Speaker 1: Mmm, Hello everybody. I'm Robert Evans and this is once
Speaker 1: again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you
Speaker 1: everything you don't know about the very worst people in
Speaker 1: all of history. Now, this is a show where I
Speaker 1: read a tale about someone or someone's terrible in history
Speaker 1: to a guest who is coming in cold. And this
Speaker 1: week my guest is Max Silvestri. He is a comedian.
Speaker 1: He is a Netflix special as part of the comedy
Speaker 1: lineup out right now, how you doing. Nice to be here.
Speaker 1: Thanks for bringing me in from the cold, you know,
Speaker 1: yeah right right like that before I was alive. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: it was a too excellent Yeah. Yeah, but that's me
Speaker 1: and I'm happy to be here. Well, it's funny Mark
Speaker 1: you talk about spies because we're not talking about spies
Speaker 1: or anything related to spies today, but we are talking
Speaker 1: about something related to the Soviet Union, which is where
Speaker 1: spies were invented. If my James Bond history let sounds right? Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, deceitful people. I don't know. I'm not going
Speaker 1: to deceitful time. Yeah, every everyone was to seitful in
Speaker 1: the Cold War. That's what made it fun. Yes, so
Speaker 1: we're talking pre Cold War and then post Cold War
Speaker 1: history here I'll just get into it. But the rough
Speaker 1: title for this episode is the Scientist who Killed Everyone,
Speaker 1: So that should give you. Yeah, you know, we all
Speaker 1: have we all have political views in this is a
Speaker 1: polarized time, right. I think I believe that scientists shouldn't
Speaker 1: kill people. That's one main views. Yeah, well this is
Speaker 1: there not gonna be a fun episode for you. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so everybody's got their own political views. I think my
Speaker 1: regular listeners of this show will pick up on some
Speaker 1: of my political views from time to time. They're far
Speaker 1: from hidden, but I try not to make my my
Speaker 1: personal politics the center of any given episode. I think
Speaker 1: it's important to criticize and understand terrible people on all
Speaker 1: sides of the of the political spectrum um and today's
Speaker 1: story is I think a good explanation of why. I
Speaker 1: think that's so important, because this is a tale about
Speaker 1: where unreasoning devotion to an ideology can lead. It's about
Speaker 1: what happens when ideas matter more than human lives. Today,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about a man who set up
Speaker 1: to feed the world and wound up starving it. But
Speaker 1: before we get into that, I'd like to provide some
Speaker 1: backstory on genetic science in early twentieth century Russia. Don't worry,
Speaker 1: it's not gonna be boring. It's actually going to start
Speaker 1: with a story about monkey semen. So, yeah, this is
Speaker 1: the fun kind of genetic science. Yeah. So it may
Speaker 1: surprise you to learn that for all the many things
Speaker 1: rus Russia sucked at, science was actually not one of them.
Speaker 1: In the late eighteen hundreds, in early nineteen hundreds, most
Speaker 1: Russians still lived more or less like medieval serfs. Actual
Speaker 1: serfdom wasn't abolished until eighteen sixty one, and things were
Speaker 1: still pretty primitive after that. Russia's class structure was stiflingly strict,
Speaker 1: and science was one of the very few means of
Speaker 1: social mobility. If you were good enough at science, you
Speaker 1: could become a member of the aristocracy. So one of
Speaker 1: these zarist era scientists was a guy named ilia Ivanov,
Speaker 1: and starting in nineteen ten, Iliyah became a tireless advocate
Speaker 1: of trying to cross breed human beings and apes. Oh
Speaker 1: to make like a doctor moreau, I didn't really his hope,
Speaker 1: No one knew. He didn't know what was going to happen.
Speaker 1: What are the best parts of monkeys? He was trying
Speaker 1: to put into humans. It was even more primitive than that.
Speaker 1: He just thought that it might work. Like he was
Speaker 1: really just like people were just starting to understand genetics
Speaker 1: at this point. He was like, I bet humans and
Speaker 1: monkeys can fuck, and I bet they can give birth
Speaker 1: to hybrids. So let's see what the reason it hasn't
Speaker 1: happened yet is because a monkey and human even fallen
Speaker 1: in love constantly, or the right monkey, the right monkey
Speaker 1: and human not fallen in love. So yeah, he's looking
Speaker 1: at like, you know, you've got I forget what you
Speaker 1: breed together to make mules? Is it like donkeys? And
Speaker 1: uh yeah, and you get this animal that is sterile,
Speaker 1: but it's useful, like we we do stuff with meals.
Speaker 1: So he was thinking like, okay, well maybe if you
Speaker 1: breed human beings and monkeys together, something useful will come
Speaker 1: out of it. I heard that like l A, California
Speaker 1: used to get rid of like fly population problems by
Speaker 1: basically breeding more of the flies, radiating them so that
Speaker 1: they were sterile, and then releasing more out so that
Speaker 1: for like six months or more flies, but they wouldn't
Speaker 1: make babies and would all die and it would like
Speaker 1: kill out the population. They're trying something similar with like
Speaker 1: a disease that they spread through mosquitoes and some South
Speaker 1: American country to like try to wipe out all the mosquitoes.
Speaker 1: So like, yeah, that's been tried a couple of times
Speaker 1: and an easy way to go wrong. I mean, yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems like, but this was a little bit different.
Speaker 1: This was um because you're talking, you know, the night
Speaker 1: early nine, You're talking a really optimistic era of science
Speaker 1: because because people have learned enough to know that like
Speaker 1: things are possible that haven't been done yet, but they
Speaker 1: haven't learned enough to know what isn't really possible. And
Speaker 1: I'm sure the rate at that time was like a
Speaker 1: lot of things were being discovered and figured out randomly
Speaker 1: constantly now that they had like a method, and because
Speaker 1: they they're just now starting to really understand genetics and stuff.
Speaker 1: And so Elia at first in nineteen ten, he doesn't
Speaker 1: really get many people on board with his research, but
Speaker 1: he he continues to be an advocate for making human
Speaker 1: beings and monkeys breed. Uh, well, he does other stuff.
Speaker 1: And in nineteen twenty four, seven years after the revolution
Speaker 1: that brings the Bolsheviks into power, ely Is working as
Speaker 1: a sperm disinfector. I don't know what that job as
Speaker 1: I couldn't find any detail, but he's disinfecting sperm, the
Speaker 1: dirty sperm out there. Yeah, it's kind of a dead
Speaker 1: end scientific job. But the Institute Pasteur in France offers
Speaker 1: to support his attempt to hybridize man apes um so,
Speaker 1: according to Russian scientific historian Kirol Russianof, they offered Ivan
Speaker 1: off free access to animals at the institute's recently organized
Speaker 1: chimpanzee facility in the village of Kindia, French Guinea, but
Speaker 1: could not pay for other operational and travel expenses of
Speaker 1: the project. So fortunately for Ilia, he found someone who
Speaker 1: did have money to pay for the operational costs of
Speaker 1: his project, the Soviet Financial Commission. They offered him ten
Speaker 1: thousand dollars to cross breed human beings and apes. He
Speaker 1: got approval for his project or just total total. That's
Speaker 1: a good amount of money. Then it was still kind
Speaker 1: of a shoestring budget, but it was enough to do
Speaker 1: some research and he gets official approval from the Soviet
Speaker 1: Academy of Sciences. Ivan Pavlov the the dog guy. Everybody
Speaker 1: knows about Ivan Pavlov. He was one of the scientists
Speaker 1: who signed off on this monkey man come project. So
Speaker 1: it's like, this could really work. Every time I hear
Speaker 1: a bell ring, I find monkeys attractive. Yeah, like it's
Speaker 1: wired into me. Probably something we should talk about with therapists. Um.
Speaker 1: It's important to point out that this was not seen
Speaker 1: yet as a ludicrous project. At the time. A number
Speaker 1: of luminaries in the scientific field had suggested variations on
Speaker 1: this research theme already. Ilia was just proposing to test
Speaker 1: several other scientists hypotheses. So he's not the original that's
Speaker 1: mixed man and monkey together. It was kind of like
Speaker 1: a race to the moon. But who's like, we're all
Speaker 1: you need to do it because it's out there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we choose to put human sperm inside of a chimpanzee,
Speaker 1: We'll put a man in a monkey. By nineteen sixty three,
Speaker 1: you go, uh So, I'm gonna quote from a Scientific
Speaker 1: American article here that kind of summarizes the early research
Speaker 1: into whether or not human beings and apes can get
Speaker 1: it down. One such hypothesis was that of the German
Speaker 1: scientist Hans Freuden Tall, whose analysis of blood cells in
Speaker 1: nineteen hundred between chimpanzees guerrillas orangutangs and humans should that
Speaker 1: they were serologically far more similar than him been previously expected.
Speaker 1: As a result, Freud and Tall proposed that anthropoid reproductive
Speaker 1: cells could be similar enough to result in a hybrid
Speaker 1: between humans and other apes. In the following two decades,
Speaker 1: other researchers, such as the Dutch zoologist Herman Marie Bernoulet
Speaker 1: Moans and the German sixologist Herman Reudler, sought to test
Speaker 1: this prediction by insimidating chimpanzee females with human sperm. However,
Speaker 1: their attempts never got beyond the planning stage, and in
Speaker 1: the case of Moans, his research plans resulted in him
Speaker 1: being fired from his teaching position. So other people have
Speaker 1: this idea and it's pretty controversial, but the Soviet scientist
Speaker 1: is going to be the guy who gets to finally
Speaker 1: test this out, because over in the West people have
Speaker 1: this idea, but they're like, no, that's fucked up. Is
Speaker 1: it that? Like there's a sort of more like humanistic
Speaker 1: morality in the West. That's like, well, there's certain yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and that Russia was just like anything for were not
Speaker 1: found my tradition anymore. Yeah, we can try anything science.
