetic research about

612
00:28:41,400 --> 00:28:43,520
Speaker 1: using fruit flies because they're just very easy to study

613
00:28:43,560 --> 00:28:45,440
Speaker 1: this kind of stuff with um or at least I

614
00:28:45,440 --> 00:28:48,400
Speaker 1: should say that the number one workhorse of Mandelian genetics.

615
00:28:48,600 --> 00:28:51,160
Speaker 1: Have you heard of Gregor Mendel. I feel like I've

616
00:28:51,200 --> 00:28:52,880
Speaker 1: heard the name, but I don't know what that means. Yeah,

617
00:28:52,960 --> 00:28:54,400
Speaker 1: he's one of those guys you would have come across

618
00:28:54,400 --> 00:28:56,280
Speaker 1: in high school. He was. He was an Austrian monk

619
00:28:56,320 --> 00:28:58,440
Speaker 1: and a scientist who bred a bunch of pea plants

620
00:28:58,440 --> 00:29:00,400
Speaker 1: and figured out the laws of heredity. He kind of

621
00:29:00,400 --> 00:29:04,160
Speaker 1: invented modern genetic science. Like he's down passed down to

622
00:29:04,200 --> 00:29:06,200
Speaker 1: that which is passed down to that, like what Newton

623
00:29:06,360 --> 00:29:09,360
Speaker 1: is to physics, he is to genetics. Like he's that

624
00:29:09,520 --> 00:29:11,840
Speaker 1: level of like foundational mind. And he came up with

625
00:29:11,840 --> 00:29:14,440
Speaker 1: the idea of recessive and dominant traits. He figured out

626
00:29:14,520 --> 00:29:16,720
Speaker 1: genes were a thing, although he used the term factors

627
00:29:16,880 --> 00:29:19,440
Speaker 1: not genes, but he came up with like he was

628
00:29:19,480 --> 00:29:21,520
Speaker 1: the first guy to understand that sort of stuff, right,

629
00:29:21,840 --> 00:29:23,960
Speaker 1: So he's he's a big dude. But trouphm Leshenko was

630
00:29:24,000 --> 00:29:26,400
Speaker 1: pretty sure Mindell was full of ship because trophim Leshenko

631
00:29:26,440 --> 00:29:29,080
Speaker 1: did not believe in genes or heredity, and instead he

632
00:29:29,080 --> 00:29:31,560
Speaker 1: thought that plants could be educated to grow in different climates.

633
00:29:31,560 --> 00:29:34,000
Speaker 1: Because plants had free will, they could choose to mature

634
00:29:34,000 --> 00:29:35,959
Speaker 1: in certain ways to meet their environment if they were

635
00:29:35,960 --> 00:29:38,680
Speaker 1: properly educated. This is why you could educate a seed

636
00:29:38,720 --> 00:29:41,000
Speaker 1: to survive the winter by freezing it before planting it.

637
00:29:41,360 --> 00:29:44,240
Speaker 1: And it's like playing music at your house plants. Yeah,

638
00:29:44,280 --> 00:29:47,040
Speaker 1: but crazier. I think there might be some I don't know.

639
00:29:47,080 --> 00:29:48,959
Speaker 1: I know that the science on that isn't as settled

640
00:29:48,960 --> 00:29:50,880
Speaker 1: as people who play beeto and for their plants want

641
00:29:50,880 --> 00:29:54,120
Speaker 1: to pretend. But like, that's less crazy than freezing a

642
00:29:54,200 --> 00:29:57,440
Speaker 1: seed because it will choose to grow better in the cold. Yeah.

643
00:29:57,440 --> 00:29:59,880
Speaker 1: And I certainly wouldn't like plan to feed my population

644
00:30:00,240 --> 00:30:03,120
Speaker 1: of people by playing Bates Oven for all the plans.

645
00:30:03,120 --> 00:30:04,560
Speaker 1: I would be like, well, it might help, but let's

646
00:30:04,560 --> 00:30:06,360
Speaker 1: not count on it. But let's not let's not base

647
00:30:06,400 --> 00:30:08,560
Speaker 1: all of our agriculture on it. So Lushenka was not

648
00:30:08,640 --> 00:30:11,720
Speaker 1: totally alone and rejecting Mandeli and genetics at this point. Again,

649
00:30:11,720 --> 00:30:14,520
Speaker 1: it's a different era. There was another guy, Lamark, who

650
00:30:14,520 --> 00:30:17,480
Speaker 1: had proposed totally different ideas about heredibility and had basically

651
00:30:17,480 --> 00:30:20,400
Speaker 1: concluded that the environment drove heredity. Like. One of his

652
00:30:20,440 --> 00:30:23,120
Speaker 1: big things was that giraffe's next were longer because many

653
00:30:23,160 --> 00:30:25,840
Speaker 1: generations of giraffes had been just stretching their necks further

654
00:30:25,960 --> 00:30:29,040
Speaker 1: inverted for feet to reach food. Yeah, this is not

655
00:30:31,120 --> 00:30:34,040
Speaker 1: the Yeah, it's like, if you do a lot of yoga,

656
00:30:34,080 --> 00:30:36,160
Speaker 1: your kid will grow up great at yoga. This is

657
00:30:36,200 --> 00:30:38,520
Speaker 1: not how genetics work. But at this point in time,

658
00:30:38,600 --> 00:30:42,040
Speaker 1: hit like whiskey was legally considered medicine, so it's it's

659
00:30:42,120 --> 00:30:46,160
Speaker 1: nothing against Lamark eighteen hundreds of the time. Yeah, exactly. Now,

660
00:30:46,240 --> 00:30:50,760
Speaker 1: Lashenko praised Lamarckian genetics, calling it perfectly correct and entirely scientific.

661
00:30:50,920 --> 00:30:54,320
Speaker 1: But he couldn't really use Lamark as his sort of

662
00:30:54,360 --> 00:30:56,360
Speaker 1: guy in the past to call to because Lamark had

663
00:30:56,360 --> 00:30:58,959
Speaker 1: been a nobleman. I forget what country he came from,

664
00:30:59,040 --> 00:31:01,920
Speaker 1: but he was like a member of the aristocracy, which

665
00:31:01,960 --> 00:31:05,280
Speaker 1: meant that he didn't have good Bolshevik credentials either. So

666
00:31:05,320 --> 00:31:09,080
Speaker 1: instead Lushanko declared himself the advocate of a Bolsheviks scientist

667
00:31:09,160 --> 00:31:11,600
Speaker 1: named Maturan. Now Maturon had died in nineteen thirty five,

668
00:31:11,680 --> 00:31:14,040
Speaker 1: but for a while he was a very famous Soviet scientist.

669
00:31:14,360 --> 00:31:17,080
Speaker 1: He had been a Lamarchian and claimed that intuition mattered

670
00:31:17,080 --> 00:31:20,560
Speaker 1: more than education and science. Maturin had called educated scientists

671
00:31:20,560 --> 00:31:24,720
Speaker 1: like Vavilov the cast priests of Jabbrology. Yeah, so it's

672
00:31:24,720 --> 00:31:27,640
Speaker 1: a great phrase. Yeah it is jabbrology. Yeah, the cast

673
00:31:27,680 --> 00:31:30,120
Speaker 1: Priests of Gabrology. Feels like a young adult fantasy novel

674
00:31:30,160 --> 00:31:33,280
Speaker 1: that I would have read a high schooler, does it? Yeah,

675
00:31:33,400 --> 00:31:35,840
Speaker 1: it's I I yeah, it feels like an old book

676
00:31:35,840 --> 00:31:38,240
Speaker 1: you would find in a video game or something. No,

677
00:31:38,400 --> 00:31:42,080
Speaker 1: you don't think so. I mean maybe like as a

678
00:31:42,120 --> 00:31:46,400
Speaker 1: young person, it would have felt fancy. Question. You're pushing

679
00:31:46,480 --> 00:31:48,200
Speaker 1: hard on it? No, no, no, I just I like

680
00:31:48,240 --> 00:31:50,840
Speaker 1: the term jabbrology. It makes it makes me laugh. I

681
00:31:50,920 --> 00:31:52,960
Speaker 1: like the term cast priest. No, No, that that does

682
00:31:53,000 --> 00:31:56,280
Speaker 1: sound like an adult fiction, like The Hardy Boys and

683
00:31:56,320 --> 00:31:58,760
Speaker 1: the cast Priests of Jabber. Okay, I'm I'm bound board now.

684
00:32:00,600 --> 00:32:02,640
Speaker 1: Uh So. This was the nineteen thirties, and nobody in

685
00:32:02,680 --> 00:32:04,960
Speaker 1: genetics was perfectly right at this point. For example, most

686
00:32:04,960 --> 00:32:08,320
Speaker 1: Mendelian geneticists believe the genes were fixed and stable, which

687
00:32:08,360 --> 00:32:11,120
Speaker 1: is not entirely the case either. But Lushenko considered the

688
00:32:11,240 --> 00:32:14,640
Speaker 1: entire idea of heredity to be heresy. Heredity in his eyes,

689
00:32:14,640 --> 00:32:17,120
Speaker 1: would mean that people were incapable of change. It was

690
00:32:17,200 --> 00:32:20,640
Speaker 1: fascist to believe that plants and animals had inherited characteristics

691
00:32:20,840 --> 00:32:23,680
Speaker 1: and that those characteristics could be enhanced through selective breeding.

