Part One: The Russian Scientist Who Helped Kill 30 Million People

This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. Hey, I'm Jay Chetty, host of The On-Purpose Podcast. My latest episode is with Hillary Duff, singer, actress, and multi-platinum artist. You desire in family like this picture, and that's not reality. My sister and I don't speak. It's definitely a very painful part of my life, and I hope it's not forever, but it's for right now. Listen to On-Purpose with Jay Chetty on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Jo Interesting, host of the Spirit Daughter Podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. And today, I'm talking with my dear friend, Christa Williams. It can change you in the best way possible, dance with the change, dance with the breakdowns, the embodiment of Pisces Intuition, with Capricorn Power Moves. You're so I'm like delusionally proud of my chart. Listen to the Spirit Daughter Podcast, starting on February 24th, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in 2023. But what if we didn't get the whole story? It has been made to fit. The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapsed. What if the truth was disguised by a story we chose to believe? Oh my god, I think she might be innocent. Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Special Agent Regal, Special Agent Bradley Hall. In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security. One of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world. The Sixth Bureau podcast is a story of the inner workings of the MSS, and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to the Sixth Bureau on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everybody. I'm Robert Evans, and this is, once again, behind the bastards. The show where we tell you everything you don't know, about the very worst people in all of history. Now, this is a show where I read a tale about someone or someone's terrible in history, to a guest who is coming in cold. In this week, my guest is Max Sylvester. He is a comedian. He is a Netflix special, as part of the comedy lineup out right now. How you doing? How you doing? Nice to be here. Thanks for bringing me in from the cold. You know, like the spy movie that came out. It was a book. Yes, it was a book. Excellent. Yeah, yeah, but that's me, and I'm happy to be here. Well, it's funny that you talk about spies, because we're not talking about spies or anything related to spies today, but we are talking about something related to the Soviet Union, which is where spies were invented. Oh, if my James Bond history lessons. That sounds right. Yeah, they're, you know, deceitful people. I don't know. I'm not talking about that. Oh, it's just deceitful time. Yeah, everyone was deceitful in the Cold War. That's what made it fun. Yes. So we're talking pre-cold war and then post Cold War history here. I'll just get into it. The rough title for this episode is the scientist who killed everyone. Oh, that should give you. Yeah. You know, we all have, we all have political views in 2018. This is a polarized time, right? I believe that scientists shouldn't kill people. You do. That's one of my main views. Yeah. Well, this is a rock. It would be a fun episode for you. Yeah, so everybody's got their own political views. I think my regular listeners of this show will pick up on some of my political views from time to time. They're far from hidden. But I try not to make my personal politics the center of any given epitome. I think it's important to criticize and understand terrible people on all sides of the political spectrum. And today's story is, I think, a good explanation of why I think that's so important. Because this is a tale about where unreasoning devotion to an ideology can lead. It's about what happens when ideas matter more than human lives. Today, we're going to talk about a man who set up to feed the world and wound up starving it. But before we get into that, I'd like to provide some backstory on genetic science and early 20th century Russia. Don't worry. It's not going to be boring. It's actually going to start with a story about monkey semen. Oh, great. This is the fun kind of genetic science. Yeah. So it may surprise you to learn that for all the many things ourest Russia sucked at, science was actually not one of them. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, most Russians still lived more or less like medieval serfs. Actual serfdom wasn't abolished until 1861, and things were still pretty primitive after that. Russia's class structure was stiflingly strict, and science was one of the very few means of social mobility. If you were good enough at science, you could become a member of the aristocracy. So one of these zarrest eras scientists was a guy named Ilya Ivanov. In starting in 1910, Ilya became a tireless advocate of trying to crossbreed human beings and apes. Oh, to make like a doctor morote. He didn't really know what was his hope. He didn't know what was going to happen. What are the best parts of monkeys he was trying to put into humans? It was even more primitive than that. He just thought that it might work. Like he was really just like people were just starting to understand genetics at this point. He was like, I bet humans and monkeys can fuck. And I bet they can give birth to hybrids. So let's see what that's like. The reason it hasn't happened yet is because a monkey and a human haven't fallen in love. Exactly. And fully consummated. Or the right monkey and a human. The right monkey and a human not falling in love. So yeah, he's looking at like, you know, you've got, I forget what you breed together to make mules. Is it like a donkey and horse? Yeah, horse and a, yeah. And you get this animal that is sterile, but it's useful. We do stuff with mules. So he was thinking like, okay, well, maybe if you breed human beings and monkeys together, something useful will come out of it. I heard that like L.A., California used to get rid of fly population problems. By basically breeding more of the flies, radiating them so that they were sterile, and then releasing more out so that for like six months, there were more flies, but they wouldn't make babies and would all die and would kill out the population. They're trying something similar with like a disease that they spread through mosquitoes. And some South American country, like try to wipe out all the mosquitoes. So like, yeah, that's been tried a couple of times. And an easy way to go raw. I mean, yeah. Yeah, it seems like it, but this was a little bit different. This was, because you're talking, you know, the early 1900s. You're talking a really optimistic era of science. It's because people have learned enough to know that like things are possible that haven't been done yet, but they haven't learned enough to know what isn't really possible. And I'm sure the rate at that time was like, a lot of things were being discovered and figured out randomly, constantly. And now that they had like a method and they're just now starting to really understand genetics and stuff. And so Ilya at first in 1910, he doesn't really get many people on board with his research, but he continues to like be an advocate for making human beings and monkeys breed. While he does other stuff. And in 1924, seven years after the revolution that brings the Bolsheviks into power, Ilya is working as a sperm disinfector. I don't know what that job is. I couldn't find any detail, but he's disinfecting sperm. The dirty sperm out there. Yeah, it's kind of a dead end scientific job, but the Institute Pustier in France offers to support his attempt to hybridize manapes. So according to Russian scientific historian Kierol Rusyanov, they offered Ivanov free access to animals at the Institute's recently organized chimpanzee facility in the village of Kindia, French Guinea, but could not pay for other operational and travel expenses of the project. So fortunately for Ilya, he found someone who did have money to pay for the operational costs of his project, the Soviet Financial Commission. They offered him $10,000 to cross breed human beings and apes. He got approval for his project. For a man ape or just total. Which is a good amount of money then. It was still kind of a shoestring budget, but it was enough to do some research. And he gets official approval from the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Ivan Pavlov, the dog guy, everybody knows about Ivan Pavlov. He was one of the scientists who signed off on this monkey man come project. So it's like this could really work. Every time I hear a bell ring, I find monkeys attractive. Yeah, it's wired into me. Probably something we should talk about with the therapist. It's important to point out that this was not seen as a ludicrous project at the time. A number of luminaries in the scientific field had suggested variations on this research theme already. Ilya was just proposing to test several other scientists' hypotheses. So he's not the original, let's mix man and monkey together. Right. It was kind of like a race to the moon, but who's like, we're well. Yeah. You need to do it because it's out there. Yeah. We choose to put human sperm inside a chimpanzee. We'll put a man in a monkey by 1963. So I'm going to quote from a scientific American article here that kind of summarizes the early research into whether or not human beings and apes can get it down. One such hypothesis was that of the German scientist Hans Freudenthal, whose analysis of blood cells in 1900 between chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and humans, should that they were serologically far more similar