Speaker 1: So that it's important to get the idea of the time.
Speaker 1: So Iliya Ivanov heads off to French Guinea in West
Speaker 1: Africa and starts his research. The other researchers there don't
Speaker 1: like him, and Elia claims that this is because the
Speaker 1: station was a disgusting mess and they were getting their
Speaker 1: monkeys killed before he could inseminate them. The station had
Speaker 1: brought in roughly seven hundred chimpanzees from hunters in the
Speaker 1: year before he arrived, but over half of them had died,
Speaker 1: so may have had a point there. But he got
Speaker 1: to work anyway, and he tried to insmidate three juvenile chimpanzees. Tragically,
Speaker 1: that did not work. Since his funds were limited, This
Speaker 1: failure or convinced Elia that he needed to try a
Speaker 1: different tactic. This is like a superhero story, like roll
Speaker 1: up your sleeves. I've got to test out the antidote
Speaker 1: on myself, is it? You know? It would actually be
Speaker 1: better if that had been what he tried. So his
Speaker 1: original plan was to insimilate three female chimpanzees, and since
Speaker 1: that didn't work, his next plan is to implant chimpanzee
Speaker 1: semen into African women without telling them what he was
Speaker 1: doing worse. Yeah, that's a cartoon villain one that I
Speaker 1: was suggesting. Yeah, now the really good news. This is
Speaker 1: the only instance in this podcast where colonial Africa is
Speaker 1: not as terrible as it could have been, because the
Speaker 1: governor of French Guinea finds out about Ilia's rape women
Speaker 1: with chimpanzee, spurn plan and shuts it down, and it's like, no,
Speaker 1: you can't do that, this is a crime against humanity.
Speaker 1: So Ilia gets sent home to Russia after one month
Speaker 1: in Africa, and the Soviet Academy of Scientists finds out
Speaker 1: that he had essentially tried to do something terrible and
Speaker 1: black balls him, so he gets pretty much shut down.
Speaker 1: Was this kind of like in England the royal societies
Speaker 1: of X y Z, where you kind of couldn't operate
Speaker 1: if you were like not part of you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's less formal than that, and we'll get to why
Speaker 1: in a little bit. It had been previous when the
Speaker 1: czar was in charge things. We're getting more radical, but
Speaker 1: Ilia in nine is too radical for the Soviet Academy
Speaker 1: of Sciences because he's again essentially trying to assault people
Speaker 1: with Champion. Yeah, but in his mind it's punk rock
Speaker 1: it's you know, yeah, we just need to try it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and this is really the end of of Ilia's tale
Speaker 1: for today. But I think telling it sets up the
Speaker 1: intellectual atmosphere of Soviet Russian And then I open your
Speaker 1: eye sheeple. Also, I want to make cheap all that's
Speaker 1: the other thing I want to do. It's cheap a man.
Speaker 1: That would have been less horrifying, right, yeah, you for
Speaker 1: whatever reason, if you're like sneaking sheep sperm into human beings,
Speaker 1: that's less awful than monkey spur because there's a cuddly aspect.
Speaker 1: There's some sort of yeah. Yeah. I also this is
Speaker 1: very dumb. And if you were to ask me, do
Speaker 1: you believe that a monkey can bear a human child
Speaker 1: or vice versa, I would be like no. Otherwise would
Speaker 1: hear about it all the time. But I don't know why,
Speaker 1: Like why if you can make a mule, I don't know.
Speaker 1: We're just too different. Like yeah, I mean I couldn't
Speaker 1: explain it scientifically, but I mean he did try the
Speaker 1: Planet of the Apes trilogy. I understand that, like we're
Speaker 1: it would be cool if we could. If we could,
Speaker 1: I would support it um, although I would want everyone
Speaker 1: involved to consent to the experiment, but it would be cool. Yes,
Speaker 1: And you long asked the question on this podcast, kind
Speaker 1: of monkey give consents to what I have planned? I
Speaker 1: asked that question regularly, often on the street corner, just
Speaker 1: to people passing by. I'd like to scream it at
Speaker 1: police officers. That's what the Scope's monkey trial was about. Right,
Speaker 1: as far as I've read, which is the titles from
Speaker 1: the movie where an actor yelled, now I'm imagining inherit
Speaker 1: the wind, but with like a guy banging a chimpanzee.
Speaker 1: Like right, it's going to work anyway. This was all
Speaker 1: to set up sort of the state of science in
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union in the nineteen twenties. Anything was seen
Speaker 1: as possible. Human beings and living beings were seen as
Speaker 1: very malleable, and in spite of how crazy ilyas plan
Speaker 1: to crossbreed humans and chimpanzees sounded, a lot of really
Speaker 1: good science was being done in the Soviet Union in
Speaker 1: the early part of the Soviet Union, and in fact,
Speaker 1: for a while the Soviet State was the world center
Speaker 1: of genetic science. I'm asking this because I'm reading the
Speaker 1: right stuff right now in the space race and the
Speaker 1: idea of it being like nationalistic. Was there any element
Speaker 1: of like they had this attitude in competition with the
Speaker 1: rest of the world or the West, or is it
Speaker 1: more just its own like the Soviets own at this
Speaker 1: point that the Cold War hasn't started, so they're less competitive,
Speaker 1: although there is still a factor of that, but it
Speaker 1: is not I mean it bumps up to the nth degree,
Speaker 1: you know, in the late forties. So in this era,
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties and early thirties, the most brilliant scientist
Speaker 1: in the Soviet Union as a guy named Nikolai v
Speaker 1: Avalov now Vavilov was born in Moscow in eighteen eighties seven.
Speaker 1: He came from a bougie middle class family. In nineteen
Speaker 1: o six he started at the Petrovskaya Agriculture Academy, which
Speaker 1: had been founded to improve Russian agricultural science after a
Speaker 1: terrible famine in eighteen ninety two. Vavilov had been five
Speaker 1: years old during that famine, and its hars were imprinted
Speaker 1: into his brain. He described his life goal as quote
Speaker 1: to work for the benefit of the poor, the enslaved
Speaker 1: classified country to raise their level of knowledge. He wanted
Speaker 1: to discover better farming methods that no Russian peasant would
Speaker 1: ever starve again, and he was apparently a pretty great guy.
Speaker 1: Vavalov just wanted to save lives, so when he graduated
Speaker 1: from the academy, he traveled around Europe, working with great
Speaker 1: geneticists all around you know, Western Europe, and then he
Speaker 1: returned to Russia and got sent out to Persia, where
Speaker 1: some of the czar soldiers had gotten sick from bad bread.
Speaker 1: During his downtime, Vavilov hiked through the really deadly mountains
Speaker 1: of modern day Iran, collecting the seeds of plants that
Speaker 1: thrived in the extreme cult. His hope was that he
Speaker 1: could plant these seeds in Russia and grow more food
Speaker 1: for his people. When he got back from Persian nineteen sixteen.
Speaker 1: World War One was kind of a thing at that
Speaker 1: point and not going well. Uh. The Bolshevik uprising happened
Speaker 1: not long after that, and suddenly Russia was the U
Speaker 1: s s R. At the beginning, the scene fine for
Speaker 1: Vavlov's career. Lennon and Trotsky were all about science, and
Speaker 1: then the years before Stalin took over, Vavolov thrived. He
Speaker 1: took up a professorship and continued traveling the world in
Speaker 1: search of plants and farming wisdom that could help the U. S.
Speaker 1: S R. Grow more food. According to Gary Navam, an
Speaker 1: ethno biologist who wrote a book about Vavolov, he traveled
Speaker 1: to sixty four countries on five continents collecting seeds. He
Speaker 1: learned fifteen languages. He was one of the first scientists
Speaker 1: to really listen to farmers, traditional farmers, peasant farmers around
Speaker 1: the world and why they felt seed diversity was important
Speaker 1: in their fields. All of our notions about biological diversity
Speaker 1: and needing diversity of food on our plates to keep
Speaker 1: us healthy sprung from his work. He was the world's
Speaker 1: greatest plant explorer. He collected more seeds, tubers, and fruits
Speaker 1: from around the world than any other person in human history. Wow,
Speaker 1: sounds great, right, Yeah. You want to hear how he
Speaker 1: gets sucked over. Is he's trying to breed wheat with
Speaker 1: a monkey? No? No, no, he's betrayed and dies starving. Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's this tale. Yeah, it's a dark one. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: as soon as you hear about someone awesome on this podcast,
Speaker 1: it's because I'm going to tell you how they get
Speaker 1: sucked over. Yeah. He's a great guy. He never did
Speaker 1: anything wrong that I read about. So yeah. By nineteen thirty,
Speaker 1: Viavalov had assembled a collection of more than two d
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand different seeds, the largest seed bank in
Speaker 1: human history. He was made director of the Institute of Genetics,
Speaker 1: and he immediately he set to work building a network
Speaker 1: of research institutes and experimental stations all across the USSR.
Speaker 1: Bavlov's network eventually included more than twenty thousand genetic scientists.
Speaker 1: One of those scientists was a man named Trophim Lashenko.
