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Hey there. I'm Scott rank, host of the podcast history unplugged. Now, it really is a dream come true to get paid to talk about history without all the stress while still being able to make a living. And I did it with Spreaker from iheart. Not only did they make it super easy to monetize my podcast, but ad revenue is 3 to four times higher with spreaker than with any other host I've worked with. So if you want to turn your passion into a podcast and give this a try visitspreaker.com, that's spreaker.com get paid to talk about the things you love. Sisters of the Underground is a podcast about fearless Dominican women who stood up against the brutal dictator Kapal Tojo. He needs to be stopped weeping, silent and complacent for far too long. I am Daniel Ramirez, and as a Dominicana myself, I am proud to be narrating this true story that is often left out of the history books through your has blood on his hands. Listen to sisters of the underground wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees. For four, oh, months, the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Living wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everybody. I'm Robert Evans, and this is once again behind the ******** 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. And this week, my guest is Max Silvestri. He is a comedian. He is a Netflix special as part of the comedy lineup out right now. Yeah. How you doing? Nice to be here. Thanks for bringing me in from the cold. You know, like a spy. Right. Like that spider movie that came out before it was alive. Yes. Yeah, it was a book too. Excellent. Yeah. Yeah. But that's me and I'm happy to be here. Well, it's funny 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. If my James Bond history. That sounds right. Yeah. You know, deceitful people. I don't know. I'm not just deceitful time. Yeah, everyone. 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. But the rough title for this episode is the scientist who killed everyone. So that should give you. Yeah. You know, we all have, we all political views in 2018. This is a polarized time, right? I think. I believe that scientists shouldn't kill people. That's one. Main views. Yeah. Well, this is going to 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, my personal politics the center of any given episode. I think it's important to criticize and understand terrible people on all sides of the 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 out to feed the world and wound up starving it. But before we get into that, I'd like to provide some back story on genetic science in 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. Payments. So yeah, this is the fun kind of genetic science. Yeah. So it may surprise you to learn that for all the many things tarist 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 czarist era scientists was a guy. And Ilya Ivanov. And starting in 1910, Ilia became a tireless advocate of trying to crossbreed human beings and apes. Ohh to make like a a doctor Moreau type. What was his hope was that 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 thought like people were just starting to understand genetics at this point. She was like, I bet humans and monkeys can **** and I bet they can give birth to hybrids. So let's see what that. And it hasn't happened yet is because a monkey and human haven't fallen in love. Exactly. Exactly. Or the right monkey in the right monkey and 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 donkeys and horse? Yeah. Yeah. And you get this animal that is sterile, but it's useful. Like, we we do stuff with meals. So he was thinking like, OK, well, maybe if you breed human beings and monkeys together, something useful will come out of it. I heard that, like, LA, California used to get rid of, like, 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 or more flies. But they wouldn't make babies and would all die. And it would, like, 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 wrong. I mean, yeah, yeah, it seems like it. But this was a little bit different. This was because you're talking, you know, the night early 1900. You're talking a really optimistic era of science 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 now that they had like, a method and because they're just. Now starting to really understand genetics and stuff. And so ilia at first in 1910, he doesn't really get many people on board with his research. But he 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, Ellie 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. That dirty sperm out there. Yeah, it's kind of a dead end scientific job. But the Institute Pasteur in. France offers to support his attempt to hybridize mayonnaise. So, according to Russian scientific historian Kirol Russianoff, they offered ivanoff free access to animals at the institutes 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 Elia, 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. Or just total. Total. That's a good amount of money. Then you're 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, like it's wired into me. Probably something we should talk about. The therapist. It's important to point out that this was not seen. Yeah. 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 hypothesis, so he's not the original. That's McMahon and Monkey together, right person. It was kind of like a race to the moon, but who's like, we're all we need to do it because it's out there. Yeah, we choose to put human sperm inside of 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 wow, 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 showed that they were serologically far more similar than had been previously expected. As a result, 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. Burnley moans, and the German sexologist Herman Reidler sought to test this prediction by inseminating 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 a 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 ****** **. Is it that, like, there's a sort of more like? Humanistic morality in the West, that's like, well, there's certain ethic, we don't want corporations, yeah, yeah. And that Russia was just like anything for tradition anymore. Yeah, we we can try anything. Science, so that it's important to get the idea of the time. So Ilya Ivanov heads off to French Guinea in West Africa and starts his research. The other researchers there don't like him. And Ilia claims this