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

Episode Date: November 14, 2018

In Part Two,  Robert is joined  again by comedian Max Silvestri to continue discussing Trofim Lysenko, the Russian scientist responsible for starving 30 million people.  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. I'm doing great. Thank you for having me back to talk more death caused by Russian. Well, before we get into that, I want to tell you something I noticed about your last name, which is I enjoy saying Sylvesterie, but it's one of the rare names that I enjoy writing more than I enjoy saying. Really?

I think it's because of the TRI. The TRI? Yeah, I enjoy writing Sylvesterie. Oh, I've always felt it had a weird rhythm to writing it. I get lazy by the end of it, especially my full name is Maximilian, so it's like, I know. Oh my gosh, you've got a lot of ground to cut. When I was a kid, I had to learn it rhythmically. That sounds exhausting.

I still kind of tap my foot. I am, I am, I am. Scantrons were not made for the likes of you. No, no, no, no, no. My nickname as a kid was Maximai, because that's in my preschool, that's where I cut it off. Which in hindsight, what kind of school only allows six letters for a first line? Yeah, that isn't a lot. There's many common first names that hit six or more. Yeah, it's not weird. Well, thank you for saying that, Robert.

Maximai is a pretty cool nickname, though. Yeah, no, I did like it. It was like my first AOL screen name, I believe, in 1994. Maximai? It was Maximai, with no number. I was in early. Nice, wow. I mean, I feel like you had a choice to make there at some point as to whether or not to be a hip-hop artist. And you could have taken that road. Well, if you can believe it, my middle name, and it's Ukrainian actually, is Shaft. It's my mom's main name.

Whoa! So there was a moment when... Maximai Shaft? Maximilian Shaft as like, you know, some sort of show business name. Some sort of show business name felt too much. I was like, I can't do it. It's going to feel like a bit. No one will believe it. Oh, my God.

Man. I went to a family wedding this weekend, and it was my cousin with the last name Shaft, and I had never thought about it. The whole other side of the family that got married into it, just like the joke of all their speeches, was like, I can't believe that our daughter is becoming a Shaft. She's now a Shaft. She's marrying all these Shafts. Oh, man. Okay. Well, that was a enjoyable digression.

You know, Ukrainian names, speaking of people who had bad things done to them by the Russians. Because we just talked about the starvation of the Ukraine. There we go. Man, that is a country that has just wound up getting screwed over by so many people. It's really, it's remarkable. I know. Yeah. There's just these nations in history.

The Congo's another one of them, where it's just like, oh, you guys have just been treated really badly by everyone for the last 300 years. It's like, like, like Italy without the art or food. We were not as excited by it. Yeah. I mean, I like Borscht. Oh, no. I mean, I like, I like pierogi.

I just mean like a, you know, every street corner doesn't have a pierogi restaurant here in America. Right. Yeah. Not a lot of that. Yet. Yeah. Yet. We need like a good Ukrainian music act to sweep the West.

The Ukrainian invasion. Right. But not from the war one. Right. That word is a little sour for them. Yeah. Okay. Anyway, we're talking about Trofim Lushenko.

And where we last left off, the USSR had instituted Lushenko's policies. He had purged the scientists of the Soviet Union, the genetic scientists who didn't agree with Lushenkoism. And of course, millions of people had starved in Ukraine and in other parts of the Soviet Union as a result of scientific fuckery. Sure. That's where we wound up last time. And this time we're taking a trip over to Chairman Mao's China to see what happened next with Lushenkoism. Okay. So as you will remember from part one, one of my sources for these episodes was the wonderful book Hungry Ghosts written by Jasper Becker.

One chapter in that book which focuses on the bad science of Lushenko and his comrades opens with a quote from a Tang dynasty poem that I felt was just too appropriate and inspired a choice not to include as we start this episode. I never think of poems in books as being like this was so necessary. But yet this spoke to you in such a way that you want to repeat it. Yeah. Because it happens a lot in the books that I read for this. I often do like this from a poem and I usually don't include that. Epigraph? What is that called at the beginning?

Yeah, epigraph probably. Right. I don't, I'm not. I just always feel like, well, oh cool, you know a poem. You know, like that is the energy that I feel when I read, you know. Yeah. And this one is more, I think it accurately sums up the mood of the people that we're going to be talking about. Seeing all men behaving like drunkards, how can I alone remain sober?

So. All right. That's where we're getting into. In 1949, Mao Zedong became the chairman of the central people's government. His rise to power had included an extensive and wildly successful propaganda campaign. Mao was the great leader, an infallible genius and brilliant Marxist, virtually incapable of making a mistake. After decades of war and chaos in China, he promised his people that he would make their country into a perfect state, a literal heaven on earth. Oh great.

