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

In episode 31, Robert is joined by comedian Max Silvestri to talk about a Russian scientist named Trofim Lysenko. He set out to feed the world, but in reality, Lysenko wound up starving it. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Mmm, Hello everybody. I'm Robert Evans and this is once
again Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you
everything you don't know about the very worst people in
all of history. Now, this is a show where I
read a tale about someone or someone's terrible in history
to a guest who is coming in cold. And this

(00:21):
week my guest is Max Silvestri. He is a comedian.
He is a Netflix special as part of the comedy
lineup out right now, how you doing. Nice to be here.
Thanks for bringing me in from the cold, you know,
yeah right right like that before I was alive. Yes, yes,
it was a too excellent Yeah. Yeah, but that's me
and I'm happy to be here. Well, it's funny Mark

(00:42):
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 let sounds right? Yeah,
you know, deceitful people. I don't know. I'm not going
to deceitful time. Yeah, every everyone was to seitful in
the Cold War. That's what made it fun. Yes, so
we're talking pre Cold War and then post Cold War

(01:04):
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 have political views in 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
there not gonna be a fun episode for you. Yeah,
so everybody's got their own political views. I think my

(01:25):
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 um and today's
story is I think a good explanation of why. I
think that's so important, because this is a tale about

(01:45):
where unreasoning devotion to an ideology can lead. It's about
what happens when ideas matter more than human lives. Today,
we're going to talk about a man who set up
to feed the world and wound up starving it. But
before we get into that, I'd like to provide some
backstory on genetic science in early twentieth century Russia. Don't worry,
it's not gonna be boring. It's actually going to start
with a story about monkey semen. So, yeah, this is

(02:06):
the fun kind of genetic science. Yeah. So it may
surprise you to learn that for all the many things
rus Russia sucked at, science was actually not one of them.
In the late eighteen hundreds, in early nineteen hundreds, most
Russians still lived more or less like medieval serfs. Actual
serfdom wasn't abolished until eighteen sixty one, 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

(02:27):
social mobility. If you were good enough at science, you
could become a member of the aristocracy. So one of
these zarist era scientists was a guy named ilia Ivanov,
and starting in nineteen ten, Iliyah became a tireless advocate
of trying to cross breed human beings and apes. Oh
to make like a doctor moreau, I didn't really his hope,
No one knew. He didn't know what was going to happen.

(02:48):
What are the best parts of monkeys? He was trying
to put into humans. It was even more primitive than that.
He just thought that it might work. Like he was
really just like people were just starting to understand genetics
at this point. He was like, I bet humans and
monkeys can fuck, and I bet they can give birth
to hybrids. So let's see what the reason it hasn't
happened yet is because a monkey and human even fallen
in love constantly, or the right monkey, the right monkey

(03:11):
and human not fallen 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 donkeys? And
uh 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, okay, well maybe if you
breed human beings and monkeys together, something useful will come
out of it. I heard that like l A, California

(03:31):
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 to like try to wipe out all the mosquitoes.

(03:52):
So like, yeah, that's been tried a couple of times
and an easy way to go wrong. I mean, yeah,
it seems like, but this was a little bit different.
This was um because you're talking, you know, the night
early nine, You're talking a really optimistic era of science
because 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

(04:13):
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 they're just now starting to really understand genetics and stuff.
And so Elia at first in nineteen ten, he doesn't
really get many people on board with his research, but
he he continues to be an advocate for making human
beings and monkeys breed. Uh, well, he does other stuff.

(04:36):
And in nineteen twenty four, seven years after the revolution
that brings the Bolsheviks into power, ely Is working as
a sperm disinfector. I don't know what that job as
I couldn't find any detail, but he's disinfecting sperm, the
dirty sperm out there. Yeah, it's kind of a dead
end scientific job. But the Institute Pasteur in France offers
to support his attempt to hybridize man apes um so,
according to Russian scientific historian Kirol Russianof, they offered Ivan

(05:00):
off free access to animals at the institute's recently organized
chimpanzee facility in the village of Kindia, French Guinea, but
could not pay for other operational and travel expenses of
the project. So fortunately for Ilia, he found someone who
did have money to pay for the operational costs of
his project, the Soviet Financial Commission. They offered him ten
thousand dollars to cross breed human beings and apes. He
got approval for his project or just total total. That's

(05:23):
a good amount of money. Then it was still kind
of a shoestring budget, but it was enough to do
some research and he gets official approval from the Soviet
Academy of Sciences. Ivan Pavlov the 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

(05:45):
wired into me. Probably something we should talk about with therapists. Um.
It's important to point out that this was not seen
yet as a ludicrous project. At the time. A number
of luminaries in the scientific field had suggested variations on
this research theme already. Ilia was just proposing to test
several other scientists hypotheses. So he's not the original that's
mixed man and monkey together. It was kind of like
a race to the moon. But who's like, we're all

(06:06):
you 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 nineteen sixty three,
you go, uh So, I'm gonna quote from a Scientific
American article here that kind of summarizes the early research
into whether or not human beings and apes can get
it down. One such hypothesis was that of the German

(06:26):
scientist Hans Freuden Tall, whose analysis of blood cells in
nineteen hundred between chimpanzees guerrillas orangutangs and humans should that
they were serologically far more similar than him been previously expected.
As a result, Freud and Tall 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 Bernoulet

(06:47):
Moans and the German sixologist Herman Reudler, sought to test
this prediction by insimidating 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 the Soviet scientist

(07:07):
is going to be the guy who gets to finally
test this out, because over in the West people have
this idea, but they're like, no, that's fucked up. Is
it that? Like there's a sort of more like humanistic
morality in the West. That's like, well, there's certain yeah, yeah,
and that Russia was just like anything for were not
found my tradition anymore. Yeah, we can try anything science.