is because the station was a disgusting mess and they were getting their monkeys killed before he could inseminate 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 you may have had a point there, but he got to work anyway, and he tried to inseminate 3 juvenile chimpanzees. Tragically, that did not work. Pension funds were limited. This failure convinced Elia that he needed to try a different tactic. This isn't like a superhero story, like roll up your sleeves. I've got to test out the antidote on myself. Thing is it, you know, it would actually be better if that had been what he tried. So it was original plan was to intimidate three female chimpanzees. And since that didn't work, his next plan is to implant chimpanzee semen into African women without telling them what he was doing. That's a 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 ilia's rape women with chimpanzee sperm plan and shuts it down. And it's like, no, you can't do that. This is a crime against humanity. So Ilia get 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 blackballed him. So he he gets pretty much shut down. Was this kind of like in England, the Royal Societies of XYZ where you kind of couldn't operate if you were, like, not part of, you know, yeah, it's less formal than that. And we'll get to why in a little bit. It had been previous when the car was in charge, things were getting more radical. But Ilya in, you know, 192425 is too radical for the Soviet Academy of Sciences because he's, again essentially trying to assault people with chimpanzees. Spurs. Yeah. But in his mind, it's punk rock. It's, you know, revolutionary. We just need to try it. Yeah. And this is really the end of of ilia's tale for today. But I think telling it sets up the intellectual atmosphere of Soviet Russia. And then open your eyes, sheeple. Also. I want to make sheeple. That's the other thing I want to do. It's sheep in people. Would have been less horrifying. I guess yeah? I 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. I 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 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 2 different we are. Like Yeah, I mean, I I couldn't explain it, scientifically, but I mean he did try. The whole planet of the Apes trilogy. I understand that like we are. It would be cool if we could. If we could, I would support it, although I wouldn't want everyone involved to to consent to the experiment. But it would be cool. And you've long asked the question on this podcast. Can a monkey give consent to what I have planned? I asked that question regularly, often on the street corner, just to people passing by. I'd like to scream it at police officers. That's what the Scopes Monkey trial was about, right? Can a monkey give full consent? As far as I've read, which is the title, I remember the scene from the movie. Or, an actor yelled. Now I'm imagining inherit the wind with like, a guy banging a chimpanzee. Like, right, it's going to work. Though only anyway. This was all to set up sort of the 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 Ilyas planned across breed 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 and 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 its own, like the Soviets own? At this point the 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 NTH 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 Vavilov. Now, Vavilov was born in Moscow in 1887. He came from a bougie middle class family. In 1906, he started at the Petrovski. In Agriculture Academy which had been founded to improve Russian agricultural science after a terrible famine in 1892, Vavilov had been five years old during that famine and its horrors were imprinted into his brain. He described his life goal as quote to work for the benefit of the poor, the enslaved classified country. To raise their level of knowledge he wanted to discover better farming methods that no Russian peasant would ever starve again. And he was apparently a pretty great guy. Vavilov just wanted to save lives. So when he graduated from the Academy he traveled around Europe working with great geneticists all around, you know, Western Europe. And then he returned to Russia and got sent out to Persia where some of the cars. Soldiers had gotten sick from bad bread. During his downtime, Vavilov 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 Persian 1916, World War One 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 of the scene. For Babylon's career, Lenin and Trotsky were all about science, and in the years before Stalin took over, Vavilov thrived. He took up a professorship. Continued traveling the world in search of plants and farming wisdom that could help the USSR grow more food, according to Gary Nabam, an ethno biologist who wrote a book about Vavilov. 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. Ubers and fruits from around the world than any other person in human history. Wow. Sounds great, right? Yeah. You wanna hear how he gets ****** over? OHS? He does he try to breed wheat with a monkey? No, no, no. He's betrayed and die 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 ****** over by the actual. Yeah, he's a great guy. He never did anything wrong that I read about. So, yeah, by 1930, Vavilov had assembled a collection of more than 250. 1000 different seeds the largest seed bank in human history. He was made 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. Babylon's network eventually included more than 20,000 genetic scientists. One of those scientists was a man named Trofim Lisenko. Ever heard of Trofim Leshko? I've not heard of Trofim Mashenka. OK, well, I like the name. Yeah, it's a solid name. Yeah, it's very Soviet sounding, yes. Is now. Trofin was born in 1896 and a region of what is today Ukraine. Trofin 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 tarist 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 in different climates. Was the state paying for people's education? Was it like, yeah. So Russia has, and this is a World War Two spoiler. Pretty brutal winters. I don't know if you if you were aware of that. I heard that their coats were not good enough. That's what I remember from the Germans. The Russians had great coats in that war, right? Yeah, wars are won and lost in the quality of the coast and boots and boots. So a 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 Trofim Lisenko wound up in Azerbaijan trying to breed cold resistant peas. Now Leshchenko believed his special winter peas would turn the