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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 Trujillo. He needs to be stopped. We've been 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 husband, 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. This is Robert Evans. I'm the host of behind the ******** and this is behind the ******** the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. This is part two of our episode on Trophy Lisenko, the scientist who got everybody killed. And with me today as within part one is Max Silvestri. Max, how you doing? I'm doing great. Thank you for having me back to talk more. Death caused by Russian. Well, before we get into that, I want to tell you something I noticed about your last name, which is, I enjoy saying sylvestri, but it's one of the rare names that I enjoy. Writing more than I enjoy saying. Really think. It's because of the TR. I I don't know. I yeah, I enjoy writing Silvestri. Oh, I've always felt it had a weird rhythm to writing it. I don't. I get lazy by the end of it, especially my my full name is Maximilian. So it's like, Oh my God, I know you've got a lot of ground to. When I was a kid, I had to learn it rhythmically. I still kind of tap my foot. I am my LAN scantrons were not made for the likes of you. No, no, no, no, no. My nickname as a kid was maximi because that's in my preschool. That's where I cut it off. Which in hindsight, what kind of school like only allows 6 letters? Yeah, first name. That's not many, many common first names that hit six or more. Yeah, it's not weird. Well, thank you for saying that. Maximize it. Pretty cool nickname, though. No, I did like, it was like my first AOL screen name. I believe in like 1994 was maximi with no number. I was in early. Nice. Wow, I mean. I feel like you had a choice to make there at some point as to whether or not to be a hip hop artist. And you you could have taken that road. Well, if you can believe it. My middle name, and it's Ukrainian, actually, is shaft. It's my mom's maiden name. So there was a moment, ma'am. My shaft. Maximilian. Shaft as like shaft. You know, some sort of showbiz name felt too much. I was like, I can't do it. It's going to feel like a bit. No one will believe it. Oh my God. Man it. I went to a family wedding this weekend and it was my cousin with the last name shaft. And, like, I had never thought about the whole other side of the family that or that got married into it. Just like the joke of all their speeches was like, I can't believe that our daughter is becoming a shaft. She's now shaft. She's marrying all these shafts. Man, OK, well, that was enjoyable digression and a Ukrainian name, Speaking of people who had bad things done to them because we just talked about the starvation of the Ukraine. There we go, man. That is a country that has just wound up getting screwed over by so many people. It's really, it's remarkable. Like there's just these nations in history, the Congos and other one of them, where it's just like, oh, you guys have just been treated really badly by everyone for the last 300 years. It's like like Italy without the art or food. You're not as excited by it. Yeah, I mean, I like borscht. Ohh no, I mean, I like, I like pierogi. I just mean, like, I, you know, every street corner doesn't have a pierogi restaurant right here in America, right? Yeah, not a lot of that yet. Yeah, yet we need, like a good Ukrainian Music act to sweep the West, the Ukrainian invasion, but not from the War One. That word is a little sour. Anyway, we're talking about trophy lisenko and where we last left off. The USSR had instituted the shanko's policies. He had purged the scientists of the Soviet Union, the genetic scientists who didn't agree with Lisenko ISM, and of course, millions of people had starved in Ukraine and in other parts of the Soviet Union as a result of scientific *******. That's where we wound up last time, and this time we're taking a trip over to Chairman Mao's China to see what happened next with the Shenko assembly. OK, so as you will remember from part one of my sources. For these episodes was the wonderful book Hungry Ghosts written by Jasper Becker. One chapter in that book, which focuses on the bad science of Leshchenko and his comrades, opens with a quote from a Tang dynasty poem that I felt was just too appropriate and inspired a choice not to include as we start this episode. I never think of poems and books as being like this was so necessary, but yet this spoke to you in such a way that you want to repeat it, because it happens a lot. In the books that I read for this, there are often from a poem, and I usually don't include that. But what is what is that called at the beginning? Yeah. Epigraph probably right. I don't. I'm not. I just always feel like, well, how cool, you know, a poem, you know, like that is the energy that I feel when I read, you know? Yeah. And this one is more, I think it accurately sums up the mood of the people that we're going to be talking about, seeing all men behaving like drunkards. How can I alone remain sober? So, all right, that's where we're getting into. In 1949, Mao Zedong became the chairman of the Central Peoples government. His rise to power had included an extensive and wildly successful. Propaganda campaign Mao was the great leader and infallible genius and brilliant Marxist, virtually incapable of making a mistake. After decades of war and chaos in China, he promised his people that he would make their country into a perfect state, a literal heaven on earth. I'm going to yeah, quote from that book here. The nation's poets, writers, journalists and scientists and the entire Communist Party joined him in proclaiming that Utopia was at hand. Out of China, the land of famine. He would make China the land of abundance. The Chinese would have so much food that they would not know what to do with it, and people would lead a life of leisure. Working only a few hours a day, under his gifted leadership, China would enter the final stage of communism ahead of every other country on Earth. If the Soviets said they would reach Communism in 10 or 20 years, Mao said the Chinese would get there in a year or two. In fact, he promised that within a year, food production would double or treble. It's too much food that is too much food. You know, it's not good to have too much food. You know, there's going to piles of rotting vegetables. They started to worry about that. So one of the things that was instituted as a result of their worried that they were going to be way too much food as they instituted a program to get rid of the pests. Before the pests could eat all of the food they were sure was about to be there. And so for like a period of weeks, all of the peasants in China were turned out to murder sparrows in mass to try to kill all of the sparrows. They did the same thing with a couple of bugs, too. We're just like people just be chasing down birds and bugs all day. Oh my God, if sparrows could talk, I'm sure they would try to just be guys. We're not sure that we're going to need to get rid of me. You might want the sparrows. Don't know. Yeah, well, they had them a Sparrow. Too much Sparrow meat. So one popular slogan. At the time was work hard for a few years, happiness for 1000, which sounds good, right? That's investment. Yeah. I can think of other countries that promise Patchiness for 1000 years. The idea that, like, they had a plan to buckle down and that just that they would be set up with abundance forever. Yeah, that was again this idea that you saw in the Soviet Union, that once we perfect our society, we will perfect the people in it. And then none of these problems that have been present throughout 12,000, however many years recorded human history will happen anymore. We're just digging ourselves out of a hole. Because you've all been wrong, the people, the wrong type of human. And now we figured it out at two years at most. 5 Maybe, yeah, couple of years and we'll reverse this 12,000 year old train. Yeah, peasants as far off as Tibet who'd never so much has seen an airplane. We're taught to expect that in the near future. Quote, practically everything would be done by machines. In fact, the time would come when our meals would be brought by machines right up to our mouths. Wow. So this is like fully automated luxury community taught to expect here. And as they say in The Simpsons, people will be needed. To clean and maintain those robots or whatever, you know, like, people