(07:30):
So that it's important to get the idea of the time.
So Iliya Ivanov heads off to French Guinea in West
Africa and starts his research. The other researchers there don't
like him, and Elia claims that 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 seven hundred chimpanzees from hunters in the
year before he arrived, but over half of them had died,
so may have had a point there. But he got

(07:53):
to work anyway, and he tried to insmidate three juvenile chimpanzees. Tragically,
that did not work. Since his funds were limited, This
failure or convinced Elia that he needed to try a
different tactic. This is like a superhero story, like roll
up your sleeves. I've got to test out the antidote
on myself, is it? You know? It would actually be
better if that had been what he tried. So his
original plan was to insimilate three female chimpanzees, and since

(08:14):
that didn't work, his next plan is to implant chimpanzee
semen into African women without telling them what he was
doing worse. Yeah, 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

(08:35):
with chimpanzee, spurn plan and shuts it down, and it's like, no,
you can't do that, this is a crime against humanity.
So Ilia gets sent home to Russia after one month
in Africa, and the Soviet Academy of Scientists finds out
that he had essentially tried to do something terrible and
black balls him, so he gets pretty much shut down.
Was this kind of like in England the royal societies

(08:55):
of X y Z, 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
czar was in charge things. We're getting more radical, but
Ilia in nine is too radical for the Soviet Academy
of Sciences because he's again essentially trying to assault people

(09:17):
with Champion. Yeah, but in his mind it's punk rock
it's you know, yeah, 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 Russian And then I open your
eye sheeple. Also, I want to make cheap all that's
the other thing I want to do. It's cheap a man.
That would have been less horrifying, right, yeah, you for

(09:39):
whatever reason, if you're like sneaking sheep sperm into human beings,
that's less awful than monkey spur because there's a cuddly aspect.
There's some sort of yeah. 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 would
hear about it all the time. But I don't know why,
Like why if you can make a mule, I don't know.

(10:01):
We're just too different. Like yeah, I mean I couldn't
explain it scientifically, but I mean he did try the
Planet of the Apes trilogy. I understand that, like we're
it would be cool if we could. If we could,
I would support it um, although I would want everyone
involved to consent to the experiment, but it would be cool. Yes,
And you long asked the question on this podcast, kind

(10:22):
of monkey give consents 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 Scope's monkey trial was about. Right,
as far as I've read, which is the titles from
the movie where an actor yelled, now I'm imagining inherit
the wind, but with like a guy banging a chimpanzee.

(10:42):
Like right, it's going to work anyway. This was all
to set up sort of the state of science in
the Soviet Union in the nineteen twenties. Anything was seen
as possible. Human beings and living beings were seen as
very malleable, and in spite of how crazy ilyas plan
to crossbreed humans and chimpanzees sounded, a lot of really

(11:03):
good science was being done in the Soviet Union in
the early part of the Soviet Union, and in fact,
for a while the Soviet State was the world center
of genetic science. I'm asking this because I'm reading the
right stuff right now in the space race and the
idea of it being like nationalistic. Was there any element
of like they had this attitude in competition with the
rest of the world or the West, or is it
more just its own like the Soviets own at this

(11:25):
point that 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 forties. So in this era,
the nineteen twenties and early thirties, the most brilliant scientist
in the Soviet Union as a guy named Nikolai v
Avalov now Vavilov was born in Moscow in eighteen eighties seven.
He came from a bougie middle class family. In nineteen

(11:46):
o six he started at the Petrovskaya Agriculture Academy, which
had been founded to improve Russian agricultural science after a
terrible famine in eighteen ninety two. Vavilov had been five
years old during that famine, and its hars 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

(12:07):
ever starve again, and he was apparently a pretty great guy.
Vavalov 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 czar 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

(12:28):
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 nineteen sixteen.
World War One was kind of a thing at that
point and not going well. Uh. The Bolshevik uprising happened
not long after that, and suddenly Russia was the U
s s R. At the beginning, the scene fine for
Vavlov's career. Lennon and Trotsky were all about science, and
then the years before Stalin took over, Vavolov thrived. He

(12:50):
took up a professorship and continued traveling the world in
search of plants and farming wisdom that could help the U. S.
S R. Grow more food. According to Gary Navam, an
ethno biologist who wrote a book about Vavolov, he traveled
to sixty four countries on five continents collecting seeds. He
learned fifteen 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

(13:11):
in their fields. All of our notions about biological diversity
and needing diversity of food on our plates to keep
us healthy sprung from his work. He was the world's
greatest plant explorer. He collected more seeds, tubers, and fruits
from around the world than any other person in human history. Wow,
sounds great, right, Yeah. You want to hear how he
gets sucked over. Is he's trying to breed wheat with

(13:31):
a monkey? No? No, no, he's betrayed and dies starving. Um, 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
sucked over. Yeah. He's a great guy. He never did
anything wrong that I read about. So yeah. By nineteen thirty,
Viavalov had assembled a collection of more than two d

(13:53):
and fifty thousand different seeds, the largest seed bank in
human history. He was made director of the Institute of Genetics,
and he immediately he set to work building a network
of research institutes and experimental stations all across the USSR.
Bavlov's network eventually included more than twenty thousand genetic scientists.
One of those scientists was a man named Trophim Lashenko.
You ever heard of Tshenka? I have not heard? Okay,

(14:16):
Well like the name. It's a solid name. Yeah, it's
it's very Soviet sounding, yes. Now. Tropin was born in
six and a region of what is today Ukraine. Trophin
was a peasant. He didn't learn to read until he
was thirteen. 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 Czarist Russia, but

(14:36):
the Bolshevik Revolution gave him an in road to the
scientific community. He was able to gain admittance to several
agricultural science institutes and began carrying out experiments into growing
vegetables in different climates. Was the state paying for people's education?
Was it like, okay, yeah, yeah, so Russia has and
this is a World War two spoiler, pretty brutal winters.
I don't know if you'd if you were aware of that.