Caucasus Mountains green in the winter and feed the Soviet people through the coldest months of the year. He also claimed that he had created a new kind of winter wheat using a process called vernalization. Now Vernalis is 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. Seeds, as they're growing. So the seeds that you tend to grow in the winter have reduced yields on the summer seeds. So Leshko is basically claiming that by soaking seeds and cold water, he could get them ready for cold weather and then they would grow like spring wheat in the winter. We could, like, prepare them for. Exactly. They're used to the cold. Yeah. Get him used to the cold while they're seeds, and then it'll be fine. Then they'll grow really, really well in the which, again, 1920s science. Something to try. Yeah, you got to try. You gotta try it once. And he got lucky that year. It just so happened in 1925 was an unusually warm winter. His seeds did very well. Now, there was zero evidence this had anything to do with the vernalization, because Trofin Lashko didn't believe in using control groups. Why would you do that? The most fun scientist shoot from the hip? Come on. This is a whole episode about scientists who shoot from the hip. So Trofim lied and falsified his data to make it look like his methods were the cause of the the better harvest that year. And then he kicked off a PR blitz to make sure everyone in the USSR heard about his work. In 1927 he convinced a reporter from Pravda to cover him. The resulting article, the green fields of winter, started out kind of negative, describing lisenko this way quote the shenko gives one the feeling of a toothache. God give him help. He has a dejected, mean, stingy of words, and insignificant effaces. He all one remembers is his sullen look creeping across the earth as if at very least he were ready to do someone in, which is pretty brutal open. Here's the picture of him from Pravda. Wow, I feel like that. Like 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 this should be about. You should be nicer. Yeah, well, it didn't like Theranos and 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 dower gross looking guy, but as it goes on, it gets more praiseful because the Pravda guy bought into what he was saying about his seeds. So it famously dubbed lisenko the Barefoot professor. Which was a compliment in Soviet era Russia. And it noted that the Barefoot Contessa. Exactly, exactly. And you would trust him to reform your nation's agricultural processes for her. I don't know anything about. Her name is Ina Garten. She was, like the head of nuclear policy, and now she is a Food Network personality. Really? Yeah. Their policy is she, like, worked under Reagan as like, one of the top policy writers and then, like, her husband, who I believe is the Dean of a school at Yale. Like, she moved up to New York after that part of her career and she, like, opened a grocery store, called her Contessa on Long Island in the Hamptons. And it became a thing. And then cookbooks and then now she's, you know, OK well, I guess maybe let her set agricultural policy. I don't know. She seems, she seems great. Leshko was not so, but the article. Yeah. Called him the barefoot professor and and noted that his experimental fields were often. Filled with agronomic luminaries eager to shake his hand and witnessed the miracles of his creation. So in that interview Lisenko 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 it. It is a useful tactic. You can change basically how quickly a plant flowers. It's more about timing than yields. Yeah, it doesn't make it better winter wheat, it just changes when it flowers and stuff. So Leshko's early work on this though had resulted in some promising findings, so. The law had had funded him at first, had been like, OK, maybe this guy's on to something. Over the next couple of years, it became increasingly obvious to Vavilov that Leshko was wrong and faking his data. Unfortunately, in the Soviet Union during this. Scientific accuracy was not the most important question. Ideology was the most important concern, and leshko's theories 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 ENT publication called Recreating Mankind that talks about what we mean when we talk about the new Soviet. And which is like a 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 he 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, Lenin 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 niche 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, like, did one of a few tasks. They had like a singular kind of vision of what the proper society had, a vision that the proper culture could. Better people, right. By creating a better society, you could change the character of the people inside the society. Society first. It's not about we're going to change the human beings so that we have a better society. We're going to change this and it's going to improve the people in our society. And that's going to like, yeah. So and that's why leshko'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 US was trying to do with 10s of millions of former peasant farmers. So we're going to get into what? Exactly happened after this and how Lisenko's ideas spread through the USSR and and what the consequences of that were. But 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. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one meant mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family and at Mint. And we start at 2 lines. 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Now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. My name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world, and if you can give a voice to them, you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with Spreaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador for speaker. But that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love. Spreaker from iheart. And we're back. We just finished talking about the new Soviet man and how Trofim, Leshko's ideas about changing seeds by dipping them in cold water basically really gelled 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. We have better winter. Yeah, a lot of cold baths in the 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 and labor. And what that meant was that 10s of millions of farmers. Netherland taken from them and smooshed 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 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 landowning peasants, or kulaks, and the willful starvation genocide of the Ukrainians. There's a lot of factors in this, this famine, because a lot of decisions are being made at this point in time. But, like, one of the key points is that Stalin just changed the way everyone in Russia had farmed for the last couple of 1000 years. Like, the actual agriculture of, like, how they were doing it day-to-day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's something similar. We just had an episode on what, the East India Tea. Then he did in India where it was very 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 like local insurance policies and stuff between different villages. So there was a lot of that going on. It was kind of an all in type thing and larger pieces of land that, yeah, 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. 