will still have a purpose. Yeah, you know, but they won't need to suffer. They won't need to labor miserably in the fields, and they won't starve in the winter, you know? Right. We'll still be a place for people, but it'll be in a perfect utopian state. So now intoxicated China with his view of what the future could be. And it's easy to see why that would be intoxicating. After decades of brutal civil war and the Japanese invasion and basically a genocide being waged and a huge chunk of like, they this China has gone through a lot of ****. Yeah, it hadn't been a good run for them lately, right? So they were eager for this. Unfortunately for everyone, the scientific underpinning of the brave new World, Mao and Vision was. Ohh yeah, yeah. See, Mao had spent years fighting as a gorilla warlord against the other men who aimed to dominate mainland China. In the years before he won, he'd become a voracious consumer of Soviet propaganda. Much of this propaganda had to do with these spectacular record harvests the USSR was supposedly, but not really having. Because remember, they were lying about that trofin Leshko was billed as the greatest scientific mind of the age, and now believe the propaganda not just because he thought it was literally true, but because it ran intoxicatingly in line with what he already believed. About the world see, Mao was not a big scientific reality guy. One of his catch phrases was quote we should be like Mark's entitled to talk nonsense. He lectured people about needing to make science more imaginative. Saying stuff like science is simply acting daringly. There is nothing mysterious about it and there is nothing special about making nuclear reactors cyclotrons or rockets. You shouldn't be frightened of these things. As long as you act daringly, you will be able to succeed very quickly. You need to have spirit to feel superior to everyone. As if there was no one beside you. You shouldn't care about any first machine building ministry, second machine building ministry or King Ha University. But just act recklessly and it will be all right. Yeah, dream big. You know, Baron Munchausen style. Just like, if you will it come on. Yeah, just balls to the wall. Go crazy. Like what is? Science is about recklessness. I'm not going to sit down with a notebook and mumbo jumbo. Figure out what all this is, you know, poor ****. And beakers get on with it. Corn should be bigger. Do it, do it. Make the ******* corn bigger. You can see why it would be fun. Like in a world where people been taught no science. It's about, like, painstaking research and checking your notes and yes, yeah, gradually arriving at truth, chiseling away at that overtime. Just be like, Nah, just ******* try **** man. It's fine. Yeah, we're the best. And we're going to be even better if you just listen to me. Don't worry about the logistics again. Another thing that unfortunately has no echoes after this time. I mean, this was like such a sad chapter that closed so abruptly. Yeah. I mean, one of the best things about history is that people learn all of their lessons from it and never repeat these mistakes. Of course humans change. They change easily. And the changes stick I found. So I'm going to guess that Mao's attitude towards recklessness was probably useful to him and his career as a warlord. That could be good if you're like running an army to just sort of be daring and bold and stuff. Question was he trying to impress Communist Soviet Union with like his adoption or was it more just like, no, I also believe this and it's worked for them and I admire it. Or did he want to, like, get in better? It's certainly changed through time, but in this. In the early period of like, you know, 49 or so, when he gets into power, he's very much trying to impress. And I think it's a mix of legitimately. Having to impress them and also wanting to be the best at communism, right? Like, that's the like, I'm gonna do communism better than you *******. I was Wiccan briefly in 7th grade because like some kids that I hung out with, like one of them got into it and I didn't really believe it. I don't know if any of us did, but we went to a magic shop and bought like source books or whatever, but I was, you know, a teachers pet type student and and in that brief 2 month period I became like the best at wiccanism. I like like knew the whole book. I'd like correct them and being like, Oh no, that's. That mojo bag positivity spell won't work like that, you know, and it won't work unless you bury it in, you know, new soil. So it wasn't that I believed it, but I did, like, excelling at it, you know? Yeah. You want to memorize everything? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, man. So like 7th grade Wiccan. Chairman Mao decided that his extreme knowledge of Lashko is procedures, and all of the reading he'd done of, you know, Soviet agricultural propaganda and whatnot had prepared him to reform the agricultural infrastructure of the largest and most populous nation on the planet. Now, were they going through, like, I imagine their climate is not universally quite as rough as Russia's. Were they going through, like, terrible famine at that point? They were, but mostly because they just been fighting a giant civil war, right? So that ***** up the food. Yeah. So, yeah, most pretty much. Everyone who was alive in China at that point had multiple times dealt with famine in their lives. So it was like the promise that there will be no famines was very powerful. And also he was ******* with something really intricate like Chinese agriculture, like some of the oldest systems in the human planet, right, were continually operating, you know, like ways of. And yeah, it's one of those things we saw. We did an episode on the East India Company in India when they came in and they tried to like, I saw the first three episodes of Taboo. So yeah, I have a pretty clear. Right. So, like in China, you've got a very intricate agricultural system, and they decide to change everything. So, like in the Soviet Union, Chinese scientists with years of experience and impressive educations were seen as useless bourgeois specialists, too cowardly and timid to make great decisions. Because, again, science requires recklessness. To be a great scientist, one had to be a peasant with an intuitive understanding of the natural world and a fervent belief in the philosophical underpinnings of the party. Even children could be great scientists. One popular propaganda book from this. Was called they are. Creating miracles, it told. It told stories about children in an elementary school who had, quote, developed 10 more new crops on its experimental plot. This was treated as fact, not fiction. It's a story. This is what Montessori schools are, basically, right? You just let the kids come up with new vegetables or whatever, and as long as you don't tell them no, make carrots, but with tomatoes on the inside, go do it. Just be daring ******* children. Quote It is a story out of a science fiction book, but no, my young friends, it is not. This is a true story. There are no fairy tale magicians, no white bearded Wizards have never Neverland. The heroes of our story are a group of young pioneers studying in an ordinary village primary school. It's a little excerpt from the book there. So the more Mao read of Leshchenko, Williams, and Maturin, those those great Soviet scientists, the three great luminaries of Soviet agriculture, the more smitten with them he became. He would have read Leshchenko list journals like Agro Biologia, and run across. Quotes that tied Leshko's ideas to the very mind of Stalin. Here's a quote from one of the articles in Agra Biologia Stalin's teachings about gradual, concealed, unnoticeable quantitative changes leading to rapid, radical qualitative changes permitted Soviet biologists to discover and plants the realization of such qualitative transitions that one species could be transformed into another. So this is the **** mouse reading. This is what he's coming to believe. Like you could literally change the nature of these plants by, like, altering them physically, like. Change them forever. And by what you're saying now is not exactly doing deep dives on the the science. He's not double checking numbers here, he's just kind of like skimming to the last paragraph and being like this sounds fantastic. And a lot of what he's reading is tying sort of Stalin's mind and ideals directly to the science, which is leading him to think that