Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Russian Scientist Who Helped Kill 30 Million People

Episode Date: November 13, 2018

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.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science?

And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences in a life without parole. My youngest? I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello everybody, I'm Robert Evans and this is Once Again Behind the Bastards. The show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history. Now this is a show where I read a tale about someone or someone's terrible in history. To a guest who is coming in cold, and this week my guest is Max Silvestri.

He is a comedian, he is a Netflix special as part of the comedy lineup out right now. Max, how you doing? Nice to be here, thanks for bringing me in from the cold. You know, like a spy? Right, like that spy movie that came out before I was alive. Yes, it was a book too. Excellent. Yeah, yeah, but that's me and I'm happy to be here. Well, it's funny that you talk about spies, because we're not talking about spies or anything related to spies today,

but we are talking about something related to the Soviet Union, which is where spies were invented. If my James Bond history like this. That sounds right, yeah, they're deceitful people. I don't know, I'm not going to say that. No, it's just a deceitful time. Everyone was deceitful in the Cold War, that's what made it fun. Yes. So we're talking pre-Cold War and then post-Cold War history here. I'll just get into it.

The rough title for this episode is The Scientist Who Killed Everyone. So that should give you, yeah. We all have political views in 2018. This is a polarized time, right? Yeah, I believe that scientists shouldn't kill people. You do. That's one of my main views, yeah, yeah. Well, this is not going to be a fun episode for you. Yeah, so everybody's got their own political views.

I think my regular listeners of this show will pick up on some of my political views from time to time. They're far from hidden, but I try not to make my personal politics the center of any given episode. I think it's important to criticize and understand terrible people on all sides of the political spectrum. And today's story is, I think, a good explanation of why I think that's so important, because this is a tale about where unreasoning devotion to an ideology can lead. It's about what happens when ideas matter more than human lives. Today, we're going to talk about a man who set out 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 20th century Russia.

Don't worry, it's not going to be boring. It's actually going to start with a story about monkey semen. Oh, great. Yeah, this is the fun kind of genetic science. Yeah. So it may surprise you to learn that for all the many things Arist Russia sucked at, science was actually not one of them. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, most Russians still lived more or less like medieval serfs.

Actual serfdom wasn't abolished until 1861, and things were still pretty primitive after that. Russia's class structure was stiflingly strict, and science was one of the very few means of social mobility. If you were good enough at science, you could become a member of the aristocracy. So one of these czarist era scientists was a guy named Ilya Ivanov. And starting in 1910, Ilya became a tireless advocate of trying to crossbreed human beings and apes. To make like a Dr. Marotite. What was his hope? No one knew.

He didn't know what was going to happen. What are the best parts of monkeys he was trying to put into humans? It was even more primitive than that. He just thought that it might work. Like he was really just like people were just starting to understand genetics at this point. So he was like, I bet humans and monkeys can fuck. And I bet they can give birth to hybrids. So let's see what that's like.

The reason it hasn't happened yet is because a monkey and a human haven't fallen in love. Exactly. He's fully consummated. Or the right monkey and human. The right monkey 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 a donkey and a horse? Yeah, a horse and a, yeah.

And you get this animal that is sterile, but it's useful. Like we do stuff with mules. So he was thinking like, okay, well maybe if you breed human beings and monkeys together, something useful will come out of it. I heard that like LA, California used to get rid of like fly population problems by basically breeding more of the flies, radiating them so that they were sterile and then releasing more out so that for like six months there were 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. So like, yeah, that's been tried a couple of times. And an easy way to go raw. I mean, yeah. Yeah, it seems like, but this was a little bit different. This was, because you're talking, you know, the early 1900s, you're talking a really optimistic era of science. It was because people have learned enough to know that like things are possible that haven't been done yet, but they haven't learned enough to know what isn't really possible.

And I'm sure the rate at that time was like a lot of things were being discovered and figured out randomly, constantly, now that they had like a method. Because they're just now starting to really understand genetics and stuff. And so Ilya at first in 1910, he doesn't really get many people on board with his research, but he continues to like be an advocate for making human beings and monkeys breed. Well, he does other stuff. And in 1924, seven years after the revolution that brings the Bolsheviks into power, Ilya is working as a sperm disinfector.

I don't know what that job is. I couldn't find any detail, but he's disinfecting sperm. That dirty sperm out there. Yeah. It's kind of a dead end scientific job. But the Institute Pasteur in France offers to support his attempt to hybridize man apes. So according to Russian scientific historian, Kirill Rossyanov, they offered Ivanov free access to animals at the Institute's recently organized chimpanzee facility

in the village of Kindia, French Guinea, but could not pay for other operational and travel expenses of the project. So fortunately for Ilya, he found someone who did have money to pay for the operational costs of his project, the Soviet Financial Commission. They offered him $10,000 to cross breed human beings and apes. He got approval for his project. For a man ape? Or just total? Total, okay.

That's a good amount of money then. So kind of a shoestring budget, but it was enough to do some research. And he gets official approval from the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Ivan Pavlov, the dog guy. Everybody knows about Ivan Pavlov. He was one of the scientists who signed off on this monkey man come project thing. So it's like, this could really work. Every time I hear a bell ring, I find monkeys attractive. Yeah.

Like it's wired into me. Probably something we should talk about with the therapist. It's important to point out that this was not seen as a ludicrous project at the time. A number of luminaries in the scientific field had suggested variations on this research theme already. Ilya was just proposing to test several other scientists' hypotheses. So he's not the original, that's mixed man and monkey together person. Right. It was kind of like a race to the moon, but who's like, we're wild.

Yeah. We need to do it because it's out there. Yeah. We choose to put human sperm inside of a chimpanzee. We'll put a man in a monkey by 1963. There you go. So I'm going to quote from a Scientific American article here that kind of summarizes the early research into whether or not human beings and apes can get it down.

One such hypothesis was that of the German scientist Hans Freudenthal, whose analysis of blood cells in 1900 between chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and humans, showed that they were serologically far more similar than had been previously expected. As a result, Freudenthal proposed that anthropoid reproductive cells could be similar enough to result in a hybrid between humans and other apes. In the following two decades, other researchers, such as the Dutch zoologist Hermann-Marie Bernoulli-Mohns and the German sexologist Hermann-Reudler, sought to test this prediction by intimidating chimpanzee females with human sperm.

However, their attempts never got beyond the planning stage, and in the case of Mohns, his research plans resulted in him being fired from his teaching position. So other people have this idea, and it's pretty controversial, but a Soviet scientist is going to be the guy who gets to finally test this out, because over in the West, people have this idea, but they're like, no, that's fucked up. Is it that there's a sort of more humanistic morality in the West that's like, well, there's certain ethical considerations. We don't want to cross these lines.