(14:56):
I heard that their codes were not good enough. That's
what I remember from was the Germans. The Russians had
great coats in that water, right, yeah, swords are one
and lost in the quality of the coats and boots
and ricks. 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.

(15:16):
So in newly minted scientists troph and Leshenko wound up
in his Gerby Shan trying to breed cold resistant peas.
Now Lashinko believed his special winter Peace 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 ver analysis is
the Latin word for spring, which basically what he was

(15:38):
trying to do is wheat seeds are different in spring
in winter because the cold damages the seeds as they're growing.
So the seeds that you tend to grow in the
winter have reduced yields in the summer seeds. So Lushenko
is basically claiming that by soaking seeds in cold water,
he could get them ready for cold weather and then
they would grow like spring wheat in the winter. Um,
you could like prepare them for exactly used to the cold. Yeah,

(16:01):
get him used to the cold while their seeds and
then it'll be fine. Then they'll grow really really well
in the which again, nineteen twenties science something to try,
he gotta try, uh, and he got lucky that year.
It just so happened the nine was an unusually warm winter.
His seeds did very well. Now, there was zero evidence
that had anything to do with the vitalization because Trophim

(16:22):
Leshenko didn't believe in using control groups. Yeah, why would
you do that? And the most fun scientists shoot from
the hip. Come on, Yeah, this is a whole episode
about scientists who shoot from the hip. Um. So trophim
lied and falsified his data to make it look like
his methods were the cause of the better harvest that year,
and then he kicked off a pr blitz to make
sure everyone in the USSR heard about his work. He

(16:44):
convinced a reporter from Pravda to cover him. The resulting article,
The Green Fields of Winter, started out kind of negative,
describing Lushenko this way quote Lushenko gives one the feeling
of a toothache. God give him help. He has a
dejected me in stingy of words and insignia and get
to faces. He all one remembers is his sullen look
creeping across the earth, as if at very least he

(17:05):
were ready to do someone in which is it's pretty
brutal opening, brutal. There's the picture of him from PROFTA.
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 they should
be about. You should be nicer. Yeah, well it did
get like Elizabeth Holmes. I feel like of an earlier time,

(17:28):
this is exactly like that. Actually, So the article starts
off talking about who he's kind of a dour, gross
looking guy, but as it goes on it gets more
praiseful because the provat the guy bought into what he
was saying about his seeds. So it famously dubbed Lushenko
the barefoot Professor, which was a compliment in Soviet era Russia,
and it noticed, loves the barefoot contessa exactly exactly, and

(17:50):
you would trust him to reform your nation's agricultural processes
for her, I don't know anything about. Her name is
Eina Garden. She was like the head of nuclear policy
and now she is a food network person and really, yeah,
she had a nuclear policy. She like worked under Reagan
as like one of the top policy writers. And then
like her husband, who I believe is a dean of
a school at Yale, Like, she moved up to New

(18:12):
York after that part of her career, and she like
opened a grocery store called Preful Contests on Long Island
and the Hampton's and it became a thing. And then
cookbooks and then now she's you know, okay, well, I
guess maybe let her set agricultural policy. I don't know,
she seems she seems great. Uh. Lushenko was not so.
But the article, yeah, called him the barefoot Professor and
and noted that his experimental fields were often filled with

(18:34):
agronomic luminaries, eager to shake his hand and witness the
miracles of his creation. So in that interview, Leshenko claimed
to have invented vitalization, which was a lie. The process
was about forty years older than he was, and vitalization
does actually work to make plants flower earlier, so you
can it is a useful tactic. You can change basically
how quickly a plant flower. It's more about timing than yields. Yeah,

(18:55):
it doesn't make it better winter wheat, It just changes
when it flowers and stuff. So Leshenko's really work on this, though,
had resulted in some promising findings, so Vavilov, had had
funded him at first had been like, Okay, maybe this
guy's onto something. Um. Over the last next couple of years,
it became increasingly obvious to Vavalov that Lushenka was wrong
and faking his data. Unfortunately, in the Soviet Union during

(19:15):
this period, scientific accuracy was not the most important question.
Ideology was the most important concern, and Leshenko'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 U
n T publication called Recreating Mankind that talks about what
we mean when we talked about the New Soviet Man,
which was like a big buzzword at the time. Lennon,

(19:37):
taking into account the benefits of a unified national order
outlined by Marx and Engel, saw the immediate allure of
creating an objective, utopian vision on which it could base
his politics, and he also recognized the foundation of this
new ideal community could quote only be maintained if the
very nature of man can be changed to conform to
the requirements of this new order. After the Revolution, through

(19:58):
this purely idealistic vision that was taken from Marx and Engles,
Lennon 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 we're talking about,
and there is definitely more than a hint of Nietzsche
in this quote from Leon. Trotsky man will make it
his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his

(20:18):
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 Soviet. They had
a vision that the proper culture could create better people
by creating a better society, you could change the character

(20:40):
of the people inside the society the society. First, are
going to change the human beings so that we have
a better society. No, we're going to change this and
it's going to improve the people in our society. And
that's going to like yeah, so, And that's why Lushenko's
ideas were so popular because he was basically saying that
plants could be improved permanently by altering their physical surroundings
and circumstances, which was essentially the same thing the U S.