692
00:32:24,080 --> 00:32:26,400
Speaker 1: And in a little bit of fairness to Leshenko, fascist

693
00:32:26,400 --> 00:32:30,400
Speaker 1: were super integ eugenics at this point. Yeah, so it

694
00:32:30,520 --> 00:32:33,560
Speaker 1: is kind of like messed up because Lushenko is saying that, like,

695
00:32:33,680 --> 00:32:36,040
Speaker 1: look at what the Nazis are saying about selective breeding

696
00:32:36,040 --> 00:32:37,960
Speaker 1: of humanity. We don't want to do that, which is

697
00:32:38,000 --> 00:32:41,200
Speaker 1: true obviously with the Nazi attitudes on genetics led us

698
00:32:41,200 --> 00:32:44,320
Speaker 1: and bad ship, but his attitude to just reject all

699
00:32:44,360 --> 00:32:47,880
Speaker 1: of science as a result that he truly was ideologically

700
00:32:47,960 --> 00:32:49,920
Speaker 1: pure or was he just like, well, as long as

701
00:32:49,920 --> 00:32:53,400
Speaker 1: I focused on keeping Stalin and people around him, uh

702
00:32:53,440 --> 00:32:56,200
Speaker 1: and me, and they're good graces. Like I'm going to

703
00:32:56,280 --> 00:32:58,480
Speaker 1: follow that track. Like he knew that he had kind

704
00:32:58,520 --> 00:33:01,160
Speaker 1: of bullshit that you know, the first year of the

705
00:33:01,200 --> 00:33:04,480
Speaker 1: Winter peace or whatever. And it's it's really hard to say,

706
00:33:04,520 --> 00:33:07,920
Speaker 1: because he's very consistent throughout the entire course of his life,

707
00:33:07,960 --> 00:33:13,040
Speaker 1: like he is consistently full of ship on this stuff. Um,

708
00:33:13,080 --> 00:33:14,320
Speaker 1: but there's a lot I guess there are a lot

709
00:33:14,320 --> 00:33:17,160
Speaker 1: of scientists that have like an ideology about the end

710
00:33:17,200 --> 00:33:20,480
Speaker 1: product that just are willing to fudge and deal with

711
00:33:20,520 --> 00:33:22,080
Speaker 1: stuff in early because they're like, I know it will

712
00:33:22,120 --> 00:33:25,400
Speaker 1: work out later, because I believe this so so clearly.

713
00:33:25,560 --> 00:33:27,480
Speaker 1: It's like you talk about that guy who did, um,

714
00:33:27,520 --> 00:33:29,920
Speaker 1: that study for the Lancet that gets cited by all

715
00:33:29,960 --> 00:33:33,480
Speaker 1: of the anti vaccine people. Um, I'm sure he doesn't

716
00:33:33,560 --> 00:33:36,880
Speaker 1: think he's a fraud. I'm sure he has internal justifications

717
00:33:36,920 --> 00:33:39,280
Speaker 1: for all of his questionable science that people bring up

718
00:33:39,320 --> 00:33:41,640
Speaker 1: as like, well, this is why this study isn't valid

719
00:33:41,680 --> 00:33:43,560
Speaker 1: because you made all of these errors, and he will say, well, no,

720
00:33:43,560 --> 00:33:44,920
Speaker 1: no, no no, I did that. And when people you don't

721
00:33:44,960 --> 00:33:47,480
Speaker 1: like to keep attacking you, you kind of people tend

722
00:33:47,480 --> 00:33:49,720
Speaker 1: to double down. You dig in and and I think

723
00:33:49,800 --> 00:33:53,600
Speaker 1: Lushenko is that kind of scientist where if you could

724
00:33:53,600 --> 00:33:55,600
Speaker 1: give him a truth serum, he would probably be like, yeah,

725
00:33:55,640 --> 00:33:57,120
Speaker 1: I did this and this and this, but I did

726
00:33:57,160 --> 00:33:58,840
Speaker 1: it for this reason, right, And I did it because

727
00:33:59,000 --> 00:34:02,240
Speaker 1: the underlying point I'm making is true. And it would

728
00:34:02,240 --> 00:34:04,280
Speaker 1: be hard not to look at the Nazis and what

729
00:34:04,320 --> 00:34:08,320
Speaker 1: they're doing using Mandelian genetics is sort of a justification

730
00:34:08,400 --> 00:34:10,279
Speaker 1: for a lot of it and not be like we'll see,

731
00:34:10,360 --> 00:34:12,600
Speaker 1: look at them, how can how can that be right?

732
00:34:12,880 --> 00:34:15,480
Speaker 1: Like the Nazis are doing it? So it is. This

733
00:34:15,600 --> 00:34:17,960
Speaker 1: is a messed up time to be arguing for hered

734
00:34:17,960 --> 00:34:21,840
Speaker 1: ability between the Russians and the Nazis. Yeah. So, Lushenko

735
00:34:21,920 --> 00:34:24,000
Speaker 1: preached that there was no such thing the survival of

736
00:34:24,000 --> 00:34:26,600
Speaker 1: the fittest among plants of the same species, because plants

737
00:34:26,600 --> 00:34:29,800
Speaker 1: would never compete with other plants of the same type. Instead,

738
00:34:29,840 --> 00:34:33,520
Speaker 1: they would all cooperate for the common good like people. Wow. Yeah,

739
00:34:33,760 --> 00:34:36,040
Speaker 1: so actually you were better off planting a shipload of

740
00:34:36,080 --> 00:34:38,560
Speaker 1: seeds very very close together in the ground, just really

741
00:34:38,600 --> 00:34:41,600
Speaker 1: like twenty times as dense with seeds as you would before.

742
00:34:41,760 --> 00:34:44,040
Speaker 1: Pour them all into the same area, because they won't

743
00:34:44,040 --> 00:34:46,959
Speaker 1: fight each other for resources. And in fact, if there's

744
00:34:46,960 --> 00:34:49,320
Speaker 1: not enough resources in the soil, some of the saplings

745
00:34:49,320 --> 00:34:52,360
Speaker 1: will quote sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the species.

746
00:34:52,520 --> 00:34:55,680
Speaker 1: He's given a lot to plant. It's a lot of credits.

747
00:34:55,680 --> 00:34:57,440
Speaker 1: Are better than people. We found that a lot of

748
00:34:57,480 --> 00:34:59,320
Speaker 1: the people don't like what we're doing. Corn. Corn is

749
00:34:59,360 --> 00:35:01,759
Speaker 1: way better than evil. What if we replaced all of

750
00:35:01,800 --> 00:35:05,120
Speaker 1: the farmers with more corn. We want to create the

751
00:35:05,160 --> 00:35:07,719
Speaker 1: new Soviet corn man. We would love to grow corn

752
00:35:08,320 --> 00:35:11,719
Speaker 1: just ejaculate on the seats. Yeah, he brought this monkey

753
00:35:11,760 --> 00:35:14,200
Speaker 1: to have sex with corn, and yeah, now we'll have

754
00:35:14,239 --> 00:35:18,200
Speaker 1: monkey corn hybrids instead of people. They will fight our wars.

755
00:35:19,200 --> 00:35:21,440
Speaker 1: And in fact, actually just as a digression, you will

756
00:35:21,480 --> 00:35:24,320
Speaker 1: often hear people claim that Stalin tried to breed ape

757
00:35:24,480 --> 00:35:27,840
Speaker 1: superman hybrids, and that's harkening back to the stuff that

758
00:35:27,880 --> 00:35:30,520
Speaker 1: never happened. He was never trying to breed super soldiers.

759
00:35:30,840 --> 00:35:33,080
Speaker 1: But there was a scientist trying to make people breed

760
00:35:33,120 --> 00:35:38,280
Speaker 1: with monkeys. That's the had made it. I think Stalin

761
00:35:38,320 --> 00:35:40,160
Speaker 1: probably had his eye on that research. I think I

762
00:35:40,160 --> 00:35:43,600
Speaker 1: think if that guy had successfully molested women with monkey

763
00:35:43,600 --> 00:35:46,279
Speaker 1: sperm and came up with monkey human hybrids, Stalin would

764
00:35:46,280 --> 00:35:48,360
Speaker 1: have been like, well, let's see, how did they shoot?