Yeah. And that Russia was just like anything for advancement. We're not bound by tradition anymore. I see. We've overthrown the old over. I see. We can try anything. Science.

So it's important to get the idea of the time. So Ilya Ivanov heads off to French Guinea in West Africa and starts his research. The other researchers there don't like him, and Ilya claims this is because the station was a disgusting mess, and they were getting their monkeys killed before he could inseminate them. The station had brought in roughly 700 chimpanzees from hunters in the year before he arrived, but over half of them had died. So Ilya may have had a point there.

But he got to work anyway, and he tried to inseminate three juvenile chimpanzees. Tragically, that did not work. Since his funds were limited, this failure convinced Ilya that he needed to try a different tactic. Oh, man. This isn't like a superhero story, like roll up your sleeves. I've got to test out the antidote on myself. That thing is it.

You know, it would actually be better if that had been what he tried. So his original plan was to inseminate three female chimpanzees, and since that didn't work, his next plan is to implant chimpanzee semen into African women without telling them what he was doing. Oh, yeah. That is worse than the cartoon villain one that I was suggesting. Yeah. Now, the really good news.

This is the only instance in this podcast where colonial Africa is not as terrible as it could have been, because the governor of French Guinea finds out about Ilya's rape women with chimpanzee sperm plan and shuts it down, and is like, no, you can't do that. This is a crime against humanity. Yeah. So Ilya gets sent home to Russia after one month in Africa, and the Soviet Academy of Scientists finds out that he had essentially tried to do something terrible and blackballs him.

So he gets pretty much shut down. Was this kind of like in England, the Royal Societies of XYZ, where you kind of couldn't operate if you were like not part of, you know? Yeah. It's less formal than that. Okay. And we'll get to why in a little bit. It had been previous when the czar was in charge, things were getting more radical.

But Ilya in, you know, 1924, 25 is too radical for the Soviet Academy of Sciences, because he's, again, essentially trying to assault people with chimpanzee sperm. Oh, for sure. Yeah. But in his mind, it's punk rock. It's, you know, revolutionary. We just need to try it. Yeah.

And this is really the end of Ilya's tale for today. But I think telling it sets up the intellectual atmosphere of Soviet Russia in the 1920s. Open your eyes, sheeple. Also, I want to make sheeple. That's the other thing I want to do. It's sheep and people. Oh, man, that would have been less horrifying, I guess. Right?

Yeah. I know for whatever reason, if you're like sneaking sheep sperm into human beings, that's less awful than monkey sperm. Because there's a cuddly aspect. There's some sort of, yeah. Yeah. I also, this is very dumb. And if you were to ask me, do you believe that a monkey can bear a human child or vice

versa? I would be like, no. Otherwise, we'd hear about it all the time. Yeah. But I don't know why. Like, why if you can make a mule? I don't know. We're just too different.

We are just different. I couldn't explain it scientifically, but I mean, he did try. I saw the whole Planet of the Apes trilogy. I understand that, like, we're alike. It would be cool if we could. If we could, I would support it. Although I would want everyone involved to consent to the experiment. But it would be cool.

Yes. And you've long asked the question on this podcast, can a monkey give consent to what I have planned? I ask that question regularly, often on the street corner, just to people passing by. I'd like to scream it at police officers. That's what the Scopes Monkey Trial was about, right? Can a monkey give full consent? As far as I've read, which is the title, Scopes Monkey Trial.

I remember the scene from the movie where an actor yelled. Now I'm imagining Inherit the Wind with, like, a guy banging a chimpanzee, like, right? It's going to work! Yeah. Oh, if only. Anyway, this was all to set up sort of the state of science in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Anything was seen as possible.

Human beings and living beings were seen as very malleable. And in spite of how crazy Ilya's planned to crossbreed humanism chimpanzees sounded, a lot of really good science was being done in the Soviet Union, in the early part of the Soviet Union. And in fact, for a while, the Soviet state was the world's center of genetic science. I'm asking this because I'm reading the right stuff right now and the space race and the idea of it being, like, nationalistic. Was there any element of, like, they had this attitude in competition with the rest of the

world or the West? Or is it more just its own, like, Soviet's own sort of? At this point, the Cold War hasn't started. So they're less competitive. Although there is still a factor of that. But it has not. So it comes up to the nth degree, you know, in the late 40s. So in this era, the 1920s and early 30s, the most brilliant scientist in the Soviet Union

is a guy named Nikolai Vavilov. Now, Vavilov was born in Moscow in 1887. He came from a bougie middle-class family. In 1906, he started at the Petrovskaya Agriculture Academy, which had been founded to improve Russian agricultural science after a terrible famine in 1892. Vavilov had been five years old during that famine, and its horrors were imprinted onto his brain. He had set his life goal as, quote, to work for the benefit of the poor, the enslaved

class of my country, to raise their level of knowledge. He wanted to discover better farming methods so that no Russian peasant would ever starve again. And he was apparently a pretty great guy. Vavilov just wanted to save lives, so when he graduated from the Academy, he traveled around Europe working with great geneticists all around, you know, Western Europe. And then he returned to Russia and got sent out to Persia, where some of the tsar's soldiers had gotten sick from bad bread.

During his downtime, Vavilov hiked through the really deadly mountains of modern-day Iran, collecting the seeds of plants that thrived in the extreme cult. His hope was that he could plant these seeds in Russia and grow more food for his people. When he got back from Persia in 1916, World War I was kind of a thing at that point and not going well, the Bolshevik uprising happened not long after that, and suddenly Russia was the USSR. At the beginning of the Seem Fime for Vavilov's career, Lenin and Trotsky were all about science, and then the years before Stalin took over, Vavilov thrived.

He took up a professorship and continued traveling the world in search of plants and farming wisdom that could help the USSR grow more food. According to Gary Nabom, an ethno-biologist who wrote a book about Vavilov, he traveled to 64 countries on five continents collecting seeds. He learned 15 languages. He was one of the first scientists to really listen to farmers, traditional farmers, peasant farmers around the world, and why they felt seed diversity was important in their fields. All of our notions about biological diversity and needing diversity of food on our plates

to keep us healthy sprung from his work. He was the world's greatest plant explorer. He collected more seeds, tubers, and fruits from around the world than any other person in human history. Wow. Sounds great, right? Yeah. You want to hear how he gets fucked over?