than had been previously expected. Freudenthal proposed that anthropoid reproductive cells could be similar enough to result in a hybrid between humans and other apes. In the following two decades, other researchers, such as the Dutch zoologist Herman Marie Bernoulli-Moons, and the German sexologist Herman Roedler, sought to test this prediction by insomidating chimpanzee females with human sperm. However, their attempts never got beyond the planning stage, and in the case of moans, his research plans resulted in him being fired from his teaching position. So other people have this idea, and it's pretty controversial, but is Soviet scientist is going to be the guy who gets to finally test this out, because over in the west, people have this idea, but they're like, no, that's fucked up. Is it that like there's a sort of more like humanistic morality in the west that's like, well, there's certain ethical considerations. We don't want to cross these lines. And that Russia was just like anything for, we're not going to like tradition anymore. We've overthrown the oil. We can try anything science. So that it's important to get the idea of the time. So I even have heads off to French Guinea in West Africa and starts his research. The other researchers there don't like him. And Ilya claims this is because the station was a disgusting mess, and they were getting their monkeys killed before he couldn't disseminate them. The station had brought in roughly 700 chimpanzees from hunters in the year before he arrived, but over half of them had died. So Ilya may have had a point there. But he got to work anyway, and he tried to disseminate three juvenile chimpanzees tragically that did not work since his funds were limited. This failure convinced Ilya that he needed to try a different tactic. Oh man. This is like a superhero story like roll up your sleeves. I've got to test out the antidote on myself. You know, it would actually be better if that had been what he tried. So his original plan was to disseminate three female chimpanzees. And since that didn't work his next plan is to implant chimpanzee seeming into African women without telling them what he was doing. Oh, yeah, that is worse than, yeah, that's the cartoon villain one that I was suggesting. Yeah, now the really good news. This is the only instance in this podcast where colonial Africa is not as terrible as it could have been. Because the governor of French Guinea finds out about Ilya's rape women with chimpanzee sperm plan. Yeah, shuts it down and is like no you can't do that. This is a crime against humanity. Yeah. So Ilya gets sent home to Russia after one month in Africa. And the Soviet Academy of Scientists finds out that he had essentially tried to do something terrible and blackball him. So he gets pretty much shut down. Was this kind of like an England, the Royal Society's of XYZ where you kind of couldn't operate if you were like not part of. Yeah, it's less formal than that. And we get to why in a little bit it had been previous when the Zar was in charge. Things were getting more radical. But Ilya in 1924, 25 is too radical for the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Right. Because he's again essentially trying to assault people with chimpanzees. Oh, yeah. But in his mind, it's punk rock. It's, you know, evolution. We just need to try it. Yeah. And this is really the end of Ilya's tale for today. But I think telling it sets up the intellectual atmosphere of the Soviet Russian in 1924. Open your eyes, sheep. Also, I want to make sheep. That's the other thing I want to do. It's sheep and people. Oh, man, that would have been less horrifying. I guess. Yeah. I don't know for whatever reason if you're like sneaking sheep sperm into human beings, that's less awful than monkey sperm. Because there's a cuddly aspect. There's some sort of. Yeah. Also, this is very dumb. And if you were to ask me, do you believe that a monkey can bear a human child or vice versa? I would be like, no. Otherwise, we'd hear about it all the time. But I don't know why? Like why if you can make a mule? I don't know. We're just too different. Yeah. I mean, I couldn't explain it scientifically. But I mean, he did try. I saw the whole plan of the ape's trilogy. I understand that like we're. It would be cool if we could. If we could, I would support it. Although I would want everyone involved to consent to the experiment. But it would be cool. Yes. And you've long asked the question on this podcast, Kenamunki, give consent to what I have. All right. Ask that question regularly, often on the street corner, just people passing by. I'd like to scream at police officers. That's what the Scopes Monkey trial was about. Right. Kenamunki, give full consent. As far as I've read, which is the title. I remember the scene from the movie where an actor yelled. Now I'm imagining in Heret the Wind with like a guy banging a chimpanzee like right? It's going to work. Oh, if only. Anyway, this was all to set up sort of the state of science in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Anything was seen as possible. Human beings and living beings were seen as very malleable. And in spite of how crazy Ilya's plan to crossbreed humanism chimpanzees sounded, a lot of really good science was being done in the Soviet Union in the early part of the Soviet Union. And in fact, for a while, the Soviet state was the world center of genetic science. I'm asking this because I'm reading the right stuff right now in the space race and the idea of it being like nationalistic. Was there any element of like they had this attitude in competition with the rest of the world or the West? Or is it more just it's like the Soviet zone at this point this the Cold War hasn't started. So they're less competitive. Although there is still a factor of that. But it is not I mean it bumps up to the end degree, you know, in the late 40s. So in this era, the 1920s and early 30s, the most brilliant scientist in the Soviet Union is a guy named Nikolai Vavlov. Now, Vavlov was born in Moscow in 1887. He came from a bougie middle class family in 1906. He started at the Petrovskaya Agricultural Academy, which had been founded to improve Russian agricultural science after a terrible famine in 1892. Vavlov had been five years old during that famine and its horrors were imprinted under his brain. He described his life goal as quote, "to work for the benefit of the poor, the enslaved class of my country to raise their level of knowledge." He wanted to discover better farming methods so that no Russian peasant would ever starve again. And he was apparently a pretty great guy. Vavlov just wanted to save lives. So when he graduated from the academy, he traveled around Europe working with great geneticists all around Western Europe. And then he returned to Russia and got sent out to Persia, where some of the Tsar soldiers had gotten sick from bad bread. During his downtime, Vavlov hiked through the really deadly mountains of modern day Iran, collecting the seeds of plants that thrived in the extreme cult. His hope was that he could plant these seeds in Russia and grow more food for his people. When he got back from Persia in 1916, World War I was kind of a thing at that point and not going well. The Bolshevik uprising happened not long after that, and suddenly Russia was the USSR. At the beginning, this seemed fine for Vavlov's career. Lenin and Trotsky were all about science, and then the years before Stalin took over, Vavlov thrived. He took up a professorship and continued traveling the world and search for plants and farming wisdom that could help the USSR grow more food. According to Gary Nabem, an ethno biologist who wrote a book about Vavlov, he traveled to 64 countries on five continents collecting seeds. He learned 15 languages. He was one of the first scientists to really listen to farmers, traditional farmers, peasant farmers around the world. And why they felt seed diversity was important in their fields. All of our notions about biological diversity and needing diversity of food on our plates to keep us healthy sprung from his work. He was the world's greatest plant explorer. He collected more seeds, tubers, and fruits from around the world than any other person in human history. Wow. Sounds great, right? Yeah. You want to hear how he gets fucked over? Oh, does he? Does he try to breed wheat with a monkey? No, no, no. He's betrayed and dies starving. Yeah, that's this tale. Yeah, it's a dark one. Yeah, no. As soon as you hear about someone awesome on this podcast, it's because I'm going to tell you how they get fucked over. Awesome. He's an awesome vocalist. Yeah, no. He's a great guy. He never did anything wrong that I read about. So yeah, by 1930, Vavlov had assembled a collection of more than 250,000 different seeds, the largest seed bank in human history. He was a director of the Institute of Genetics, and he immediately set to work building a network of research institutes and experimental stations all across the USSR. Vavlov's network eventually included more than 20,000 genetic scientists. One of those scientists was a man named Trophim Lashenko. Have you ever heard of Trophim Lashenko? I have not heard of Trophim Lashenko. Okay. Well, I like the name. Yeah, it's a solid name. Trophim. Yeah, it's very Soviet sounding. Yes. Trophim Lashenko, yes. Now, Trophim was born in 1896 in a region of what is today Ukraine. Trophim was a peasant. He didn't learn to read until he was 13. He was so low on the cultural totem pole that there probably would have been no chance of him having any career beyond peasant and zarrist Russia. But the Bolshevik Revolution