Speaker 1: You ever heard of Tshenka? I have not heard? Okay,
Speaker 1: Well like the name. It's a solid name. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's very Soviet sounding, yes. Now. Tropin was born in
Speaker 1: six and a region of what is today Ukraine. Trophin
Speaker 1: was a peasant. He didn't learn to read until he
Speaker 1: was thirteen. He was so low on the cultural totem
Speaker 1: pole that there probably would have been no chance of
Speaker 1: him having any career beyond peasant and Czarist Russia, but
Speaker 1: the Bolshevik Revolution gave him an in road to the
Speaker 1: scientific community. He was able to gain admittance to several
Speaker 1: agricultural science institutes and began carrying out experiments into growing
Speaker 1: vegetables in different climates. Was the state paying for people's education?
Speaker 1: Was it like, okay, yeah, yeah, so Russia has and
Speaker 1: this is a World War two spoiler, pretty brutal winters.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you'd if you were aware of that.
Speaker 1: I heard that their codes were not good enough. That's
Speaker 1: what I remember from was the Germans. The Russians had
Speaker 1: great coats in that water, right, yeah, swords are one
Speaker 1: and lost in the quality of the coats and boots
Speaker 1: and ricks. So a. Famines had been a regular part
Speaker 1: of life for centuries, and the Soviet government was trying
Speaker 1: to find out new ways to make that not the case.
Speaker 1: So in newly minted scientists troph and Leshenko wound up
Speaker 1: in his Gerby Shan trying to breed cold resistant peas.
Speaker 1: Now Lashinko believed his special winter Peace would turn the
Speaker 1: Caucasus mountains green in the winter and feed the Soviet
Speaker 1: people through the coldest months of the year. He also
Speaker 1: claimed that he had created a new kind of winter
Speaker 1: wheat using a process called vernalization. Now ver analysis is
Speaker 1: the Latin word for spring, which basically what he was
Speaker 1: trying to do is wheat seeds are different in spring
Speaker 1: in winter because the cold damages the seeds as they're growing.
Speaker 1: So the seeds that you tend to grow in the
Speaker 1: winter have reduced yields in the summer seeds. So Lushenko
Speaker 1: is basically claiming that by soaking seeds in cold water,
Speaker 1: he could get them ready for cold weather and then
Speaker 1: they would grow like spring wheat in the winter. Um,
Speaker 1: you could like prepare them for exactly used to the cold. Yeah,
Speaker 1: get him used to the cold while their seeds and
Speaker 1: then it'll be fine. Then they'll grow really really well
Speaker 1: in the which again, nineteen twenties science something to try,
Speaker 1: he gotta try, uh, and he got lucky that year.
Speaker 1: It just so happened the nine was an unusually warm winter.
Speaker 1: His seeds did very well. Now, there was zero evidence
Speaker 1: that had anything to do with the vitalization because Trophim
Speaker 1: Leshenko didn't believe in using control groups. Yeah, why would
Speaker 1: you do that? And the most fun scientists shoot from
Speaker 1: the hip. Come on, Yeah, this is a whole episode
Speaker 1: about scientists who shoot from the hip. Um. So trophim
Speaker 1: lied and falsified his data to make it look like
Speaker 1: his methods were the cause of the better harvest that year,
Speaker 1: and then he kicked off a pr blitz to make
Speaker 1: sure everyone in the USSR heard about his work. He
Speaker 1: convinced a reporter from Pravda to cover him. The resulting article,
Speaker 1: The Green Fields of Winter, started out kind of negative,
Speaker 1: describing Lushenko this way quote Lushenko gives one the feeling
Speaker 1: of a toothache. God give him help. He has a
Speaker 1: dejected me in stingy of words and insignia and get
Speaker 1: to faces. He all one remembers is his sullen look
Speaker 1: creeping across the earth, as if at very least he
Speaker 1: were ready to do someone in which is it's pretty
Speaker 1: brutal opening, brutal. There's the picture of him from PROFTA.
Speaker 1: I feel like that like reads like one of those
Speaker 1: celebrity profiles now where they focus too much on like
Speaker 1: how many French fries they ate. At the beginning, it's
Speaker 1: just like, oh, this doesn't feel like what they should
Speaker 1: be about. You should be nicer. Yeah, well it did
Speaker 1: get like Elizabeth Holmes. I feel like of an earlier time,
Speaker 1: this is exactly like that. Actually, So the article starts
Speaker 1: off talking about who he's kind of a dour, gross
Speaker 1: looking guy, but as it goes on it gets more
Speaker 1: praiseful because the provat the guy bought into what he
Speaker 1: was saying about his seeds. So it famously dubbed Lushenko
Speaker 1: the barefoot Professor, which was a compliment in Soviet era Russia,
Speaker 1: and it noticed, loves the barefoot contessa exactly exactly, and
Speaker 1: you would trust him to reform your nation's agricultural processes
Speaker 1: for her, I don't know anything about. Her name is
Speaker 1: Eina Garden. She was like the head of nuclear policy
Speaker 1: and now she is a food network person and really, yeah,
Speaker 1: she had a nuclear policy. She like worked under Reagan
Speaker 1: as like one of the top policy writers. And then
Speaker 1: like her husband, who I believe is a dean of
Speaker 1: a school at Yale, Like, she moved up to New
Speaker 1: York after that part of her career, and she like
Speaker 1: opened a grocery store called Preful Contests on Long Island
Speaker 1: and the Hampton's and it became a thing. And then
Speaker 1: cookbooks and then now she's you know, okay, well, I
Speaker 1: guess maybe let her set agricultural policy. I don't know,
Speaker 1: she seems she seems great. Uh. Lushenko was not so.
Speaker 1: But the article, yeah, called him the barefoot Professor and
Speaker 1: and noted that his experimental fields were often filled with
Speaker 1: agronomic luminaries, eager to shake his hand and witness the
Speaker 1: miracles of his creation. So in that interview, Leshenko claimed
Speaker 1: to have invented vitalization, which was a lie. The process
Speaker 1: was about forty years older than he was, and vitalization
Speaker 1: does actually work to make plants flower earlier, so you
Speaker 1: can it is a useful tactic. You can change basically
Speaker 1: how quickly a plant flower. It's more about timing than yields. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it doesn't make it better winter wheat, It just changes
Speaker 1: when it flowers and stuff. So Leshenko's really work on this, though,
Speaker 1: had resulted in some promising findings, so Vavilov, had had
Speaker 1: funded him at first had been like, Okay, maybe this
Speaker 1: guy's onto something. Um. Over the last next couple of years,
Speaker 1: it became increasingly obvious to Vavalov that Lushenka was wrong
Speaker 1: and faking his data. Unfortunately, in the Soviet Union during
Speaker 1: this period, scientific accuracy was not the most important question.
Speaker 1: Ideology was the most important concern, and Leshenko's theories just
Speaker 1: happened to gel with communist political theory. To understand why
Speaker 1: we have to talk about the concept of the new
Speaker 1: Soviet man so I'm going to quote from an U
Speaker 1: n T publication called Recreating Mankind that talks about what
Speaker 1: we mean when we talked about the New Soviet Man,
Speaker 1: which was like a big buzzword at the time. Lennon,
Speaker 1: taking into account the benefits of a unified national order
Speaker 1: outlined by Marx and Engel, saw the immediate allure of
Speaker 1: creating an objective, utopian vision on which it could base
Speaker 1: his politics, and he also recognized the foundation of this
Speaker 1: new ideal community could quote only be maintained if the
Speaker 1: very nature of man can be changed to conform to
Speaker 1: the requirements of this new order. After the Revolution, through
Speaker 1: this purely idealistic vision that was taken from Marx and Engles,
Speaker 1: Lennon and his party carried out their utopian reforms in
Speaker 1: the hopes of recreating the perfect citizens. Some academics maintain
Speaker 1: that this idea of the new Soviet Man bordered on
Speaker 1: eugenics a lot like what the Nazis we're talking about,
Speaker 1: and there is definitely more than a hint of Nietzsche
Speaker 1: in this quote from Leon. Trotsky man will make it
Speaker 1: his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his
Speaker 1: instincts to the heights of consciousness to create a higher
Speaker 1: biological type or if you please, a superman. So it
Speaker 1: wasn't about making a new Soviet man that like did
Speaker 1: one of a few tasks. They had like a singular
Speaker 1: kind of vision of what the proper Soviet. They had
Speaker 1: a vision that the proper culture could create better people
Speaker 1: by creating a better society, you could change the character
Speaker 1: of the people inside the society the society. First, are
Speaker 1: going to change the human beings so that we have
Speaker 1: a better society. No, we're going to change this and
Speaker 1: it's going to improve the people in our society. And
Speaker 1: that's going to like yeah, so, And that's why Lushenko's
Speaker 1: ideas were so popular because he was basically saying that
Speaker 1: plants could be improved permanently by altering their physical surroundings
Speaker 1: and circumstances, which was essentially the same thing the U S.