Oh, does he try to breed wheat with a monkey? No, no, no. He's betrayed and dies starving. Yeah, that's this tale. Yeah, it's a dark one. Oh. Yeah, no. As soon as you hear about someone awesome on this podcast, it's because I'm going to

tell you how they get fucked over by the actual focus. The awesome act only increased. Yeah. No, he's a great guy. He never did anything wrong that I read about. So yeah, by 1930, Vavilov had assembled a collection of more than 250,000 different seeds, the largest seed bank in human history. He was made director of the Institute of Genetics, and he immediately set to work building a

network of research institutes and experimental stations all across the USSR. Vavilov's network eventually included more than 20,000 genetic scientists. One of those scientists was a man named Trofim Leshenko. You ever heard of Trofim Leshenko? I've not heard of Trofim Leshenko. Okay. Well, I like the name. Yeah, it's a solid name.

Yeah. It's very Soviet sounding. Yes. Trofim Leshenko. Yes. Now, Trofim was born in 1896 in a region of what is today Ukraine. Trofim was a peasant. He didn't learn to read until he was 13.

He was so low on the cultural totem pole that there probably would have been no chance of him having any career beyond peasant in Tsarist Russia. But the Bolshevik Revolution gave him an inroad to the scientific community. He was able to gain admittance to several agricultural science institutes and begin carrying out experiments into growing vegetables in different climates. Was the state paying for people's education? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. So, Russia has, and this is a World War II spoiler, pretty brutal winters. I don't know if you were aware of that. I heard that their coats were not good enough. That's what I remember from World War II. That was the Germans. The Russians had great coats in that war.

Yeah. Yeah. So, wars are won and lost in the quality of the coats. And boots. And boots, yeah. I have heard that. Yeah. Dry socks.

So, famines had been a regular part of life for centuries, and the Soviet government was trying to find out new ways to make that not the case. So in 1925, newly minted scientist Trofim Lashenko wound up in Azerbaijan trying to breed cold resistant peas. Now, Lashenko believed his special winter peas would turn the Caucasus Mountains green in the winter and feed the Soviet people through the coldest months of the year. He also claimed that he had created a new kind of winter wheat using a process called vernalization.

Now, vernalis is the Latin word for spring, which basically what he was trying to do is wheat seeds are different in spring and winter because the cold damages 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 Lashenko 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. They could like prepare them for, they're used to the cold. Yeah, get them used to the cold while they're seeds and then it'll be fine, then they'll

grow really, really well. Which again, 1920s science, something to try, you know. Yeah, you gotta try and find out what doesn't work once. And he got lucky that year. It just so happened that 1925 was an unusually warm winter. His seeds did very well. Now, there was zero evidence this had anything to do with the vernalization because Trofim Lashenko didn't believe in using control groups.

Right. Yeah. Why would you do that? Yeah, the most fun scientists shoot from the hip. Come on. Yeah. This is a whole episode about scientists who shoot from the hip. So Trofim lied and falsified his data to make it look like his methods were the cause

of the better harvest that year. Then he kicked off a PR blitz to make sure everyone on the USSR heard about his work. In 1927, he convinced a reporter from Pravda to cover him. The resulting article, The Green Fields of Winter, started out kind of negative, describing Lashenko this way, quote, Lashenko gives one the feeling of a toothache. God give him help. He has a dejected mean, stingy of words and insignificant of faces he. All one remembers is his sullen look creeping across the earth as if at very least he were

ready to do someone in, which is it's pretty brutal opening. It's very brutal. Oh my God. Here's the picture of him from Pravda. Wow. I feel like that like reads like one of those celebrity profiles now where they focus too much on like how many French fries they ate at the beginning. It's just like, oh, this doesn't feel like what they should be about.

You should be nicer. Yeah. Well, it does get nicer. This is like Theranos and Elizabeth Holmes, I feel like of an earlier time. This is exactly like that, actually. So the article starts off talking about who he's kind of a dower, gross looking guy. But as it goes on, it gets more praiseful because the Pravda guy bought into what he was saying about his seeds.

So it famously dubbed Lushenko the barefoot professor, which was a compliment in Soviet era, Russia. And it noted that his. I love the barefoot Contessa. Exactly. Exactly. And you would trust him to reform your nation's agricultural processes. Absolutely.

I don't know anything about. Her name's Ina Garten. She was like the head of nuclear policy and now she is a food network personality. Really? Yeah. Yeah. Wait. She's 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 York after that part of her career and she like opened a grocery store called Contessa in Long Island in the Hamptons and it became a thing and then cookbooks and then now she's, you know. Okay. Well, I guess maybe let her set agricultural policy. She's fantastic. I don't know. She seems she seems great.

Lushenko was not so. But the article, yeah, called him the barefoot professor and noted that his experimental fields were often filled with agronomic luminaries, eager to shake his hand and witness the miracles of his creation. So in that interview, Lushenko claimed to have invented vernalization, which was a lie. The process was about 40 years older than he was and vernalization does actually work to make plants flower earlier. So you can, it is a useful tactic.

You can change basically how quickly a plant flowers, but it's less about, it's more about timing than yield. Yeah. It doesn't make it better winter wheat. It just changes when it flowers and stuff. So Lushenko's early work on this though had resulted in some promising findings. So Vavilov had funded him at first, had been like, okay, maybe this guy's onto something. Over the next couple of years, it became increasingly obvious to Vavilov that Lushenko was wrong

and faking his data. Unfortunately, in the Soviet Union during this period, scientific accuracy was not the most important question. Ideology was the most important concern. And Lushenko'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. I'm going to quote from an UNT publication called Recreating Mankind that talks about what we mean when we talk about the new Soviet man, which was like a big buzzword at the

time. Lenin, taking into account the benefits of a unified national order outlined by Marx and Engels, saw the immediate allure of creating an objective utopian vision on which he could base his politics. And he also recognized the foundation of this new ideal community could quote, only be maintained if the very nature of man can be changed to conform to the requirements of this new order after the revolution. Through this purely idealistic vision that was taken from Marx and Engels, Lenin and

his party carried out their utopian reforms in the hopes of recreating the perfect citizens. Some academics maintain that this idea of the new Soviet man bordered on eugenics, a lot like what the Nazis were talking about. And there is definitely more than a hint of Nietzsche in this quote from Leon Trotsky. Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to create a higher biological type, or if you please, a superman. So it wasn't about making a new Soviet man that 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 of the people inside the society. Oh, society first. It's not about we're going to change the human beings so that we have a better society. No, we're going to change this and it's going to improve the people in our society. And that's going to like, yeah. So it 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 USSR was trying to do with tens of millions of former peasant farmers. So we're going to get into what exactly happened after this and how Lushenko's ideas spread for the USSR and what the consequences of that were. 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. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right.