765
00:35:50,360 --> 00:35:53,799
Speaker 1: But that never happened. So Lashenko believed that the death

766
00:35:53,840 --> 00:35:56,239
Speaker 1: of individual saplings in the group occurs not because they

767
00:35:56,239 --> 00:35:58,480
Speaker 1: are crowded, but for the express purpose of ensuring that

768
00:35:58,520 --> 00:36:00,720
Speaker 1: in the future they will not be out it. So again,

769
00:36:01,040 --> 00:36:04,239
Speaker 1: a lot of credit to plants. He really credits them

770
00:36:04,280 --> 00:36:06,680
Speaker 1: with a lot of intelligence and planning and free will,

771
00:36:07,440 --> 00:36:10,719
Speaker 1: um and like a morality, yeah, and and not just

772
00:36:10,800 --> 00:36:13,200
Speaker 1: a morality, but a morality that's perfectly in line with

773
00:36:13,280 --> 00:36:18,120
Speaker 1: Soviet theory of the day. So natural selection was, according

774
00:36:18,160 --> 00:36:21,920
Speaker 1: to Lushenko, Darwin's greatest mistake. Uh. He claimed that plants

775
00:36:21,920 --> 00:36:24,120
Speaker 1: did not have hormones. He also claimed that he had

776
00:36:24,160 --> 00:36:27,600
Speaker 1: turned wheat into rye barley oats, corn flowers and other

777
00:36:27,640 --> 00:36:30,680
Speaker 1: plants that are not wheat. At one point, Lushenko even

778
00:36:30,680 --> 00:36:33,360
Speaker 1: said that he'd successfully turned small white birds into large

779
00:36:33,360 --> 00:36:37,600
Speaker 1: blackbirds via blood transfusions. He's just he's gone off the

780
00:36:37,680 --> 00:36:39,960
Speaker 1: rails at this point. At first he's like, I can

781
00:36:40,000 --> 00:36:42,480
Speaker 1: make wheat do better by freezing it, and then he's

782
00:36:42,800 --> 00:36:46,120
Speaker 1: shooting other birds blood and it's like an extemporaneous rally

783
00:36:46,120 --> 00:36:48,479
Speaker 1: where he's just like coming up with new stuff. And yeah,

784
00:36:48,520 --> 00:36:49,880
Speaker 1: I think that is a lot of it. Where he

785
00:36:49,960 --> 00:36:52,240
Speaker 1: just gets into a speech and just starts lying about

786
00:36:52,280 --> 00:36:55,040
Speaker 1: what he's done and there's no checking up on anyone.

787
00:36:55,080 --> 00:36:58,760
Speaker 1: That's probably certainly more entertaining speech. Yeah, it is Davilov

788
00:36:58,840 --> 00:37:01,160
Speaker 1: sitting there being like and in twelve years, we can

789
00:37:01,239 --> 00:37:04,520
Speaker 1: make grade more durable by doing that. And then Leshenko

790
00:37:04,600 --> 00:37:10,120
Speaker 1: is like I made birds bigger birds? Could I turned

791
00:37:10,160 --> 00:37:14,920
Speaker 1: sparrows into turkeys with blood? Yeah? Who are you going

792
00:37:14,960 --> 00:37:18,520
Speaker 1: to listen to Leshenko? Sounds way more exciting. So Leshenko

793
00:37:18,719 --> 00:37:20,960
Speaker 1: was not a big fan of academic integrity, nor was

794
00:37:21,000 --> 00:37:23,480
Speaker 1: he a big fan of the scientific method. His personal

795
00:37:23,480 --> 00:37:26,480
Speaker 1: philosophy and science was quote, if you want a particular result,

796
00:37:26,520 --> 00:37:29,240
Speaker 1: you obtain it. I need only people who will obtain

797
00:37:29,280 --> 00:37:33,000
Speaker 1: what I require. So that sounds very scientific, Yeah, which

798
00:37:33,000 --> 00:37:35,600
Speaker 1: just sounds like scientology. It's a little bit like you know,

799
00:37:36,000 --> 00:37:38,239
Speaker 1: that kind of will Smith energy of just like you know,

800
00:37:38,480 --> 00:37:40,759
Speaker 1: my children are going to like be the princes and

801
00:37:40,800 --> 00:37:43,360
Speaker 1: princesses of space in a hundred years and like, you know,

802
00:37:44,000 --> 00:37:46,640
Speaker 1: controls time with my mind. If will Smith had been

803
00:37:46,640 --> 00:37:49,439
Speaker 1: in charge of all Soviet agriculture, it would have probably

804
00:37:49,480 --> 00:37:52,960
Speaker 1: been a lot like actually, yeah, okay, So we're going

805
00:37:53,000 --> 00:37:56,359
Speaker 1: to get into how trouphrom Leshenko contributed to the worst

806
00:37:56,400 --> 00:37:59,399
Speaker 1: famine in Russian history. But first we're going to get

807
00:37:59,440 --> 00:38:02,000
Speaker 1: into some ads that I will go here right now

808
00:38:02,000 --> 00:38:04,719
Speaker 1: and guarantee none of the companies that support this podcast

809
00:38:04,760 --> 00:38:11,200
Speaker 1: will be responsible for the worst famine in Russian history.

810
00:38:15,000 --> 00:38:17,080
Speaker 1: And we're back now I'm gonna quote now from an

811
00:38:17,080 --> 00:38:19,239
Speaker 1: Atlantic article on trop from Lushenka that gives a good

812
00:38:19,239 --> 00:38:21,520
Speaker 1: idea of how he was viewed by the Western scientific community.

813
00:38:21,560 --> 00:38:23,920
Speaker 1: Because scientists in the Soviet Union are still talking the

814
00:38:23,920 --> 00:38:25,560
Speaker 1: scientists and the rest of the world at this point

815
00:38:25,600 --> 00:38:28,960
Speaker 1: this pre iron curtain, So other people outside of Russia

816
00:38:29,160 --> 00:38:32,040
Speaker 1: hearing what Lushenko is saying, and they are not buying

817
00:38:32,040 --> 00:38:34,080
Speaker 1: it to the same extent that guys like Stalin are.

818
00:38:34,600 --> 00:38:37,799
Speaker 1: Quote a British biologist, for instance, lamented that Lushenka was

819
00:38:37,920 --> 00:38:41,719
Speaker 1: completely ignorant of the elementary principles of genetics and plant physiology.

820
00:38:41,960 --> 00:38:44,440
Speaker 1: To talk to Lushenko was like trying to explain differential

821
00:38:44,480 --> 00:38:46,400
Speaker 1: calculus to a man who did not know his twelves

822
00:38:46,440 --> 00:38:52,799
Speaker 1: timetable criticism from four yes our science burn, motherfucker, you

823
00:38:52,840 --> 00:38:56,799
Speaker 1: can't multiply like in the prov article, like people are

824
00:38:56,880 --> 00:38:59,520
Speaker 1: brutal in print. Then yeah, No, it was a lot

825
00:38:59,520 --> 00:39:03,080
Speaker 1: more fun where people were like Russian scientists publishing or

826
00:39:03,160 --> 00:39:04,520
Speaker 1: was it like, well, if I gotta go to a

827
00:39:04,520 --> 00:39:06,000
Speaker 1: World's Fair and watch a lecture, if I want to

828
00:39:06,000 --> 00:39:07,640
Speaker 1: find out what he thinks about plans, No, No, they're

829
00:39:07,680 --> 00:39:12,040
Speaker 1: they're publishing and like Lushenko's there, they're like scientific symposiums

830
00:39:12,040 --> 00:39:14,520
Speaker 1: and stuff, so go like at this point, scientists to

831
00:39:14,640 --> 00:39:18,080
Speaker 1: an extent always like even when the USSR was at

832
00:39:18,080 --> 00:39:21,239
Speaker 1: its most closed, there were still Russian scientists communicating with

833
00:39:21,280 --> 00:39:23,560
Speaker 1: the rest of the world and vice versa, because that's

834
00:39:23,560 --> 00:39:26,920
Speaker 1: just what scientists do, because scientists understand that the only

835
00:39:26,920 --> 00:39:28,919
Speaker 1: way to get better at science is for everyone doing

836
00:39:28,920 --> 00:39:31,040
Speaker 1: it to talk about what they're trying to do. Like,

837
00:39:31,920 --> 00:39:35,000
Speaker 1: so criticism from foreigners to nut sit well with Lushenko,

838
00:39:35,080 --> 00:39:38,200
Speaker 1: who loathed Western bourgeois scientists and denounced them as tools

839
00:39:38,200 --> 00:39:41,760
Speaker 1: of imperialist oppressors. He especially detested the American born practice

840
00:39:41,800 --> 00:39:44,360
Speaker 1: of studying fruit flies the work course of modern genetics.

841
00:39:44,360 --> 00:39:47,600
Speaker 1: He called sus geneticists fly lovers and people haters. So

842
00:39:47,640 --> 00:39:50,000
Speaker 1: that's a big thing in Leshenko's life, is he really

843
00:39:50,040 --> 00:39:54,360
Speaker 1: fucking hates people studying flies because he doesn't rampage. But

844
00:39:54,400 --> 00:39:56,920
Speaker 1: the Rocks character has always talked about as well, you

845
00:39:56,960 --> 00:39:59,080
Speaker 1: don't like people, but you love animals. It's like his

846
00:39:59,120 --> 00:40:01,800
Speaker 1: main characters is that he just wants to hang with

847
00:40:01,800 --> 00:40:04,359
Speaker 1: with the giant ape but also he's played by the Rock,

848
00:40:04,760 --> 00:40:07,400
Speaker 1: so he's very charming and makes constant jokes and it's beautiful.