Speaker 1: S I was trying to do with tens of millions
Speaker 1: of former peasant farmers. So we're going to get into
Speaker 1: what exactly happened after this and how Lushanko's ideas spread
Speaker 1: for the U S. SR and what the consequences of
Speaker 1: that were. But first, if you really want to be
Speaker 1: a superman, the only way I know is by listening
Speaker 1: to these products and services that support our show. And
Speaker 1: we're back. We just finished talking about the new Soviet Man,
Speaker 1: and Howshenko's ideas about changing seeds by nimping them in
Speaker 1: cold water basically really jelled well with what communist theory
Speaker 1: at the time said about human beings, and so that
Speaker 1: if we dipped them in cold water for a little bit, yes,
Speaker 1: exactly better. Yeah, a lot of cold baths and the
Speaker 1: and the early Bolshevik era. So now, one of the
Speaker 1: first major sets of reforms once Stalin came to power,
Speaker 1: it was a policy of collectivization in rural Russia. The
Speaker 1: government called it consolidation of land and labor, and what
Speaker 1: that meant was that tens of millions of farmers had
Speaker 1: their land taken from them and smushed together into gigantic
Speaker 1: collective farms. A lot of people did not like this
Speaker 1: because it was lane they'd been farming for generations, and
Speaker 1: some people resisted. So in estimated ten million peasant farmers
Speaker 1: and their families were exiled or imprisoned from nine nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty three for fighting against the collectivization policy. Now, Stalin
Speaker 1: had expected us mass and sudden collectivization to increase food yields,
Speaker 1: so he levied increased grain taxes and all farmers these
Speaker 1: taxes came off the top, which means a lot of
Speaker 1: farmers wound up with no food to eat. This, combined
Speaker 1: with the disruption of collectivization, led to a famine that
Speaker 1: started in nineteen thirty. Now a major factor in all
Speaker 1: of this with Stalin's obsession with destroying the rich landowning
Speaker 1: peasants or kulaks, and the wilful starvation genocide of the Ukrainians.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of factors in this, this famine because
Speaker 1: a lot of decisions are being made at this point
Speaker 1: in time. But like one of the key points is
Speaker 1: that Stalin just changed the way everyone in Russia had
Speaker 1: farmed for the last couple of thousand years, like the
Speaker 1: actual agriculture of like how they were doing it day
Speaker 1: to day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's something similar. We
Speaker 1: just had an episode on what the East India Tea
Speaker 1: Company did in India where it was very basically very similar,
Speaker 1: where they just forced everyone in these giant collective farms
Speaker 1: thinking that would improve yields, and what it actually did
Speaker 1: was destroy these networks of like local insurance policies and
Speaker 1: stuff between different villages. So there was a lot of
Speaker 1: that going on. It's kind of an all in type
Speaker 1: thing and larger pieces of land that yeah, when it
Speaker 1: didn't work, and it was not just that, uh, he
Speaker 1: was forcing everyone onto these farms, he was also changing
Speaker 1: the way that they farmed. Now, the first part of
Speaker 1: the famine seems to have been intentional because he wanted
Speaker 1: to get rid of all these rich coolocks, and he
Speaker 1: wanted to get rid of Ukrainians. And in fact, one
Speaker 1: of Stalin's lieutenants in Ukraine noted that the force starvation
Speaker 1: had shown the peasants, quote who was the master here?
Speaker 1: It cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system
Speaker 1: is here to stay. So it's a little bit about
Speaker 1: breaking them, Yeah, a little. It was like early on
Speaker 1: it was about breaking them. But the famine continues after
Speaker 1: the point where any kind of resistance is really broken,
Speaker 1: to the fact that it starts to become a problem
Speaker 1: for the Soviet state because this has gone further than
Speaker 1: they had intended. So there was some amount of people
Speaker 1: they planned to starve to death, but um, it just
Speaker 1: turns out you can't can troll that thing as much
Speaker 1: as you might. That's why I'm always saying you shouldn't
Speaker 1: plan to starve anyone to really because it just kind
Speaker 1: of it. It always spins out of control. You know,
Speaker 1: you set a number and the next thing you know,
Speaker 1: you go over budget. Go over budget. Let's not throw
Speaker 1: starving the baby out with the backwater like that feels unreasonable.
Speaker 1: A lot of good people that deserve to be starving.
Speaker 1: There's good people starving people on all sides. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: good hungry people on both sides. So yeah. The devastation
Speaker 1: grows beyond what Stalin had planned for, and as the
Speaker 1: worst famine in Russian history starts to really bite, Stalin
Speaker 1: calls on both Vlov and Leshenko to offer solutions. Vavelov,
Speaker 1: using actual science, says that he can breed wheat and
Speaker 1: other crops that will do better in the Russian climate.
Speaker 1: It will take around twelve years. Lashenko, using lies, promises
Speaker 1: to do it in three. Can you guess that was
Speaker 1: the famine just because the new farming system didn't work
Speaker 1: or was he actually changing It's partly that you're just
Speaker 1: fucking with sort of the way things have been done
Speaker 1: for ever by forcing people on these collective farms but
Speaker 1: there's also there was there was enough food that they
Speaker 1: could have stopped mass numbers of people from dying, but
Speaker 1: they refused to hand it over, like they were taking
Speaker 1: food away from people who were growing it in like Ukraine,
Speaker 1: because they wanted to starve a lot of those people
Speaker 1: and they were So it was a mix of things
Speaker 1: because they literally didn't have access to that's was a
Speaker 1: lot of the family. Like there still would have been
Speaker 1: some problem as a result of this, and there had
Speaker 1: been famine, you know, a few years earlier as a
Speaker 1: result of the civil war too. But I'm half Ukrainian
Speaker 1: and I knew my ancestor had come to this country
Speaker 1: because he killed someone in a bar fight. But it
Speaker 1: also seems like there were other bad things coming on. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: The Holodomor is what the Ukrainians call, and it was
Speaker 1: probably between three and five million Ukrainians starf to death,
Speaker 1: and most of those deaths were intentional. Um but again
Speaker 1: it it quickly goes beyond that. So Stalin d acts Leshenko.
Speaker 1: There's some debate as to why he liked Lushenko so much.
Speaker 1: Some of the sources say that Stalin just liked ideologically
Speaker 1: what with Lushenko was saying and didn't never really talk
Speaker 1: to the guy very much. And there's other sources that
Speaker 1: say Leshenko and Stalin worked closely together and Lushenko basically
Speaker 1: charmed him. Someone to read a quote from book Stalinist
Speaker 1: Genetics that takes the attitude that Lushenko was buddy buddy
Speaker 1: with Stalin and convinced him to sort of back his
Speaker 1: science by being a charming motherfucker. So, although a mediocrity
Speaker 1: and scientific questions, Leshenko was highly talented in the art
Speaker 1: of leading an ideological fight and of surviving in the
Speaker 1: midst of Stalinist terror unerringly divining the boss's wishes and anxieties,
Speaker 1: Leshenko came to the four thanks to his considerable natural talents.
Speaker 1: He fought for position to top the pyramid of power
Speaker 1: and won it not by chance or by a whim
Speaker 1: of Stalin's but by his skill in waging the kind
Speaker 1: of battle that was necessary. He outfoxed even Stalin and
Speaker 1: was able to pull the wool over his eyes even
Speaker 1: when other party leaders already had seen through Lushenko, thanks
Speaker 1: to his courtiers, intuition and his shrewdness. Thanks to his
Speaker 1: ability to divine Stalin's secret designs, he always struck the
Speaker 1: right chord with the Great Helmsman, never arousing his irritation.
Speaker 1: They called Stalin the great Helmsman, and yeah, which at
Speaker 1: this point, he's like ramming rocks just to see what
Speaker 1: happens when the boat hits them right right, and it
Speaker 1: seems to be working. What's Vavilov feel at this point
Speaker 1: about Lushenko? I mean, he knows the science isn't Vavilov
Speaker 1: does not like Lushenko, but it's also he has to
Speaker 1: be very careful about how he goes about opposing him,
Speaker 1: because Lushenko is ideologically correct. Yeah, and it's also really
Speaker 1: worth noting that Vavolov is is bougie. He comes from
Speaker 1: an upper middle class background and that is toxic in
Speaker 1: the Soviet Union's period. Lushenko is a peasant, so that
Speaker 1: counts for a lot as well. And most of the
Speaker 1: actual talented scientists in the U S s are are
Speaker 1: people who had grown up well here because they were
Speaker 1: able to afford to go to college and stuff and
Speaker 1: to like study science as young men rather than having
Speaker 1: to support their families. So these are the best scientists
Speaker 1: in the U S s R at this point, But
Speaker 1: they're also bougie, which means they're not trusted by the
Speaker 1: Soviet leaders. There's not a lot of hard scrabble scientists
Speaker 1: like Leshenko. Yeah, you know, yeah, unless she's not really
Speaker 1: a scientist. He just calls himself a scientist. Yeah, he's
Speaker 1: just a bullshit artist. But he's got the right background,
Speaker 1: and so that puts him above these guys who actually
Speaker 1: know what they're doing and have decades of experience doing
Speaker 1: real science. There's definitely no echoes of that never later
Speaker 1: in history. You know, people have never supported someone who
Speaker 1: doesn't know anything because they wanted to stop supporting the
Speaker 1: people who were experts. And it's like that, that's not
Speaker 1: something that's every only happened in Russia this one time,
Speaker 1: thank god, thank god. Uh So, yeah, in in that
Speaker 1: first profile article in Pravda, had praised Lushenko for working
Speaker 1: for the people rather than study and quote the hairy
Speaker 1: legs of flies. Um, yeah, this is a reference to
Speaker 1: fruit flies, which were then in our today the number
Speaker 1: one workhorse critter for genetic research because they breed so
Speaker 1: quickly you can test a lot of different genetic stuff.
Speaker 1: I'm not a geneticist, but they're they're very important. You
Speaker 1: can't have a lot of really crucial genetic research about
Speaker 1: using fruit flies because they're just very easy to study
Speaker 1: this kind of stuff with um or at least I
Speaker 1: should say that the number one workhorse of Mandelian genetics.