I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark.

And not on the gun badass way, he's a nasty shark. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself

stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman.

Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now one of the first major sets of reforms once Stalin came to power was a policy of

collectivization in rural Russia. The government called it consolidation of land and labor and what that meant was that tens of millions of farmers had their land taken from them and smushed together into gigantic collective farms. A lot of people did not like this because it was land they'd been farming for generations and some people resisted. So an estimated 10 million peasant farmers and their families were exiled or imprisoned from 1929 to 1933 for fighting against the collectivization policy.

Now Stalin had expected this mass and sudden collectivization to increase food yields, so he levied increased grain taxes on all farmers. These taxes came off the top, which meant a lot of farmers wound up with no food to eat. This combined with the disruption of collectivization led to a famine that started in 1930. Now a major factor in all of this was Stalin's obsession with destroying the rich landowning peasants or kulaks and the willful starvation genocide of the Ukrainians. There's a lot of factors in this 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 to day. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's something similar. We just had an episode on what the East India Tea Company did in India where it was basically very similar where they just forced everyone in these giant collective farms thinking that

would improve yields. And what it actually did was destroy these networks of like local insurance policies and stuff between different villages. So there was a lot of that going on. It was kind of an all-in type thing in larger pieces of land that when it didn't work out. And it was not just that he was forcing everyone onto these farms. He was also changing the way that they farmed. Now the first part of the famine seems to have been intentional because he wanted to

get rid of all these rich kulaks and he wanted to get rid of Ukrainians. And in fact, one of Stalin's lieutenants in Ukraine noted that the forced starvation had shown the peasants, quote, who is the master here? It cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay. So it's a little bit about breaking them. Yeah. Early on it was about breaking them. But the famine continues after the point where any kind of resistance is really broken to

the fact that it starts to become a problem for the Soviet state because this has gone further than they had intended. So there was some amount of people they planned to starve to death. But it just turns out you can't control that thing as much as you might hope. That's why I'm always saying you shouldn't plan to starve anyone to death. Really? Because it always spins out of control. You set a number and the next thing you know, you go over budget, you go over budget.

Let's not throw starving the baby out with the backwater. That feels unreasonable. There's a lot of good people that deserve to be starved. There's good people starving people on all sides? Yeah. Good people hungry on both sides. Yeah, good hungry people on both sides. So yeah, the devastation grows beyond what Stalin had planned for.

And as the worst famine in Russian history starts to really bite, Stalin calls on both Vavilov and Lushenko to offer solutions. Vavilov, using actual science, says that he can breed wheat and other crops that will do better in the Russian climate. It will take around 12 years. Lushenko, using lies, promises to do it in three. And you guess Stalin goes to it. Lushenko.

Yeah. Was the famine just because the new farming system didn't work or was he actually changing? It's partly that you're just fucking with sort of the way things have been done forever by forcing people on these collective farms. But there's also, there was enough food that they could have stopped mass numbers of people from dying, but they refused to hand it over. Like they were taking food away from people who were growing it in like Ukraine because they wanted to starve a lot of those people and they were, so it was a mix of things.

The famine was because they literally didn't have access to some of their. That was a lot of the famine. Like there still would have been some problem as a result of this and there had been famine a few years earlier as a result of the civil war too. But I'm half Ukrainian and I knew my ancestor had come to this country because he killed someone in a bar fight, but it also seems like there were other bad things going on. Yeah. Yeah.

The holodomor is what the Ukrainians call and it was probably between three and five million Ukrainians starved to death and most of those deaths were intentional. But again, it quickly goes beyond that. So Stalin backs Lushenko. There's some debate as to why he liked Lushenko so much. Some of the sources say that Stalin just liked ideologically what Lushenko was saying and didn't ever really talk to the guy very much. And there's other sources that say Lushenko and Stalin worked closely together and Lushenko

basically charmed him. So I'm going to read a quote from the book Stalinist 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 in scientific questions, Lushenko was highly talented in the art of leading an ideological fight and of surviving in the midst of Stalinist terror, unerringly dividing the boss's wishes and anxieties. Lushenko came to the fore thanks to his considerable natural talents.

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 courtier's intuition and his shrewdness, thanks to his ability to divine Stalin's secret designs, he always struck the right chord with the Great Helmsman, never arousing his irritation. They called Stalin the Great Helmsman.

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? He knows the science, isn't he? Vavilov does not like Lushenko, but he has to be very careful about how he goes about opposing him, because Lushenko is ideologically correct.

And it's also really worth noting that Vavilov is boujee. He comes from an upper middle class background, and that is toxic in the Soviet Union in this period. Lushenko is a peasant, so that counts for a lot as well. And most of the actual talented scientists in the USSR are people who had grown up well here because they were able to afford to go to college and stuff and to study science as young men rather than having to support their families. So these are the best scientists in the USSR at this point, but they're also boujee, which

means they're not trusted by the Soviet leaders. There's not a lot of hard-scrabble scientists like Lushenko, they're sort of, you know, creative. Yeah, and Lushenko'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, 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 later in history.

No, people have never supported someone who doesn't know anything because they wanted to stop supporting the people who are experts. That's not something that's ever happened before. Only happened in Russia this one time, thank God, thank God. So yeah, in that first profile article in 1927, Pravda had praised Lushenko for working for the people rather than study, quote, the hairy legs of flies. Yeah, this is a reference to fruit flies, which were then and are today the number one workhorse critter for genetic research, because they breed so quickly.

You can test a lot of different genetic stuff. I'm not a geneticist, but they're very important. You can't have a lot of really crucial genetic research without using fruit flies, because they're just very easy to study this kind of stuff with. Or at least I should say that the number one workhorse of Mendelian genetics, have you heard of Gregor Mendel? I feel like I've heard the name, but I don't know what that means. Yeah, he's one of those guys you would have come across in high school.