849
00:40:07,440 --> 00:40:08,919
Speaker 1: So you're like, I don't really buy it when people

850
00:40:08,960 --> 00:40:10,640
Speaker 1: say he's not a people. It doesn't seem like you

851
00:40:10,680 --> 00:40:13,399
Speaker 1: hate everybody. Yeah, you're the rock so much charisma. Seems

852
00:40:13,400 --> 00:40:15,480
Speaker 1: like you're the most charming man who's ever lived. Exactly.

853
00:40:16,800 --> 00:40:21,560
Speaker 1: So Lashenko denounced Mandelian genetics as a capitalist and clerical

854
00:40:21,640 --> 00:40:25,640
Speaker 1: conspiracy because they didn't like the church either. Also because

855
00:40:25,680 --> 00:40:29,600
Speaker 1: Mindel was was a monk. So clearly his genetics are

856
00:40:29,680 --> 00:40:34,120
Speaker 1: part of a Catholic scheme to to stop communism, right

857
00:40:34,160 --> 00:40:37,360
Speaker 1: and great more Catholics. Yes, the Pope really plans deep.

858
00:40:38,760 --> 00:40:42,200
Speaker 1: He's got a whole big corkboards where he's connecting dots.

859
00:40:42,280 --> 00:40:45,240
Speaker 1: It's like his tenure plan. No, I imagine the Pope's

860
00:40:45,239 --> 00:40:47,520
Speaker 1: plan for world domination looks like that Q and on

861
00:40:47,640 --> 00:40:51,920
Speaker 1: flow chart that just came out. It's just one of

862
00:40:51,960 --> 00:40:55,000
Speaker 1: those crazy image macro It's like circling people's moles and

863
00:40:55,040 --> 00:40:58,279
Speaker 1: red arrows pointing to everything. Of like, that's the Pope.

864
00:40:58,560 --> 00:41:03,360
Speaker 1: Classic Pope. So Leshenko denounced Mendelian genetics in the ninety

865
00:41:03,400 --> 00:41:06,800
Speaker 1: five speech, which he delivered in Stalin's presence. In the speech,

866
00:41:06,800 --> 00:41:10,600
Speaker 1: he called Vavalov and his cohorts Kulak wrecords and sabot tours,

867
00:41:10,680 --> 00:41:13,080
Speaker 1: and said that instead of helping collective farmers, they did

868
00:41:13,120 --> 00:41:15,839
Speaker 1: their destructive business, both in the scientific world and out

869
00:41:15,880 --> 00:41:20,280
Speaker 1: of it. Stalin responded to this, bravo, Comrade Leshenko, bravo,

870
00:41:20,600 --> 00:41:23,200
Speaker 1: because of course Stalin had kind of wrecked the Kulaks

871
00:41:23,360 --> 00:41:25,600
Speaker 1: and and gotten all those people killed, so he needed

872
00:41:25,600 --> 00:41:28,440
Speaker 1: a fall guy. So like, what's happening now is they

873
00:41:28,480 --> 00:41:31,319
Speaker 1: need a fall guy, and they're picking the geneticists that

874
00:41:31,360 --> 00:41:34,680
Speaker 1: have already picked an ideologically inconsistent thing, because you know,

875
00:41:34,760 --> 00:41:38,399
Speaker 1: Vavilov had been the lead geneticist in the Soviet Union

876
00:41:38,480 --> 00:41:41,000
Speaker 1: up until the mid thirties, so he gets picked a

877
00:41:41,040 --> 00:41:44,360
Speaker 1: sort of the fall guy. Fortun a lot of needs

878
00:41:44,400 --> 00:41:48,520
Speaker 1: for Stalin's great at finding guys to fill his needs.

879
00:41:50,040 --> 00:41:54,239
Speaker 1: That sounds a little anyway. So after this point, the

880
00:41:54,239 --> 00:41:57,960
Speaker 1: Soviet Union switches from actual genetics to lushenko Is genetics.

881
00:41:58,040 --> 00:42:01,000
Speaker 1: In terms of its underpinnings of its aggres cultural system.

882
00:42:01,040 --> 00:42:04,000
Speaker 1: More than a billion rubles are invested trying out lushenko

883
00:42:04,160 --> 00:42:06,360
Speaker 1: Ist agricultural theories on the fields and farms of the

884
00:42:06,360 --> 00:42:09,080
Speaker 1: famine racked Soviet Union. How well did all this work,

885
00:42:09,320 --> 00:42:12,000
Speaker 1: you want to want to take a guess they did

886
00:42:12,040 --> 00:42:14,839
Speaker 1: not get more plants that they needed. You don't think

887
00:42:14,840 --> 00:42:20,080
Speaker 1: that freezing seeds and thirty times as many seeds as

888
00:42:20,080 --> 00:42:21,880
Speaker 1: you need, like digging a hole and filling it with

889
00:42:21,920 --> 00:42:24,680
Speaker 1: seeds because there seeds in it, because the seeds are

890
00:42:24,719 --> 00:42:30,520
Speaker 1: like my seed brothers were. Yes. Yes, Now I'm gonna

891
00:42:30,600 --> 00:42:33,400
Speaker 1: quote from a book called Hungry Ghosts, which is a

892
00:42:33,400 --> 00:42:36,359
Speaker 1: book about famine, not about pac Man, not about pac Man,

893
00:42:36,400 --> 00:42:40,000
Speaker 1: although that would be the Pacman book title. Yeah, all

894
00:42:40,040 --> 00:42:42,839
Speaker 1: these ideas helped transform a rich farming nation into one

895
00:42:42,880 --> 00:42:46,359
Speaker 1: beset by permanent food shortages. On the collectives, farmers could

896
00:42:46,400 --> 00:42:49,440
Speaker 1: use neither chemical fertilizers nor the hybrid corn that America

897
00:42:49,480 --> 00:42:52,480
Speaker 1: was using to boost yields. By Lushenko didn't believe you

898
00:42:52,480 --> 00:42:57,920
Speaker 1: should use fertilizers either at all, not not chemical fertilizers. Yeah. Furthermore,

899
00:42:58,000 --> 00:43:01,799
Speaker 1: their seeds should just want it. Yeah, exactly, and he had.

900
00:43:02,440 --> 00:43:04,839
Speaker 1: We'll get onto his yeah. So Furthermore, the fields were

901
00:43:04,880 --> 00:43:06,760
Speaker 1: left fallow most of the time, and when the crops

902
00:43:06,760 --> 00:43:10,440
Speaker 1: were sowned, the vernalized wheat did not sprout, nor did

903
00:43:10,520 --> 00:43:13,400
Speaker 1: Leshenko's frost resistant wheat and rice seeds, or the potatoes

904
00:43:13,440 --> 00:43:15,560
Speaker 1: grown in summer, or the sugar beets planted in the

905
00:43:15,560 --> 00:43:18,520
Speaker 1: hot plains of Central Asia. They all rotted. One year,

906
00:43:18,600 --> 00:43:21,120
Speaker 1: Leshenko even managed to persuade the government to send an

907
00:43:21,200 --> 00:43:23,960
Speaker 1: army of peasants into the fields with tweezers to remove

908
00:43:24,000 --> 00:43:26,319
Speaker 1: the anthers from the spikes of each wheat plant, because

909
00:43:26,320 --> 00:43:30,640
Speaker 1: he believed that his hybrids must be pollinated by hand. Wow, yeah, great,

910
00:43:30,760 --> 00:43:32,920
Speaker 1: So like, is he feeling hot under the collar at

911
00:43:32,960 --> 00:43:36,439
Speaker 1: any point right now? I imagine each harvests must put

912
00:43:36,520 --> 00:43:40,520
Speaker 1: him in a more precarious position, or he's just like, well,

913
00:43:40,520 --> 00:43:42,960
Speaker 1: and bad winters happen, Let's just keep going forward. You

914
00:43:42,960 --> 00:43:45,399
Speaker 1: would think so, wouldn't you. He would really think that

915
00:43:45,400 --> 00:43:47,040
Speaker 1: that would matter. I don't know why I would think that,

916
00:43:47,080 --> 00:43:50,080
Speaker 1: like logic would somehow quickly win out in the midst

917
00:43:50,239 --> 00:43:54,960
Speaker 1: of stupid dangerous things. Yeah, because never proved. Stupid dangerous

918
00:43:54,960 --> 00:43:58,520
Speaker 1: things are in line with the ideology, so they cannot

919
00:43:58,520 --> 00:44:01,319
Speaker 1: be the problem. And Stalin's not going hungry, Yes, of

920
00:44:01,360 --> 00:44:05,839
Speaker 1: course not hungry. Why would Stalin go hungry? Now? Under

921
00:44:05,840 --> 00:44:09,120
Speaker 1: banners proclaiming greater harvests with less dung, so which is

922
00:44:09,760 --> 00:44:13,960
Speaker 1: hell of a slogan. That's that's often been the motivational

923
00:44:14,000 --> 00:44:16,520
Speaker 1: slogan here at the offices. I have them put up

924
00:44:16,520 --> 00:44:19,759
Speaker 1: banners that say that, yeah, it's the original McDonald's looking.