(21:01):
S I was trying to do with tens of millions
of former peasant farmers. So we're going to get into
what exactly happened after this and how Lushanko's ideas spread
for the U S. SR 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. And

(21:26):
we're back. We just finished talking about the new Soviet Man,
and Howshenko's ideas about changing seeds by nimping them in
cold water basically really jelled well with what communist theory
at the time said about human beings, and so that
if we dipped them in cold water for a little bit, yes,
exactly better. Yeah, a lot of cold baths and the
and the early Bolshevik era. So now, one of the

(21:47):
first major sets of reforms once Stalin came to power,
it was a policy of collectivization in rural Russia. The
government called it consolidation of land and labor, and what
that meant was that tens of millions of farmers had
their land taken from them and smushed together into gigantic
collective farms. A lot of people did not like this
because it was lane they'd been farming for generations, and
some people resisted. So in estimated ten million peasant farmers

(22:09):
and their families were exiled or imprisoned from nine nineteen
thirty three for fighting against the collectivization policy. Now, Stalin
had expected us mass and sudden collectivization to increase food yields,
so he levied increased grain taxes and all farmers these
taxes came off the top, which means a lot of
farmers wound up with no food to eat. This, combined
with the disruption of collectivization, led to a famine that

(22:30):
started in nineteen thirty. Now a major factor in all
of this with Stalin's obsession with destroying the rich landowning
peasants or kulaks, and the wilful 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 thousand years, like the
actual agriculture of like how they were doing it day

(22:53):
to day. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's it's something similar. We
just had an episode on what the East India Tea
Company 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's kind of an all in type

(23:13):
thing and larger pieces of land that yeah, when it
didn't work, and it was not just that, uh, he
was forcing everyone onto these farms, he was also changing
the way that they farmed. Now, the first part of
the famine seems to have been intentional because he wanted
to get rid of all these rich coolocks, and he
wanted to get rid of Ukrainians. And in fact, one
of Stalin's lieutenants in Ukraine noted that the force starvation

(23:35):
had shown the peasants, quote who was 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. It was 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

(23:56):
they planned to starve to death, but um, it just
turns out you can't can troll that thing as much
as you might. That's why I'm always saying you shouldn't
plan to starve anyone to really because it just kind
of it. 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 backwater like that feels unreasonable.
A lot of good people that deserve to be starving.

(24:17):
There's good people starving people on all sides. Yeah, 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 Vlov and Leshenko to offer solutions. Vavelov,
using actual science, says that he can breed wheat and

(24:37):
other crops that will do better in the Russian climate.
It will take around twelve years. Lashenko, using lies, promises
to do it in three. Can you guess that was
the famine just because the new farming system didn't work
or was he actually changing It's partly that you're just
fucking with sort of the way things have been done
for ever by forcing people on these collective farms but

(24:59):
there's also there was 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
because they literally didn't have access to that's was a
lot of the family. Like there still would have been

(25:19):
some problem as a result of this, and there had
been famine, you know, a few years earlier as a
result of the civil war too. But I'm half Ukrainian
and I knew my ancestor had come to this country
because he killed someone in a bar fight. But it
also seems like there were other bad things coming on. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The Holodomor is what the Ukrainians call, and it was
probably between three and five million Ukrainians starf to death,
and most of those deaths were intentional. Um but again

(25:43):
it it quickly goes beyond that. So Stalin d acts Leshenko.
There's some debate as to why he liked Lushenko so much.
Some of the sources say that Stalin just liked ideologically
what with Lushenko was saying and didn't never really talk
to the guy very much. And there's other sources that
say Leshenko and Stalin worked closely together and Lushenko basically
charmed him. Someone to read a quote from book Stalinist

(26:05):
Genetics that takes the attitude that Lushenko was buddy buddy
with Stalin and convinced him to sort of back his
science by being a charming motherfucker. So, although a mediocrity
and scientific questions, Leshenko was highly talented in the art
of leading an ideological fight and of surviving in the
midst of Stalinist terror unerringly divining the boss's wishes and anxieties,
Leshenko came to the four thanks to his considerable natural talents.

(26:27):
He fought for position to top the pyramid of power
and won it not by chance or by a whim
of Stalin's 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 Lushenko, thanks
to his courtiers, intuition and his shrewdness. Thanks to his
ability to divine Stalin's secret designs, he always struck the

(26:47):
right chord with the Great Helmsman, never arousing his irritation.
They called Stalin the great Helmsman, and 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 Lushenko? I mean, he knows the science isn't Vavilov
does not like Lushenko, but it's also he has to
be very careful about how he goes about opposing him,

(27:09):
because Lushenko is ideologically correct. Yeah, and it's also really
worth noting that Vavolov is is bougie. He comes from
an upper middle class background and that is toxic in
the Soviet Union's period. Lushenko is a peasant, so that
counts for a lot as well. And most of the
actual talented scientists in the U S s are are
people who had grown up well here because they were
able to afford to go to college and stuff and

(27:31):
to like study science as young men rather than having
to support their families. So these are the best scientists
in the U S s R 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 Leshenko. Yeah, you know, yeah, unless she's not really
a scientist. He just calls himself a scientist. Yeah, he's
just a bullshit artist. But he's got the right background,

(27:52):
and so that puts him above these guys who actually
know what they're doing and have decades of experience doing
real science. There's definitely no echoes of that never later
in history. You know, people have never supported someone who
doesn't know anything because they wanted to stop supporting the
people who were experts. And it's like that, that's not
something that's every only happened in Russia this one time,

(28:14):
thank god, thank god. Uh So, yeah, in in that
first profile article in Pravda, had praised Lushenko for working
for the people rather than study and quote the hairy
legs of flies. Um, yeah, this is a reference to
fruit flies, which were then in our today the number
one workhorse critter for genetic research because they breed so
quickly you can test a lot of different genetic stuff.