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 four 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 it's a little bit about breaking them. Yeah, a little like 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 has 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. That's why I'm always saying you shouldn't plan to starve anyone, 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, go over budget. Let's not throw starving the baby out with the bathwater like that feels unreasonable. A lot of good people that deserve to be starved. There's good people, starving people on all sides. 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 Vavilov and Leshko to offer solutions. Vavilov, 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. Leshchenko, using lies, promises to do it in three. Can you guess who Stalin goes with now? Was the famine just because the new farming system didn't work, or was he? Actually changing. It's partly that you're just ******* with sort of the way things have been done forever by forcing people on the collective farms. But there's also there, 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 something that 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 I knew my ancestor had come to this country because he killed someone in a bar fight. But it also seems like there are other bad things going on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The the Holodomor is what the Ukrainians call, and it was probably between 3 and 5,000,000 Ukrainians starved to death. And most of those deaths were intentional. But again, it it it quickly goes beyond that. So Stalin, Baxley, Shenko, there's some debate as to why he liked Plushenko so much. Some of the sources say that Stalin just liked ideologically what would the Shenko was saying and didn't ever really talk to the guy very much. And there's other sources that say Leshchenko and Stalin worked closely together and leshko basically charmed him. I'm going to read a quote from the book Stalinist Genetics that takes the attitude that Leshchenko was buddy, buddy with Stalin and convinced him to sort of back his science by being a charming ************. So although mediocrity and scientific questions, Leshko was highly talented in the art of leading an ideological fight and of surviving in the midst of Stalinist terror, an airily divining the boss's wishes and anxieties, Leshko came to the fore. Thanks to his considerable natural talents. He fought for position atop the Pyramid of Power and won it not by chance or by a whim of stalins, but by his skill in waging the kind of battle that was necessary. He outfoxed even Stalin and was able to pull the wool over his eyes even when other party leaders already had seen through the Shanko, thanks to his courtiers intuition and his shrewdness. Thanks to his ability to divine Stalin secret designs, he always struck the right chord 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. Right. And it seems to be working. What's Vavilov feel at this point about the shenko? I mean, he knows the science isn't. Pavlov does not like Leshko, but it's also he has to be very careful about who, how he goes about opposing him because the shenko's ideologically correct. Yeah. And it's also really worth noting that. Davis is bougie. He comes from an upper middle class background, and that is toxic. And the Soviet Union this. Leshko 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 science as young men rather than 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 Scrabble scientists. Like lisheng code. Yeah. You know, yeah, unless she does not really a scientist. He just calls himself a scientist. Yeah, he's just a ******** 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. 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 and like that. That's not something that's ever got. That only happened in Russia. This one. Alright, thank God, thank God. So yeah, in in that first profile article in 1927, profit had praised Lisenko for working for the people rather than studying. Quote the hairy legs of flies. This is a reference to fruit flies, which were then and are today the number one workhorse critter for genetic research. Because they breed so quickly, you can test a lot of different genetic stuff. I'm not a geneticist, but there's 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, he's one of those guys you have come across in high school. He was he was an Austrian monk and a scientist who bred a bunch of pea plants and figured out the laws of heredity. He kind of invented modern genetic science. Like, he's passed down to that which is passed down to that. Like what Newton is to physics, he is to genetics. Like he's. Is 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 he's a big dude. But Trofim Mashenka was pretty sure Mendel was full of **** because Trofim Leshko did not believe in jeans 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 is just like playing music. Your house plant grows 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 play Beethoven for their plants want to pretend. But, like, that's less crazy 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. I'd be like, 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 Plushenko was not totally alone. And rejecting Mendelian genetics. At this point, again, it's a different era. There was another guy, Lamarck, who had proposed totally different ideas about heritability and had basically concluded that the environment drove heredity. Like one of his big things was that giraffes necks were longer because many generations of giraffes had been just stretching their necks for their feet to reach food. Yeah, this is not how