gave him an inroad to the scientific community. He was able to gain admittance to several agricultural science institutes and begin carrying out experiments into growing vegetables and different climates. Was the state paying for people's education? Was it like a. Yeah, yeah. So Russia has, and this is a World War II spoiler, pretty brutal winters. I don't know if you were aware of that. I heard that their coats were not good enough. That's what I remember from my first year. That was the Germans. The Russians had great coats in that war. Yeah. Wars are won and lost in the quality of the coats. In boots. In boots, yeah. I have heard that. Yeah. It's dry socks. So, famines had been a regular part of life for centuries, and the Soviet government was trying to find out new ways to make that not the case. So, in 1925, newly minted scientist Trophim Lashenko wound up in a nearby shan trying to breed cold resistant peas. Now, Lashenko believed his special winter peas would turn the Caucasus mountains green in the winter and feed the Soviet people through the winter. He also claimed that he had created a new kind of winter wheat using a process called vernalization. Now, vernalis has the Latin word for spring, which basically what he was trying to do is wheat seeds are different in spring and winter because the cold damages the seeds as they're growing. So, the seeds that you tend to grow in the winter have reduced yields in summer seeds. So, Lashenko was basically claiming that by soaking seeds in cold water, he could get them ready for cold weather, and then they would grow like spring wheat in the winter. You could like prepare them for exactly their use to the cold. Yeah, get them used to the cold while they're seeds and then it'll be fine. They'll grow really, really well in the, which again, 1920s science, something to try. Yeah, you got to try and find out that's what I want. And he got lucky that year. It just so happened that 1925 was an unusually warm winter. His seeds did very well. Now, there was zero evidence that said anything to do with the vernalization because Trophim Lashenko didn't believe in using control groups. Yeah, why would you do that? And the most fun scientist shoot from the hip. Come on. Yeah, that's true. This is a whole episode about scientists who shoot from the hip. So, Trophim Lied and falsified his data to make it look like his methods were the cause of the better harvest that year. Then he kicked off a PR blitz to make sure everyone on the USSR heard about his work. In 1927, he would convince a reporter from Provdett to cover him. The resulting article, The Green Fields of Winter, started out kind of negative describing Lashenko this way. So, the Shenko gives one the feeling of a toothache. God give him help. He has a dejected me in. Stingy of words and insignificate a facetcy. All one remembers is his soul and look creeping across the earth as if at very least he were ready to do someone in. Which is pretty brutal opening. It's very brutal. Oh my god. Where's the picture of him from Provdett? Wow. I feel like that reads like one of those celebrity profiles now where they focus too much on like how many French fries they ate at the beginning. It's just like, oh, this doesn't feel like what they should be about. You should be nicer. Yeah. Well, it is like a Theronis in a Elizabeth Holmes, I feel like, of an earlier time. This is exactly like that, actually. So, the article starts off talking about who he's kind of a dour gross looking guy. But as it goes on, it gets more praiseful because the Provdett guy bought into what he was saying about his seeds. So, it famously dubbed Lashenko the Barefoot Professor, which was a compliment in Soviet era, Russia. And it noted that he's-- I love the Barefoot Contessa. I agree. Exactly. And you would trust him to reform your nation's agricultural processes. Absolutely. I don't know anything about it. Her name's Anna Gartin. She was like the head of nuclear policy and now she is a food network person. Wait, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wait. They had a nuclear policy? She like worked under Reagan as like one of the top policy writers and then like her husband who I believe is a dean of a school at Yale. She moved up to New York after that part of her career and she like opened a grocery store called the Contessa on Long Island in the Hamptons and it became a thing and then cookbooks and then now she's, you know. Okay, well, I guess maybe let her set agricultural policy. I don't know. She seems great. Lashenko was not. But the article-- yeah, called him the Barefoot Professor and noted that his experimental fields were often filled with agronomic luminaries eager to shake his hand and witness the miracles of his creation. So in that interview, Lashenko claimed to have invented vernalization, which was a lie. The process was about 40 years older than he was. And vernalization does actually work to make plants flower earlier. So you can't-- it is a useful tactic. You can change basically how quickly a plant flowers. It's less about timing than yields. Yeah, it doesn't make it better winter wheat. It just changes when it flowers and stuff. So Lashenko's early work on this though had resulted in some promising findings. So Vavlov had fun in him at first. Had been like, okay, maybe this guy's onto something. Over the next couple years, it became increasingly obvious to Vavlov that Lashenko was wrong and faking his data. Unfortunately, in the Soviet Union during this period, scientific accuracy was not the most important question. Ideology was the most important concern. And Lashenko's theory has just happened to gel with communist political theory. To understand why we have to talk about the concept of the new Soviet man. So I'm going to quote from an UNT publication called Recreating Mankind that talks about what we mean when we talk about the new Soviet man, which was like the big buzzword at the time. Linen, taking into account the benefits of a unified national order outlined by Marx and Engels, saw the immediate allure of creating an objective utopian vision on which it could base his politics. And he also recognized the foundation of this new ideal community could quote, "Only be maintained if the very nature of man can be changed to conform to the requirements of this new order." After the revolution, through this purely idealistic vision that was taken from Marx and Engels, Linen and his party carried out their utopian reforms in the hopes of recreating the perfect citizens. Some academics maintain that this idea of the new Soviet man bordered on eugenics, a lot like what the Nazis were talking about. And there is definitely more than a hint of Nietzsche in this quote from Leon Trotsky. "Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to create a higher biological type, or if you please a Superman." So it wasn't about making a new Soviet man that did one of a few tasks. They had a singular vision of what the proper Soviet. They had a vision that the proper culture could create better people. By creating a better society, you could change the character of the people inside the society. Oh, society first. It's not about we're going to change the human beings so that we have a better society. No, we're going to change this and it's going to improve the people in our society. And that's going to. Yeah, so that's why Lushenko's ideas were so popular because he was basically saying that plants could be improved permanently by altering their physical surroundings and circumstances, which was essentially the same thing the USSR was trying to do with tens of millions of former peasant farmers. So we're going to get into what exactly happened after this and how Lushenko's ideas spread for the USSR and what the consequences of that were. So first, if you really want to be a Superman, the only way I know is by listening to these products and services that support our show. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the on-purpose podcast. I'm joined by Luke Combs, award-winning country music artist, and one of the most authentic voices in music today. Luke opens up about success, self-doubt, mental health, and what it really takes to stay true to who you are when your life changes overnight. I hate fame. I hate the word "seller" to hate those words that you make me uncomfortable. But I think when you get to a certain point, the fame or the success or the influence, it just accentuates and exacerbates the inherent person that you are. The guy that says he's always going to be there and that we'll do anything to be there is the only guy that's not there. I'm in Australia when bow is born. My whole identity is that no matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children. Over my job, I dread the conversation with my son. What do you think you'd say? Listen to on-purpose with Jay Shetty on the IHOT Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Jo Winterstein, host of the Spirit Dollar podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. And I just sat down with a mini driver. The Irish Traffler said when I was 16, you're going to have a terrible time with men. (laughs) Actor, storyteller, and unapologetic, aquarium visionary. Aquarius is all about freedom-loving and different perspectives. And I find a lot of people with strong placements and Aquarius are misunderstood. A son and Venus and Aquarius in her seventh house spark her unconventional approach to partnership. He really has taught me to embrace people sleeping in different rooms on different houses and different places, but just an embracing of the isness of it all. If you're navigating your own transformation or just want a chart side view into how a leading artist integrates astrology, creativity, and real life, this episode is a must listen. Listen to the Spirit Dollar podcast starting on February 24th on the IHOT Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your podcast. In 2023, a story gripped the UK, evoking horror and disbelief. A nurse who should have been in charge of caring for tiny babies is now the most prolific child killer in modern British history. Everyone thought they knew how it ended. A verdict, a villain, a nurse named Lucy Leppy. Lucy Leppy has been found guilty. The moment you look at the whole picture, the case collapses. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast "Doubt, the case of Lucy Leppy," we follow the evidence and hear from the people that lived it, to ask what really happened when the world decided who Lucy Leppy was. No voicing of any skepticism or doubt. It'll cause so much harm at every single level of the British establishment of this is wrong. Listen to "Doubt," the case of Lucy Leppy on the IHOT Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. China's Ministry of State Security is one of the most mysterious and powerful spy agencies in the world. But in 2017, the FBI got inside. This MSS officer has no idea the US government is on to him. But the FBI has his chats, texts, emails, even his personal diary. Hear how they got it on the 6th Bureau podcast. I now have several terabytes of an MSS officer, no doubt, no question of his life. And that's the unicorn. No one had ever seen anything like that. It was unbelievable. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS, and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to the 6th Bureau on the IHOT Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We just finished talking with the new Soviet man and how Throfen Lyschenko's ideas about changing seeds by nipigment cold water basically really jelled well with what communist theory at the time said about human beings. And so that if we dip them in cold water for a little bit. Yes, exactly. They'll have better winter. Yeah, a lot of cold bats in the early Bolshevik era. So now one of the first major sets of reforms once Stalin came to power was a policy of collectivization in rural Russia. The government called it consolidation of land in labor and what that meant was that tens of millions of farmers had their land taken from them and smushed together into gigantic collective farms. A lot of people did not like this because it was land they'd been farming for generations and some people resisted. So an estimated 10 million peasant farmers and their families were exiled or imprisoned from 1929 to 1933 for fighting against the collectivization policy. Now Stalin had expected this mass and sudden collectivization to increase food yields. So he'd levied increased grain taxes on all farmers. These taxes came off the top which meant a lot of farmers wound up with no food to eat. This combined with the disruption of collectivization led to a famine that started in 1930. Now a major factor in all of this was Stalin's obsession with destroying the rich land-owning peasants or kulaks and the wolf-al-starvation genocide of the Ukrainians. There's a lot of factors in this famine because a lot of decisions are being made at this point in time. But one of the key points is that Stalin just changed the way everyone in Russia had farmed for the last couple of thousand years. Like the actual agriculture of how they were doing it day to day? Yeah, yeah. It's something similar. We just had an episode on what the East India tea company did in India. It was basically very similar where they just forced everyone in these giant collective farms thinking that would improve yields. And what it actually did was destroy these networks of local insurance policies and stuff between different villages. So there was a lot of that going on. There was kind of an all-in type thing in larger pieces of land that when it didn't work. And it was not just that he was forcing everyone onto these farms. He was also changing the way that they farmed. Now the first part of the famine seems to have been intentional because he wanted to get rid of all these rich kulaks and he wanted to get rid of Ukrainians. And in fact one of Stalin's lieutenants in Ukraine noted that the forced starvation had shown the peasants quote, "Who is the master here? It cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay." So there's a little bit about breaking them? Yeah, early on it was about breaking them. But the famine continues after the point where any kind of resistance is really broken to the fact that it starts to become a problem for the Soviet state. Because this is gone further than they had intended. So there was some amount of people they plan to starve to death. But it just turns out you can't control that thing as much as you might have. Yeah. That's why I'm always saying you shouldn't plan to starve anyone to do. Really? Because it just kind of, it always spins out of control. You know, you set a number and the next thing you know, you go over budget, you go over budget. Let's not throw starving the baby out with the backwater. Like that feels unreasonable. A lot of good people that deserve to be starving. There's good people starving people on all sides. Yeah. Good people hungry. Yeah. On both sides. Yeah. Good hungry people on both sides. So yeah, the devastation grows beyond what Stalin had planned for. And as the worst famine in Russian history starts to really bite Stalin calls on both Vavalova and Lashenko to offer solutions. Vavalova using actual science says that he can breed wheat and other crops that will do better in the Russian climate. It will take around 12 years. Lashenko, using lies, promises to do it in three. Can you guess who Stalin goes to it? Lashenko. Yeah. Was the famine just because the new farming system didn't work? Or was he actually changing? It's partly that you're just fucking with sort of the way things have been done. For every by forcing people on these collective farms. But there's also there was enough food that they could have stopped mass numbers of people from dying. But they refused to hand it over. Like they were taking food away from people who were growing it in like Ukraine because they wanted to starve a lot of those people. And they were so it was a mix of things. The famine was because they literally didn't have access to. That's was a lot of the family. Like there still would have been some problem as a result of this and there had been famine you know a few years earlier as a result of the civil war too. But I'm half Ukrainian and I knew my ancestor had come to this country because he killed someone in a bar fight. But it also seems like there were other bad things going on. Yeah, yeah. The hall of Domoar is what the Ukrainians call and it was probably between three and five million Ukrainian star to death. And most of those deaths were intentional. But again it quickly goes beyond that. So Stalin backs Lashenko. There's some debate as to why he liked Lashenko so much. Some of the sources say that Stalin just liked ideologically what Lashenko was saying and didn't ever really talk to the guy very much. And there's other sources that say Lashenko and Stalin worked closely together and Lashenko basically charmed him. So I'm going to read a quote from book Stalinist genetics that takes the attitude that Lashenko was buddy buddy with Stalin and convinced him to sort of back his science by being a charming motherfucker. So although a mediocrity and scientific questions Lashenko was highly talented in the art of leading an ideological fight and of surviving in the midst of Stalinist terror, an airingly dividing the bosses wishes and anxieties. Lashenko came to the fore thanks to his considerable natural talents. He fought for position to top the pyramid of power and wanted not by chance or by a whim of Stalin's but by his skill and waging the kind of battle that was necessary. He outfoxed even Stalin was able to pull the wool over his eyes even when other party leaders already had seen through Lashenko thanks to his courtyards intuition and his shrewdness thanks to his ability to divine Stalin's secret designs. He always struck the right cord with the great Helmsman never arousing his irritation. They called Stalin the great Helmsman. Yeah, which at this point he's like ramming rocks just to see what happens when the boat hits them. Right. And it seems to be working. What's Vavlov feel at this point about Lashenko? I mean, he knows the sciences and the Vavlov does not like the shenko. But it's also he has to be very careful about how he goes about opposing him because Lashenko is ideologically correct. Yeah. And it's also really worth noting that Vavlov is is bougie. He comes from an upper middle class background and that is toxic in the Soviet Union. That's period. Lashenko is a peasant. So that counts for a lot as well. And most of the actual talented scientists in the USSR are people who had grown up wealthier because they were able to afford to go to college and stuff and to like study sciences young men whether having to support their families. So these are the best scientists in the USSR at this point, but they're also bougie, which means they're not trusted by the Soviet leaders. There's not a lot of hard scrap all scientists like Lashenko. Yeah, and unless he does not really a scientist, he just calls himself a scientist. He's just a bullshit artist, but he's got the right background. And so that puts him above these guys who actually know what they're