925
00:44:20,840 --> 00:44:23,960
Speaker 1: Soviet farmers also had to create artificial manure by mixing

926
00:44:24,040 --> 00:44:27,319
Speaker 1: humus with organic mineral fertilizers and a rotating barrel. This

927
00:44:27,400 --> 00:44:29,719
Speaker 1: method removed the phosphate and nitrogen, and when the muck

928
00:44:29,800 --> 00:44:32,719
Speaker 1: was spread on the field, it was useless. Ignoring Leashenko's

929
00:44:32,760 --> 00:44:35,200
Speaker 1: repeated failures, the Soviet press continued to trump at his

930
00:44:35,280 --> 00:44:39,359
Speaker 1: endless successes. Cows which produced only cream, cabbages turned into

931
00:44:39,400 --> 00:44:42,800
Speaker 1: swedes which is rude, vegas barley transformed into oats, and

932
00:44:42,880 --> 00:44:46,240
Speaker 1: lemon trees which blossomed in Siberia. Were any of those true?

933
00:44:47,120 --> 00:44:49,360
Speaker 1: Of course not. No, it's all because why are we

934
00:44:49,360 --> 00:44:54,919
Speaker 1: not talking about these cream cows? Just a straight which

935
00:44:54,920 --> 00:44:58,640
Speaker 1: is sounds very painful, butter cows is coming out solid.

936
00:44:58,640 --> 00:45:02,120
Speaker 1: It's like a soft serve machine. Just imagine the saddest

937
00:45:02,200 --> 00:45:05,560
Speaker 1: cow just like moaning in pain as pure cream sheets

938
00:45:05,560 --> 00:45:09,200
Speaker 1: out of its nipples. Yeah, you wouldn't. You wouldn't wouldn't

939
00:45:09,200 --> 00:45:11,080
Speaker 1: want that as a farmer, you'd be like something is

940
00:45:11,080 --> 00:45:14,600
Speaker 1: fucked up with my cows. Frosting is pouring out of it.

941
00:45:15,200 --> 00:45:17,560
Speaker 1: I did learn from this that Ruda begs are also

942
00:45:17,600 --> 00:45:19,520
Speaker 1: called Swedes, because I at first I thought he was

943
00:45:19,560 --> 00:45:22,120
Speaker 1: saying he had literally turned cabbages into Swedish people, and

944
00:45:22,160 --> 00:45:25,800
Speaker 1: I was like, WHOA, I gotta find this prompt article.

945
00:45:26,440 --> 00:45:29,160
Speaker 1: So in nineteen thirty seven, four years after the Soviet

946
00:45:29,200 --> 00:45:31,960
Speaker 1: State had increased its cultivation of farmland a hundred and

947
00:45:32,040 --> 00:45:35,759
Speaker 1: sixty threefold. So when they start using Lushanko's methods, they

948
00:45:35,760 --> 00:45:37,880
Speaker 1: increase the amount of land they're farming by a hundred

949
00:45:37,920 --> 00:45:40,040
Speaker 1: and sixty three times. So it's not even just that

950
00:45:40,120 --> 00:45:43,239
Speaker 1: his methods were well. Now our farms are collective and

951
00:45:43,320 --> 00:45:46,959
Speaker 1: organized differently, but it's like, oh no, we're expanding because

952
00:45:46,960 --> 00:45:49,360
Speaker 1: you are saying all these places that we can't farm,

953
00:45:49,480 --> 00:45:51,880
Speaker 1: I can farm now because I've made these special seeds

954
00:45:51,880 --> 00:45:53,960
Speaker 1: so we can grow these things where they've never grown before.

955
00:45:54,320 --> 00:45:56,880
Speaker 1: So they're farming a hundred and sixty three times as

956
00:45:56,920 --> 00:46:00,360
Speaker 1: much land as they've ever farmed before, and four years

957
00:46:00,480 --> 00:46:03,239
Speaker 1: into this, food production in the Soviet Union is lower

958
00:46:03,320 --> 00:46:06,120
Speaker 1: than it had been when they started. So they increased

959
00:46:06,120 --> 00:46:08,680
Speaker 1: the amount of land being farmed by a hundred and

960
00:46:08,680 --> 00:46:11,840
Speaker 1: sixty threefold and they're growing less food. What's happening to

961
00:46:11,920 --> 00:46:15,840
Speaker 1: their population? And it's dying. Yeah, they are. Millions of

962
00:46:15,840 --> 00:46:17,719
Speaker 1: people are dying. Experienced. Food is one of the top

963
00:46:17,760 --> 00:46:19,760
Speaker 1: ways I stay alive. It was up there, but food

964
00:46:19,760 --> 00:46:22,680
Speaker 1: and eating it almost every day very important. I would

965
00:46:22,719 --> 00:46:25,240
Speaker 1: say more than two thirds of people rely on food

966
00:46:25,840 --> 00:46:30,600
Speaker 1: in order to stay alive. Well, there's the berth Arians

967
00:46:32,960 --> 00:46:36,880
Speaker 1: now troph and Lushenko was awarded six Orders of Linen,

968
00:46:37,000 --> 00:46:39,560
Speaker 1: the Order of the Red Banner, and three Stalin Prizes.

969
00:46:39,840 --> 00:46:42,239
Speaker 1: He was declared a hero of Socialist Labor and made

970
00:46:42,360 --> 00:46:44,960
Speaker 1: vice president of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

971
00:46:45,400 --> 00:46:47,480
Speaker 1: As a Russian hero, statutes were made of him, and

972
00:46:47,480 --> 00:46:50,200
Speaker 1: in fairness to Leshenko into history, he had a face

973
00:46:50,280 --> 00:46:53,840
Speaker 1: made for sculpture. Check out this motherfucker's jaw line. Wow,

974
00:46:54,040 --> 00:46:56,840
Speaker 1: doesn't it's an angry jawline, Like, we'll have the pictures

975
00:46:56,840 --> 00:46:59,400
Speaker 1: on our website behind the Bastards dot com. But his

976
00:46:59,600 --> 00:47:02,640
Speaker 1: jaw looks like it could literally cut things. Yes, that

977
00:47:02,719 --> 00:47:06,160
Speaker 1: is such a character actor face that's seen him in films.

978
00:47:06,200 --> 00:47:09,280
Speaker 1: I feel like he was like a sub captain something

979
00:47:09,320 --> 00:47:11,520
Speaker 1: in a movie. I own on DV, Like, I feel

980
00:47:11,520 --> 00:47:13,480
Speaker 1: like he's been in every movie that was filmed in

981
00:47:13,480 --> 00:47:15,840
Speaker 1: the nineteen forties, Like he just has that look to

982
00:47:15,920 --> 00:47:19,160
Speaker 1: his face. But like you can't not make statues of

983
00:47:19,160 --> 00:47:21,520
Speaker 1: a guy that left. I can't. I can't blame the

984
00:47:21,560 --> 00:47:25,239
Speaker 1: sculptor's dream exactly. He's just got that look. So now

985
00:47:25,280 --> 00:47:28,040
Speaker 1: that Leshenko is sort of the chief scientist of the

986
00:47:28,080 --> 00:47:31,280
Speaker 1: Soviet Union, he starts getting the ability to purge people.

987
00:47:31,320 --> 00:47:34,160
Speaker 1: So in nineteen thirty four, one guy to Leyakov had

988
00:47:34,160 --> 00:47:36,160
Speaker 1: found out that Lushenko had stolen the work of another

989
00:47:36,200 --> 00:47:38,520
Speaker 1: scientist and tried to blow the whistle on this. But

990
00:47:38,560 --> 00:47:41,400
Speaker 1: at this point Lushenko had enough cachet that he was

991
00:47:41,440 --> 00:47:43,719
Speaker 1: able to get to laya Kov denounced in Pravda and

992
00:47:43,719 --> 00:47:47,880
Speaker 1: then shot I like that suddenly that the problem is

993
00:47:47,880 --> 00:47:50,520
Speaker 1: that he's stealing other people's science. It feels like that's

994
00:47:50,560 --> 00:47:53,040
Speaker 1: best case, that he's just taking science. It was like,

995
00:47:53,080 --> 00:47:55,480
Speaker 1: you would really academic honesty policies would not be what

996
00:47:55,520 --> 00:47:58,040
Speaker 1: I'm focusing on is tens of millions of people die.