like, well, a forceful personality can almost change the nature of science by like what he understands and believes in the world. So many began to tell his friends of his exciting plans to have Chinese peasants plant seeds close together, saying with company they will grow easily. When they grow together they will be comfortable. Mao, like Leshko, felt that plants of the same type could not compete with each other. The Chinese Communist Party gained its own Leshchenko as scientists Lu Tianyu, who went on to persecute all of that country's experts in genetics. Throughout the 1940s, he mandated that Soviet agricultural science and best practices had to be used fascist eugenicists. Scientists who accepted heritability, were arrested or forced to denounce their old beliefs. Soviet science reigned supreme. Here's a quote from one Chinese doctor about his experience in college at the time we were told the Soviets had discovered. Invented everything, even the aeroplane. We had to change textbooks and rename things in the Shenko's honor. So the having Cushing syndrome, a disease of the adrenaline gland, became Leshchenko syndrome to show it had been discovered by him. Since genetics did not exist, we were forbidden to talk about inherited diseases such as sickle cell anemia. Even to students. This meant that all through Mao's lifetime, there was no policy to stop people in the same family marrying each other in passing down their genes. A lot of idiots were born as a result. His words idiots. Idiots. Idiots. You know, in the traditional sense of the word. I don't mean idiots. Like they bother me at parties. I mean like they're they're two idiots. Yeah, yeah. What did China have at that point if 49 or whatever? Like was there a tradition of bourgeois scientists that were following a kind of world stage western style of scientific method? Or I think it was more that scientists in China, like scientists everywhere, connected with other scientists around the world to learn what they were doing and try to uncover truth better and those scientists. Probably we're not dogmatic about much of anything because good scientists are. So before they died, it must have been so annoying to scientists, which was relatively, in the scheme of history, a new thing. They're like, no, no, none of that. We're not doing magic anymore. Now we got science and then like, the New Scientist be like, actually we're going to do some magic. It's gonna be pretty magical. It's going to be magic. Children are scientists now anyway. You have to die. Yeah, mashenka's theory demolished Chinese agriculture just as it had Russian agriculture, a potato blight hit in the 1950s under the Shenko wism. The cause of the blight was assumed to be environmental, not the result of a stunning lack of biodiversity among the potatoes. Good research that was done into the blight was suppressed for decades when the findings contradicted scientific orthodoxy. As a result, Mao era China grew, by some accounts, half as many potatoes as it should have during this. I don't want to get too deep into the woods on communist botany in the mid 20th. I do like the idea that. Someone was like, this is how many potatoes they should have grown. Well, you can look like this is how much land they dedicated the potatoes and how many potatoes they need to make, right not die from lack of potatoes, man? Yeah, I'm talk to the Irish about that. One of the things that was really big and communist botany in this. Was grafting and crossing different species with one another. It wasn't useful for mass agriculture, but countless peasant scientists would be lauded in the press for, like, growing grapes on a Persimmon tree or apples from a pear tree where you're just splicing off pieces of trees. And so you have one tree that grows multiple fruits. Right. Like, it's the thing you can do in your yard and it's cool and you can. Oh yeah. Yeah. I would be like, oh, another example of magic. That's not true. The idea of having 2 citrus fruits on one tree? No, you can totally do that. Like, I don't know, it's like not every plant can be done that way, but there are a lot of different burn. The guy that I saw that had that in his yard. You just saw an apple and a pair of the same tree and started lighting fires. His poor house. Oh my God, there's nothing but ash. Scent. You can do that, but, like, it's not. It's not a solution for more production or anything. It's a neat thing for your own garden. It's not something that is really useful in a mass agricultural scale, right? It takes a lot of time, right? It's not like, you might as well just grow a different field of apples in a field of persimmons and whatnot, right? Reason not to. But it was cool and it was impressive to people at the time, and they were just figuring this out. So, like, that's one of the things that would make the news a lot as they talk about, like, look at all these scientists who have crossed these two different fruits and whatnot together. I had mezcal. This weekend that had a pair in the bottle, like a full pair, and we were trying to figure out very briefly and drunkenly how they got the parent and I was like, well it's not some sort of ship in a bottle type situation where they, you know, had a flat pair and then it got fat. I was like maybe they put a dried pair in the mescal. What they do is they have the tiny little pear on the tree. They hang the tree with the bottles so that grows inside and I was like, that is cool, but also not the most efficient way to bottle alcohol or grow pears to have a handful of trees or perhaps a whole field of them. Bottles on the end. It seems novel rather than super useful. Well, I mean, yeah, it was delicious. Cow went down so smooth I didn't even need a line. Did you eat the pear? You know, we didn't drink that much. And and luckily, when would you break the bottle? I guess so, yeah. I mean, you have to, like, get a glass or something. Get a little bit of glass in your I just want to drink a mess. Called up pair. That sounds delicious. Yes, that sounds fantastic. Yeah. OK. So grafting and crossing all these plants and stuff became something of a meme in Red China. And soon the state news filled with fanciful stories of pumpkins crossbred with papaya, corn crossed with rice and other such nonsense, which you can't do. You can't make corn rice corn. You can't make ear of corn. Has rice in it, cooked rice on the instead of kernels. Unclear. OK. It would be kind of cool either way. Yes, totally. Yeah. But it didn't happen. Neither would really fulfill a need that I have. You know, I go in for different reasons when I'm going for both of those two. Yeah. Never again will, man, you have to go to two different places for rice grains and corn cob. I'm tired of when I eat rice that there's nothing to rotate. And so that would have solved that problem. That's really frustrating. So different districts, we compete with each other for like claiming. Child successes and things that could like go in the local newspapers and stuff. There were stories of like 130 pound pumpkins and whatnot, most of which were complete lies. I feel like that's still a thing we're covering in the news today. Yeah. Somebody grows a really big fruit and you're like, look at this big fruit. Yes, exactly. I mean, I almost feel like it's pre social media. Yeah. You know, American heartland memes was like 10 times forwarded emails that had just like, look at this giant pumpkin the size of a man. This is that. And this is kind of how the craze over this new science. Let's sweep China. You know, at first it's not super negative. Like, yeah, I mean, they're definitely not grown as many potatoes, but like, it's mostly just people being like, well, I can be a scientist. Look at what I did to this tree. Look at I look at this photo of my Husky son next to a potato as tall as he is, you know, come on, this will inspire people for a decade. Yeah. A mix of actual neat little experiments just lies. Yeah. So we're going to get into the Great Leap forward next, which. Was not a great time for most people, but it's called the Great Leap forward. I know, I know sometimes advertisements are not true, but in this case the advertisements are true because they're the ads for our show and they're great. 