He was an Austrian monk and a scientist who bred a bunch of pea plants and figured out the laws of heredity. He kind of invented modern genetic science. The idea of this is passed down to that, which is passed down to that. What Newton is to physics, he is to genetics. He's that level of foundational mind. He came up with the idea of recessive and dominant traits. He figured out genes were a thing, although he used the term factors, not genes, but he

came up with the first guy to understand that sort of stuff. He's a big dude, but Trofim Lushenko was pretty sure Mendel was full of shit, because Trofim Lushenko did not believe in genes or heredity. Instead he thought that plants could be educated to grow in different climates, because plants had free will. They could choose to mature in certain ways to meet their environment if they were properly educated. This is why you could educate a seed to survive the winter by freezing it before planting

it. Is this like playing music for your house plants? That grows better a little? 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 beto and for their plants want to pretend, but that's less crazy than freezing a seed because it will choose to grow better in the cold. Yeah, and I certainly wouldn't plan to feed my population of people by playing beto and

for all the plants. I'd be like, well, it might help, but let's not count on it. But let's not base all of our agriculture on it. So Lushenko was not totally alone in rejecting Mendelian genetics at this point. Again, it's a different era. There was another guy, Lamarck, who had proposed totally different ideas about hereditability and had basically concluded that the environment drove heredity. One of his big things was that giraffes' necks were longer because many generations of giraffes

had been just stretching their necks further and further into the feed. To reach food? Yeah. This is not how genetics work. Passing on their stretch out neck to their long neck child. Yeah, it's like if you do a lot of yoga, your kid will grow up great at yoga. This is not how genetics work, but at this point in time whiskey was legally considered medicine.

So it's nothing against Lamarck, 1800s or whatever. Of this time. Yeah, exactly. Now Lushenko praised Lamarckian genetics, calling it perfectly correct and entirely scientific. But he couldn't really use Lamarck as his sort of guy in the past to call to you because Lamarck 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 instead Lushenko declared himself the advocate of a Bolshevik scientist named Maturin. Now Maturin had died in 1935, but for a while he was a very famous Soviet scientist. He had been a Lamarckian and claimed that intuition mattered more than education and science. Maturin had called educated scientists like Vavilov, the caste priests of jabberology. Wow. Yeah. That's a great phrase.

Yeah, it is. Jabberology. Yeah. The caste priests of jabberology feels like a young adult fantasy novel that I would have read. Yeah. That's a high schooler. Does it?

Yeah. It feels like an old book you would find in a video game or something. No? You don't think so? I mean, maybe. Like as a young person, it would have felt fancy and mystical and you're pushing hard on it. No, no, no.

I like the term jabberology. Sure. It makes me laugh. I like the term caste priests. That's different. No, no. I like the hardy boys and the caste priests of jabber. Okay.

I'm on board now. Fantastic. Yeah. So this was the 1930s and nobody in genetics was perfectly right at this point. For example, most Mendelian geneticists believe that genes were fixed and stable, which is not entirely the case either. But Lushenko considered the entire idea of heredity to be heresy. Heredity in his eyes would mean that people were incapable of change.

It was fascist to believe that plants and animals had inherited characteristics and that those characteristics could be enhanced through selective breeding. And in a little bit of fairness to Lushenko, fascists were super into eugenics at this point. Yeah, right. Yeah. So it is kind of like messed up because Lushenko is saying that like, look at what the Nazis are saying about selective breeding of humanity.

We don't want to do that. Right. Which is true. Obviously with the Nazi attitudes on genetics led to some bad shit. But his attitude is to just reject all of science as a result. Is it that he truly was ideologically pure or was he just like, well, as long as I focus on keeping Stalin and people around him and me and their good graces, like I'm going to follow that track.

Like he knew that he had kind of bullshit that, you know, the first year of the winter peas or whatever. And it's really hard to say because he's very consistent throughout the entire course of his life. Like he is consistently full of shit on this stuff. Yeah. But there is a lot. I guess there are a lot of scientists that have like an ideology about the end product

that just are willing to fudge and deal with stuff 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 that study for the Lancet that gets cited by all of the anti-vaccine people. I'm sure he doesn't think he's a fraud. I'm sure he has internal justifications for all of his questionable science that 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, I did that.

And when people you don't like it, keep attacking you, you kind of people tend to double down. You dig in. Yeah. And I think Lushanko is that kind of scientist where if you could give him a truth serum, he would probably be like, yeah, I did this and this and this, but I did it for this reason and I did it because the underlying point I'm making is true and it would be hard not to look at the Nazis and what they're doing using Mendelian genetics as sort of a justification

for a lot of it and not be like, we'll see. Look at them. How can how can that be right? Yeah. The Nazis are doing it. Yeah. It's a messed up time to be arguing for heredibility. Having to pick between the Russians and the Nazis.

Yeah. So Lushanko preached that there was no such thing as survival of the fittest among plants of the same species because plants would never compete with other plants of the same type. Instead they would all cooperate for the common good, like people. Wow. Yeah. So actually you were better off planting a shitload of seeds very, very close together in the ground.

Just really like 20 times as dense with seeds as you would before, 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. Wow. He's given a lot to plants. He gives a lot of credit to grain. These plants are amazing.

Better than people. We found that a lot of the people don't like what we're doing. Corn is way better than people. What if we replace all of the farmers with more corn? We want to create the new Soviet corn man. We would love to grow corn into a man. Just ejaculate on the seeds. Yeah.

We want this monkey to have sex with this year of corn and yeah. Now we'll have monkey corn hybrids instead of people. They will fight our wars in the future. And in fact, actually, just as a digression, you will often hear people claim that Stalin tried to breed ape supermen hybrids and that's harkening back to the Elia Avanov stuff. That never happened. He was never trying to breed sufer soldiers, but there was a scientist trying to make people breed with monkeys.

All right. So that's the kernel of the truth. Stalin would have loved it, perhaps, though, if it had made it. I think Stalin probably had his eye on that research. I think if that guy had successfully molested women with monkey sperm and came up with monkey human hybrids, Stalin would have been like, well, let's see how good they shoot. But that never happened. So Lushenko believed that the death of individual saplings in the group occurs not because they

are crowded, but for the express purpose of ensuring that in the future they will not be crowded. So again, a lot of credit to plants. He really credits them with a lot of intelligence and planning and free will. And like a morality. Yeah. And not just a morality, but a morality that's perfectly in line with Soviet theory of the day.

Yeah. So natural selection was, according to Lushenko, Darwin's greatest mistake. He claimed that plants did not have hormones. He also claimed that he had turned wheat into rye, barley, oats, cornflowers, and other plants that are not wheat. At one point, Lushenko even said that he'd successfully turned small white birds into large black birds via blood transfusions. Wow.

Speaking of caste priests. 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. It's like an extemporaneous rally where he's just like coming up with new stuff. I think that is a lot of it where he just gets into a speech and just starts lying about what he's done. Wow.

And there's no checking up on anyone. It's probably more, it's certainly more entertaining speech. Yeah, it is. Vavilov sitting there being like, and in 12 years we can make grade 30% more durable by doing that. And then Lushenko's like, I made birds bigger. What if birds could do you? Dishes.