(28:35):
I'm not a geneticist, but they're they're very important. You
can't have a lot of really crucial genetic research about
using fruit flies because they're just very easy to study
this kind of stuff with um or at least I
should say that the number one workhorse of Mandelian 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 would have come across
in high school. He was. He was an Austrian monk

(28:56):
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 down passed down to
that which is passed down to that, like what Newton
is to physics, he is to genetics. Like he's that
level of like foundational mind. And he came up with
the idea of recessive and dominant traits. He figured out
genes were a thing, although he used the term factors

(29:16):
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 trouphm Leshenko was
pretty sure Mindell was full of ship because trophim Leshenko
did not believe in genes or heredity, and instead he
thought that plants could be educated to grow in different climates.
Because plants had free will, they could choose to mature
in certain ways to meet their environment if they were
properly educated. This is why you could educate a seed

(29:38):
to survive the winter by freezing it before planting it.
And it's like playing music at your house plants. Yeah,
but crazier. 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 beeto and 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

(30:00):
of people by playing Bates Oven for all the plans.
I would 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 Lushenka was not
totally alone and rejecting Mandeli and genetics at this point. Again,
it's a different era. There was another guy, Lamark, who
had proposed totally different ideas about heredibility and had basically
concluded that the environment drove heredity. Like. One of his

(30:20):
big things was that giraffe's next were longer because many
generations of giraffes had been just stretching their necks further
inverted for feet to reach food. Yeah, this is not
the 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 was legally considered medicine, so it's it's

(30:42):
nothing against Lamark eighteen hundreds of the time. Yeah, exactly. Now,
Lashenko praised Lamarckian genetics, calling it perfectly correct and entirely scientific.
But he couldn't really use Lamark as his sort of
guy in the past to call to because Lamark had
been a nobleman. I forget what country he came from,
but he was like a member of the aristocracy, which
meant that he didn't have good Bolshevik credentials either. So

(31:05):
instead Lushanko declared himself the advocate of a Bolsheviks scientist
named Maturan. Now Maturon had died in nineteen thirty five,
but for a while he was a very famous Soviet scientist.
He had been a Lamarchian and claimed that intuition mattered
more than education and science. Maturin had called educated scientists
like Vavilov the cast priests of Jabbrology. Yeah, so it's
a great phrase. Yeah it is jabbrology. Yeah, the cast

(31:27):
Priests of Gabrology. Feels like a young adult fantasy novel
that I would have read a high schooler, does it? Yeah,
it's I I 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. Question. You're pushing
hard on it? No, no, no, I just I like

(31:48):
the term jabbrology. It makes it makes me laugh. I
like the term cast priest. No, No, that that does
sound like an adult fiction, like The Hardy Boys and
the cast Priests of Jabber. Okay, I'm I'm bound board now.
Uh So. This was the nineteen thirties, and nobody in
genetics was perfectly right at this point. For example, most
Mendelian geneticists believe the genes were fixed and stable, which

(32:08):
is not entirely the case either. But Lushenko considered the
entire idea of heredity to be heresy. Heredity in his eyes,
would mean that people were incapable of change. It was
fascist to believe that plants and animals had inherited characteristics
and that those characteristics could be enhanced through selective breeding.
And in a little bit of fairness to Leshenko, fascist
were super integ eugenics at this point. Yeah, so it

(32:30):
is kind of like messed up because Lushenko is saying that, like,
look at what the Nazis are saying about selective breeding
of humanity. We don't want to do that, which is
true obviously with the Nazi attitudes on genetics led us
and bad ship, but his attitude to just reject all
of science as a result that he truly was ideologically
pure or was he just like, well, as long as
I focused on keeping Stalin and people around him, uh

(32:53):
and me, and they're good graces. Like I'm going to
follow that track. Like he knew that he had kind
of bullshit that you know, the first year of the
Winter peace 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 ship on this stuff. Um,
but there's a lot I guess there are a lot

(33:14):
of scientists that have like an ideology about the end
product that just are willing to fudge and deal with
stuff in early because they're like, I know it will
work out later, because I believe this so so clearly.
It's like you talk about that guy who did, um,
that study for the Lancet that gets cited by all
of the anti vaccine people. Um, I'm sure he doesn't
think he's a fraud. I'm sure he has internal justifications

(33:36):
for all of his questionable science that 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,
no, no no, I did that. And when people you don't
like to keep attacking you, you kind of people tend
to double down. You dig in and and I think
Lushenko is that kind of scientist where if you could
give him a truth serum, he would probably be like, yeah,
I did this and this and this, but I did

(33:57):
it for this reason, right, And I did it because
the underlying point I'm making is true. And it would
be hard not to look at the Nazis and what
they're doing using Mandelian 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 hered

(34:17):
ability between the Russians and the Nazis. Yeah. So, Lushenko
preached that there was no such thing the 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 shipload of
seeds very very close together in the ground, just really

(34:38):
like twenty 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. It's a lot of credits.
Are better than people. We found that a lot of
the people don't like what we're doing. Corn. Corn is

(34:59):
way better than evil. 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
just ejaculate on the seats. Yeah, he brought this monkey
to have sex with corn, and yeah, now we'll have
monkey corn hybrids instead of people. They will fight our wars.
And in fact, actually just as a digression, you will

(35:21):
often hear people claim that Stalin tried to breed ape
superman hybrids, and that's harkening back to the stuff that
never happened. He was never trying to breed super soldiers.
But there was a scientist trying to make people breed
with monkeys. That's the 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

(35:43):
sperm and came up with monkey human hybrids, Stalin would
have been like, well, let's see, how did they shoot?
But that never happened. So Lashenko believed that the death
of individual saplings in the group occurs not because they
are crowded, but for the express purpose of ensuring that
in the future they will not be out it. So again,
a lot of credit to plants. He really credits them

(36:04):
with a lot of intelligence and planning and free will,
um and like a morality, yeah, and and not just
a morality, but a morality that's perfectly in line with
Soviet theory of the day. So natural selection was, according
to Lushenko, Darwin's greatest mistake. Uh. He claimed that plants
did not have hormones. He also claimed that he had
turned wheat into rye barley oats, corn flowers and other