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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. We're talking. When we were about to talk about the Great Leap forward, which started in 1958, it was Chairman Mao's big sort of plan to rapidly turn China into an industrial and agricultural powerhouse. Now, one aspect of the leap that's probably most famous was the creation of countless backyard furnaces and steel smelting plants and peasant villages designed to sort of the idea was like, we don't need to all, like, move into cities and make big factories like the rest of the world. We can just have our peasants be, like, producing this sort of they didn't make good steel. That farmers don't make great steel in their backyards? Well, we are going to need that steel for when all the robots do all the tasks. In the near, near future, we might as well start building the steel. We might not have the robots. Yeah, we get the steel ready. The robots. Yeah. Anyway, it also involved an 8 point blueprint for Chinese agricultural, written up by Mao himself and based heavily in Leshko's theories. the IT points included close planting and deep plowing. Yeah, real deep plowing. 2 things that by 1953 the Soviet Union knew did not work because again, they had this data. They just weren't sharing it because they didn't want to embarrass themselves by admitting that they'd starved a lot of people unnecessarily with bad science. So they hadn't shared it. But were they, like, quietly changing practices? They were starting to by the mid 50s or so, like, by, yeah, certainly by the late 50s some of this had started to change in the Soviet Union, but they weren't letting people know. And so China was just like, I guess this stuff works, we'll give it a shot ourselves. So probably would have told us. It would have told us if this was killing people. Writer Leshan Tilism 1.5 million seedlings had been spread per 2.5 acres of farmland in China, right in 1958, as part of the Great Leap Forward, Chinese farmers were ordered to plant six and a half million seedlings per 2 1/2 acres. So that's I'm 1.5 million seedlings to six and a half million seed. That's a lot more seeds being planted in the same amount of dirt. And in 1959, the government increased the number of seedlings to between 12 and 15 million per 2 1/2 acres. So they're just dousing way too many. ******* seeds in the land. And they're gonna hoping that these seeds start talking to each other and be like, you know what? We gotta start growing differently. Like people seeds are stronger together. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Good dynamics. I remember something about every important crop in China was planted using this method. And across the board, almost all of the seedlings died. State propaganda photographers would do things like find a field of wheat that was growing height, a bench inside it, and have kids stand on the bench so that they could at least claim that the wheat was growing so dense that children could walk across the top of a field of wheat. So like. In reality, they're having huge trouble getting stuff to grow. And in the areas where it is growing, it's not growing any denser than it ever came in before. But they're essentially faking it. They're cropping the photos in a way that it makes it look like they're, you know, potato inauguration is far more populated with potatoes than perhaps it actually is. Yeah, and many people didn't know this was ********. Millions of farmers were watching crops die. The propagandists who, you know, stuck benches inside of Fields knew that they were faking yields. This was all essentially a play put on for Chairman Mao out of what was probably a mix of genuine. Desire to please the chairman, and fear of what would happen if their yields didn't match what he'd already declared to be reality. One witness to a visit from Mao to the Zen Lee experimental field outside Tianjin in 1958 recalled that before he arrived, everyone grabbed rice plants from other fields and shoved them together so tightly that you really could walk across them. Once Mao left, the rice was replanted. Mao's doctor recalled seeing the same thing done in a different city. The chairman visited. He later stated all of China was a stage, all the people performers in an extravaganza. So everybody's just like, we got it, we got this. This is the guy. Like, we've got to make it look like this ****** working. And weirdly, like, walking on it is the way we've all decided that it is weird to me. Spread, like it's going to grow so dense we can walk across. All right? This is the thing we're committing to that. How else can you say it's growing? A lot of ******* corn. Were there purges happening? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I know as a thing, people were murdered that didn't quite definitely purchase. Oh yeah. Yeah. He's purging. Purging during this. So Mel also fell in love with the idea that that Soviet scientist Williams had come up with, basically, that planting seeds super deep was a good idea. But we're Stalin had been content to find scientists whose theories agreed with his own theories. Mao saw himself as an innovator, so he figured that if planting seeds deep was good, planting seeds even deeper was even better. Oh my God. Yeah, why stop there? These scientists didn't have the ambition of his imagination, of planting it way too deep. I guys, we all know that ground is this deep. But what if I'm just saying. Even deeper, yeah, even deeper. As deep as you possibly can. Often he would have basically whole armies of peasants dig enormous furrows in the land, sometimes 10 feet deep, in order to land seats. It's like, how is a comedian know that wearing two hats is very funny, but, you know, it's even funnier than that. Wearing three hats. Yeah. Just go bigger. Yeah. And now would be walking into the room with like 40 or 50 hats off. And everyone would also be like, we also need to put these on. Everybody get on them. Many hats. How dare you not have 30 hats? Walk across the hats. In one province, 5 million people were ordered to plow. 45 straight days. In order to prepare 3,000,000 hectares of land in the north where the soil was too frozen to dig into, holes were blasted with dynamite in order to help them dig deeper. This logic also applied to rice paddies, which meant peasant farmer women had to wade deeper into the patties than they've ever gone before, often catching infections as a result. In at least one province, farmers had to tie ropes around their waists to avoid drowning in their rice paddies because they were just going so deep. Oh my God, yeah, just way too deep with shenko is to agro biology also meant that Chinese farmers couldn't use chemical fertilizers. Anymore Mao had the government into all its spending to build new chemical plants and instead tried the same sort of ******** fertilizer recipes the Russians had used, generally a mix of 10% manure and 90% normal dirt. According to Lisenko ISM, the manure would magically transfer all its properties to the regular dirt. This practice led to farmers just mixing in random garbage with dirt. Here's a quote from Hungry ghosts. People in Guangzhou took their household rubbish to the outskirts of the city, where it was buried for several weeks before being put out on the fields near Shanghai. Peasants dumped so much broken glass that they could not walk. Across the fields and bare feet, others broke up the mud floors of their huts and their brick stoves and even pulled down their mud walls to use as fertilizer. You know, tip, mouse credit. I I know that's maybe not right, but if I were to put a little of my own manure into, say, a bowl of mashed potatoes and mix it together, I would kind of be like, that's all manure now. I wouldn't be like, well, there's still, there's a lot of good mashed potatoes in there when you are mixing poop with food. Yes, 10% poop means all of the really, it's all poop. Poop. Now, 100% that is a fair point, but it doesn't work that way when you're trying to create. Fertilized soil. So Mao's government expected crop yields to triple after all of this heroic innovation. But that meant they were also going to have to deal with the surgeon pests, as I mentioned. So yeah, in 1958 he ordered farmers to run around banging pots and pans to exhaust all of the sparrows to death. We already went over that. Clearly this is all like a platform, someone inside the government that hates sparrows. Just a long play to get rid of sparrows. I'll show you how many people starve if we get rid of those *** **** birds. Get off my roof. This all was for a while. Things looked like they were going great. 