Speaker 1: Have you heard of Gregor Mendel. I feel like I've
Speaker 1: heard the name, but I don't know what that means. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's one of those guys you would have come across
Speaker 1: in high school. He was. He was an Austrian monk
Speaker 1: and a scientist who bred a bunch of pea plants
Speaker 1: and figured out the laws of heredity. He kind of
Speaker 1: invented modern genetic science. Like he's down passed down to
Speaker 1: that which is passed down to that, like what Newton
Speaker 1: is to physics, he is to genetics. Like he's that
Speaker 1: level of like foundational mind. And he came up with
Speaker 1: the idea of recessive and dominant traits. He figured out
Speaker 1: genes were a thing, although he used the term factors
Speaker 1: not genes, but he came up with like he was
Speaker 1: the first guy to understand that sort of stuff, right,
Speaker 1: So he's he's a big dude. But trouphm Leshenko was
Speaker 1: pretty sure Mindell was full of ship because trophim Leshenko
Speaker 1: did not believe in genes or heredity, and instead he
Speaker 1: thought that plants could be educated to grow in different climates.
Speaker 1: Because plants had free will, they could choose to mature
Speaker 1: in certain ways to meet their environment if they were
Speaker 1: properly educated. This is why you could educate a seed
Speaker 1: to survive the winter by freezing it before planting it.
Speaker 1: And it's like playing music at your house plants. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but crazier. I think there might be some I don't know.
Speaker 1: I know that the science on that isn't as settled
Speaker 1: as people who play beeto and for their plants want
Speaker 1: to pretend. But like, that's less crazy than freezing a
Speaker 1: seed because it will choose to grow better in the cold. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And I certainly wouldn't like plan to feed my population
Speaker 1: of people by playing Bates Oven for all the plans.
Speaker 1: I would be like, well, it might help, but let's
Speaker 1: not count on it. But let's not let's not base
Speaker 1: all of our agriculture on it. So Lushenka was not
Speaker 1: totally alone and rejecting Mandeli and genetics at this point. Again,
Speaker 1: it's a different era. There was another guy, Lamark, who
Speaker 1: had proposed totally different ideas about heredibility and had basically
Speaker 1: concluded that the environment drove heredity. Like. One of his
Speaker 1: big things was that giraffe's next were longer because many
Speaker 1: generations of giraffes had been just stretching their necks further
Speaker 1: inverted for feet to reach food. Yeah, this is not
Speaker 1: the Yeah, it's like, if you do a lot of yoga,
Speaker 1: your kid will grow up great at yoga. This is
Speaker 1: not how genetics work. But at this point in time,
Speaker 1: hit like whiskey was legally considered medicine, so it's it's
Speaker 1: nothing against Lamark eighteen hundreds of the time. Yeah, exactly. Now,
Speaker 1: Lashenko praised Lamarckian genetics, calling it perfectly correct and entirely scientific.
Speaker 1: But he couldn't really use Lamark as his sort of
Speaker 1: guy in the past to call to because Lamark had
Speaker 1: been a nobleman. I forget what country he came from,
Speaker 1: but he was like a member of the aristocracy, which
Speaker 1: meant that he didn't have good Bolshevik credentials either. So
Speaker 1: instead Lushanko declared himself the advocate of a Bolsheviks scientist
Speaker 1: named Maturan. Now Maturon had died in nineteen thirty five,
Speaker 1: but for a while he was a very famous Soviet scientist.
Speaker 1: He had been a Lamarchian and claimed that intuition mattered
Speaker 1: more than education and science. Maturin had called educated scientists
Speaker 1: like Vavilov the cast priests of Jabbrology. Yeah, so it's
Speaker 1: a great phrase. Yeah it is jabbrology. Yeah, the cast
Speaker 1: Priests of Gabrology. Feels like a young adult fantasy novel
Speaker 1: that I would have read a high schooler, does it? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's I I yeah, it feels like an old book
Speaker 1: you would find in a video game or something. No,
Speaker 1: you don't think so. I mean maybe like as a
Speaker 1: young person, it would have felt fancy. Question. You're pushing
Speaker 1: hard on it? No, no, no, I just I like
Speaker 1: the term jabbrology. It makes it makes me laugh. I
Speaker 1: like the term cast priest. No, No, that that does
Speaker 1: sound like an adult fiction, like The Hardy Boys and
Speaker 1: the cast Priests of Jabber. Okay, I'm I'm bound board now.
Speaker 1: Uh So. This was the nineteen thirties, and nobody in
Speaker 1: genetics was perfectly right at this point. For example, most
Speaker 1: Mendelian geneticists believe the genes were fixed and stable, which
Speaker 1: is not entirely the case either. But Lushenko considered the
Speaker 1: entire idea of heredity to be heresy. Heredity in his eyes,
Speaker 1: would mean that people were incapable of change. It was
Speaker 1: fascist to believe that plants and animals had inherited characteristics
Speaker 1: and that those characteristics could be enhanced through selective breeding.
Speaker 1: And in a little bit of fairness to Leshenko, fascist
Speaker 1: were super integ eugenics at this point. Yeah, so it
Speaker 1: is kind of like messed up because Lushenko is saying that, like,
Speaker 1: look at what the Nazis are saying about selective breeding
Speaker 1: of humanity. We don't want to do that, which is
Speaker 1: true obviously with the Nazi attitudes on genetics led us
Speaker 1: and bad ship, but his attitude to just reject all
Speaker 1: of science as a result that he truly was ideologically
Speaker 1: pure or was he just like, well, as long as
Speaker 1: I focused on keeping Stalin and people around him, uh
Speaker 1: and me, and they're good graces. Like I'm going to
Speaker 1: follow that track. Like he knew that he had kind
Speaker 1: of bullshit that you know, the first year of the
Speaker 1: Winter peace or whatever. And it's it's really hard to say,
Speaker 1: because he's very consistent throughout the entire course of his life,
Speaker 1: like he is consistently full of ship on this stuff. Um,
Speaker 1: but there's a lot I guess there are a lot
Speaker 1: of scientists that have like an ideology about the end
Speaker 1: product that just are willing to fudge and deal with
Speaker 1: stuff in early because they're like, I know it will
Speaker 1: work out later, because I believe this so so clearly.
Speaker 1: It's like you talk about that guy who did, um,
Speaker 1: that study for the Lancet that gets cited by all
Speaker 1: of the anti vaccine people. Um, I'm sure he doesn't
Speaker 1: think he's a fraud. I'm sure he has internal justifications
Speaker 1: for all of his questionable science that people bring up
Speaker 1: as like, well, this is why this study isn't valid
Speaker 1: because you made all of these errors, and he will say, well, no,
Speaker 1: no, no no, I did that. And when people you don't
Speaker 1: like to keep attacking you, you kind of people tend
Speaker 1: to double down. You dig in and and I think
Speaker 1: Lushenko is that kind of scientist where if you could
Speaker 1: give him a truth serum, he would probably be like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I did this and this and this, but I did
Speaker 1: it for this reason, right, And I did it because
Speaker 1: the underlying point I'm making is true. And it would
Speaker 1: be hard not to look at the Nazis and what
Speaker 1: they're doing using Mandelian genetics is sort of a justification
Speaker 1: for a lot of it and not be like we'll see,
Speaker 1: look at them, how can how can that be right?
Speaker 1: Like the Nazis are doing it? So it is. This
Speaker 1: is a messed up time to be arguing for hered
Speaker 1: ability between the Russians and the Nazis. Yeah. So, Lushenko
Speaker 1: preached that there was no such thing the survival of
Speaker 1: the fittest among plants of the same species, because plants
Speaker 1: would never compete with other plants of the same type. Instead,
Speaker 1: they would all cooperate for the common good like people. Wow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so actually you were better off planting a shipload of
Speaker 1: seeds very very close together in the ground, just really
Speaker 1: like twenty times as dense with seeds as you would before.
Speaker 1: Pour them all into the same area, because they won't
Speaker 1: fight each other for resources. And in fact, if there's
Speaker 1: not enough resources in the soil, some of the saplings
Speaker 1: will quote sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the species.
Speaker 1: He's given a lot to plant. It's a lot of credits.
Speaker 1: Are better than people. We found that a lot of
Speaker 1: the people don't like what we're doing. Corn. Corn is
Speaker 1: way better than evil. What if we replaced all of
Speaker 1: the farmers with more corn. We want to create the
Speaker 1: new Soviet corn man. We would love to grow corn
Speaker 1: just ejaculate on the seats. Yeah, he brought this monkey
Speaker 1: to have sex with corn, and yeah, now we'll have
Speaker 1: monkey corn hybrids instead of people. They will fight our wars.
Speaker 1: And in fact, actually just as a digression, you will
Speaker 1: often hear people claim that Stalin tried to breed ape
Speaker 1: superman hybrids, and that's harkening back to the stuff that
Speaker 1: never happened. He was never trying to breed super soldiers.
Speaker 1: But there was a scientist trying to make people breed
Speaker 1: with monkeys. That's the had made it. I think Stalin
Speaker 1: probably had his eye on that research. I think I
Speaker 1: think if that guy had successfully molested women with monkey
Speaker 1: sperm and came up with monkey human hybrids, Stalin would
Speaker 1: have been like, well, let's see, how did they shoot?
Speaker 1: But that never happened. So Lashenko believed that the death
Speaker 1: of individual saplings in the group occurs not because they
Speaker 1: are crowded, but for the express purpose of ensuring that
Speaker 1: in the future they will not be out it. So again,
Speaker 1: a lot of credit to plants. He really credits them
Speaker 1: with a lot of intelligence and planning and free will,
Speaker 1: um and like a morality, yeah, and and not just
Speaker 1: a morality, but a morality that's perfectly in line with
Speaker 1: Soviet theory of the day. So natural selection was, according
Speaker 1: to Lushenko, Darwin's greatest mistake. Uh. He claimed that plants
Speaker 1: did not have hormones. He also claimed that he had
Speaker 1: turned wheat into rye barley oats, corn flowers and other
Speaker 1: plants that are not wheat. At one point, Lushenko even
Speaker 1: said that he'd successfully turned small white birds into large
Speaker 1: blackbirds via blood transfusions. He's just he's gone off the
Speaker 1: rails at this point. At first he's like, I can
Speaker 1: make wheat do better by freezing it, and then he's
Speaker 1: shooting other birds blood and it's like an extemporaneous rally
Speaker 1: where he's just like coming up with new stuff. And yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that is a lot of it. Where he
Speaker 1: just gets into a speech and just starts lying about
Speaker 1: what he's done and there's no checking up on anyone.