genetics work. Stretched out next to their exact child. Yeah, it's like if you do a lot of yoga, your kid will grow up great at yoga. This is not how genetics work, but at this point in time, hit like whiskey. Is legally considered medicine, so it's it's nothing against lamark 1800s of time. Yeah, exactly. Now, Leshchenko praised Lamarque in genetics, calling it perfectly correct and entirely scientific. But he couldn't really use Lamarque as his sort of guy in the past to call to, because Lamarque had been a noble man. I forget what country he came from, but he was like a an A member of the aristocracy, which meant that he didn't have good Bolshevik credentials either. So instead, Leshko declared himself the advocate of a Bolshevik scientist named Maturin. Maturing had died in 1935, but for a while he was a very famous Soviet scientist. He had been a Lamarckian and claimed that intuition mattered more than education and science. Maturan had called educated scientists like Vavilov, the cast priests of Jabberwocky. Wow. Yeah, so that's a great phrase. Yeah, it is. Yeah. The cast priest of Jabberwocky feels like a young adult fantasy novel that I would have read a high schooler does it. Yeah, it's 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 why. Question. Yeah, you're pushing hard on it. No, no, no. I just. I like the term Jabberwocky. It makes me makes me laugh. I like the term cast priest. No, no, that does sound like a young adult fiction thing. Like the Hardy boys and the cast priest of Jabber. OK, I'm, I'm on board now. 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 Lisenko 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 lashko, fascists were super anti eugenics at this point. Yeah, so. Is kind of like messed up because the shenko saying that, like, look at what the Nazis are saying about selective breeding of humanity. We don't want to do that. Which is true, obviously with the Nazi attitudes on genetics led to some bad ****. But his attitude is just reject all of science as a result 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 ******** that, you know, the. First year of the Winter Peas or whatever, and it's, it's really hard to say because he's very consistent throughout the entire course of his life. Like, he is consistently full of **** on this stuff. But there is a, 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 like, I know it'll work out later because I believe this so, 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, right. 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 you made all of these errors and he will say, well, no, I did that. And when people you don't like to keep attacking you, you kind of you people tend to double down. You dig in. And I think leshko 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. Then it would be hard not to look at the Nazis and what they're doing. Using Mendelian genetics is 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? Like the Nazis are doing it. So it is this is a messed up time to be arguing for her credibility, having to pick between the Russians and the Nazis. Yeah, so lisenko 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 **** load of seeds very, very close together in the ground. Just really like 20 times as dense with seeds as you would before. Pour them 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. He's given a lot to plant, a lot of credit, but plants are amazing, better than people. We found that a lot of the people don't like what we're doing. Corn is way better than people. What if we replaced all of the farmers? With more corn, we want to create the new Soviet corn man. We would love to grow corn into a man just ejaculate on the seeds. Yeah, we brought this monkey to have sex with this ear of corn. And yeah, now we'll have monkey corn hybrids instead of people. They will fight our wars in the future. And in fact, actually, just as a digression, you will often hear people claim that Stalin tried to breed ape Superman hybrids. And that's harkening back to the Oh yeah, Ave stuff that never happened. He was never trying to breed super soldiers, but there was a scientist trying to make people breed. Monkeys. So that's the kind of love that perhaps, though if it had made it, I think Stalin probably had his eye on that research. I think. 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. But that never happened. So Lisenko 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 yeah. And not just a morality, but morality that's perfectly in line with Soviet theory of the day. So natural selection was, according to Leshchenko, Darwin's greatest mistake. He claimed that plants did not have hormones. He also claimed that he had turned wheat into rye, barley, oats, corn flowers and other plants that are not wheat. At one point, Leshko even said that he'd successfully turned small white birds into large black birds via blood transfusions. He's just, 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 and like an extemporaneous 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 a speech and just starts lying about what he's done and there's no checking up on anyone. That's probably certainly more entertaining speech. Yeah, it is Vavilov sitting there being like, and then 12 years we can make grade 30% more durable by doing that. And then Leshko is like, I made birds bigger. What if birds could do your dishes? I turned sparrows into turkeys with blood. Yeah. Who are you going to listen to? Leshko sounds way more exciting. So Lisenko 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, sounds like Scientology. Yeah. 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 Princess and princesses of space in 100 years and like, you know? Yeah, controls time with my mind. If Will Smith had been in charge of all Soviet agriculture, it would probably been a lot like Truffle Mashiko, actually. Yeah, OK, so we're going to get into how TRO from Lisenko 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. 