1958 was a good year for weather, and rampant lying made it look like the autumn harvest had quadrupled now, and his comrades started discussing how to handle the massive food surplus they knew they were soon going to have. It was reported that Fields had been producing less than 330 pounds of grain per 1/5 of an acre, now produced 45 to 53,000 pounds of grain, which if true, would be an amazing rate of income. They have too much food. They should just start destroying the food they have now, just to make room for the new food coming in. It's weird. That you predicted exactly what happens next. You're going to need that food. So all of that information on how much grain they were growing was lies. The State Statistical Bureau had been shuttered and replaced by good news reporting stations, which just spouted increasingly lurid lies about the harvest. And so for a little while, China thought it had more food than it knew what to do with. So in the autumn of 1958, Chinese citizens were told to eat like it was going out of style. One slogan at the time was eat as much as you can and exert your utmost in production, peasants in a village called Zangu told anthropologists. To do that quote, everyone irresponsibly ate whether they were hungry or not. And in 20 days they had finished almost all their rice. They had rice, which should have lasted six months. Oh my God. So I do now feel guilty that that is my attitude to eating three to five times a day is like, well, when it starts to hurt, that's when you stop. You stop until it hurts, man. And I'm not getting out in the fields and doing any labor. One of the good rules of thumb with life is that if you do whatever you're doing until it hurts, about 50% of the time that will be the right thing to do. Your body is a way of telling you to stop, which is coding physical discomfort. Yeah. So if you work out till it hurts. Yeah. Good. Right. Pain is just weakness leaving the body. That's what we're always. The same thing is true with eating or with snoring. A lot of cocaine, right? You know, do coke until you start to bleed too much to do more coke. And then it's time to stop doing catch nostrils, switch nostrils, switch drugs. You know, move to the **** till your veins collapse. Yeah, do it till it hurts. Advice for all of our listeners. So Wade, a survivor of the Great Leap forward, later recalled. We lived well. We ate a lot of meat. It was considered revolutionary to eat meat. If you didn't eat meat, it wouldn't do. People even divide with each other to see who could eat the most. So they're have an eating contest. They are being ordered basically to eat their entire winter supply of food in a couple of weeks just because, why not? There's going to be so much food. I know it's going to take a hard right turn, Robert, but this is all sounding pretty nice to me right now. Come on. It's coming down from on high, like and if you're one of these peasants after years of war and privation. Eat as much meat as you can. Like you're feeling great, you're feeling like this ******* communism thing. There's no downside. Yeah, I mean, it's up, up, up, up. I can't imagine the graph changing. Yeah, we got plenty of meat, plenty of grain. That's really all we care about. Like, other than the stuff we have. That's not meat and grain. But anyway, it seems great. For a while. People ate so much that by the time winter came around, the granaries were empty and most of China was running out of food. So there's that hard right turn. The state still had full granaries, but rather than hand out food to the people, Mao convinced himself that the peasants. Hiding grain to be counter revolutionary. It was very important to him that Communism seemed to be doing well in China. He didn't want to look bad to the USSR so he had China double her grain exports and cut down on imports that way. It would at least look like a success now. Oh man, this is like a romcom where like 2 characters hate each other or like or too afraid to tell the other person the truth because they don't want to look bad. But really like if they just came together and had a sit down conversation which they might at the end of this film they be like we have a lot in common. I don't have any. Do you have any grain? Oh my God, I'm trying to impress you this whole time. It would be really fun to do a nice romantic comedy set during just as 20 million people starved to death. Like. Stalin and Mao having a meet, cute and just Oh my God, what a cute movie that would be. Or a Stalin and Mao buddy cop comedy where it's the 1980s and they both live in Hawaii and like, they've got to take down a cocaine smuggling ring. Road movie where they're just like going to get more grain to get, you know, something where it's just like they have to spend a lot of time in a truck together, in a car together. Yeah. There's a lot of fun potential. Yeah. OK. So the collective farming system that now and, you know, his regime had induced meant that the farmers were never actually in direct control of the food that they grew in, harvested it, went into communal granaries and was cooked in communal kitchens. All this meant that it was under the direct control of party functionaries who all wanted to deliver record-breaking allocations to the government. So food. It could have fed people, was given to the government for the sake of individual party members careers, and Mao then shipped out of the country for the sake of his own ego. 1958 Harvest had been the highest in a decade, but by the spring of 1959, more than 24 million people were starving in China. Mao, being Mao, was incapable of attributing his nation's growing problems to his own policies. The increasingly evident failures of the Great Leap forward were only, quote tuition fees that must be paid to gain experience. So that's an artful way of putting. Yeah. I mean, he does have a similar attitude towards tuition as a lot of people in this country today, the lenders in this country today. Yeah. When his braver aides brought up just how bad things were starting to look in the countryside, Mao said, quote, come back in 10 years and see whether we were correct. China is not going to sink into the sea and the sky won't tumble down simply because there are shortages of vegetables and hairpins and soap imbalances and market problems have made everybody tense. But this tension is not justified, even though I am tense myself. No, it wouldn't be honest to say I'm not tense. If I am tense before midnight, I take some sleeping pills and then I feel better. You want to try sleeping pills if you feel uptight. So wait, that's a real quote. Yeah. My God's advice when his guys are like, you know, 10s of millions of people are starving and he's like, try some drugs. Oh my God. Yeah. I follow someone like him on Instagram. I think I am someone like him a lot of the time, but I've never tried to reform a continent. Farming practices just get high. All like when these things, when he saw that they were not going well, did any part of him feel like it's the peoples fault for not allowing the system to change them or to not love forcing themselves into newer better? You know, versions or was he just sort of like a bad weather? I don't know about him to say it was going on in his own internal heart, but the things that he said and the practices that he put out as a result of like these problems portray a man who believes that the issues in his plan are due to selfish people who are not following the plan, who are hoarding grain, who are refusing to give up what they owe to the government and whatnot. Like that's the issue, right? So in the long, in the long term, if he just, like, keeps a strong hand or a stronger one, it'll all work out because they're not really starving. They're hiding. Food because they don't give it to the government. They're eating in secret and stuff like that. That's his. What he kind of are they rounding up fat children and just being like you were hiding grain and eating? I don't think they were fat children. Alright, yeah. So at this point, disaster probably could have been averted. The government had a lot of food and storage, and if the flaws in the system had been admitted, the bad practices halted and changed back to normal. Things might have been OK for Chinese agriculture. But that would have meant Mao and his comrades admitting to flaws and their ideologically consistent scientific theories. It also would have meant backpedaling. And all of the propaganda they put out. So rather than admit any error, Mao doubled down. Anyone