(36:27):
plants that are not wheat. At one point, Lushenko even
said that he'd successfully turned small white birds into large
blackbirds 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 it's like an extemporaneous rally
where he's just like coming up with new stuff. And yeah,

(36:48):
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 Davilov
sitting there being like and in twelve years, we can
make grade more durable by doing that. And then Leshenko
is like I made birds bigger birds? Could I turned

(37:10):
sparrows into turkeys with blood? Yeah? Who are you going
to listen to Leshenko? Sounds way more exciting. So Leshenko
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, which

(37:33):
just sounds like scientology. It's a little bit like you know,
that kind of will Smith energy of just like you know,
my children are going to like be the princes and
princesses of space in a hundred years and like, you know,
controls time with my mind. If will Smith had been
in charge of all Soviet agriculture, it would have probably
been a lot like actually, yeah, okay, So we're going
to get into how trouphrom Leshenko contributed to the worst

(37:56):
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.
And we're back now I'm gonna quote now from an

(38:17):
Atlantic article on trop from Lushenka that gives a good
idea of how he was viewed by the Western scientific community.
Because scientists in the Soviet Union are still talking the
scientists and the rest of the world at this point
this pre iron curtain, So other people outside of Russia
hearing what Lushenko 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 Lushenka was

(38:37):
completely ignorant of the elementary principles of genetics and plant physiology.
To talk to Lushenko was like trying to explain differential
calculus to a man who did not know his twelves
timetable criticism from four yes our science burn, motherfucker, you
can't multiply like in the prov article, like people are
brutal in print. Then yeah, No, it was a lot

(38:59):
more fun where people were like Russian scientists publishing or
was it like, well, if I gotta 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
they're publishing and like Lushenko's there, they're like scientific symposiums
and stuff, so go like at this point, scientists to
an extent always like even when the USSR was at
its most closed, there were still Russian scientists communicating with

(39:21):
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 to nut sit well with Lushenko,
who loathed Western bourgeois scientists and denounced them as tools
of imperialist oppressors. He especially detested the American born practice

(39:41):
of studying fruit flies the work course of modern genetics.
He called sus geneticists fly lovers and people haters. So
that's a big thing in Leshenko's life, is he really
fucking hates people studying flies because he doesn't rampage. But
the Rocks character has always talked about as well, you
don't like people, but you love animals. It's like his
main characters is that he just wants to hang with
with the giant ape but also he's played by the Rock,

(40:04):
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. It doesn't seem like you
hate everybody. Yeah, you're the rock so much charisma. Seems
like you're the most charming man who's ever lived. Exactly.
So Lashenko denounced Mandelian genetics as a capitalist and clerical
conspiracy because they didn't like the church either. Also because

(40:25):
Mindel was was a monk. So clearly his genetics are
part of a Catholic scheme to to stop communism, right
and great more Catholics. Yes, the Pope really plans deep.
He's got a whole big corkboards where he's connecting dots.
It's like his tenure plan. No, I imagine the Pope's
plan for world domination looks like that Q and on

(40:47):
flow chart that just came out. It's just one of
those crazy image macro It's like circling people's moles and
red arrows pointing to everything. Of like, that's the Pope.
Classic Pope. So Leshenko denounced Mendelian genetics in the ninety
five speech, which he delivered in Stalin's presence. In the speech,
he called Vavalov and his cohorts Kulak wrecords and sabot tours,

(41:10):
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 Leshenko, 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

(41:31):
have already picked an ideologically inconsistent thing, because you know,
Vavilov had been the lead geneticist in the Soviet Union
up until the mid thirties, so he gets picked a
sort of the fall guy. Fortun 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

(41:54):
Soviet Union switches from actual genetics to lushenko Is genetics.
In terms of its underpinnings of its aggres cultural system.
More than a billion rubles are invested trying out lushenko
Ist agricultural theories on the fields and farms of the
famine racked Soviet Union. How well did all this work,
you want to want to take a guess they did
not get more plants that they needed. You don't think

(42:14):
that freezing seeds and thirty times as many seeds as
you need, like digging a hole and filling it with
seeds because there seeds in it, because the seeds are
like my seed brothers were. Yes. Yes, Now I'm gonna
quote from a book called Hungry Ghosts, which is a
book about famine, not about pac Man, not about pac Man,

(42:36):
although that would be the Pacman book title. Yeah, all
these ideas helped 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 Lushenko didn't believe you
should use fertilizers either at all, not not chemical fertilizers. Yeah. Furthermore,

(42:58):
their seeds should just want it. Yeah, exactly, and he had.
We'll get onto his yeah. So Furthermore, the fields were
left fallow most of the time, and when the crops
were sowned, the vernalized wheat did not sprout, nor did
Leshenko'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,

(43:18):
Leshenko 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,

(43:40):
and bad winters happen, Let's just keep going forward. You
would think so, wouldn't you. He 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. Stupid dangerous
things are in line with the ideology, so they cannot
be the problem. And Stalin's not going hungry, Yes, of

(44:01):
course not hungry. Why would Stalin go hungry? Now? Under
banners proclaiming greater harvests with less dung, so which is
hell of a slogan. That's that's often been the motivational
slogan here at the offices. I have them put up
banners that say that, yeah, it's the original McDonald's looking.
Soviet farmers also had to create artificial manure by mixing

(44:24):
humus with organic mineral fertilizers and a rotating barrel. This
method removed the phosphate and nitrogen, and when the muck
was spread on the field, it was useless. Ignoring Leashenko's
repeated failures, the Soviet press continued to trump at his
endless successes. Cows which produced only cream, cabbages turned into
swedes which is rude, vegas barley transformed into oats, and
lemon trees which blossomed in Siberia. Were any of those true?