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Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love. Spreaker from iheart. And we're back now, I'm gonna quote now from an Atlantic article on Troy from Mashenka that gives a good idea of how he was viewed by the Western scientific community, because scientists in the Soviet Union are still talking with scientists and the rest of the world at this point, this pre Iron Curtain. So other people outside of Russia are hearing what Leshchenko 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 Mashenka was completely ignorant of the elementary principles of genetics and plant Physiology. To talk to Lisenko was like trying to explain differential calculus. I'm a man who did not know his 12th timetable. Criticism with from four. Yeah, harsh science burn between that and the ************ you can't multiply. And the Pravda article, like, people are brutal and print. Yeah. Then yeah. No, it was a lot more fun where people were like, Russian scientists publishing. Or was it like, well, if I got to go to a world's fair and watch a lecture, if I want to find out what he thinks about plans? No, no, they're publishing. And like, leshko's, they're they're like scientific symposiums and stuff. So, like, at this point, scientists and to an extent, always like, even when the 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 science is for everyone doing it to talk about what they're trying to do. Like so criticism from foreigners did not sit well with Plushenko, who loathed western bourgeois scientists and denounced them as tools of imperialist oppressors. He especially detested the American born practice of studying fruit flies, the workhorse of modern genetics. He called such geneticists fly lovers and people haters. So that's a big thing in Mashenka's life is he really ******* hates people studying flies because he doesn't know the movie rampage? But the rocks character is always. Talked about is, well, you don't like people, but you love animals. It's like his main character is that 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. Seems like the most charming man who's ever lived. Exactly. So Leshko denounced Mendelian genetics as a capitalist and clerical conspiracy because they didn't like the the church either. Also because mendel. Was it was a monk so right. Clearly his genetics are part of a Catholic scheme to to stop communism, right, and create more Catholics. Yes, the Pope really plans deep. He's got a whole big corkboard. Connect and it's like it's 10 year plan, no, I imagine the Pope's plan for world domination looks like that Q Anon flow chart that just came out that's got like 1000. It's just one of those crazy image macros like circling people's moles and Red Arrows, pointing to everything, like that's the Pope's classic Pope. So Leshko denounced Mendelian genetics in the 1935 speech, which he delivered in Stalin's presence. In the speech, he called Vavilov and his cohorts Kulak wreckers and saboteurs, 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, comrade lisenko, bravo. Because of course Stalin had kind of wrecked the kulaks and and gotten all those people killed. So he needed a fall guy. So, like what's happening now is they need a fall guy and they're picking the geneticists that have already picked an ideologically inconsistent thing because, you know, Vavilov had been the lead geneticist in the Soviet Union up until the mid 30s. So he he gets picked as sort of the fall guy. Shenko is really just satisfying. A lot of needs for Stalin's great at finding guys to fill his needs. That sounds a little. Anyway, so after this point, the Soviet Union switches from actual genetics to lisenko as genetics in terms of its underpinnings of its agricultural system. More than a billion rubles are invested trying out lisenko list agricultural theories on the fields and farms of the famine wracked Soviet Union. How well did all this work? You want to you want to take a guess. They did not get more plants that they needed. You don't think that freezing seeds and it did it. Not planting 30 times as many seeds as you need. Just like digging a hole and filling it. See, because they're all seeds in it. Because the seeds are like my seed brothers. We are in this each other as Soviet seeds. Yes, 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. Yeah. 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% leshko. Can't believe you should use fertilizers either at all. No. Yeah. OK. Not not chemical fertilizers. Yeah. Furthermore, they're seed. Should just want it. Yeah, exactly. And he had. We'll get on to his. Yeah. So furthermore, the fields were left fallow most of the time, and when the crops were sown, the vernalized wheat did not sprout. No. Nor did leshko's frost resistant wheat and rice seeds. Or the potatoes grown in summer, or the sugar beets planted in the hot plains of Central Asia. They all rotted. One year, Leshko 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 harvests must put him in a more precarious position or he's just like, well, bad winters happen. Let's just keep going forward. You would think so, wouldn't you? 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. Yeah, because never proved this 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. Stalin go hungry. Why would Stalin go hungry? No. Under banners proclaiming greater harvest with less dung. So which is hell of a slogan? That's that's often been the the motivational slogan here at the offices I have them put up banners that say that yeah, the original McDonald's looking greater harvest. Soviet farmers also had to create artificial manure. And mixing humus with organic mineral fertilizers and a rotating barrel. This method removes the Phosphate and nitrogen and when the muck was spread on the fields. It was useless, ignoring the Shenko 's repeated failures. The Soviet press continued to trumpet his endless successes cows, which produced only cream cabbages turned into Swedes, which is rutabagas, barley transformed into oats and lemon trees, which blossomed in Siberia, where any of those true oh of course, not, no it's all lies. Why are we not talking about these cream cows? I know the whole point of podcasts these are bad guys but he's making cream cows. Just a straight cut, which sounds very painful for the one of those butter cows is coming out solid. It's like a soft serve machine. It's going right into a piece. It's just like moaning in pain as peer cream shoots out of its *******. So, yeah, you wouldn't, you wouldn't want that as a farmer. You'd be like, something is ****** ** with my cow. This frosting is pouring out of him. I did learn from this that rutabagas are also called Swedes because I at first I thought he was saying he had literally turned cabbages into Swedish people. And I was like, whoa, I got to find this Pravda article. So in 1937, four years after the Soviet state had increased its cultivation of farmland, 163. Old O when they start using the shanko's methods, they increase 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, taking