Come on. I turned sparrows into turkeys with blood. Yeah. So who are you going to listen to? Lushenko sounds way more exciting. So Lushenko was not a big fan of academic integrity, nor was he a big fan of the scientific method. His personal philosophy on 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. It just sounds like Scientology. Yeah. You know, that kind of Will Smith energy of just like, you know, my children are going to like be the princes and princesses of space in 100 years and like, you know, I can control

time with my mind. If Will Smith had been in charge of all Soviet agriculture, it would have probably been a lot like Trofim Lushenko, actually. Yeah. Okay. So we're going to get into how Trofim Lushenko contributed to the worst famine in Russian history. But first, we're going to get into some ads that I will go here right now and guarantee

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And we're back. Now, I'm going to quote now from an Atlantic article on Trophon Lashenko that gives a good idea of how he was viewed by the Western scientific community, because scientists in the Soviet Union are still talking to scientists in the rest of the world at this point, this pre-iron curtain. So other people outside of Russia are hearing what Lashenko is saying, and they are not buying it to the same extent that guys like Stalin are. Quote, a British biologist, for instance, lamented that Lashenko was completely ignorant

of the elementary principles of genetics and plant physiology. To talk to Lashenko was like trying to explain differential calculus to a man who did not know his 12s timetable. Criticism from four, yeah, that's harsh science burn. Between that and the Provda article, I feel like. Motherfucker, you can't multiply. And the Provda article, people are brutal in print back then. Yeah, no, it was a lot more fun.

Were people, were Russian scientists publishing, or was it like, well, I got to go to a World's Fair and watch a lecture if I want to find out what he thinks about plants? No, no, they're publishing and Lashenko's, they're like scientific symposiums and stuff. So, at this point, scientists, to an extent always, like even when the USSR was at its most close, there were still Russian scientists communicating with the rest of the world and vice versa, because that's just what scientists do. Because scientists understand that the only way to get better at science is for everyone doing it to talk about what they're trying to do.

So criticism from foreigners did not sit well with Lashenko, who loathed Western bourgeois scientists and denounced them as tools of imperialist oppressors. He especially detested the American-born practice of studying fruit flies, the work course of modern genetics. He called such geneticists fly lovers and people haters. So that's a big thing in Lashenko's life, is he really fucking hates people studying flies. I don't know if you saw the movie Rampage, but the rock's character is always talked

about as, well, you don't like people, but you love animals. It's like his main character trait is that he just wants to hang with the giant ape, but also he's played by the rock, so he's very charming and makes constant jokes and is beautiful. I don't really buy it when people say he's not a people person. Yeah, it doesn't seem like you hate everybody. Yeah, you're the rock. You have so much charisma.

It seems like you're the most charming man who's ever lived. So Lashenko denounced Mendelian genetics as a capitalist and clerical conspiracy because they didn't like the church either. Also because Mendel was a monk. So clearly his genetics are part of a Catholic scheme to stop communism. Right, and create more Catholics. The Pope really plans deep. He's got a whole big corkboard in the Vatican where he's connecting dots.

He's like, this is a ten-year plan. No, I imagine the Pope's plan for world domination looks like that QAnon flow chart that just came out. That's right, yeah. One of those crazy image macros that's like circling people's moles and red arrows pointing to everything. That's the Pope. Yeah, classic Pope.

Also Lashenko denounced Mendelian genetics in the 1935 speech which he delivered in Stalin's presence. In the speech he called Vavilov and his cohorts, Kulak, Wreckers and Saboteurs, and said that instead of helping collective farmers, they did their destructive business both in the scientific world and out of it. Stalin responded to this, bravo, Kamrad Lashenko, bravo! Because of course Stalin had kind of wrecked the Kulaks and gotten all those people killed. So he needed a fall guy.

Like what's happening now is they need a fall guy and they're picking the geneticists that have already picked an ideologically inconsistent thing because Vavilov had been the lead geneticist in the Soviet Union up until the mid-30s. So he gets picked as sort of the fall guy for the day. Lashenko's really just satisfying a lot of needs for Stalin. Stalin's great at finding guys who fill his needs. That sounds a little more. Anyway, so after this point, the Soviet Union switches from actual genetics to Lashenkoist

genetics in terms of its underpinnings of its agricultural system. More than a billion rubles are invested trying out Lashenkoist agricultural theories on the fields and farms of the famine-wracked Soviet Union. How well did all this work? You want to take a guess? They did not get more plants that they needed. You don't think that freezing seeds and planting 30 times as many seeds as you need and just like digging a hole and filling it with seeds because they're all because the seeds are

like my seed brothers. We are in this together. We would all help each other. Soviet seeds. Yes. No, I'm going to quote from a book called Hungry Ghosts, which is a book about famine. Not about Pac-Man. Not about Pac-Man, although that would be the Pac-Man book title.

All these ideas help transform a rich farming nation into one beset by permanent food shortages. On the collectives, farmers could use neither chemical fertilizers nor the hybrid corn that America was using to boost yields by 30 percent. Lashenko didn't believe he should use fertilizers either at all. Not chemical fertilizers. Furthermore, their fields- The seeds should just want it. Yeah, exactly. And he had a- We'll get on to this.

So furthermore, the fields were left fallow most of the time and when the crops were sown, the vernalized wheat did not sprout. Nor did Lashenko's frost-resistant wheat and rye seeds or the potatoes grown in summer or the sugar beets planted in the hot plains of Central Asia. They all rotted. One year, Lashenko even managed to persuade the government to send an army of peasants into the fields with tweezers to remove the anthers from the spikes of each wheat plant because he believed that his hybrids must be pollinated by hand.

Wow. Yeah, great. So like, is he feeling hot under the collar at any point right now? I imagine each harvest must put him in a more precarious position or he's just like, ah, well, bad winters happen, let's just keep going for it. You would think so, wouldn't you? Yes. You would really think that that would matter.

I don't know why I would think that logic would somehow quickly win out in the midst of stupid dangerous things happening that's never proven. Yeah, because the stupid dangerous things are in line with the ideology, so they cannot be the problem. And Stalin's not going hungry. Yes, of course not. Stalin go hungry. Right, right.

Why would Stalin go hungry? No. Under banners proclaiming greater harvest with less dung, which is hell of a slogan. That's often been the motivational slogan here at the offices. I have them put up banners to say that. It's the original McDonald's slogan, greater harvest less dung. Soviet farmers also had to create artificial manure by mixing humus with organic mineral fertilizers in a rotating barrel.

This method removed the phosphate nitrogen, and when the muck was spread on the fields, it was useless. Ignoring Lushenko's repeated failures, the Soviet press continued to trumpet his endless successes. Cows, which produced only cream, cabbages turned into Swedes, which is rutabagas, barley transformed into oats and lemon trees, which blossomed in Siberia. Were any of those true? No.