(44:47):
Of course not. No, it's all because why are we
not talking about these cream cows? Just a straight which
is sounds very painful, butter cows is coming out solid.
It's like a soft serve machine. Just imagine the saddest
cow just like moaning in pain as pure cream sheets
out of its nipples. Yeah, you wouldn't. You wouldn't wouldn't

(45:09):
want that as a farmer, you'd be like something is
fucked up with my cows. Frosting is pouring out of it.
I did learn from this that Ruda begs 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 gotta find this prompt article.
So in nineteen thirty seven, four years after the Soviet
State had increased its cultivation of farmland a hundred and

(45:32):
sixty threefold. So when they start using Lushanko's methods, they
increase the amount of land they're farming by a hundred
and sixty three 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 because
you are saying all these places that we can't farm,
I can farm now because I've made these special seeds
so we can grow these things where they've never grown before.

(45:54):
So they're farming a hundred and sixty three 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 a hundred and
sixty threefold and they're growing less food. What's happening to
their population? And it's dying. Yeah, they are. Millions of

(46:15):
people are dying. Experienced. Food is one of the top
ways I stay alive. It was up there, but food
and eating it almost every day very important. I would
say more than two thirds of people rely on food
in order to stay alive. Well, there's the berth Arians
now troph and Lushenko was awarded six Orders of Linen,

(46:37):
the Order of the Red Banner, and three Stalin Prizes.
He was declared a hero of Socialist Labor and made
vice president of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.
As a Russian hero, statutes were made of him, and
in fairness to Leshenko into history, he had a face
made for sculpture. Check out this motherfucker's jaw line. Wow,
doesn't it's an angry jawline, Like, we'll have the pictures
on our website behind the Bastards dot com. But his

(46:59):
jaw looks like it could literally cut things. Yes, that
is such a character actor face that's seen him in films.
I feel like he was like a sub captain something
in a movie. I own on DV, Like, I feel
like he's been in every movie that was filmed in
the nineteen forties, Like he just has that look to
his face. But like you can't not make statues of
a guy that left. I can't. I can't blame the

(47:21):
sculptor's dream exactly. He's just got that look. So now
that Leshenko is sort of the chief scientist of the
Soviet Union, he starts getting the ability to purge people.
So in nineteen thirty four, one guy to Leyakov had
found out that Lushenko had stolen the work of another
scientist and tried to blow the whistle on this. But
at this point Lushenko had enough cachet that he was
able to get to laya Kov denounced in Pravda and

(47:43):
then shot I like that suddenly that the problem is
that he's stealing other people's science. It feels like that's
best case, that he's just taking science. It was like,
you would really academic honesty policies would not be what
I'm focusing on is tens of millions of people die.
You would really think that the scientist will be like, well, no,
actually just let him have this storm come here. He
didn't cite in this paper as a classic scientist thing. Anyway,

(48:06):
that guy gets killed, um so Leshenko convince a style
and that Mandelian geneticists are fascist, and he was also
able to convince Staal into executor 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 Ivanov dies of disease,
I think in a goolag or something, but he's arrested

(48:28):
and he's sent away along with a bunch of other scientists.
So the purges aren't all bad because Ivanov sure probably
could used to be perched, 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 they are fascist Mendelian geneticists.

(48:51):
They are supporters of fascist genetic science, and so they
must be perched. So the battle between Leshanko and actual
science comes to a head of nineteen thirty six, when
the Soviet Unions geneticists met up for a conference at
the Lenin Academy. There was a big debate where Vavalov
and the other legitimately great scientists of the Soviet Union
pointed out everything wrong with Lushenko's ideas, but Stalin backed Leshenko.

(49:12):
Merlov the president of the Lenin Academy, and Vavlov's ally
was executed and Leshenko was given his job. So yeah,
that's not only a good man and scientists brave this
point to still be standing by credibly 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 tanks

(49:34):
and modern science, people die hiking those mountains. And he
was doing it in like the nineteen teens um So
he was like the original, like almost an Indiana Jones style,
traveling around the world collecting seeds and interviewing farmers in
a lot of places. And he believes that belong in
a museum. Yes, he did believe seeds belong in a museum.
So Lushenko is given this guy Merrilov's job. He becomes

(49:57):
the president of the Lenin academy, and now he's in
charge of vava Lov. So you know, Leshenko is the
barefoot professor, a true peasant, and you know Vavilov is
a world traveler and a son of the middle class.
He was seen as susceptible to foreign influence. So Stalin
really likes now that Leshenko's in charge and purging all
of these untrustworthy scientists. So now that he's in charge,

(50:17):
Lushenko escalates the purges of all the scientists who disagree
with him. But he waited for a little bit on Vavolov.
By August of nineteen forty, it had become clear that
Stalin's farming reforms in lushenko Science had not increased crop yields.
People were still starving. A scapegoat was needed, and of
course Babolov was the perfect goat escape. So in August six,
nineteen forty, while he was out collecting seeds in Ukraine,
Vavolov is arrested by the secret police and taken to Moscow.

(50:38):
He was interrogated for eleven months and eventually sent to
a gulag, where he starved to death. In nineteen forty three, hundreds,
perhaps thousands of geneticists were arrested and denounced as agents
of international fascism, and most of them were starved death.
That was the common way to deal with these guys
who had dedicated their lives to stopping famine was to
start with. Lushenko was very good at starving people to death.
If there was anything that he approved, he dropped over

(51:00):
his career, for sure. He's the Lebron James of starving
people to death. You're breaking my heart, Robert. Then I
knew it was going to happen. But Volov, you know,
you introduced this guy that I just really this cool
Baly came to like an admire and here we are
watching him staring. Well, I do have kind of a
heartbreaking but also sort of inspiring story for you. Okay,
So let's let's roll with that, so Vevlov, I mean,

(51:23):
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 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 Lushanko's purges started faking their data and lying like