997
00:47:58,239 --> 00:47:59,880
Speaker 1: You would really think that the scientist will be like, well, no,

998
00:48:00,000 --> 00:48:01,840
Speaker 1: actually just let him have this storm come here. He

999
00:48:01,880 --> 00:48:06,840
Speaker 1: didn't cite in this paper as a classic scientist thing. Anyway,

1000
00:48:06,880 --> 00:48:10,879
Speaker 1: that guy gets killed, um so Leshenko convince a style

1001
00:48:10,920 --> 00:48:13,640
Speaker 1: and that Mandelian geneticists are fascist, and he was also

1002
00:48:13,719 --> 00:48:16,719
Speaker 1: able to convince Staal into executor exile possibly thousands of

1003
00:48:16,719 --> 00:48:20,280
Speaker 1: respected Russian geneticists and other scientists for their fascist beliefs.

1004
00:48:20,719 --> 00:48:23,080
Speaker 1: One of the men that he has executed is Ilya Ivanov,

1005
00:48:23,160 --> 00:48:26,360
Speaker 1: the chimpanzee insemination advocate, or at least Ivanov dies of disease,

1006
00:48:26,400 --> 00:48:28,360
Speaker 1: I think in a goolag or something, but he's arrested

1007
00:48:28,360 --> 00:48:30,760
Speaker 1: and he's sent away along with a bunch of other scientists.

1008
00:48:30,800 --> 00:48:34,719
Speaker 1: So the purges aren't all bad because Ivanov sure probably

1009
00:48:34,719 --> 00:48:38,200
Speaker 1: could used to be perched, But thousands of other scientists

1010
00:48:38,239 --> 00:48:41,160
Speaker 1: who are actual scientists doing actual work are also getting

1011
00:48:41,440 --> 00:48:43,160
Speaker 1: and he's making a lot of these arguments based on

1012
00:48:43,239 --> 00:48:46,719
Speaker 1: He's saying they're science is ideologically exactly. It's not like, oh,

1013
00:48:46,760 --> 00:48:51,280
Speaker 1: they're they're bad people, it's they are fascist Mendelian geneticists.

1014
00:48:51,280 --> 00:48:53,840
Speaker 1: They are supporters of fascist genetic science, and so they

1015
00:48:53,920 --> 00:48:56,960
Speaker 1: must be perched. So the battle between Leshanko and actual

1016
00:48:57,000 --> 00:48:59,399
Speaker 1: science comes to a head of nineteen thirty six, when

1017
00:48:59,400 --> 00:49:02,080
Speaker 1: the Soviet Unions geneticists met up for a conference at

1018
00:49:02,080 --> 00:49:05,560
Speaker 1: the Lenin Academy. There was a big debate where Vavalov

1019
00:49:05,600 --> 00:49:07,959
Speaker 1: and the other legitimately great scientists of the Soviet Union

1020
00:49:07,960 --> 00:49:11,800
Speaker 1: pointed out everything wrong with Lushenko's ideas, but Stalin backed Leshenko.

1021
00:49:12,280 --> 00:49:15,360
Speaker 1: Merlov the president of the Lenin Academy, and Vavlov's ally

1022
00:49:15,520 --> 00:49:19,000
Speaker 1: was executed and Leshenko was given his job. So yeah,

1023
00:49:19,080 --> 00:49:23,000
Speaker 1: that's not only a good man and scientists brave this

1024
00:49:23,080 --> 00:49:26,880
Speaker 1: point to still be standing by credibly brave scientific principles.

1025
00:49:26,920 --> 00:49:28,640
Speaker 1: I mean, he had gotten his start when I say

1026
00:49:28,680 --> 00:49:30,759
Speaker 1: he was collecting seeds in the mountains of Iran. He

1027
00:49:30,840 --> 00:49:34,040
Speaker 1: was up in mountains that today with like oxygen tanks

1028
00:49:34,040 --> 00:49:37,319
Speaker 1: and modern science, people die hiking those mountains. And he

1029
00:49:37,400 --> 00:49:40,719
Speaker 1: was doing it in like the nineteen teens um So

1030
00:49:40,760 --> 00:49:44,160
Speaker 1: he was like the original, like almost an Indiana Jones style,

1031
00:49:44,600 --> 00:49:48,640
Speaker 1: traveling around the world collecting seeds and interviewing farmers in

1032
00:49:48,760 --> 00:49:50,680
Speaker 1: a lot of places. And he believes that belong in

1033
00:49:50,680 --> 00:49:53,560
Speaker 1: a museum. Yes, he did believe seeds belong in a museum.

1034
00:49:53,760 --> 00:49:57,160
Speaker 1: So Lushenko is given this guy Merrilov's job. He becomes

1035
00:49:57,160 --> 00:49:59,239
Speaker 1: the president of the Lenin academy, and now he's in

1036
00:49:59,320 --> 00:50:02,680
Speaker 1: charge of vava Lov. So you know, Leshenko is the

1037
00:50:02,719 --> 00:50:05,600
Speaker 1: barefoot professor, a true peasant, and you know Vavilov is

1038
00:50:05,640 --> 00:50:07,360
Speaker 1: a world traveler and a son of the middle class.

1039
00:50:07,360 --> 00:50:10,400
Speaker 1: He was seen as susceptible to foreign influence. So Stalin

1040
00:50:10,600 --> 00:50:13,759
Speaker 1: really likes now that Leshenko's in charge and purging all

1041
00:50:13,760 --> 00:50:17,120
Speaker 1: of these untrustworthy scientists. So now that he's in charge,

1042
00:50:17,200 --> 00:50:19,720
Speaker 1: Lushenko escalates the purges of all the scientists who disagree

1043
00:50:19,760 --> 00:50:21,680
Speaker 1: with him. But he waited for a little bit on Vavolov.

1044
00:50:22,160 --> 00:50:24,600
Speaker 1: By August of nineteen forty, it had become clear that

1045
00:50:24,640 --> 00:50:27,960
Speaker 1: Stalin's farming reforms in lushenko Science had not increased crop yields.

1046
00:50:27,960 --> 00:50:30,440
Speaker 1: People were still starving. A scapegoat was needed, and of

1047
00:50:30,480 --> 00:50:33,440
Speaker 1: course Babolov was the perfect goat escape. So in August six,

1048
00:50:33,600 --> 00:50:35,880
Speaker 1: nineteen forty, while he was out collecting seeds in Ukraine,

1049
00:50:35,920 --> 00:50:38,520
Speaker 1: Vavolov is arrested by the secret police and taken to Moscow.

1050
00:50:38,800 --> 00:50:41,480
Speaker 1: He was interrogated for eleven months and eventually sent to

1051
00:50:41,520 --> 00:50:44,840
Speaker 1: a gulag, where he starved to death. In nineteen forty three, hundreds,

1052
00:50:44,880 --> 00:50:48,040
Speaker 1: perhaps thousands of geneticists were arrested and denounced as agents

1053
00:50:48,040 --> 00:50:50,879
Speaker 1: of international fascism, and most of them were starved death.

1054
00:50:50,920 --> 00:50:52,680
Speaker 1: That was the common way to deal with these guys

1055
00:50:52,680 --> 00:50:55,279
Speaker 1: who had dedicated their lives to stopping famine was to

1056
00:50:55,320 --> 00:50:57,879
Speaker 1: start with. Lushenko was very good at starving people to death.

1057
00:50:57,920 --> 00:51:00,520
Speaker 1: If there was anything that he approved, he dropped over

1058
00:51:00,560 --> 00:51:03,400
Speaker 1: his career, for sure. He's the Lebron James of starving

1059
00:51:03,400 --> 00:51:05,160
Speaker 1: people to death. You're breaking my heart, Robert. Then I

1060
00:51:05,239 --> 00:51:06,960
Speaker 1: knew it was going to happen. But Volov, you know,

1061
00:51:07,120 --> 00:51:09,560
Speaker 1: you introduced this guy that I just really this cool

1062
00:51:09,600 --> 00:51:12,880
Speaker 1: Baly came to like an admire and here we are

1063
00:51:12,920 --> 00:51:15,799
Speaker 1: watching him staring. Well, I do have kind of a

1064
00:51:15,920 --> 00:51:20,360
Speaker 1: heartbreaking but also sort of inspiring story for you. Okay,

1065
00:51:20,440 --> 00:51:23,440
Speaker 1: So let's let's roll with that, so Vevlov, I mean,

1066
00:51:23,960 --> 00:51:25,719
Speaker 1: you read a couple of paragraphs about the guy, you

1067
00:51:25,760 --> 00:51:29,080
Speaker 1: start to really appreciate him. He had a dedicated following

1068
00:51:29,080 --> 00:51:32,279
Speaker 1: of scientists, hundreds of scientists who he had mentored and

1069
00:51:32,320 --> 00:51:35,440
Speaker 1: trained and who had worked under him and who idolized

1070
00:51:35,520 --> 00:51:38,319
Speaker 1: him as like the pinnacle of what a scientist should be.

1071
00:51:38,600 --> 00:51:41,040
Speaker 1: And not all of these guys got purged. Now, a

1072
00:51:41,040 --> 00:51:42,879
Speaker 1: lot of them did, and many of the scientists who

1073
00:51:42,920 --> 00:51:46,400
Speaker 1: survived Lushanko's purges started faking their data and lying like

1074
00:51:46,480 --> 00:51:48,560
Speaker 1: Leshanko in order to come up with results that supported

1075
00:51:48,560 --> 00:51:51,800
Speaker 1: his theories. You know, evidence against his batchet claims was destroyed.