land, 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 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. Millions of people are dying. Experience. Food is one of the top ways I stay alive airs up there, but food and eating it almost every day, very important I would say. More than 2/3 of people rely on food in order to stay alive. Well, there's the breatharians. Now, Trump and Leshko was awarded 6 orders of linen, the order of the Red Banner, and three Stalin prizes. He was declared a hero of socialist Labour and made Vice president of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. As a Russian hero, statues were made of him. And in fairness to Leshchenko and to history, he had a face made for sculpture. Check out this ************** jawline. Wow, doesn't it's an angry jawline. Like, we'll have the pictures on our website, behindthebastards.com, but his jaw looks like it could literally cut things. That is such a character actor face that is like, I've seen him in films. I feel like he was like a sub captain. Yeah, something in a movie I own on DVD. Like I feel like he's been in every movie that was filmed in the 1940s. Like he just has that look to his face. But like you can't not make statues of a guy that looks like that. I can't. I can't blame the sculptors dream exactly. He's just got that look. So now that Lisenko is sort of the the chief scientist of the Soviet Union, he starts getting the ability to purge people. So in 1934. One guy to Leakoff had found out that Leshko had stolen the work of another scientist and tried to blow the whistle on this. But at this point, Lisenko had enough cachet that he was able to get to Lakov denounced in Pravda and then shop. I like that suddenly that the problem is that he's stealing other people science. It feels like that's best case, that he's just taking science. It was like, you would really academic honesty policies would not be. What I'm focusing on is 10s of millions of people die. You would really think that scientists be like, well, no, actually, just let him have this big problem here. He didn't cite his sources. In this paper, yeah, that's a classic scientist thing. Anyway, that guy gets killed, so Leshchenko convinces Stalin that Mandela and 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 the men that he has executed is Ilya Ivanov, the chimpanzee insemination advocate, or at least ivanoff dies of disease, I think, in a gulag or something. But he's arrested and he sent away along with a bunch of other scientists, so the purges aren't all bad, because Ivanov. Sure, probably could have used to be purged. But thousands of other scientists who are actual scientists doing actual work are also getting. And he's making a lot of these arguments based on he's saying they're science is ideologically. Exactly. It's not like, oh, they're they're bad people. It's specifically Fascist Mendelian geneticists. They are supporters of fascist genetic science, and so they must be purged. So the battle between mashenka and actual science comes to a head in 1936, when the Soviet Union geneticists met up for a conference at the Linen Academy. There was a big debate where Vavilov and the other legitimately great scientists of the Soviet Union pointed out everything wrong with Leshko 's ideas, but Stalin backed Leshchenko murloc. The president of the linen Academy and Vavilov 's ally was executed and Leshko was given his job. So yeah, that's Vavilov not only a good man, and scientists brave at this point to still be standing by incredibly brave scientific principles. 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. Banks 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. Yeah, traveling around the world collecting seeds and interviewing farmers and a lot of places. And he believes seeds belong in a museum. Yes. He did believe seeds belong in a museum. So Plushenko is given this guy Marlow's job. He becomes the president of the Linen Academy, and now he's in charge of Vavilov. So, you know, Lisenko is the barefoot professor at true. Present. And you know Vavilov is a world traveler in the center of the middle class. He was seen as susceptible to foreign influence. So Stalin really likes now that lisenko's in charge and purging all of these untrustworthy scientists. So now that he's in charge, leshko escalates the purges of all the scientists who disagree with him. But he waited for a little bit on Vavilov. By August of 1940, it had become clear that Stalin's farming reforms in the Shenko science had not increased crop yields. People were still starving. A scapegoat was needed. And of course Vavilov was the perfect goat to escape. So on August 6th, 1940. While he was out collecting seeds in Ukraine, Vavilov was arrested by the secret police and taken to 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 as agents of international fascism, and most of them were starved to death. That was the common way to deal with these guys who had dedicated their lives to stopping. Famine was to start, yeah, Leshko was very good at starving people to death. If there was anything that he proved, he was over his career, for sure, he's the LeBron James of starving people to death. You're breaking my heart. Remember that I knew it was going to happen, but Vavilov, you know, you introduced this guy that I just really this cool guy actually came to like and admire. And here we are watching him starving at gulag. Well, I do have kind of a heartbreaking but also sort of inspiring story for you. OK. So let's let's roll with that. So Vavilov, I mean you you read a couple of paragraphs about the guy, you start to really appreciate him. He had a dedicated following of scientists, hundreds of scientists who he had mentored and trained and who had worked under him and who. Idolized him as like the the pinnacle of what a scientist should be, and not all of these guys got purged. Now a lot of them did, and many of the scientists who survived Leshko's purges started faking their data and lying like Plushenko in order to come up with results that supported his theories. You know, evidence against his batshit claims was destroyed. Mendelian geneticists were forced to confess their errors and praised the scientific wisdom of the party. The resultant brain drain is generally estimated to have set the USSR's genetic sciences, backed by between 30 and 50 years, but the upside of the story is that the giant seed. Think Pavlov had collected was not destroyed? A lot of the scientists who had worked for him