(51:46):
Leshanko in order to come up with results that supported
his theories. You know, evidence against his batchet claims was destroyed.
Mandelian geneticists were forced to confess their errors and praise
the scientific wisdom of the party. The resultant brain drain
is generally estimated to have set the U. S. S r.
Of science is backed by between thirty and fifty years.
But the upside of the story is that the giant
seed bank Vavalov had collected was not destroyed. A lot

(52:08):
of the scientists wh would work for him stayed there
maintaining the seed bank, and the seed bank was not
inherently against sort of lushenko Is genetics. He had no
problem with seeds. You know, so these guys basically stop
talking about Mandelian genetics and like go low for a
while and just try to maintain the seed bank. And
why doesn't he a little worried that, like the seeds
would all communicate with one another and decide up. Yeah,

(52:31):
I mean they commute, they talk all the time. You know,
they're they've got one single goal. Um, So there's this
giant seed bank in St. Petersburg, and you know, during
World War Two, the Nazis invade and they lay siege
to St. Petersburg, where the seed bank has helped. The
scientists who work with Favlov barricaded themselves inside it, and
this was to defend it from both the Nazis and
from the people of St. Petersburg who were starving. Now,

(52:53):
seeds are edible. You can survive off of seeds. So
the seeds in the seed bank, a couple hundred thousand
of them at this point, would not have been enough
to save the people of St. Petersburg. But if they
found out the seeds were there, they would have eaten
them in a frenzy, trying to save if you get
one night or whatever, just 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

(53:15):
starving too. Now there's enough seeds in the seed bank
that these guys it could it might have saved them
if the scientists hitty in the seeds, but they didn't
eat a single seed. Instead, they for months hold up
and defend the seed bank I'm gonna quote again from
Gary Naham. Over a series of months in nineteen forty
two and nineteen forty three, a dozen of the scientists
starved to death while guarding those seeds. One of them said,

(53:36):
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

(53:57):
a very catholic. Yeah, maybe it is a clerical conspiracy.
The popes just like listening to this um. After World
War Two, Stalin continued to embrace Leshenko, culminating in a
nineteen forty eight session of the Lenin Academy where Leshenko
read the opening remarks, which had been written by Stalin himself.
The speech glorified the Lamarchian genetic science that had gotten

(54:19):
so many people killed already. Proponents of Mendelian genetics were
dubbed enemies of the people. Leshenko 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

(54:40):
persistent famine. This led to the absurd situation of Russia
exporting grain to the rest of the world while here
people starved to death for lack of food. Because you
can't admit that it's not working, So just export the
grain and let people die. Yeah, it's not the only
time that happens, so Leshenko, hero of the Soviet Union,
had his portrait hung in scientific facilities across the entire
uss are. My brass band and a chorus accompanied him

(55:02):
every time he gave a speech. Songs, very stupid songs
were written to honor him and sung by scientists over
the land. I mean almost all songs sung by scientists
are not the top songs, never the top songs, except
for Actually, there's a rapper from Louisiana called Astronaut Talus
that does a whole great album of songs about like scientists. Scientist. No, no,

(55:24):
I don't mind scientists. I think he's an alcoholic and
a rapper, but he's he's does some good songs. But
I want you to try and sing this song about Lushenko. Okay,
you picked the tune. You can see where the two
bars there are. Um, yes, here we go, all right,
do your best. Do you need a beat? Uh? Yeah, yeah,
I need I need a little beat. Can we can
we get a beat? You can just narrowly play on

(55:49):
accordion with my girlfriend. Let me sing of the eternal
glory of academician Losschenko. He walks the Maturan path with
m tread. He protects us from being juped my mentalist
Morgan is great song, really great song. Thank you you
saying it beautifully. Thank you. I I got mad that

(56:10):
I mispronounced the names in the singing. I hadn't seen
them written down yet. And they, yeah, no, it's it's
it's a weird song. To ask any academicians. We don't
run across that word before said yeah. So. Soviet science
was remade in Leshanko'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

(56:32):
gonna read one more quote from Hungry Ghosts about one
of these men. Another hero of the Lushenko school was
the son of an American engineer, for Silly 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 nineteen thirties,
when American farmers in Oklahoma saw their fields turned to dust.

(56:52):
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 Prashannakov, who stressed the
importance of mineral fertilizers and shallow plowing, but Williams dubbed
them records of socialist agriculture. So Williams's theory stated that

(57:14):
in order to take maximum advantage of the nutrients, and
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, doesn't work. No, no, no, it's
that water that But he's a Lushenko is so his
his theories. Now it becomes whoever can suggest the next
crazy thing that is in line with what Lushenko is

(57:35):
already saying, that thing gets done right, And it is
like they're almost like out running the mistakes exactly their
past methods by introducing new ones that are even more
ideologically Yeah, exactly. So that's where we are as we
enter the nineteen fifties. The USSR had been started for years.
Five to seven million conservatively had died during this and
at least some of those deaths are in thrill from

(57:56):
Lushenko's heads. You know, probably a couple of million people
have starved to this point because of his bad science.
And we are not near the end of troph and
Leshenko's body count yet. On part two, we're going to
take a trip over to Chairman Mouse China and learn
what happened with Lushenko is um next that's tail for
next Thursday, So why don't you plug your may if

(58:20):
you go onto Netflix. The comedy Lineup Part two is
streaming now. My episode is My Name, which is Max Silvestri,
and also um big Mouth Season two 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 troph and

(58:42):
Leshanko helped kill thirty million people. It's gonna be a
doozy So until then, I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind
the Bastards. You can find us on the Internet behind
the Bastards dot com. You can find us on social
media at Bastards pod, and you can find me on
Twitter at I Right okay. And 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

(59:03):
a DJ Stalin T shirt which you can wear and
think about the millions who starved from Stalinist genetic theory.
Uh and I hope that makes you happy. If it does,
there's something wrong with you that by the shirt