1076
00:51:51,840 --> 00:51:54,720
Speaker 1: Mandelian geneticists were forced to confess their errors and praise

1077
00:51:54,760 --> 00:51:57,719
Speaker 1: the scientific wisdom of the party. The resultant brain drain

1078
00:51:57,840 --> 00:51:59,680
Speaker 1: is generally estimated to have set the U. S. S r.

1079
00:52:00,120 --> 00:52:03,160
Speaker 1: Of science is backed by between thirty and fifty years.

1080
00:52:03,200 --> 00:52:05,000
Speaker 1: But the upside of the story is that the giant

1081
00:52:05,040 --> 00:52:08,120
Speaker 1: seed bank Vavalov had collected was not destroyed. A lot

1082
00:52:08,120 --> 00:52:09,759
Speaker 1: of the scientists wh would work for him stayed there

1083
00:52:09,760 --> 00:52:11,719
Speaker 1: maintaining the seed bank, and the seed bank was not

1084
00:52:11,800 --> 00:52:15,200
Speaker 1: inherently against sort of lushenko Is genetics. He had no

1085
00:52:15,239 --> 00:52:19,600
Speaker 1: problem with seeds. You know, so these guys basically stop

1086
00:52:19,760 --> 00:52:22,640
Speaker 1: talking about Mandelian genetics and like go low for a

1087
00:52:22,680 --> 00:52:24,480
Speaker 1: while and just try to maintain the seed bank. And

1088
00:52:24,480 --> 00:52:26,520
Speaker 1: why doesn't he a little worried that, like the seeds

1089
00:52:26,560 --> 00:52:31,799
Speaker 1: would all communicate with one another and decide up. Yeah,

1090
00:52:31,840 --> 00:52:33,880
Speaker 1: I mean they commute, they talk all the time. You know,

1091
00:52:33,960 --> 00:52:37,160
Speaker 1: they're they've got one single goal. Um, So there's this

1092
00:52:37,200 --> 00:52:40,120
Speaker 1: giant seed bank in St. Petersburg, and you know, during

1093
00:52:40,120 --> 00:52:42,440
Speaker 1: World War Two, the Nazis invade and they lay siege

1094
00:52:42,480 --> 00:52:44,719
Speaker 1: to St. Petersburg, where the seed bank has helped. The

1095
00:52:44,719 --> 00:52:47,759
Speaker 1: scientists who work with Favlov barricaded themselves inside it, and

1096
00:52:47,760 --> 00:52:50,080
Speaker 1: this was to defend it from both the Nazis and

1097
00:52:50,160 --> 00:52:53,000
Speaker 1: from the people of St. Petersburg who were starving. Now,

1098
00:52:53,200 --> 00:52:55,959
Speaker 1: seeds are edible. You can survive off of seeds. So

1099
00:52:56,400 --> 00:52:58,560
Speaker 1: the seeds in the seed bank, a couple hundred thousand

1100
00:52:58,600 --> 00:53:00,000
Speaker 1: of them at this point, would not have been enough

1101
00:53:00,000 --> 00:53:02,319
Speaker 1: to save the people of St. Petersburg. But if they

1102
00:53:02,320 --> 00:53:04,200
Speaker 1: found out the seeds were there, they would have eaten

1103
00:53:04,200 --> 00:53:06,160
Speaker 1: them in a frenzy, trying to save if you get

1104
00:53:06,160 --> 00:53:10,080
Speaker 1: one night or whatever, just exactly. So, these guys are

1105
00:53:10,120 --> 00:53:12,560
Speaker 1: defending the seed bank from their fellow citizens and from

1106
00:53:12,560 --> 00:53:14,960
Speaker 1: the Nazis. But while they're doing this, the scientists are

1107
00:53:15,000 --> 00:53:17,759
Speaker 1: starving too. Now there's enough seeds in the seed bank

1108
00:53:17,800 --> 00:53:20,319
Speaker 1: that these guys it could it might have saved them

1109
00:53:20,360 --> 00:53:22,879
Speaker 1: if the scientists hitty in the seeds, but they didn't

1110
00:53:22,920 --> 00:53:26,359
Speaker 1: eat a single seed. Instead, they for months hold up

1111
00:53:26,360 --> 00:53:28,319
Speaker 1: and defend the seed bank I'm gonna quote again from

1112
00:53:28,360 --> 00:53:31,480
Speaker 1: Gary Naham. Over a series of months in nineteen forty

1113
00:53:31,520 --> 00:53:33,800
Speaker 1: two and nineteen forty three, a dozen of the scientists

1114
00:53:33,840 --> 00:53:36,680
Speaker 1: starved to death while guarding those seeds. One of them said,

1115
00:53:36,680 --> 00:53:38,200
Speaker 1: it was hard to wake up, It was hard to

1116
00:53:38,200 --> 00:53:39,759
Speaker 1: get on your feet and put on your clothes in

1117
00:53:39,800 --> 00:53:41,880
Speaker 1: the morning. But no, it was not hard to protect

1118
00:53:41,920 --> 00:53:44,560
Speaker 1: the seeds once you had your wits about you. Saving

1119
00:53:44,600 --> 00:53:47,280
Speaker 1: those seeds for future generations and helping the world recover

1120
00:53:47,360 --> 00:53:49,920
Speaker 1: after war was more important than a single person's comfort.

1121
00:53:50,600 --> 00:53:54,520
Speaker 1: So a dozen scientists starved to death guarding Vavilov seed Bank,

1122
00:53:54,560 --> 00:53:57,160
Speaker 1: but it survives the war. Wow, wasting no seed is

1123
00:53:57,160 --> 00:54:02,000
Speaker 1: a very catholic. Yeah, maybe it is a clerical conspiracy.

1124
00:54:02,360 --> 00:54:08,520
Speaker 1: The popes just like listening to this um. After World

1125
00:54:08,520 --> 00:54:11,279
Speaker 1: War Two, Stalin continued to embrace Leshenko, culminating in a

1126
00:54:11,360 --> 00:54:13,960
Speaker 1: nineteen forty eight session of the Lenin Academy where Leshenko

1127
00:54:14,000 --> 00:54:16,720
Speaker 1: read the opening remarks, which had been written by Stalin himself.

1128
00:54:17,080 --> 00:54:19,920
Speaker 1: The speech glorified the Lamarchian genetic science that had gotten

1129
00:54:19,960 --> 00:54:23,080
Speaker 1: so many people killed already. Proponents of Mendelian genetics were

1130
00:54:23,120 --> 00:54:25,839
Speaker 1: dubbed enemies of the people. Leshenko claimed that there were

1131
00:54:25,840 --> 00:54:30,319
Speaker 1: two different types of biological science, bourgeois and socialist dialectical

1132
00:54:30,360 --> 00:54:34,400
Speaker 1: materialist bourgeois. Mendelian genetics was removed from Soviet textbooks, and

1133
00:54:34,440 --> 00:54:37,719
Speaker 1: the entire agricultural infrastructure of the USSR was retooled to

1134
00:54:37,800 --> 00:54:40,400
Speaker 1: prove crop yields were on the rise in spite of

1135
00:54:40,440 --> 00:54:43,760
Speaker 1: persistent famine. This led to the absurd situation of Russia

1136
00:54:43,800 --> 00:54:45,799
Speaker 1: exporting grain to the rest of the world while here

1137
00:54:45,840 --> 00:54:48,520
Speaker 1: people starved to death for lack of food. Because you

1138
00:54:48,560 --> 00:54:50,840
Speaker 1: can't admit that it's not working, So just export the

1139
00:54:50,840 --> 00:54:54,000
Speaker 1: grain and let people die. Yeah, it's not the only

1140
00:54:54,000 --> 00:54:57,200
Speaker 1: time that happens, so Leshenko, hero of the Soviet Union,

1141
00:54:57,239 --> 00:54:59,959
Speaker 1: had his portrait hung in scientific facilities across the entire

1142
00:55:00,120 --> 00:55:02,880
Speaker 1: uss are. My brass band and a chorus accompanied him

1143
00:55:02,880 --> 00:55:06,320
Speaker 1: every time he gave a speech. Songs, very stupid songs

1144
00:55:06,400 --> 00:55:08,719
Speaker 1: were written to honor him and sung by scientists over

1145
00:55:08,800 --> 00:55:12,000
Speaker 1: the land. I mean almost all songs sung by scientists

1146
00:55:12,239 --> 00:55:15,080
Speaker 1: are not the top songs, never the top songs, except

1147
00:55:15,120 --> 00:55:18,080
Speaker 1: for Actually, there's a rapper from Louisiana called Astronaut Talus

1148
00:55:18,120 --> 00:55:24,200
Speaker 1: that does a whole great album of songs about like scientists. Scientist. No, no,

1149
00:55:24,280 --> 00:55:26,840
Speaker 1: I don't mind scientists. I think he's an alcoholic and