stayed there, maintaining the seat bank. And the seed bank was not inherently against sort of the checklist genetics, right? He had no problem with seeds right now. So these guys basically stop talking about Mendelian genetics and, like, go low for a while and just try to maintain the seed bank. Why doesn't he a little worried that, like, the seeds would all communicate with one another and decide to uprise again? Yeah, they commute, they talk all the time. You know, they're they've got one single. So there's this giant seed bank in Saint Petersburg. And, you know, during World War 2, the Nazis invade and they lay siege to Saint Petersburg, where the seed bank has held. The scientist who worked with Vavilov barricaded themselves inside it, and this was to defend it from both the Nazis and from the people of Saint Petersburg who were starving. Now, seeds are edible. You can survive off of seeds. So the seeds in the seed bank couple, 100,000 of them at this point, would not have been enough to save the people of Saint Petersburg. But if they found out the seeds were there, they would have eaten them in a frenzy, trying to. Sure, if you get one night or whatever just happened, a bunch of cheese. 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 hitting the seeds, but they didn't eat a single seed. Instead, they for months, whole up and defend the seed bank. I'm going to quote again from Gary Nabam. Over a series of months in 1942 and 1943, a dozen of the scientists starved 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 starved to death guarding Vavilov seed bank. But it survives the war. Wow. Wasting no seed is a very Catholic yeah wave. Maybe. It is a clerical conspiracy. The Pope's just like listening to this. Yeah. After World War Two, Stalin continued to embrace Lisenko, culminating in a 1948 session of the Linen Academy where Lisenko read the opening remarks, which had been written by Stalin himself. The speech glorified the Lamarckian genetic science that had gotten so many people killed already. Proponents of Mendelian genetics were dubbed enemies of the people. Leshko claimed that there were two different types of biological science, bourgeois and socialist, dialectical materialist. Bourgeois. Mendelian genetics was removed from Soviet textbooks, and 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 her 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 Le Shenko, 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. Songs, very stupid songs, were written to honor him and sung by scientists. Where 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 Astronautalis that does a whole great album of songs about like 1800 scientists. He is scientist. Scientist. I think he's an alcoholic and a rapper. OK, but he's he does some good songs. But I I want you to try and sing this song about the shenko. OK, you pick the tune. You can see where the two bars there are. Here we go. Alright, do your best. Do you need a beat? Yeah, yeah. I need a I need a little beat. Can we can we get a beat? You can just. Merrily play on accordion with my girlfriend. Let me sing of the eternal glory of academician was chanko. He walks them at your own path with firm tread. He protects us from being duped by mentalist Morgan Inists. It's great song. Really great song. Yeah. Thank you. Sang it beautifully. Thank you. I got mad that I mispronounced the names and the singing. I hadn't seen them written down yet. And they yeah. No, it's it's it's a weird song. Ask any academician is a you don't run across that word you heard before. Yeah, so Soviet science was remade in Leshko's image, and his new acolytes went even further than he had, denying the existence of chromosomes and embarking on every stranger theories of plant biology. I'm going to read one more quote from hungry ghosts about one of these men. Another hero of the Plushenko School was the son of an American engineer facility, 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 turned to dust. Williams believed that the answer was to rotate fields, as medieval peasants had done, growing grain only every third year. The rest 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 Prashant Akov, who stressed the importance of mineral fertilizers and shallow plowing. But Williams dubbed them records of socialist agriculture. So, William, this 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. It's not that. Water. You need that. But he's so his his theory is now it becomes whoever can suggest the next crazy thing that is in line with what the shenko is already saying. That thing gets done right, and it seems like they're almost like outrunning the mistakes exactly their past methods by introducing new ones that are even more ideologically exactly stupid. So that's where we are as we enter the 1950s. The USSR had been starred for years, 5 to 7,000,000, conservatively. Died during this, and at least some of those deaths are in full from the Shenko's heads. You know, probably a couple of million people have starved to death at this point because of his bad science, and we are not near the end of Trophon leshko's body count yet. On Part 2, we're going to take a trip over to Chairman Mao's China and learn what happened with Lisenko ISM next. So. That's global retail for next Thursday. So why don't you plug your yeah my if you go on to Netflix, the comedy lineup Part 2 is streaming now. My episode is my name, which is Max Silvestri and also big mouth. Season 2 comes out on Netflix in October. I wrote on that and it's pretty funny. 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 trophy Meshanko helped kill 30 million people. It's gonna be a doozy. So until then, I am Robert Evans. This is behind the ********. You can find us on the Internet behindthebastards.com. You can find us on social media at ******** pod. 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 I hope that makes you happy. If it does, there's something wrong with you. Buy the shirt. Hey there. I'm Scott rank, host of the podcast history unplugged. Now, it really is a dream come true to get paid to talk about history without all the stress while still being able to make a living. And I did it with Spreaker from iheart. Not only did they make it super easy to monetize my podcast, but ad revenue is 3 to four times higher with spreaker than with any other host I've worked with. So if you want to turn your passion into a podcast and give this a try, visit spreaker. Com that's spreaker.com. 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