Speaker 1: That's probably certainly more entertaining speech. Yeah, it is Davilov
Speaker 1: sitting there being like and in twelve years, we can
Speaker 1: make grade more durable by doing that. And then Leshenko
Speaker 1: is like I made birds bigger birds? Could I turned
Speaker 1: sparrows into turkeys with blood? Yeah? Who are you going
Speaker 1: to listen to Leshenko? Sounds way more exciting. So Leshenko
Speaker 1: was not a big fan of academic integrity, nor was
Speaker 1: he a big fan of the scientific method. His personal
Speaker 1: philosophy and science was quote, if you want a particular result,
Speaker 1: you obtain it. I need only people who will obtain
Speaker 1: what I require. So that sounds very scientific, Yeah, which
Speaker 1: just sounds like scientology. It's a little bit like you know,
Speaker 1: that kind of will Smith energy of just like you know,
Speaker 1: my children are going to like be the princes and
Speaker 1: princesses of space in a hundred years and like, you know,
Speaker 1: controls time with my mind. If will Smith had been
Speaker 1: in charge of all Soviet agriculture, it would have probably
Speaker 1: been a lot like actually, yeah, okay, So we're going
Speaker 1: to get into how trouphrom Leshenko contributed to the worst
Speaker 1: famine in Russian history. But first we're going to get
Speaker 1: into some ads that I will go here right now
Speaker 1: and guarantee none of the companies that support this podcast
Speaker 1: will be responsible for the worst famine in Russian history.
Speaker 1: And we're back now I'm gonna quote now from an
Speaker 1: Atlantic article on trop from Lushenka that gives a good
Speaker 1: idea of how he was viewed by the Western scientific community.
Speaker 1: Because scientists in the Soviet Union are still talking the
Speaker 1: scientists and the rest of the world at this point
Speaker 1: this pre iron curtain, So other people outside of Russia
Speaker 1: hearing what Lushenko is saying, and they are not buying
Speaker 1: it to the same extent that guys like Stalin are.
Speaker 1: Quote a British biologist, for instance, lamented that Lushenka was
Speaker 1: completely ignorant of the elementary principles of genetics and plant physiology.
Speaker 1: To talk to Lushenko was like trying to explain differential
Speaker 1: calculus to a man who did not know his twelves
Speaker 1: timetable criticism from four yes our science burn, motherfucker, you
Speaker 1: can't multiply like in the prov article, like people are
Speaker 1: brutal in print. Then yeah, No, it was a lot
Speaker 1: more fun where people were like Russian scientists publishing or
Speaker 1: was it like, well, if I gotta go to a
Speaker 1: World's Fair and watch a lecture, if I want to
Speaker 1: find out what he thinks about plans, No, No, they're
Speaker 1: they're publishing and like Lushenko's there, they're like scientific symposiums
Speaker 1: and stuff, so go like at this point, scientists to
Speaker 1: an extent always like even when the USSR was at
Speaker 1: its most closed, there were still Russian scientists communicating with
Speaker 1: the rest of the world and vice versa, because that's
Speaker 1: just what scientists do, because scientists understand that the only
Speaker 1: way to get better at science is for everyone doing
Speaker 1: it to talk about what they're trying to do. Like,
Speaker 1: so criticism from foreigners to nut sit well with Lushenko,
Speaker 1: who loathed Western bourgeois scientists and denounced them as tools
Speaker 1: of imperialist oppressors. He especially detested the American born practice
Speaker 1: of studying fruit flies the work course of modern genetics.
Speaker 1: He called sus geneticists fly lovers and people haters. So
Speaker 1: that's a big thing in Leshenko's life, is he really
Speaker 1: fucking hates people studying flies because he doesn't rampage. But
Speaker 1: the Rocks character has always talked about as well, you
Speaker 1: don't like people, but you love animals. It's like his
Speaker 1: main characters is that he just wants to hang with
Speaker 1: with the giant ape but also he's played by the Rock,
Speaker 1: so he's very charming and makes constant jokes and it's beautiful.
Speaker 1: So you're like, I don't really buy it when people
Speaker 1: say he's not a people. It doesn't seem like you
Speaker 1: hate everybody. Yeah, you're the rock so much charisma. Seems
Speaker 1: like you're the most charming man who's ever lived. Exactly.
Speaker 1: So Lashenko denounced Mandelian genetics as a capitalist and clerical
Speaker 1: conspiracy because they didn't like the church either. Also because
Speaker 1: Mindel was was a monk. So clearly his genetics are
Speaker 1: part of a Catholic scheme to to stop communism, right
Speaker 1: and great more Catholics. Yes, the Pope really plans deep.
Speaker 1: He's got a whole big corkboards where he's connecting dots.
Speaker 1: It's like his tenure plan. No, I imagine the Pope's
Speaker 1: plan for world domination looks like that Q and on
Speaker 1: flow chart that just came out. It's just one of
Speaker 1: those crazy image macro It's like circling people's moles and
Speaker 1: red arrows pointing to everything. Of like, that's the Pope.
Speaker 1: Classic Pope. So Leshenko denounced Mendelian genetics in the ninety
Speaker 1: five speech, which he delivered in Stalin's presence. In the speech,
Speaker 1: he called Vavalov and his cohorts Kulak wrecords and sabot tours,
Speaker 1: and said that instead of helping collective farmers, they did
Speaker 1: their destructive business, both in the scientific world and out
Speaker 1: of it. Stalin responded to this, bravo, Comrade Leshenko, bravo,
Speaker 1: because of course Stalin had kind of wrecked the Kulaks
Speaker 1: and and gotten all those people killed, so he needed
Speaker 1: a fall guy. So like, what's happening now is they
Speaker 1: need a fall guy, and they're picking the geneticists that
Speaker 1: have already picked an ideologically inconsistent thing, because you know,
Speaker 1: Vavilov had been the lead geneticist in the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: up until the mid thirties, so he gets picked a
Speaker 1: sort of the fall guy. Fortun a lot of needs
Speaker 1: for Stalin's great at finding guys to fill his needs.
Speaker 1: That sounds a little anyway. So after this point, the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union switches from actual genetics to lushenko Is genetics.
Speaker 1: In terms of its underpinnings of its aggres cultural system.
Speaker 1: More than a billion rubles are invested trying out lushenko
Speaker 1: Ist agricultural theories on the fields and farms of the
Speaker 1: famine racked Soviet Union. How well did all this work,
Speaker 1: you want to want to take a guess they did
Speaker 1: not get more plants that they needed. You don't think
Speaker 1: that freezing seeds and thirty times as many seeds as
Speaker 1: you need, like digging a hole and filling it with
Speaker 1: seeds because there seeds in it, because the seeds are
Speaker 1: like my seed brothers were. Yes. Yes, Now I'm gonna
Speaker 1: quote from a book called Hungry Ghosts, which is a
Speaker 1: book about famine, not about pac Man, not about pac Man,
Speaker 1: although that would be the Pacman book title. Yeah, all
Speaker 1: these ideas helped transform a rich farming nation into one
Speaker 1: beset by permanent food shortages. On the collectives, farmers could
Speaker 1: use neither chemical fertilizers nor the hybrid corn that America
Speaker 1: was using to boost yields. By Lushenko didn't believe you
Speaker 1: should use fertilizers either at all, not not chemical fertilizers. Yeah. Furthermore,
Speaker 1: their seeds should just want it. Yeah, exactly, and he had.
Speaker 1: We'll get onto his yeah. So Furthermore, the fields were
Speaker 1: left fallow most of the time, and when the crops
Speaker 1: were sowned, the vernalized wheat did not sprout, nor did
Speaker 1: Leshenko's frost resistant wheat and rice seeds, or the potatoes
Speaker 1: grown in summer, or the sugar beets planted in the
Speaker 1: hot plains of Central Asia. They all rotted. One year,
Speaker 1: Leshenko even managed to persuade the government to send an
Speaker 1: army of peasants into the fields with tweezers to remove
Speaker 1: the anthers from the spikes of each wheat plant, because
Speaker 1: he believed that his hybrids must be pollinated by hand. Wow, yeah, great,
Speaker 1: So like, is he feeling hot under the collar at
Speaker 1: any point right now? I imagine each harvests must put
Speaker 1: him in a more precarious position, or he's just like, well,
Speaker 1: and bad winters happen, Let's just keep going forward. You
Speaker 1: would think so, wouldn't you. He would really think that
Speaker 1: that would matter. I don't know why I would think that,
Speaker 1: like logic would somehow quickly win out in the midst
Speaker 1: of stupid dangerous things. Yeah, because never proved. Stupid dangerous
Speaker 1: things are in line with the ideology, so they cannot
Speaker 1: be the problem. And Stalin's not going hungry, Yes, of
Speaker 1: course not hungry. Why would Stalin go hungry? Now? Under
Speaker 1: banners proclaiming greater harvests with less dung, so which is
Speaker 1: hell of a slogan. That's that's often been the motivational
Speaker 1: slogan here at the offices. I have them put up
Speaker 1: banners that say that, yeah, it's the original McDonald's looking.