who does not make a great leap is a rightist conservative. Some people think that a leap is far too adventurous. It is new IT may not be perfect, but it is not an adventure. All must have revolutionary optimism and revolutionary heroism. So y'all are just too scared of the future. Yeah, and that's why this is having some growing pains. Revolutionary we all. We all got to be revolutionaries. Those growing pains might feel a lot like hunger pains, but it's growing. I mean, not for me or the other cadres, the members of the Communist Party in China, because we all are eating well. It's disgusting amount of grain. I'm if I see one more bowl of grain, I am done. I threw out more than I eat. My dog lives like a king. So the autumn of 1959 harvest was 30 million tons lower than the 1958 harvested men officials, however, reported that the harvest was the highest ever. This saved them from reporting failure to mount, but it also meant that the government based its taxes that year on the expectation that the country had grown more food than ever. And so in 1959, a year of famine, the Chinese government levied the highest taxes in recent history. Peasants were required to turn over 40% of their total output, and since that total output was a fake number. Calculated via nonsense math. They were basically ordered to hand over all of their food, and in many cases more food than they actually had. So well that those numbers just aren't going to work out for anybody they don't know. And I bet they get all mad when they don't pay their taxes. Yeah, they sure do. I didn't pay my taxes for five years. I didn't file, and it took five years for me to hear anything about it. I bet that's not what the case was then. No, no, no, actually, I will say this. Everybody whines about the IRS like I grew up in a pretty conservative part of the world and always talking about how horrible it is. As someone who's been late on his texts a few times, they're actually pretty easy to deal with. Yeah, they try to find a solution. They really want you to give them something and they'll work with you. Look at us just defending the IRS here, and they're reasonable policies. Mean, I like roads, like ambulances. OK, Speaking of something else, I like products and services that support the show, and let's let those products and services advertise to us and irritate the ghost of Mao Zedong. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint 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. Families start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at Mint Mobile. Com slash behind. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on Tik T.O.K. You maybe even heard the rumors from your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we hear at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions, sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. 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 speaker, 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 with spreaker from iheart. And we're back. Boy, those were some good products. Oh my God. I mean, for for the ones that meet my needs. I'm definitely going to think about exchanging goods or money for them. Oh yeah, goods or money, they'll take both. Usually trades. Big trade is bit bartered. Oh my God, I'm all about barter. Oh my God. Waited to see these clamshell necklaces that I make. Oh my God. OK, so we just talked about the autumn 1959 harvest, which was 30 million tons lower than it had been the year before, and the fact that they calculated the taxes based on sort of nonsense math of what they hoped it would be. And so they wound up essentially taxing most peasants more than they'd actually grown. I'm going to read another quote from Hungry Ghosts here. In many places, the entire harvest was seized. Sometimes officials reported a harvest so big that even after taking away everything they could, including all livestock, vegetables, and cash crops, they still continued to search from house to house. Now had ordered officials not only to deliver the grain quotas, but also to set quotas for pigs, chickens, ducks and eggs. Party leaders went from village to village, leading the search for hidden food reserves. It was a brutal and violent campaign in which many peasants were tortured and beaten to death. So again, IRS isn't sounding so bad now, so this is a real dumb question, but like. Money taxes pay for things the state needs. You give the you give the government dollars and they use the dollars to pay a guy to make sure the roads aren't following. Absolutely. That's my understanding. So when they're taking the food and on principle, on principle that like, well, we're all afraid of saying that, that what the truth is, is it just so that the capital has a ton or are they selling it? Is this is their global trade going on where it's somehow like benefiting? The idea is both that, you know, the state is supposed to take care of everyone's food needs, so you give all your food. The state, and then it redistributes it. This is how it's supposed to perfectly work. And of course, also, they're not just exporting to the Soviet Union, they're exporting, supporting North Korea at this point because it's this idea that, like, the food that we produce will be used. You know, some of it we will have to sell for resources so that we can buy things that we can't yet make ourselves, and we can continue to expand and eventually create this wonderful socialist block that can compete against the decade and, you know, the terrible West and whatnot. Are spread out seeds with our slightly spread out. ******* horrifically spread out. Yeah. Oh my God. So much corn, so much soil around them. *** **** fertilizer swimming in it. Oh boy. OK, so obviously willful denial of reality can only last for so long, as we in the West learned with the Little war called all of the wars we fought in the last 70 years. Eventually it became clear that even the heavy-handed methods used by the government weren't turning up as much food as they ought to have. Since Russian agricultural science was obviously flawless, Mao came to the conclusion that the peasants were just burying their grain underground to hide it. He accused them of eating turnips and pretending to starve by day and eating rice secretly at night. In reality, most people were subsisting on gruel served in communal kitchens that was made mostly out of grass and inedible plants. Yeah, well, what else you going to do? I think those are now called grain bowls in LA. Well, no. Now you would pay $14.00 to have one of those out of a truck. Nuts and seeds your body. Can't I guess that's the food of this city at the end of the year while 10s of millions of people starved the People's Daily newspaper advice peasants, to quote practice strict economy, live with the utmost frugality and only eat 2 meals a day, one of which should be soft and liquid, which again, sounds pretty much like California right now on the run. You know, you will be glad to know that while 10s of millions of people were starving, Mel gave up meat. Oh. That's good. You know, follow the leader. Exactly. Everybody give up meat. Oh, you. We took all the meat, right? And we beat half of you to death because you didn't give us your chickens. Ohh life. Funny, sometimes the Great Famine would last until 1961 and go down as the deadliest peacetime disaster in Chinese history. During this entire time, Mao's government continued to export grain to North Korea, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere as a result of their desire to hide the famine and put on a successful face. The provinces that grew the most food during the famine were the provinces were the most peasants starved. Oh God, yeah. So the people who are actually making the most food are the people who are most likely to die in the end, conservatively. 