doing and have decades of experience doing real science. There's definitely no echoes of that. Never later in history. No, people have never supported someone who doesn't know anything because they wanted to stop supporting the people who are experts. Yes. That's not something that's ever had before. Thank God it died with that. Only happened in Russia this one time. Thank God. Thank God. So yeah, in that first profile article in 1927, Provdah had praised Lashenko for working for the people rather than study and quote the hairy legs of flies. This is a reference to fruit flies, which were then and are today the number one wear course critter for genetic research because they breed so quickly. You can test a lot of different genetic stuff. I'm not a geneticist, but they're very important. You can't have a lot of really crucial genetic research without using fruit flies because they're just very easy to study this kind of stuff with. Or at least I should say that the number one workhorse of Mendelian genetics. Have you heard of Gregor Mendel? I feel like I've heard the name, but I don't know what that means. Yeah, it's one of those guys you would have come across in high school. He was an Austrian monk and a scientist who bred a bunch of pea plants and figured out the loss of heredity. He kind of invented modern genetic science. Okay. Yeah, this is passed down to that, which is passed down to that. Yeah. Like what Newton is to physics, he is to genetics. Like he's that level of like foundational mind. And he came up with the idea of recessive and dominant traits. He figured out genes were a thing, although he used the term factors, not genes, but he came up with like, he was the first guy to understand that sort of stuff. Right? So he's a big dude, but Trofen Lashenko was pretty sure Mendel was full of shit because Trofen Lashenko did not believe in genes or heredity. And instead he thought that plants could be educated to grow in different climates because plants had free will. They could choose to mature in certain ways to meet their environment if they were properly educated. This is why you could educate a seed to survive the winter by freezing it before planting it. It's just like playing music for your house plants. Yeah. That was better. Yeah, but crazier. Right. I think there might be some, I don't know, I know that the science on that isn't as settled as people who played Beethoven for their plants want to pretend. Right. But that's less crazier than freezing a seed because it will choose to grow better in the cold. Yeah, and I certainly wouldn't like plan to feed my population of people by playing Beethoven for all the plants. Well, it might help, but let's not count on it. But let's not, let's not base all of our agriculture on it. So, Lashenko was not totally alone in rejecting Mendelian genetics at this point. Again, it's a different era. There was another guy, Lamar, who had proposed totally different ideas about heredibility and had basically concluded that the environment drove heredity. Like one of his big things was that giraffes next were longer because many generations of giraffes had been just stretching their next. They're inverted for 5 feet to reach food. Yeah. This is not having to stretch out next to their long chop. Exactly. I like if you do a lot of yoga, your kiddo girl, upgraded yoga. This is not how genetics work, but at this point in time, like whiskey was legally considered medicine. So it's nothing against Lamar, 1800s. Oh, this time. Yeah, exactly. Now, Lashenko praised Lamar's genetics calling it perfectly correct and entirely scientific. But he couldn't really use Lamar as his sort of guy in the past to call to because Lamar could have been a nobleman. I forget what country he came from, but he was like a member of the aristocracy, which meant that he didn't have good Bolshevik credentials either. So instead, Lashenko declared himself the advocate of a Bolshevik scientist named Macchurren. Now, Macchurren had died in 1935, but for a while he was a very famous Soviet scientist. He had been a Lamarkean and claimed that intuition mattered more than education and science. Macchurren had called educated scientists like Vavlov, the cast priests of Jabarology. Wow. Yeah. That's a great phrase. It's Jabarology. Yeah. The cast priest of Jabarology feels like a young adult fantasy novel that I would have read. That's a high schooler. Does it? Yeah. It feels like an old book you would find in a video game or something. No, you don't think so. I mean, maybe. Like as a young person, it would have felt fancy. I don't know what. It's like a cool, you're pushing hard on it. No, no, no. I just like the term Jabarology. It makes me laugh. I like the term cast priest. No, no, no. That does sound like a young adult fiction thing. Like the hearty boys in the cast priest of Jabar. Okay, I'm bound board now. Yeah. Bent out of there. So this was the 1930s and nobody in genetics was perfectly right at this point. For example, most Mendelian geneticists believe that genes were fixed and stable, which is not entirely the case either. But Lushenko considered the entire idea of heredity to be heresy. Heredity in his eyes would mean that people were incapable of change. It was fascist to believe that plants and animals had inherited characteristics and that those characteristics could be enhanced through selective breeding. And in a little bit of fairness to Lushenko, fascists were super into eugenics at this point. Yeah, right. Yeah. So it is kind of like messed up because Lushenko is saying that like, look at what the Nazis are saying about selective breeding of humanity. We don't want to do that. Right. Which is true. Obviously with the Nazi attitudes on genetics led to some bad shit. But his attitude just reject all of science as a result. Is it that he truly was ideologically pure or was he just like, well, as long as I focus on keeping Stalin and people around him and me and their good graces, like, I'm going to follow that track. Like, he knew that he had kind of bullshit that, you know, the first year of the Winter Peas or whatever. It's really hard to say because he's very consistent throughout the entire course of his life. Like, he is consistently full of shit on this stuff. Yeah. But there is a lot. I guess there are a lot of scientists that have like an ideology about the end product that just are willing to fudge and deal with stuff in the early because they're like, I know it'll work out later because I believe this so clearly. It's like you talk about that guy who did that study for the Lancet that gets cited by all of the anti-vaccine people. I'm sure he doesn't think he's a fraud. I'm sure he has internal justifications for all of his questionable science that our people bring up as like, well, this is why this study isn't valid because he made all of these errors. And he will say, well, no, no, no, no, I did that. And when people you don't like keep attacking you, you kind of, you, people tend to double down. You dig in. And I think Lushenko is that kind of scientist where if you could give him a truth serum, he would probably be like, yeah, I did this and this and this. But I did it for this reason. And I did it because the underlying point I'm making is true. And it would be hard not to look at the Nazis and what they're doing using Mendelian genetics as sort of a justification for a lot of it and not be like, we'll see, look at them. How can, how can that be right? Yeah. But Nazis are doing it. This is a messed up time to be arguing for heredability. Having to pay for between the Russians and the Nazis. Yeah. So Lushenko preached that there was no such thing as survival of the fittest among plants of the same species because plants would never compete with other plants of the same type. Instead they would all cooperate for the common good like people. Wow. Yeah. So actually you were better off planting a shitload of seeds very, very close together in the ground. Just really like 20 times as dense with seeds as you would before. I'm all into the same area because they won't fight each other for resources. And in fact, if there's not enough resources in the soil, some of the saplings will quote sacrifice themselves for the benefit of the species. Wow. He's given a lot to plant. There's a lot of credits. These plants are amazing. Better than people. Yeah. We found that a lot of the people don't like what we're doing. Corn is way better than people. Yeah. What if we replace all of the farmers with more corn? We want to create the new Soviet corn man. Yeah. We would love to grow corn into a man. Just to ejaculate on the seeds. Yeah. It's a monkey to have sex with this year of corn. Now we'll have monkey corn hybrids instead of people. They will fight our wars in the people. And in fact, actually, just as a digression, you will often hear people claim that Stalin tried to breed ape supermen hybrids. Wow. And that's harkening back to the Elia Avinus stuff. That never happened. He was never trying to breed super soldiers. Okay. But there was a scientist trying to make people breed with monkeys. All right. That's the common word of love that perhaps though if it had made it. I think Stalin probably had his eye on that research. And I think if that guy had successfully molested women with monkey sperm and came up with monkey human hybrids, Stalin would have been like, "Whoa, let's see how good they shoot." Yeah, yeah. But that never happened. So Lashenko believed that the death of individual saplings in the group occurs not because they are crowded, but for the express purpose of ensuring that in the future they will not be