19. Stalin’s Half-Ape, Half-Man, Hybrids
Russian biologist Ilya Ivanov won considerable acclaim in the early twentieth century as an artificial insemination pioneer. He used his skills to improve the bloodstock of imperial Russia’s horses, inseminating mares with sperm from the best stallions. When the communists took over, Ivanov continued his work on behalf of new masters. One such was Stalin, who in 1926 expressed an interest in “a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat“. Ivanov was directed to see to it, and he figured that the best bet to meet such criterion would be a hybrid crossbreed of apes and humans. He came up with a scheme that approached the issue from both sides. Female humans would be inseminated with male chimpanzee sperm, and chimp females would be inseminated with male human sperm.
The first alternative was easier. A research center was established in Georgia, where female human volunteers were to be inseminated with male chimp sperm, and where the human-ape hybrid babies were to be raised. The second alternative was tougher, because female chimp volunteers were harder to come by in the Soviet Union. So Ivanov travelled to Guinea, French West Africa, to inseminate female chimps with human sperm. Unsurprisingly, the project was unsuccessful. Ivanov failed to impregnate a single female chimp with human sperm. When he returned to the USSR, his disappointment was doubled when he discovered that not a single human female in the Georgia research center had been impregnated with chimp sperm. A disgraced Ivanov was eventually sentenced to five years imprisonment, later commuted to five years internal exile in Kazakhstan, where he died in 1932.