25 to 30 million people died from the famines that came from the Great Leap forward. You will hear higher numbers as well. It is very politicized death toll both because people, conservatives in the West have a vested interest in making it seem higher. So you'll sometimes hear 50 million, sixty million. And also people who are, you know, further to the left or even Maoist today have a desire. And downplaying the famine 25 to 30, maybe 35 million seems like a very fair estimate based on what I've read, which is obviously a nightmare. It's a big range, but it's all bad. It's probably roughly half the death toll of World War Two. Starve to death during this famine that didn't need to happen. Oh my God, you know, so these deaths were the result of many different bad policy decisions. You know, the idea to, like, make steel and backyard furnaces and stuff was not great. I'm trying to smelt and I'm just. Trying, you know, amateur, you know, you go online, you watch these videos, you know, set it up in your backyard. You melt down your plowshares, of course, yeah, liquid. And then you let it cool into the shape you want. Try it never works. Yeah, no, it's not great. So there were a lot of factors in the Great Leap forward, and why so many people starve. But Leshchenko, Wasm was maybe the number one contributing factor to this family. The blame for many of these deaths, then, must land on the head of Trofim Plushenko. It is very likely, although impossible, to prove to 100% certainty. That Lisenko was responsible for more death than any other scientist in human history. Although there's still time for the the guys who made the atom bomb to to take that, you know? Right. Come on. But right now, it's probably the shanko. Where is he right now again? Oh, he's back in the Soviet Union. That's about. We're about to get back to it. Yeah. Yeah. So Trophimus dominance in the Soviet agricultural science started to degrade in 1953 after the death of Stalin. Some of this was due to the millions of people who had starved, but a lot of it had to do with some very public post World War Two failures. Right after the war ended, Leshchenko launched the Great Stalin plan for the transformation of nature. He believed that he could change Russia's climate and make it warmer by growing millions upon millions of trees. That might work if you could do it. I don't know. Yeah, it seems like it might actually work. But because he was leshko, he ordered all of the seeds and saplings to be planted incredibly close to each other, and all of the plants die. You know, I feel like if you're trying to grow things, that essential thing is to grow them, right? He has all these other big ideas but can't actually nail just. It's like people have been growing trees for forever. Like, we know, we know there's forests everywhere you look. Come on. You don't need to change that up. So. He tries to plant millions and millions of trees really, really close together, but the plants all died, of course. Of course they didn't die. Before the composer, Shostakovich had written his choral Symphony, the song of the Trees, and Bertold Brecht had pinned this poem about the forest that was supposed to happen but never wound up actually growing. Because anyway, don't put your poem before the forest is what I always say, you know, let the forest grow. And then there's a lot of wisdom there. Don't put your poem, but, well, I'm going to read the poem for this non-existent forest anyway, so let us with ever newer. Arts change this Earth's form and operation gladly measure 1000 year old wisdom by new Wisdom one year old dreams golden if let the lovely flood of grain rise higher so. All the more tragic beauty wasted on science, networking, and really bad science. If only he just knowing he just needed to, like, have cars with not catalytic converters instead of trees or whatever he probably could have accomplished. Oh yeah, that would be the same thing. And I don't know, warming Russia just have everyone pollute a lot. Exactly. Yeah, well, they're getting that anyway. So the way the Chinese ate rice, we just needed to drive pointlessly in Russia. Come on, everyone, it's your duty to just go in circles. Let's go in circles. On the one Rd in 1962, the first generation of post purge, Soviet scientists began to carefully try to dismantle the myth of Leshchenko. Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin successor, protected Leshchenko for a little while, but Khrushchev lost his job in 1964, and that same year physicist Andrei Sakharov denounced Lisenko to the Russian Academy of Sciences. Quote he is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics, in particular for the dissemination of pseudoscientific views for adventurism. With the degradation of learning and for the defamation, firing, arrest, and even death of many genuine scientists, so Sakharov is spitting some fire. Yeah, shanko damn. Yeah, that's that's pretty damning. In 1965, Lisenko was removed from his position as the director of the Institute of Genetics and forced onto a tiny experimental farm where he was allowed to continue his mostly lie based research alone. That same year, the President of the Academy of Sciences declared that Lisenko ISM was no longer immune to criticism because it had been legally immune to criticism. Setting 46, an expert Commission was sent to look into Leshko's experimental farm and study his methods. They found that he was an obvious and tremendous fraud. These results were published permanently demolishing Lisenko's career and reputation. I mean, I have truly no sympathy for this man and who he killed, but the image of, you know, this deeply fallen from grace scientist on a small little experimental farm, trying to make imagine a grain or something. Yeah. Gonna do whatever being made with the seed. Should be even closer, even more seats. Maybe, just maybe the problems. We're not digging deep enough. You guys give me too few seeds and now everything's growing. Oh, OK. So Trofim attempted to defend himself from this attack. He wound up in a 6 hour debate with the Experts Commission where he basically argued that what he fed his animals and how he altered his compost for different experiments, his utter lack of control groups, all of that was meaningless. The details of his experiments shouldn't matter. What should matter was his results, which he reported. And they should basically just trust what he reported as the truth. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, why would you lie? Is a scientist. Exactly. He's a scientist. Go to the last page. Yeah. So let me show my work. The point is whether. Calculator or not a calculator, the answer is right. I'm going to quote from a book called The Shenko Affair here. He had never troubled himself, to be precise, and he insisted that precise data were not essential shrilly. He called attention to biological theory, to the progressive biological theory that had been developed, quote, in unity with the practice of collective and state farms and that had always enjoyed the support of the party and state. Basically, he whined that his theories were correct with Communism and the party had always supported him. So why were they suddenly being so mean and asking for proof? Which if you're the shenko, this has got to be confusing. Yeah, you're like you guys like me so much. It was crazy. Some of the times I'm like, well, they're gonna like this one and then you like, they're gonna put it even more seats closer together. OK, well, they know. Yeah, here's another quote from Leshko affair. The specialist stuck to their narrow task with devastating effect, for Leshchenko and his colleagues were simply incapable of sustained reasoning with facts and figures. Their favorite devise, as the chairman of the investigating Commission put it, was to quote to say a single thing and hush up all the rest as long as everything looks good. This was a perfectly obvious and deadly accurate characterization, and would have been with respect to any of leshko's recipes at any time, beginning in 1929 when he first became prominent, with his scheme for verbalizing grain. But that perfectly appropriate. Response to the Shintoism was 35 years overdue, which we know what happened now in those 35 years. Yeah, like 40 million people died. So many. About a million people a year maybe. Yeah, it's hard to get out of that. Was Stalin wanting to kill the Ukrainians and the kulaks and stuff like, there was other **** wrapped into that. But it's an impressive, sustained production. You know, like, I feel like a lot of the big death tolls ascribed to one person are, like, in a bit of a tighter window. And this is just, like, to just keep pumping out debts. Yeah, because you look at, like, the Nazis, and they were murder sprinters. You know, most of the killing they did was like 42 to 45, and then they were sort of out of gas with shenko's killing people for a really long time. And, you know, you, you kill a man's fish. He stars for a day. You teach a man to kill his fish accidentally. Then you've got multiple generations of people with no fish. Think of the long game. So