crowded. So again, a lot of credit to plants. Yeah. Wow. He really credits them with a lot of intelligence and planning and free will. And like a morality. Yeah. And not just a morality, but a morality that's perfectly in line with Soviet theory of the day. Yeah. So natural selection was according to Lashenko, Darwin's greatest mistake. He claimed that plants did not have hormones. He also claimed that he had turned wheat into rye, barley oats, cornflowers and other plants that are not wheat. At one point Lashenko even said that he'd successfully turned small whitebirds into large blackbirds via blood transfusions. Wow. Speaking of cast priest. He's gone off the rails at this point. At first he's like, I can make wheat do better by freezing it. And then he's shooting other birds blood in the like an ex temperaniace rally where he's just like coming up with new stuff. And yeah, I think that is a lot of it where he just gets into his speech and just starts lying about what he's done. Wow. And there's no checking up on anyone. It's probably more. It's certainly more entertaining speech. Yeah, it is. The avalov's sitting there being like, and in 12 years we can make grade 30% more durable by doing that. And Lashenko is like, I made birds bigger. What birds could do your dishes? I turned sparrows into turkeys with blood. Yeah. Who are you going to listen to? Lashenko sounds way more exciting. So Lashenko was not a big fan of academic integrity nor was he a big fan of the scientific method. His personal philosophy and science was quote, if you want a particular result, you obtain it. I need only people who will obtain what I require. So that sounds very scientific. Yeah. Scienceology, it's a little bit like, you know, that kind of will Smith energy of just like, you know, my children are going to like be the princes and princesses of space in 100 years and like, you know, I can control time with my mind. If will Smith had been in charge of all Soviet agriculture, it would have probably been a lot like trofe of the ship. Yeah. Okay. So we're going to get into how trofe of Lashenko contributed to the worst famine in Russian history. But first, we're going to get into some ads that I will go here right now and guarantee none of the companies that support this podcast will be responsible for the worst famine in Russian history. Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the on purpose podcast. I'm joined by Luke Combs, award-winning country music artist and one of the most authentic voices in music today. Luke opens up about success, self-doubt, mental health and what it really takes to stay true to who you are when your life changes overnight. I hate fame. I hate the word celebrity. I hate those words that you made me uncomfortable. The guy that says he's always going to be there and that will do anything to be there is the only guy that's not there. My whole identity is that no matter what, I'm going to prioritize my life and my children. My job, I dread the conversation with my son. What do you think you say? Listen to on purpose with Jay Shetty on the IHAR radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Joe Winterstein, host of the Spirit.org podcast where we talk about astrology, natal charts and how to step into your most vibrant life. 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Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Leppie on the IHAR radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. It was unbelievable. This is a story of the inner workings of the MSS and how one man's ambition and mistakes opened its vault of secrets. Listen to the 6th Bureau on the IHAR radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. I'm going to quote from an Atlantic article on Troph and Lashenko that gives a good idea of how he was viewed by the Western scientific community. Because scientists in the Soviet Union are still talking to scientists in the rest of the world at this point. This is pre-Iron Curtain. Other people outside of Russia are hearing what Lashenko is saying. And they are not buying it to the same extent that guys like Stalin are. Quote, a British biologist for instance, lamented that Lashenko was completely ignorant of the elementary principles of genetics and plant physiology. To talk to Lashenko was like trying to explain differential calculus to a man who did not know his 12th timetable. Criticism from 40. Yes, science, science, burn. Between that and the Prob to art. Motherfucker, you can't multiply. Like in the Prob to article, like people are brutal and print up then. Yeah, no, it was a lot more fun. Were people like Russian scientists publishing or was it like, well, I think I got to go to a world's fair and watch a lecture if I want to find out what he thinks about plants? No, no, they're publishing and like Lashenko's, they're like scientific symposiums. Okay. So guy, like at this point, scientists, in, to an extent, always like even when the USSR was at its most close, there were still Russian scientists communicating with the rest of the world and vice versa because that's just what scientists do. Because scientists understand that the only way to get better at sciences for everyone doing it to talk about what they're trying to do. So criticism from foreigners did not sit well with Lashenko who loathed Western bourgeois scientists and denounced them as tools of imperialist oppressors. He especially to tested the American born practice of studying fruit flies, the workhorse of modern genetics. He called us geneticists fly lovers and people haters. So that's a big thing in Lashenko's life is he really fucking hates people studying flies. Because he doesn't know if he's on a movie rampage, but the rock's character is always talked about is well, you don't like people, but you love animals. It's like his main character. Oh, yeah. He just wants to hang with, with the giant ape, but also he's played by the rock. So he's very charming and makes constant jokes and it's beautiful. So you're like, I don't really buy it when people say he's not a people person. It doesn't seem like you hate everybody. Yeah, you're the rock. You have so much charisma. It seems like you're the most charming man who's ever lived. Exactly. So, Lashenko denounced Mendelian genetics as a capitalist and clerical conspiracy because they didn't like the the church either. Also because Mendel was a monk. So clearly his genetics are part of a Catholic scheme to stop communism. Right. Yeah. The Pope really plans deep. He's got a whole big cork board in the Vatican. He's just connecting dots. He's like, it's 10 year plan. No, I imagine the Pope's plan for world domination looks like that Q and on flow chart that just came out. He's got like a thousand. It's just one of those crazy image macros, like circling people's moles. You write arrows pointing to everything. That's the Pope. Classic Pope. So Lashenko denounced Mendelian genetics in the 1935 speech which he delivered in Stalin's presence. In the speech he called Vavlov and his cohorts, Kulak, Reckers and Sabah tours and said that instead of helping collective farmers, they did their destructive business both in the scientific world and out of it. Stalin responded to this. Bravo, Carmred Lashenko. Bravo. Because of course Stalin had kind of wrecked the Kulaks and gotten all those people killed. So he needed a fall guy. So what's happening now is they need a fall guy. And they're picking the geneticists that have already picked an ideologically inconsistent thing. Vavlov had been the lead geneticist in the Soviet Union up until the mid 30s. So he gets picked to sort of the fall guy for the. Shanko's really just satisfying a lot of needs for Stalin's great at finding guys who fill his needs. Yeah. That sounds a little. Yeah. Anyway. So after this point, the Soviet Union switches from actual genetics to Lashenkoist genetics in terms of its underpinnings of its agricultural system. More than a billion rubles are invested trying out Lashenkoist agricultural theories on the fields and farms of the famine racked Soviet Union. How well did all this work? You want to take a guess? They did not get more plants that they needed. You don't think that freezing seeds and planting 30 times as many seeds as you need. Just like digging a hole and filling it with seeds because they're all seeds in it. Because the seeds are like my seed brothers. We are in this together. There are some of the other seeds. Yes. No. I'm going to quote from a book called Hungry Ghosts, which is a book about famine. Not about Pac-Man. Not about Pac-Man, although that would be the Pac-Man book title. All these ideas help transform a rich farming nation into one beset by permanent food shortages. On the collectives, farmers could use neither chemical fertilizers nor the hybrid corn that America was using to boost yields by 30%. With Shanko didn't believe who she'd use fertilizers either. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. Furthermore, their field seed should just want it. Yeah. Exactly. And he had a. We'll get on to this. Yeah. So furthermore, the fields were left phallow most of the time. And when the crops were sown, the vernalized wheat did not sprout. No. Norded Lachenko's frost-resistant wheat and rye seeds or the potatoes grown in summer or the sugarbeats planted in the hot plains of Central Asia. They all rotted. One year, Lachenko even managed to persuade the government to send an army of peasants into the fields with tweezers to remove the anthers from the spikes of each wheat plant. Because he believed that his hybrids must be pollinated by hand. Wow. Yeah. Great. So, like, is he feeling hot under the collar at any point right now? I imagine each harvest must put him in a more precarious position? Or he's just like, "Yeah." Well, bad winters happen. Let's just keep going for it. You would think so, wouldn't you? Yes. You would really think that that would matter. I don't know why I would think that, like, logic would somehow quickly win out in the midst of stupid dangerous things happening. Yes, because it never proves what I mean. The stupid dangerous things are in line with the ideology, so they cannot be the problem. And Stalin's not going hungry. Yes, of course not. Yes, Stalin going hungry. Right. Right, right. Right, right. No. Underbanners proclaiming greater harvest with less dung, which is hell of a slogan. That's often been the motivational slogan here at the offices. I have them put up banners to say that. Yeah. It's the original McDonald's. It's looking greater harvest list on. Soviet farmers also had to create artificial manure by mixing humus with organic mineral fertilizers in a rotating barrel. This method removed the phosphate nitrogen, and when the muck was spread on the fields, it was useless. Ignoring Leshanco's repeated failures, the Soviet press continued to trump at his endless successes. Cowes, which produced only cream, cabbages turned into Swedes, which is root of agus. Barley transformed into oats and lemon trees, which blossomed in Siberia. Were any of those true? No. Oh, okay. Of course not. No, it's all lies. I know the whole point of that, these are big guys, but it's making cream cabs. Making just a street cart, which sounds very painful for the cow. I think one of those butter cows is coming out solid. It's like a soft serve machine. I just don't write into a piece. I imagine the saddest cow, just like moaning and pain is pure cream. Oh my god. She's sad of its nipples. So thick. Yeah. You wouldn't want that as a farmer. You'd be like, something is fucked up with my cow. It's frosting. It's pouring out of me. I did learn from this that root of agus are also called Swedes, because at first I thought he was saying he had literally turned cabbages into Swedish people. And I was like, whoa. I get to find this prompt article. So in 1937, four years after the Soviet state had increased its cultivation of farmland 163 fold. So when they start using Lashenko's methods, they increased the amount of land they're farming by 163 times. So it's not even just that his methods were, well, now our farms are collective and organized differently, but it's like, oh no, we're expanding. We're expanding. Because he's saying all these places that we can't farm, I can farm now because I've made these special seeds. So we can grow these things where they've never grown before. So they're farming 163 times as much land as they've ever farmed before. And four years into this food production in the Soviet Union is lower than it had been when they started. So they increased the amount of land being farmed by 163 fold and they're growing less food. What's happening to their population at this point? It's dying. Yeah. There are millions of people who die. My experience food is one of the top ways I stay alive. It is up there, but food and eating it almost every day is crucial. Very important. I would say more than two thirds of people rely on food in order to stay alive. Oh, it'll be very important. It's very important. Yeah. Well, there's the Bertherians. Right. Of course, very. Now, Troph and Lashenko was awarded six orders of linen, the order of the red banner, and three Stalin prizes. He was declared a hero of socialist labor and made vice president of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. He was a Russian hero, statues were made of him. An infernist to Lashenko and to history, he had a face made for sculpture. Check out this motherfucker's jawline. Wow. It's an angry jawline. We'll have the pictures on our website behind the bastards.com. But his jaw looks like it could literally cut things. Yes, that is such a character actor face that has like right seen him in films. I feel like he was like a sub-captain or something in a movie I own on DVD. I feel like he's been in every movie that was filmed in the 1940s. He just has that look to his face. But like, you can't not make statues of a guy that looks like that. Of course. I can't blame the statue manager. A sculptor's dream. Exactly. He's just got that look. So now that Lashenko is sort of the chief scientist of the Soviet Union, he starts getting the ability to purge people. So in 1934, one guy, Tlaikov, had found out that Lashenko had stolen the work of another scientist and tried to blow the whistle on this. But at this point, Lashenko had enough cash that he was able to get Tlaikov denounced in Provda and then shot. I like that suddenly that the problem is that he's stealing other people's science. It feels like that's best case that he's just taking science. It was. Like, he would really academic honesty policies would not be what I'm focusing on as tens of millions of people die. Yeah. You would really think that the scientist would be like, well, no, actually just let him have this one. But big time he or she didn't cite his sources in this paper. Yeah. That's a classic scientist thing. Anyway, that guy gets killed. So Lashenko convinces Stalin that Mendelian geneticists are fascist and he was also able to convince Stalin to execute or exile possibly thousands of respected Russian geneticists and other scientists for their fascist beliefs. One of them in that he has executed is Ivanov, the chimpanzee insemination advocate, or at least Ivanov dies of disease, I think, in a gulag or something. He's arrested and he's sent away along with a bunch of other scientists. So the purges aren't all bad because Ivanov probably could have used to be purged. But thousands of other scientists who are actual scientists doing actual work are also getting purged. And he's making a lot of these arguments based on he's saying their science is ideologically exactly. It's not like, oh, they're bad people. Yeah. They are fascist Mendelian geneticists. They are supporters of fascist genetic science. And so they must be purged. So the battle between Lashenko and actual science comes to a head in 1936 when the Soviet unions geneticists met up for a conference at the linen academy. There was a big debate where Vavlov and the other legitimately great scientists of the Soviet Union pointed out everything wrong with Lashenko's ideas, but Stalin backed Lashenko. Muralov, the president of the linen academy and Vavlov's ally, was executed and Lashenko was given his job. So Vavlov, not only a good man in scientists brave at this point, still be standing by his scientific principles. He's incredibly brave. I mean, he had gotten his start when I say he was collecting seeds in the mountains of Iran. He was up in mountains that today with like oxygen tanks and modern science, people die hiking those mountains. And he was doing it in like the 19 teens. Wow. So he was like the original like almost an Indiana Jones style traveling around the world, collecting seeds and interviewing farmers in a lot of places. And he believes he's belonging to museum. Yes, he did. He believes he's belonging to museum. So Lashenko is given this guy Muralov's job. He becomes the president of the linen academy and now he's in charge of Vavlov. So you know, Lashenko is the barefoot professor, a true peasant. And you know, Vavlov is a world traveler in a center of the middle class. He was seen as susceptible to foreign influence. So Stalin really likes now that Lashenko's in charge and purging all of these untrustworthy scientists. So now that he's in charge, Lashenko escalates the purges of all the scientists who disagree with him. But he waited for a little bit on Vavlov. By August of 1940, he had become clear that Stalin's farming reforms in Lashenko's science had not increased crop yields. People were still starving. Escape goat was needed and of course, Vavlov was the perfect goat to escape. So on August 6, 1940, while he was out collecting seeds in Ukraine, Vavlov is arrested by the secret police and taken a Moscow. He was interrogated for 11 months and eventually sent to a gulag where he starved to death in 1943. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of geneticists were arrested and denounced his agents of international fascism. And most of them were starved to. That was the common way to deal with these guys who had dedicated their lives to stopping famine. Wow. It was very good at starving people to death. If there was anything that he proved, he was adept over his career. Oh, for sure. He's the LeBron James of starving people to death. You're breaking my heart, Robert, that I knew was going to happen. But Vavlov, you know, you introduced this guy that I just really. This cool guy. Wait until he came to like and admire and here we are watching him starving at gulag. Well, I do have kind of a heart breaking, but also sort of inspiring story for you. Okay. So let's roll with that. So, Vavlov, I mean, you read a couple of paragraphs about the guy. He started to really appreciate him. He had a dedicated following of scientists, hundreds of scientists who he had mentored and trained in who had worked under him and who idolized him as like the pinnacle of what a scientist should be. And not all of these guys got perched. Now, a lot of them did and many of the scientists who survived, the Shankos purges started faking their data and lying like the Shanko in order to come up with results that supported his theories. You know, evidence against his batshit claims was destroyed. Kelly and geneticists were forced to confess their errors and praise the scientific wisdom of the party. The resultant brain drain is generally estimated to have set the USSR's genetic scientists back by between 30 and 50 years. But the upside to the story is that the giant seed bank, Vavlov had collected was not destroyed. A lot of the scientists who had worked for him stayed there maintaining the seed bank. And the seed bank was not inherently against sort of the Shanko as genetics. Right. He had no problem with seeds, you know. So these guys basically stopped talking about Mendelian genetics and like go low for a while and just try to maintain the seed bank. Wasn't he a little worried that like the seeds would all communicate with one another and decide to uprise against the soot. Uprise, yeah, yeah. I mean, they commute, they talk all the time, you know, they've got one single goal. So there's this giant seed bank in St. Petersburg. And you know, during World War II, the Nazis invade and they lay seeds to St. Petersburg where the seed bank is held. The scientists who work with Vavlov barricaded themselves and cite it. And this was to defend it from both the Nazis and from the people of St. Petersburg who were starving. Now, seeds are edible. You can survive off of seeds. So the seeds in the seed bank, a couple hundred thousand of them at this point would not have been enough to save the people of St. Petersburg. But if they found out the seeds were there, they would have eaten them in a frenzy trying to save it. Sure. If you get one night or whatever, just having a bunch of chia seeds. Exactly. So these guys are defending the seed bank from their fellow citizens and from the Nazis. But while they're doing this, the scientists are starving too. Now there's enough seeds in the seed bank that these guys, it could, it might have saved them if the scientists had eaten the seeds. But they didn't eat a single seed. Wow. Instead they, for months, hold up and defend the seed bank. I'm going to quote again from Gary Nabham. Over a series of months in 1942 and 1943, a dozen of the scientists starve to death while guarding those seeds. One of them said it was hard to wake up. It was hard to get on your feet and put on your clothes in the morning. But no, it was not hard to protect the seeds once you had your wits about you saving those seeds for future generations and helping the world recover after war was more important than a single person's comfort. So a dozen scientists starve to death guarding the Vavalov seed bank, but it survives the war. Wow. Wasting no seed is a very Catholic. Yeah. A wave. Maybe it is a clear, a conspiracy. The Pope's just like listening to this. Excellent. Excellent. After World War II, Stalin continued to embrace Lashenko, culminating in a 1948 session of the linen academy where Lashenko read the opening remarks, which had been written by Stalin himself. The speech glorified the Lamarkey and genetic science that had gotten so many people killed already. Proponents of Mendelian genetics were dubbed "inemies of the people." Lashenko claimed that there were two different types of biological science, bourgeois and socialist dialectical materialists. Bourgeois Mendelian genetics was removed from Soviet textbooks in the entire agricultural infrastructure of the USSR was retooled to prove crop yields were on the rise in spite of persistent famine. This led to the absurd situation of Russia exporting grain to the rest of the world while here people starve to death for lack of food. Wow. Because you can't admit that it's not working, so just export the grain and let people die. Wow. Yeah. It's not the only time that happens. So Lashenko, hero of the Soviet Union, had his portrait hung in scientific facilities across the entire USSR. A brass band and a chorus accompanied him every time he gave a speech. And he was very stupid songs. We're written to honor him and sung by scientists over the land. I mean, almost all songs sung by scientists are not the top songs. Never the top songs. Except for, actually, there's a rapper from Louisiana called astronaut Talas that does a whole great album of songs about like 1800s scientists. But is he a scientist? No, no. I don't mind songs about scientists. I think he's an alcoholic and a rapper. Oh, okay. But he does some good songs. But I want you to try and sing this song about Lashenko. Okay. You got it. Let's see where the two bars there are. Yes. Here we go. All right. Do your best. Do you need a beat? Yeah. Yeah. I need a little beat. Can we get a beat? You can just-- [sounds of a beat] Merrily play on. A chord. Beyond. With my girlfriend, let me sing of the eternal glory of academician Lashenko. She walks the maturing path with firm tread. She protects us from being juved. My mentalist Morgan is-- It's a great song. Really great song. Yeah. Thank you. You sang it beautifully. Oh, thank you. I got mad that I mispronounced the names in the singing. I hadn't seen them written down yet. And they-- Yeah, no. It's a weird song to ask. An academician. An academician. You don't want to cross that word before. No, I don't want to. Before, I learned that it was my house. Yeah. So Soviet science was remade in Lashenko's image. And his new accolades went even further than he had. Denying the existence of chromosomes and embarking on ever-stranger theories. A plant biology. I'm going to read one more quote from Hunger Ghost about one of these men. Another hero of the Lashenko school was the son of an American engineer, Facili Williams, who became a professor at the Moscow Agricultural Academy. Williams thought that capitalism and American style commercial farming based on the application of chemical fertilizers were taking the world to the brink of catastrophe. This was in the early 1930s when American farmers in Oklahoma saw their fields turn to dust. Williams believed that the answer was to rotate fields as medieval peasants had done, growing grain only every third year. Most of the time, the fields would be left-fallow, allowing nitrogen to accumulate in the roots of the clover and other grasses which would enrich the soil. He was opposed by other experts among them, Prashanikov, who stressed the importance of mineral fertilizers and shallow plowing, but Williams dubbed them "reckers of socialist agriculture." So Williams' theory stated that in order to take maximum advantage of the nutrients in the soil, crops should be planted much deeper than they normally were, deeper than anyone had ever planted anything. Which, spoiler alert, doesn't work. So it doesn't work. Yeah, no, no, no. You need that water. But he's a Lishenkoist. So his theory is now it becomes, whoever can suggest the next crazy thing that is in line with what Lishenko is already saying, that thing gets done. And it seems like they're almost like outrunning the mistakes of their past methods by introducing new ones that are even more ideologically. Yeah, exactly. So that's where we are as we enter the 1950s. The USSR had been starred for years, five to seven million conservatively had died during this, and at least some of those deaths aren't from Lishenko's heads. Probably a couple of million people have starved at this point because of his bad science. And we are not near the end of Troph and Lishenko's body count yet. On part two, we're going to take a trip over to Chairman Mao's China and learn what happened with Lishenkoism next. Oh, gosh. That's a tale for next Thursday. So why don't you plug your Facebook and Facebook links in there. If you go on to Netflix, the comedy lineup, part two is streaming now. My episode is my name, which is Max Lvestri, and also Big Mouth Season 2 comes out on Netflix in October. I wrote on that and it's very funny and there's lots of dirty jokes. Excellent. Well, for more dirty jokes about literal dirt, because this is a farming, farming based episode. Come back to here about how Troph and Lishenko helped kill 30 million people. It's going to be a doozy. So until then, I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Basterds. You can find us on the internet behind the Basterds.com. You can find us on social media at @basterdspod. And you can find me on Twitter at I Write OK. You can buy my book on Amazon, a brief history of vice. We have a t-shirt store on T-Public. So buy our t-shirts. There's a DJ Stalin t-shirt, which you can wear and think about the millions who starved from Stalinist genetic theory. And I hope that makes you happy. If it does, there's something wrong with you though. Boom, boom, boom! Buy the shirt! I'm joined by Luke Cones, award-winning country music artist, and one of the most authentic voices in music today. No matter what, I'm going to prioritize my wife and my children. I dread the conversation with my son. Listen to on-purpose with Jay Chetty on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Amanda Knox, and in the new podcast, Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, we unpack the story of an unimaginable tragedy that gripped the UK in the past. The moment you look at the whole picture of the case, collapse. Listen to Doubt, the case of Lucy Letby, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, it's Jill Interesting, host of the Spirit Daughter podcast, where we talk about astrology, natal charts, and how to step into your most vibrant life. So I'm like delusionally proud of my chart. Listen to the Spirit Daughter podcast, starting on February 24th, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. In 2018, the FBI took down a ring of spies working for China's Ministry of State Security, one of the most mysterious intelligence agencies in the world. Guaranteed Human.