Oh, okay. Of course not. No, it's all lies. Because why are we not talking about these cream cows? I know the whole point of the podcast. These are bad guys. But he's making cream cows. Making just a straight curve, which sounds very painful for the cow.

Oh, give me one of those butter cows. It's coming out solid. It's like a soft serve machine. It's just... Just going right into a piece of barley bread. Imagine the saddest cow, just like moaning in pain, as pure cream shoots out of its nipples. So thick. Yeah.

You wouldn't want that as a farmer. You'd be like, something is fucked up with my cow. This frosting is pouring out of them. I did learn from this that rutabegas are also called Swedes, because at first I thought he was saying he had literally turned cabbages into Swedish people, and I was like, whoa. I got to find this Pravda article. So in 1937, four years after the Soviet state had increased its cultivation of farmland 163-fold.

So when they start using Lushenko's methods, they increase the amount of land they're farming by 163 times. So it's not even just that his methods were, well, now our farms are collective and organized differently, but it's like, oh, no, we're... We're expanding. We're taking land. Because he's saying all these places that we can't farm, I can farm now, because I've made these special seeds.

So we can grow these things where they've never grown before. So they're farming 163 times as much land as they've ever farmed before. And four years into this, food production in the Soviet Union is lower than it had been when they started. So they increase the amount of land being farmed by 163-fold, and they're growing less food. What's happening to their population at this point? It's dying.

Yeah. Millions of people are dying. And my experience, food is one of the top ways I stay alive. It airs up there, but food and eating it almost every day, crucial. Huge. Very important. I would say more than two-thirds of people rely on food in order to stay alive. Oh, to be that lucky third, but yeah.

Well, there's the Britharians. Right. Of course. Very, very right. Now, Trophin Lushenko was awarded six orders of linen, the order of the Red Banner, and three Stalin prizes. He was declared a hero of socialist labor and made vice president of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

As a Russian hero, statues were made of him, and in fairness to Lushenko and to history, he had a face made for sculpture. Check out this motherfuckers' jawline. Wow. It's an angry jawline. We'll have the pictures on our website, behindthebastards.com, but his jaw looks like it could literally cut things. Yes, that is such a character actor face that it's like, I've seen him in films.

I feel like he was like a sub-captain or something in a movie I own on DVD. I feel like he's been in every movie that was filmed in the 1940s. He just has that look to his face, but you can't not make statues of a guy that looks like that. Of course. Of course. I can't blame the statue makers. A sculptor's dream.

Exactly. He's just got that look. Now that Lushenko is sort of the chief scientist of the Soviet Union, he starts getting the ability to purge people. In 1934, one guy, Tolayakov, 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 cache that he was able to get Tolayakov denounced in Pravda and then shot. I like that suddenly the problem is that he's stealing other people's science.

It feels like that's best case that he's just taking science from the people. I was. Academic honesty policies would not be what I'm focusing on is tens of millions of people die. You would really think that scientists would be like, well, no, actually, just let him have this one. The big problem here is he didn't cite his sources in this paper yet. That's a classic scientist thing to, anyway, that guy gets killed.

So Lushenko convinces Stalin that Mendelian geneticists are fascist, and he was also able to convince Stalin to execute or exile possibly thousands of respected Russian geneticists and other scientists for their fascist beliefs. One of the men that he has executed is Ilya Ivanov, the chimpanzee insemination advocate, or at least Ivanov dies of disease, I think, in a gulag or something, but he's arrested and he's sent away along with a bunch of other scientists. So the purges aren't all bad because Ivanov probably could use to be purged, but thousands of other scientists who are actual scientists doing actual work are also getting purged.

And he's making a lot of these arguments based on he's saying their science is ideologically. It's not like, oh, they're bad people. Yeah, they are fascist, Mendelian geneticists. They are supporters of fascist genetic science, and so they must be purged. So the battle between Lashenko and actual science comes to a head in 1936, when the Soviet Union's geneticists met up for a conference at the Lenin Academy. There was a big debate where Vavilov and the other legitimately great scientists of the Soviet Union pointed out everything wrong with Lashenko's ideas, but Stalin backed

Lashenko. Murilov, the president of the Lenin Academy, and Vavilov's ally was executed, and Lashenko was given his job. So Vavilov, not only a good man and scientist, brave at this point to still be standing by his 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 oxygen tanks and modern science, people die hiking

those mountains, and he was doing it in the 19 teens. So he was the original almost an Indiana Jones style figure, traveling around the world, collecting seeds and interviewing farmers in a lot of places. And he believed seeds belong in a museum. Yes, he did believe seeds belong in a museum. So Lashenko is given this guy Murilov's job. He becomes the president of the Lenin Academy, and now he's in charge of Vavilov. So Lashenko is the barefoot professor, a true peasant, and Vavilov is a world traveler in

the center of the middle class. He was seen as susceptible to foreign influence. So Stalin really likes now that Lashenko is in charge and purging all of these untrustworthy scientists. So now that he's in charge, Lashenko escalates the purges of all the scientists who disagree with him. But he waited for a little bit on Vavilov. By August of 1940, it had become clear that Stalin's farming reforms in Lashenko's

science had not increased crop yields. People were still starving. Escape goat was needed, and of course Vavilov was the perfect goat to escape. So on August 6, 1940, while he was out collecting seeds in Ukraine, Vavilov is arrested by the secret police and taken to Moscow. He was interrogated for 11 months, and eventually sent to a gulag where he starved to death in 1943. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of geneticists were arrested and denounced as agents of

international fascism, and most of them were starved to death. That was the common way to deal with these guys who had dedicated their lives to stopping famine, was to starve. Yeah, Lashenko was very good at starving people to death, if there was anything that he proved adept over his career at. For sure. He's the LeBron James of starving people to death. You're breaking my heart, Robert, that I knew was going to happen, but Vavilov, you

know, you introduced this guy that I just really... This cool guy. ...wakely came to like and admire, and here we are, watching him starve in a gulag. Well, I do have kind of a heartbreaking, but also sort of inspiring story for you. So let's roll with that. So Vavilov, I mean, you read a couple 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 perched. Now a lot of them did, and many of the scientists who survived Lashenko's purges started faking their data and lying like Lashenko in order to come up with results that supported his theories. You know, evidence against his batshit claims was destroyed, Mendelian geneticists were forced to confess their errors and praise the scientific wisdom of the party. The resultant brain drain is generally estimated to have set the USSR's genetic scientists

back by between 30 and 50 years, but the upside to the story is that the giant seed bank Vavilov had collected was not destroyed. A lot of the scientists who had worked for him stayed there maintaining the seed bank, and the seed bank was not inherently against sort of Lashenkoist genetics. He had no problem with seeds, you know? So these guys basically stopped talking about Mendelian genetics and like go low for a while and just try to maintain the seed bank. Wasn't he a little worried that like the seeds would all communicate with one another

and decide to... Uprising against the Soviet Union. Yeah, they talk all the time, you know, they've got one single goal. So there's this giant seed bank in St. Petersburg, and you know, during World War II the Nazis invade and they lay seeds to St. Petersburg where the seed bank is held. The scientists who worked with Vavilov barricaded themselves and sited, and this was to defend it from both the Nazis and from the people of St. Petersburg who were starving. Now seeds are edible, you can survive off of seeds.