finally, at least the Soviet Union's agricultural scientists were able to do actual science again. Quote the confusion of political and technical authority was now declared to be a mistake. Specialists were to resume their laborious efforts to distinguish really worthwhile methods from those that only seemed so. The 35 year error was not to be examined or analyzed, so they understood leshko ISM was wrong. They announced Leshchenko, but they weren't willing to, like, look back and really analyze how many people had died or how ****** ** things had gotten because of their belief, because that was still, you know, post Stalin. Soviet Union was a bit more open, but they still weren't willing to, like, dig into just how ****** ** things, for sure. And other people were, you know, shared some responsibility. Yeah, you know, a lot of people's responsibility. It has been suggested by some historians that trophy meshanko may be the single individual most responsible for the fall of the USSR, the true extent of the damage. Did mankind is incalculable. Lisenko died in Moscow in 1976. The government waited two days to even announce his death, so in the end he died obscuring, discredited. But the politicians and officials who enforced his ****** science and praised him while he was Stalin's favorite were not punished. Nor were the people who helped export his bad ideas to China. After 1953, when the Soviets knew damn well Leshko Wism did not work. But now, as yet another mark against our benighted modern age of conmen and ******** trophon leshko is enjoying a renaissance. No, I barely got to relish that was like 4 minutes of him living in obscurity. Yeah, no. And now he's back to. I mean, it's the trophy. The trophy. Trophy. Naissance. Yeah, right. They can't all be the McConnell said. No, no, no, not all the words. You phonically work the right way. It looks better on paper, like refinance on. I can't even print. Yeah, no, it looks it looks like it should print out, but I'm not. You're not coming out anyway. Record yourself trying to portmanteau trod him and Renaissance and send it to us on Twitter. So according to an article in current biology over in Russia, the work of the SHENKO has been picked up by quote, a quirky coalition of Russian right wingers, Stalinists. A few qualified. Scientists and even the Orthodox Church so. It's coming back a little bit now. One of the reasons for this is epigenetics, which is sort of a new finding in genetic science. We've basically learned pretty recently that certain things that happen in the environment, like living through a bad winter or a war starving for a period of time, can be passed down from parents to children, meaning that to a tiny extent, some of the ideas of Lamarckian genetics are not 100% wrong. This has been seen by some as evidence that the shenko was right all along, even though epigenetics has to do with changes in genes. And Leshko didn't believe genes existed. The other factor is that these changes always revert after a couple of generations or something. They're not permanent. But like, if you live through a famine and you have a kid, like, right around that time, you can pass on certain things as a result of the fact that you were in that extreme state. I mean, in this, I feel like the simple grade school version of genetics and Evolution I learned did not take that into account. And I probably got answers marked wrong that perhaps I feel like that's somewhat recent and. Yeah. Actually pretty recent that we've really gotten an understanding of it. I don't claim to be an expert on genetics, people are still figuring this out, but like the Shanko didn't believe in genes. So it's wrong to say people who were attacking the Shingo weren't saying nothing is passed down like as a result of environmental changes. They were saying you can't reliably control for that when you're trying to figure out how to grow better grain. Yeah, and in fact, the Shenko had declared the entire science of genetics to be, quote, an expression of the senile decay and degradation of bourgeois culture. So crediting. One for epigenetics is a little bit irrational. Are the people, though, that are like, giving rise to it again, doing it out of the ideological principle of it? That is a little bit of it. I think some of it is because, and I'm not near, I'm not an expert on modern Russia. But like, there's this because obviously Russia right now is not the Soviet Union. It's not anything close to a communist state. But there is a lot of longing for that period of time for a variety of reasons, some of which there are things that were better back then and some of which is just obviously the same way that people long for the 1950s don't think about the fact that, you know, water fountains. Segregated and stuff. So it's it's a complicated thing, I think why certain groups are starting to come back to these ideas. But it is definitely scary because that means that there's the possibility that Trump and Lisenko is very, very, very, very, very dumb. Science has the chance to kill somebody again, man, which guys? If you're listening at home, spread Joe Seeds. Just switch your spread your seeds. Don't plant them too deep. Should be able to see him, but not too close together. I've known a lot of really good farmers in my life. None of them planted millions of seeds per acre. It's not. Yeah. It's like one of those gross things you buy at a State Fair that's got like, a little bit of, like, molasses, and it's just kind of like sesame seeds. It's almost like a candied apple. There's like a weird feel, like Southern dessert that's just like seeds and goo and a ball and you know what? It's gross. And I wouldn't plan at my ground and expected to feed my family. I had a seed goofball. I mean, maybe it's just a weird thing that I was given that I was somebody just put some seeds and good together, like it wasn't Yankee some seed goo. At the State Fair was just handed to me by a man at the front desk of a motel I was staying at. I shouldn't have eaten that seed, goofball. I'm still digesting it. You just got poisoned by someone. What state were you in? I just remember like as a kid that I was like, yeah, I mean this is not a thing that I'm now. I would be responsible to turn down a seat goofball now. And this was a child. I was like, this is a dessert. This feels like I can say as a child in Texas, we played many a good game of poison. The Yankee that was everybody's. The game growing up Ohpa hot day. No better way to pass the time than to kill a traveling northerner. We just love making carpetbaggers sick, grinding up glass, putting it in their grits, feeding, doing slowly until their insides played out. Yeah, those are better times. Oh, boy. All right, well, that's that's our episode on trophy lashko. How you doing, Max? I mean, I know that's not your style, nor is it the style of human history, but I wish the ending had been a little more uplifting rather than quietly covered up. And now, Sergeant research, it would be nice if people ever learned lessons from history, but if there's one thing we've learned from history, it's that we don't. Thanks for having me on and depressing. Yeah, thanks for coming on and being depressed by this. You wanna plug some plegables? Sure. I have a 15 minute stand up special on Netflix. Go to the comedy lineup Part 2 and. Yeah, I I don't know how to farm. Ohh also seed goo balls.com use promo code shaft. But I now sell these balls. They're not good, but they are heavy. So yeah yeah if you need a heavy snack. If you need a heavy ball shaft is your man. And I'm Margaret Evans. You can find me on the Internet at I write OK on Twitter. You can find this podcast website at behindthebastards.com. You can also find us on Twitter and Instagram at at ******** Pot. So check us out. Follow us. Tweet us your best attempts to portmanteau Trofim and Renaissance. I really feel like there's a way. I'm just not getting it. Through finish now. I'm not. I'm not gonna try it anymore. The Shank of ocean. I don't know that that's closer. Alright, alright. Alright. Have a good day. We'll be back next Tuesday talking about someone else terrible. And until then, I love about 40% of you. 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 SPREA. Aer.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 Capaill Tojo. He needs to be stopped. We've been 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 impactful behavioural discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.