Speaker 1: Soviet farmers also had to create artificial manure by mixing
Speaker 1: humus with organic mineral fertilizers and a rotating barrel. This
Speaker 1: method removed the phosphate and nitrogen, and when the muck
Speaker 1: was spread on the field, it was useless. Ignoring Leashenko's
Speaker 1: repeated failures, the Soviet press continued to trump at his
Speaker 1: endless successes. Cows which produced only cream, cabbages turned into
Speaker 1: swedes which is rude, vegas barley transformed into oats, and
Speaker 1: lemon trees which blossomed in Siberia. Were any of those true?
Speaker 1: Of course not. No, it's all because why are we
Speaker 1: not talking about these cream cows? Just a straight which
Speaker 1: is sounds very painful, butter cows is coming out solid.
Speaker 1: It's like a soft serve machine. Just imagine the saddest
Speaker 1: cow just like moaning in pain as pure cream sheets
Speaker 1: out of its nipples. Yeah, you wouldn't. You wouldn't wouldn't
Speaker 1: want that as a farmer, you'd be like something is
Speaker 1: fucked up with my cows. Frosting is pouring out of it.
Speaker 1: I did learn from this that Ruda begs are also
Speaker 1: called Swedes, because I at first I thought he was
Speaker 1: saying he had literally turned cabbages into Swedish people, and
Speaker 1: I was like, WHOA, I gotta find this prompt article.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen thirty seven, four years after the Soviet
Speaker 1: State had increased its cultivation of farmland a hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty threefold. So when they start using Lushanko's methods, they
Speaker 1: increase the amount of land they're farming by a hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty three times. So it's not even just that
Speaker 1: his methods were well. Now our farms are collective and
Speaker 1: organized differently, but it's like, oh no, we're expanding because
Speaker 1: you are saying all these places that we can't farm,
Speaker 1: I can farm now because I've made these special seeds
Speaker 1: so we can grow these things where they've never grown before.
Speaker 1: So they're farming a hundred and sixty three times as
Speaker 1: much land as they've ever farmed before, and four years
Speaker 1: into this, food production in the Soviet Union is lower
Speaker 1: than it had been when they started. So they increased
Speaker 1: the amount of land being farmed by a hundred and
Speaker 1: sixty threefold and they're growing less food. What's happening to
Speaker 1: their population? And it's dying. Yeah, they are. Millions of
Speaker 1: people are dying. Experienced. Food is one of the top
Speaker 1: ways I stay alive. It was up there, but food
Speaker 1: and eating it almost every day very important. I would
Speaker 1: say more than two thirds of people rely on food
Speaker 1: in order to stay alive. Well, there's the berth Arians
Speaker 1: now troph and Lushenko was awarded six Orders of Linen,
Speaker 1: the Order of the Red Banner, and three Stalin Prizes.
Speaker 1: He was declared a hero of Socialist Labor and made
Speaker 1: vice president of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
Speaker 1: As a Russian hero, statutes were made of him, and
Speaker 1: in fairness to Leshenko into history, he had a face
Speaker 1: made for sculpture. Check out this motherfucker's jaw line. Wow,
Speaker 1: doesn't it's an angry jawline, Like, we'll have the pictures
Speaker 1: on our website behind the Bastards dot com. But his
Speaker 1: jaw looks like it could literally cut things. Yes, that
Speaker 1: is such a character actor face that's seen him in films.
Speaker 1: I feel like he was like a sub captain something
Speaker 1: in a movie. I own on DV, Like, I feel
Speaker 1: like he's been in every movie that was filmed in
Speaker 1: the nineteen forties, Like he just has that look to
Speaker 1: his face. But like you can't not make statues of
Speaker 1: a guy that left. I can't. I can't blame the
Speaker 1: sculptor's dream exactly. He's just got that look. So now
Speaker 1: that Leshenko is sort of the chief scientist of the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union, he starts getting the ability to purge people.
Speaker 1: So in nineteen thirty four, one guy to Leyakov had
Speaker 1: found out that Lushenko had stolen the work of another
Speaker 1: scientist and tried to blow the whistle on this. But
Speaker 1: at this point Lushenko had enough cachet that he was
Speaker 1: able to get to laya Kov denounced in Pravda and
Speaker 1: then shot I like that suddenly that the problem is
Speaker 1: that he's stealing other people's science. It feels like that's
Speaker 1: best case, that he's just taking science. It was like,
Speaker 1: you would really academic honesty policies would not be what
Speaker 1: I'm focusing on is tens of millions of people die.
Speaker 1: You would really think that the scientist will be like, well, no,
Speaker 1: actually just let him have this storm come here. He
Speaker 1: didn't cite in this paper as a classic scientist thing. Anyway,
Speaker 1: that guy gets killed, um so Leshenko convince a style
Speaker 1: and that Mandelian geneticists are fascist, and he was also
Speaker 1: able to convince Staal into executor exile possibly thousands of
Speaker 1: respected Russian geneticists and other scientists for their fascist beliefs.
Speaker 1: One of the men that he has executed is Ilya Ivanov,
Speaker 1: the chimpanzee insemination advocate, or at least Ivanov dies of disease,
Speaker 1: I think in a goolag or something, but he's arrested
Speaker 1: and he's sent away along with a bunch of other scientists.
Speaker 1: So the purges aren't all bad because Ivanov sure probably
Speaker 1: could used to be perched, But thousands of other scientists
Speaker 1: who are actual scientists doing actual work are also getting
Speaker 1: and he's making a lot of these arguments based on
Speaker 1: He's saying they're science is ideologically exactly. It's not like, oh,
Speaker 1: they're they're bad people, it's they are fascist Mendelian geneticists.
Speaker 1: They are supporters of fascist genetic science, and so they
Speaker 1: must be perched. So the battle between Leshanko and actual
Speaker 1: science comes to a head of nineteen thirty six, when
Speaker 1: the Soviet Unions geneticists met up for a conference at
Speaker 1: the Lenin Academy. There was a big debate where Vavalov
Speaker 1: and the other legitimately great scientists of the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: pointed out everything wrong with Lushenko's ideas, but Stalin backed Leshenko.
Speaker 1: Merlov the president of the Lenin Academy, and Vavlov's ally
Speaker 1: was executed and Leshenko was given his job. So yeah,
Speaker 1: that's not only a good man and scientists brave this
Speaker 1: point to still be standing by credibly brave scientific principles.
Speaker 1: I mean, he had gotten his start when I say
Speaker 1: he was collecting seeds in the mountains of Iran. He
Speaker 1: was up in mountains that today with like oxygen tanks
Speaker 1: and modern science, people die hiking those mountains. And he
Speaker 1: was doing it in like the nineteen teens um So
Speaker 1: he was like the original, like almost an Indiana Jones style,
Speaker 1: traveling around the world collecting seeds and interviewing farmers in
Speaker 1: a lot of places. And he believes that belong in
Speaker 1: a museum. Yes, he did believe seeds belong in a museum.
Speaker 1: So Lushenko is given this guy Merrilov's job. He becomes
Speaker 1: the president of the Lenin academy, and now he's in
Speaker 1: charge of vava Lov. So you know, Leshenko is the
Speaker 1: barefoot professor, a true peasant, and you know Vavilov is
Speaker 1: a world traveler and a son of the middle class.
Speaker 1: He was seen as susceptible to foreign influence. So Stalin
Speaker 1: really likes now that Leshenko's in charge and purging all
Speaker 1: of these untrustworthy scientists. So now that he's in charge,
Speaker 1: Lushenko escalates the purges of all the scientists who disagree
Speaker 1: with him. But he waited for a little bit on Vavolov.
Speaker 1: By August of nineteen forty, it had become clear that
Speaker 1: Stalin's farming reforms in lushenko Science had not increased crop yields.
Speaker 1: People were still starving. A scapegoat was needed, and of
Speaker 1: course Babolov was the perfect goat escape. So in August six,
Speaker 1: nineteen forty, while he was out collecting seeds in Ukraine,
Speaker 1: Vavolov is arrested by the secret police and taken to Moscow.
Speaker 1: He was interrogated for eleven months and eventually sent to
Speaker 1: a gulag, where he starved to death. In nineteen forty three, hundreds,
Speaker 1: perhaps thousands of geneticists were arrested and denounced as agents
Speaker 1: of international fascism, and most of them were starved death.
Speaker 1: That was the common way to deal with these guys
Speaker 1: who had dedicated their lives to stopping famine was to
Speaker 1: start with. Lushenko was very good at starving people to death.
Speaker 1: If there was anything that he approved, he dropped over
Speaker 1: his career, for sure. He's the Lebron James of starving
Speaker 1: people to death. You're breaking my heart, Robert. Then I
Speaker 1: knew it was going to happen. But Volov, you know,
Speaker 1: you introduced this guy that I just really this cool
Speaker 1: Baly came to like an admire and here we are
Speaker 1: watching him staring. Well, I do have kind of a
Speaker 1: heartbreaking but also sort of inspiring story for you. Okay,
Speaker 1: So let's let's roll with that, so Vevlov, I mean,
Speaker 1: you read a couple of paragraphs about the guy, you
Speaker 1: start to really appreciate him. He had a dedicated following
Speaker 1: of scientists, hundreds of scientists who he had mentored and
Speaker 1: trained and who had worked under him and who idolized
Speaker 1: him as like the pinnacle of what a scientist should be.
Speaker 1: And not all of these guys got purged. Now, a
Speaker 1: lot of them did, and many of the scientists who
Speaker 1: survived Lushanko's purges started faking their data and lying like
Speaker 1: Leshanko in order to come up with results that supported
Speaker 1: his theories. You know, evidence against his batchet claims was destroyed.