So the seeds in the seed bank, a couple hundred thousand of them at this point, would not have been enough to save the people of St. Petersburg, but if they found out the seeds were there, they would have eaten them in a frenzy trying to stay alive. For sure, if you get one night or whatever, just have a bunch of chia seeds. Exactly. So these guys are defending the seed bank from their fellow citizens and from the Nazis, but while they're doing this, the scientists are starving too. Now there's enough seeds in the seed bank that these guys, it might have saved them

if the scientists had eaten the seeds, but they didn't eat a single seed. Wow. Instead they, for months, hold up and defend the seed bank. I'm going to quote again from Gary Nabom. Over a series of months in 1942 and 1943, a dozen of the scientists starved to death while guarding those seeds. One of them said it was hard to wake up. It was hard to get on your feet and put on your clothes in the morning, but no, it was

not hard to protect the seeds once you had your wits about you. Saving those seeds for future generations and helping the world recover after war was more important than a single person's comfort. Wow. So a dozen scientists starved to death guarding Vavilov's seed bank, but it survives the war. Wow. Wasting no seed is a very Catholic way. Yeah.

Maybe it is a clerical conspiracy. The Pope's just like, listening to this, excellent, excellent. After World War II, Stalin continued to embrace Lushenko, culminating in a 1948 session of the Linen Academy where Lushenko read the opening remarks, which had been written by Stalin himself. The speech glorified the Lamarckian genetic science that had gotten so many people killed already. Proponents of Mendelian genetics were dubbed enemies of the people.

Lushenko claimed that there were two different types of biological science, bourgeois and socialist dialectical materialist. Bourgeois-Mendelian genetics was removed from Soviet textbooks and the entire agricultural infrastructure of the USSR was retooled to prove crop yields were on the rise in spite of persistent famine. This led to the absurd situation of Russia exporting grain to the rest of the world while here people starved to death for lack of food. Wow.

Because you can't admit that it's not working, so just export the grain and let people die. Wow. Yeah, it's not the only time that happens. So Lushenko, hero of the Soviet Union, had his portrait hung in scientific facilities across the entire USSR. A brass band and a chorus accompanied him every time he gave a speech, songs, very stupid songs were written to honor him and sung by scientists over the land. I mean, almost all songs sung by scientists are not the top songs.

Never the top songs. Yeah. Except for, actually, there's a rapper from Louisiana called Astronaut Tallis that does a whole great album of songs about, like, 1,800 scientists. But is he a scientist? No. I don't mind songs about scientists. I think he's an alcoholic and a rapper.

Oh, okay. But he does some good songs. Now, I want you to try and sing this song about Lushenko. Okay, you got it. You pick the tune. You can see where the two bars there are. Yes, here we go. All right.

Do your best. Do you need a beat? Yeah, yeah, I need a little beat. Can we get a beat? You can just... Merrily play on, accordion, with my girlfriend let me sing of the eternal glory of academia in Lushenko, he walks the miturine path with firm tread, he protects us from being duped by mentalist morganists.

It's a great song. Really great song. Thank you. You sang it beautifully. Thank you. I got mad that I mispronounced the names in the singing. I hadn't seen them written down yet and they... Yeah, no, it's a weird song to ask any academician, so you don't want to cross that word.

Not a word that I've ever heard before, a little embarrassed by how I said it. So Soviet science was remade in Lushenko's image and his new acolytes went even further than he had, denying the existence of chromosomes and embarking on every stranger theories of plant biology. I'm going to read one more quote from Hungry Ghost about one of these men. Another hero of the Lushenko School was the son of an American engineer, Facili Williams, who became a professor at the Moscow Agricultural Academy. Williams thought that capitalism and American-style commercial farming based on the application

of chemical fertilizers were taking the world to the brink of catastrophe. This was in the early 1930s when American farmers in Oklahoma saw their fields turn to dust. Williams believed that the answer was to rotate fields as medieval peasants had done, growing grain only every third year. 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 Prashanikov, who stressed the importance of

mineral fertilizers and shallow plowing, but Williams dubbed them records of socialist agriculture. So Williams' theory stated that in order to take maximum advantage of the nutrients in the soil, crops should be planted much deeper than they normally were, deeper than anyone had ever planted anything, which, spoiler alert, doesn't work. It also doesn't work. Yeah. No, no, no.

You need that water. You need that. But he's a Lashenko. So his theory is now it becomes whoever can suggest the next crazy thing that is in line with what Lashenko is already saying, that thing gets done. Right. It doesn't matter. And it seems like they're almost like outrunning the mistakes of their past methods by introducing

new ones that are even more ideologically stupid. So that's where we are as we enter the 1950s. The USSR had been starved for years, five to seven million conservatively had died during this. And at least some of those deaths are on Trofim Lashenko's heads, you know, probably a couple of million people have starved at this point because of his bad science. And we are not near the end of Trofim Lashenko's body count yet. On part two, we're going to take a trip over to Chairman Mao's China and learn what happened

with Lashenkoism next. So that's a tale for next Thursday. So why don't you plug your, yeah, my, uh, if you go on to Netflix, the comedy lineup part two is streaming now. My episode is my name, which is Max Sylvesterie and also Big Mouth season two comes out on Netflix in October. I wrote on that and it's very 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 hear about how Trofim Lashenko helped kill 30 million people. It's going to be a doozy. So until then, I am Robert Evans. This is behind the bastards. You can find us on the internet at behindthebastards.com. You can find us on social media at at bastard pod and you can find me on Twitter at I write

okay by my book on Amazon, a brief history of vice. We have a t-shirt store on T public. So buy our t-shirts. There's a DJ Stalin t-shirt, which you can wear and think about the millions who starved from Stalinist genetic theory. And I hope that makes you happy. If it does, there's something wrong with you. Buy the shirt.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

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