1150
00:55:26,880 --> 00:55:29,319
Speaker 1: a rapper, but he's he's does some good songs. But

1151
00:55:29,480 --> 00:55:32,320
Speaker 1: I want you to try and sing this song about Lushenko. Okay,

1152
00:55:32,320 --> 00:55:34,560
Speaker 1: you picked the tune. You can see where the two

1153
00:55:34,560 --> 00:55:37,839
Speaker 1: bars there are. Um, yes, here we go, all right,

1154
00:55:37,920 --> 00:55:41,919
Speaker 1: do your best. Do you need a beat? Uh? Yeah, yeah,

1155
00:55:41,920 --> 00:55:43,879
Speaker 1: I need I need a little beat. Can we can

1156
00:55:43,880 --> 00:55:48,759
Speaker 1: we get a beat? You can just narrowly play on

1157
00:55:49,640 --> 00:55:54,640
Speaker 1: accordion with my girlfriend. Let me sing of the eternal

1158
00:55:54,640 --> 00:55:59,520
Speaker 1: glory of academician Losschenko. He walks the Maturan path with

1159
00:56:00,200 --> 00:56:04,239
Speaker 1: m tread. He protects us from being juped my mentalist

1160
00:56:04,320 --> 00:56:08,160
Speaker 1: Morgan is great song, really great song. Thank you you

1161
00:56:08,280 --> 00:56:10,960
Speaker 1: saying it beautifully. Thank you. I I got mad that

1162
00:56:10,960 --> 00:56:12,799
Speaker 1: I mispronounced the names in the singing. I hadn't seen

1163
00:56:12,800 --> 00:56:15,560
Speaker 1: them written down yet. And they, yeah, no, it's it's

1164
00:56:15,600 --> 00:56:18,920
Speaker 1: it's a weird song. To ask any academicians. We don't

1165
00:56:19,000 --> 00:56:24,240
Speaker 1: run across that word before said yeah. So. Soviet science

1166
00:56:24,280 --> 00:56:26,640
Speaker 1: was remade in Leshanko's image, and his new acolytes went

1167
00:56:26,680 --> 00:56:29,680
Speaker 1: even further than he had, denying the existence of chromosomes

1168
00:56:29,680 --> 00:56:32,120
Speaker 1: and embarking on every stranger theories of plant biology. I'm

1169
00:56:32,120 --> 00:56:34,040
Speaker 1: gonna read one more quote from Hungry Ghosts about one

1170
00:56:34,040 --> 00:56:36,799
Speaker 1: of these men. Another hero of the Lushenko school was

1171
00:56:36,800 --> 00:56:38,960
Speaker 1: the son of an American engineer, for Silly Williams, who

1172
00:56:38,960 --> 00:56:42,000
Speaker 1: became a professor at the Moscow Agricultural Academy. Williams thought

1173
00:56:42,000 --> 00:56:44,440
Speaker 1: that capitalism and American style commercial farming based on the

1174
00:56:44,480 --> 00:56:46,920
Speaker 1: application of chemical fertilizers were taking the world to the

1175
00:56:46,920 --> 00:56:49,560
Speaker 1: brink of catastrophe. This was in the early nineteen thirties,

1176
00:56:49,600 --> 00:56:52,200
Speaker 1: when American farmers in Oklahoma saw their fields turned to dust.

1177
00:56:52,440 --> 00:56:55,120
Speaker 1: Williams believed that the answer was to rotate fields as

1178
00:56:55,160 --> 00:56:57,759
Speaker 1: medieval peasants had done, growing grain only every third year.

1179
00:56:58,080 --> 00:56:59,839
Speaker 1: The rest of the time, the fields would be left fallow,

1180
00:56:59,840 --> 00:57:02,000
Speaker 1: allowing nitrogen to accumulate in the roots of the clover

1181
00:57:02,040 --> 00:57:04,279
Speaker 1: and other grasses, which would enrich the soil. He was

1182
00:57:04,280 --> 00:57:07,759
Speaker 1: opposed by other experts, among them Prashannakov, who stressed the

1183
00:57:07,800 --> 00:57:10,840
Speaker 1: importance of mineral fertilizers and shallow plowing, but Williams dubbed

1184
00:57:10,840 --> 00:57:14,239
Speaker 1: them records of socialist agriculture. So Williams's theory stated that

1185
00:57:14,239 --> 00:57:16,520
Speaker 1: in order to take maximum advantage of the nutrients, and

1186
00:57:16,520 --> 00:57:18,760
Speaker 1: the soil crops should be planted much deeper than they

1187
00:57:18,760 --> 00:57:21,960
Speaker 1: normally were, deeper than anyone had ever planted anything which

1188
00:57:22,320 --> 00:57:25,960
Speaker 1: spoiler alert doesn't work, doesn't work. No, no, no, it's

1189
00:57:26,280 --> 00:57:29,200
Speaker 1: that water that But he's a Lushenko is so his

1190
00:57:29,200 --> 00:57:32,919
Speaker 1: his theories. Now it becomes whoever can suggest the next

1191
00:57:32,960 --> 00:57:35,160
Speaker 1: crazy thing that is in line with what Lushenko is

1192
00:57:35,200 --> 00:57:38,560
Speaker 1: already saying, that thing gets done right, And it is

1193
00:57:38,560 --> 00:57:41,440
Speaker 1: like they're almost like out running the mistakes exactly their

1194
00:57:41,480 --> 00:57:43,800
Speaker 1: past methods by introducing new ones that are even more

1195
00:57:43,840 --> 00:57:47,920
Speaker 1: ideologically Yeah, exactly. So that's where we are as we

1196
00:57:48,040 --> 00:57:51,360
Speaker 1: enter the nineteen fifties. The USSR had been started for years.

1197
00:57:51,440 --> 00:57:54,680
Speaker 1: Five to seven million conservatively had died during this and

1198
00:57:54,800 --> 00:57:56,440
Speaker 1: at least some of those deaths are in thrill from

1199
00:57:56,480 --> 00:57:59,320
Speaker 1: Lushenko's heads. You know, probably a couple of million people

1200
00:57:59,320 --> 00:58:02,280
Speaker 1: have starved to this point because of his bad science.

1201
00:58:02,360 --> 00:58:04,120
Speaker 1: And we are not near the end of troph and

1202
00:58:04,200 --> 00:58:06,880
Speaker 1: Leshenko's body count yet. On part two, we're going to

1203
00:58:06,880 --> 00:58:09,360
Speaker 1: take a trip over to Chairman Mouse China and learn

1204
00:58:09,440 --> 00:58:15,480
Speaker 1: what happened with Lushenko is um next that's tail for

1205
00:58:15,880 --> 00:58:20,680
Speaker 1: next Thursday, So why don't you plug your may if

1206
00:58:20,680 --> 00:58:23,680
Speaker 1: you go onto Netflix. The comedy Lineup Part two is

1207
00:58:24,080 --> 00:58:27,480
Speaker 1: streaming now. My episode is My Name, which is Max Silvestri,

1208
00:58:27,560 --> 00:58:30,360
Speaker 1: and also um big Mouth Season two comes out on

1209
00:58:30,400 --> 00:58:33,080
Speaker 1: Netflix in October. I wrote on that and it's pretty funny.

1210
00:58:33,080 --> 00:58:35,920
Speaker 1: There's lots of dirty jokes. Excellent. Well for more dirty

1211
00:58:36,000 --> 00:58:39,000
Speaker 1: jokes about literal dirt, because this is a farming, farming

1212
00:58:39,160 --> 00:58:42,000
Speaker 1: based episode, come back to here about how troph and

1213
00:58:42,040 --> 00:58:44,680
Speaker 1: Leshanko helped kill thirty million people. It's gonna be a

1214
00:58:44,720 --> 00:58:48,479
Speaker 1: doozy So until then, I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind

1215
00:58:48,520 --> 00:58:50,479
Speaker 1: the Bastards. You can find us on the Internet behind

1216
00:58:50,480 --> 00:58:52,440
Speaker 1: the Bastards dot com. You can find us on social

1217
00:58:52,440 --> 00:58:55,600
Speaker 1: media at Bastards pod, and you can find me on

1218
00:58:55,640 --> 00:58:58,320
Speaker 1: Twitter at I Right okay. And buy my book on Amazon,

1219
00:58:58,440 --> 00:59:00,760
Speaker 1: A Brief History of Vice. We have a T shirt

1220
00:59:00,840 --> 00:59:03,120
Speaker 1: store on t Public, so buy our t shirts. There's

1221
00:59:03,120 --> 00:59:06,120
Speaker 1: a DJ Stalin T shirt which you can wear and

1222
00:59:06,200 --> 00:59:10,560
Speaker 1: think about the millions who starved from Stalinist genetic theory.

1223
00:59:10,680 --> 00:59:14,280
Speaker 1: Uh and I hope that makes you happy. If it does,

1224
00:59:14,400 --> 00:59:17,760
Speaker 1: there's something wrong with you that by the shirt