Speaker 1: Mandelian geneticists were forced to confess their errors and praise
Speaker 1: the scientific wisdom of the party. The resultant brain drain
Speaker 1: is generally estimated to have set the U. S. S r.
Speaker 1: Of science is backed by between thirty and fifty years.
Speaker 1: But the upside of the story is that the giant
Speaker 1: seed bank Vavalov had collected was not destroyed. A lot
Speaker 1: of the scientists wh would work for him stayed there
Speaker 1: maintaining the seed bank, and the seed bank was not
Speaker 1: inherently against sort of lushenko Is genetics. He had no
Speaker 1: problem with seeds. You know, so these guys basically stop
Speaker 1: talking about Mandelian genetics and like go low for a
Speaker 1: while and just try to maintain the seed bank. And
Speaker 1: why doesn't he a little worried that, like the seeds
Speaker 1: would all communicate with one another and decide up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean they commute, they talk all the time. You know,
Speaker 1: they're they've got one single goal. Um, So there's this
Speaker 1: giant seed bank in St. Petersburg, and you know, during
Speaker 1: World War Two, the Nazis invade and they lay siege
Speaker 1: to St. Petersburg, where the seed bank has helped. The
Speaker 1: scientists who work with Favlov barricaded themselves inside it, and
Speaker 1: this was to defend it from both the Nazis and
Speaker 1: from the people of St. Petersburg who were starving. Now,
Speaker 1: seeds are edible. You can survive off of seeds. So
Speaker 1: the seeds in the seed bank, a couple hundred thousand
Speaker 1: of them at this point, would not have been enough
Speaker 1: to save the people of St. Petersburg. But if they
Speaker 1: found out the seeds were there, they would have eaten
Speaker 1: them in a frenzy, trying to save if you get
Speaker 1: one night or whatever, just exactly. So, these guys are
Speaker 1: defending the seed bank from their fellow citizens and from
Speaker 1: the Nazis. But while they're doing this, the scientists are
Speaker 1: starving too. Now there's enough seeds in the seed bank
Speaker 1: that these guys it could it might have saved them
Speaker 1: if the scientists hitty in the seeds, but they didn't
Speaker 1: eat a single seed. Instead, they for months hold up
Speaker 1: and defend the seed bank I'm gonna quote again from
Speaker 1: Gary Naham. Over a series of months in nineteen forty
Speaker 1: two and nineteen forty three, a dozen of the scientists
Speaker 1: starved to death while guarding those seeds. One of them said,
Speaker 1: it was hard to wake up, It was hard to
Speaker 1: get on your feet and put on your clothes in
Speaker 1: the morning. But no, it was not hard to protect
Speaker 1: the seeds once you had your wits about you. Saving
Speaker 1: those seeds for future generations and helping the world recover
Speaker 1: after war was more important than a single person's comfort.
Speaker 1: So a dozen scientists starved to death guarding Vavilov seed Bank,
Speaker 1: but it survives the war. Wow, wasting no seed is
Speaker 1: a very catholic. Yeah, maybe it is a clerical conspiracy.
Speaker 1: The popes just like listening to this um. After World
Speaker 1: War Two, Stalin continued to embrace Leshenko, culminating in a
Speaker 1: nineteen forty eight session of the Lenin Academy where Leshenko
Speaker 1: read the opening remarks, which had been written by Stalin himself.
Speaker 1: The speech glorified the Lamarchian genetic science that had gotten
Speaker 1: so many people killed already. Proponents of Mendelian genetics were
Speaker 1: dubbed enemies of the people. Leshenko claimed that there were
Speaker 1: two different types of biological science, bourgeois and socialist dialectical
Speaker 1: materialist bourgeois. Mendelian genetics was removed from Soviet textbooks, and
Speaker 1: the entire agricultural infrastructure of the USSR was retooled to
Speaker 1: prove crop yields were on the rise in spite of
Speaker 1: persistent famine. This led to the absurd situation of Russia
Speaker 1: exporting grain to the rest of the world while here
Speaker 1: people starved to death for lack of food. Because you
Speaker 1: can't admit that it's not working, So just export the
Speaker 1: grain and let people die. Yeah, it's not the only
Speaker 1: time that happens, so Leshenko, hero of the Soviet Union,
Speaker 1: had his portrait hung in scientific facilities across the entire
Speaker 1: uss are. My brass band and a chorus accompanied him
Speaker 1: every time he gave a speech. Songs, very stupid songs
Speaker 1: were written to honor him and sung by scientists over
Speaker 1: the land. I mean almost all songs sung by scientists
Speaker 1: are not the top songs, never the top songs, except
Speaker 1: for Actually, there's a rapper from Louisiana called Astronaut Talus
Speaker 1: that does a whole great album of songs about like scientists. Scientist. No, no,
Speaker 1: I don't mind scientists. I think he's an alcoholic and
Speaker 1: a rapper, but he's he's does some good songs. But
Speaker 1: I want you to try and sing this song about Lushenko. Okay,
Speaker 1: you picked the tune. You can see where the two
Speaker 1: bars there are. Um, yes, here we go, all right,
Speaker 1: do your best. Do you need a beat? Uh? Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I need I need a little beat. Can we can
Speaker 1: we get a beat? You can just narrowly play on
Speaker 1: accordion with my girlfriend. Let me sing of the eternal
Speaker 1: glory of academician Losschenko. He walks the Maturan path with
Speaker 1: m tread. He protects us from being juped my mentalist
Speaker 1: Morgan is great song, really great song. Thank you you
Speaker 1: saying it beautifully. Thank you. I I got mad that
Speaker 1: I mispronounced the names in the singing. I hadn't seen
Speaker 1: them written down yet. And they, yeah, no, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's a weird song. To ask any academicians. We don't
Speaker 1: run across that word before said yeah. So. Soviet science
Speaker 1: was remade in Leshanko's image, and his new acolytes went
Speaker 1: even further than he had, denying the existence of chromosomes
Speaker 1: and embarking on every stranger theories of plant biology. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna read one more quote from Hungry Ghosts about one
Speaker 1: of these men. Another hero of the Lushenko school was
Speaker 1: the son of an American engineer, for Silly Williams, who
Speaker 1: became a professor at the Moscow Agricultural Academy. Williams thought
Speaker 1: that capitalism and American style commercial farming based on the
Speaker 1: application of chemical fertilizers were taking the world to the
Speaker 1: brink of catastrophe. This was in the early nineteen thirties,
Speaker 1: when American farmers in Oklahoma saw their fields turned to dust.
Speaker 1: Williams believed that the answer was to rotate fields as
Speaker 1: medieval peasants had done, growing grain only every third year.
Speaker 1: The rest of the time, the fields would be left fallow,
Speaker 1: allowing nitrogen to accumulate in the roots of the clover
Speaker 1: and other grasses, which would enrich the soil. He was
Speaker 1: opposed by other experts, among them Prashannakov, who stressed the
Speaker 1: importance of mineral fertilizers and shallow plowing, but Williams dubbed
Speaker 1: them records of socialist agriculture. So Williams's theory stated that
Speaker 1: in order to take maximum advantage of the nutrients, and
Speaker 1: the soil crops should be planted much deeper than they
Speaker 1: normally were, deeper than anyone had ever planted anything which
Speaker 1: spoiler alert doesn't work, doesn't work. No, no, no, it's
Speaker 1: that water that But he's a Lushenko is so his
Speaker 1: his theories. Now it becomes whoever can suggest the next
Speaker 1: crazy thing that is in line with what Lushenko is
Speaker 1: already saying, that thing gets done right, And it is
Speaker 1: like they're almost like out running the mistakes exactly their
Speaker 1: past methods by introducing new ones that are even more
Speaker 1: ideologically Yeah, exactly. So that's where we are as we
Speaker 1: enter the nineteen fifties. The USSR had been started for years.
Speaker 1: Five to seven million conservatively had died during this and
Speaker 1: at least some of those deaths are in thrill from
Speaker 1: Lushenko's heads. You know, probably a couple of million people
Speaker 1: have starved to this point because of his bad science.
Speaker 1: And we are not near the end of troph and
Speaker 1: Leshenko's body count yet. On part two, we're going to
Speaker 1: take a trip over to Chairman Mouse China and learn
Speaker 1: what happened with Lushenko is um next that's tail for
Speaker 1: next Thursday, So why don't you plug your may if
Speaker 1: you go onto Netflix. The comedy Lineup Part two is
Speaker 1: streaming now. My episode is My Name, which is Max Silvestri,
Speaker 1: and also um big Mouth Season two comes out on
Speaker 1: Netflix in October. I wrote on that and it's pretty funny.
Speaker 1: There's lots of dirty jokes. Excellent. Well for more dirty
Speaker 1: jokes about literal dirt, because this is a farming, farming
Speaker 1: based episode, come back to here about how troph and
Speaker 1: Leshanko helped kill thirty million people. It's gonna be a
Speaker 1: doozy So until then, I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards. You can find us on the Internet behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards dot com. You can find us on social
Speaker 1: media at Bastards pod, and you can find me on
Speaker 1: Twitter at I Right okay. And buy my book on Amazon,
Speaker 1: A Brief History of Vice. We have a T shirt
Speaker 1: store on t Public, so buy our t shirts. There's
Speaker 1: a DJ Stalin T shirt which you can wear and
Speaker 1: think about the millions who starved from Stalinist genetic theory.
Speaker 1: Uh and I hope that makes you happy. If it does,
Speaker 1: there's something wrong with you that by the shirt