I'm going to, yeah, quote from that book here. The nation's poets, writers, journalists, and scientists in the entire Communist Party joined him in proclaiming that utopia was at hand. Out of China, the land of famine, he would make China the land of abundance. The Chinese would have so much food that they would not know what to do with it, and people would lead a life of leisure, working only a few hours a day. Under his gifted leadership, China would enter the final stage of communism, ahead of every other country on earth. If the Soviets said they would reach communism in 10 or 20 years, Mao said the Chinese would get there in a year or two. In fact, he promised that within a year, food production would double or treble. Wow.

It's too much food. That is too much food. You know, it's not good to have too much food. You know, you're just going to piles of rotting vegetables. They started to worry about that. So one of the things that was instituted as a result of their worry that there was just going to be way too much food is they instituted a program to get rid of the pests before the pests could eat all of the food they were sure was about to be there. And so for like a period of weeks, all of the peasants in China were turned out to murder sparrows in mass, to try to kill all of the sparrows. Oh man.

They did the same thing with a couple of bugs too, where people would just be chasing down birds and bugs all day. Oh my God. If sparrows could talk, I'm sure they would try to just be like, guys, we're not sure that we're going to need to get rid of me. You might want the sparrows. Yeah. Well, they had them as sparrows. Too much sparrow meat. Yeah.

So one popular slogan at the time was work hard for a few years, happiness for a thousand, which sounds good, right? Great investment. Yeah. I can think of other countries that promised happiness for a thousand years. Was the idea that like they had a plan to buckle down and that just that they would be set up with abundance forever? Yeah. That was, again, this idea that you saw in the Soviet Union, that once we perfect our society, we will perfect the people in it and then none of these problems that have been present throughout 12,000, however many years of recorded human history will happen anymore. We're just digging ourselves out of a hole because you've all been wrong.

The people have been the wrong type of human. And now we figured it out. Two years at most. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. We'll reverse this 12,000-year-old train. Yeah.

Peasants as far off as Tibet, who'd never so much as seen an airplane, were taught to expect that in the near future, quote, practically, everything would be done by machines. In fact, a time would come when our meals would be brought by machines right up to our mouths. Wow. So this is like fully automated luxury commune, isn't it, that you're taught to expect here? And as they say in The Simpsons, people will be needed to clean and maintain those robots or whatever. You know, like people will still have a purpose. Yeah. But they won't need to suffer.

They won't need to labor miserably in the fields. And they won't starve in the winter, you know? Right. We'll still be a place for people, but it'll be in a perfect utopian state. So Mao intoxicated China with his view of what the future could be. And it's easy to see why that would be intoxicating after decades of brutal civil war and the Japanese invasion and basically a genocide being waged in a huge chunk of... China had gone through a lot of shit. Yeah.

It hadn't been a good run for them lately. Right. So they were eager for this. Music to their ears. To everyone, the scientific underpinning of the brave new world Mao envisioned was... Lishenkoism. Perfect. Oh, shit.

Yeah. See, Mao had spent years fighting as a guerrilla warlord against the other men who aimed to dominate mainland China. In the years before he won, he'd become a voracious consumer of Soviet propaganda. Much of this propaganda had to do with the spectacular record harvests the USSR was supposedly but not really having. Because remember, they were lying about that. Mao and Lishenko was billed as the greatest scientific mind of the age, and Mao believed the propaganda. Not just because he thought it was literally true, but because it ran intoxicatingly in line with what he already believed about the world. See, Mao was not a big scientific reality guy.

One of his catchphrases was, quote, we should be like Marx entitled to talk nonsense. He lectured people about needing to make science more imaginative, saying stuff like, science is simply acting daringly. There is nothing mysterious about it. There is nothing special about making nuclear reactors, cyclotrons, or rockets. You shouldn't be frightened of these things. As long as you act daringly, you will be able to succeed very quickly. You need to have spirit to feel superior to everyone, as if there was no one beside you. You shouldn't care about any first-machine building ministry, second-machine building ministry, or king-high university, but just act recklessly, and it will be all right.

Yeah, dream big, you know? Baron Munchausen style, just like if you will it, come on. Yeah, just balls to the wall, go crazy. Science is about recklessness. I'm not going to sit down with a notebook and mumbo jumbo figure out what all this is, you know? Just pour shit in beakers, get on with it. Corn should be bigger, do it. Do it, make the fucking corn bigger. You can see why it would be fun, like in a world where people have been taught.

No, science is about painstaking research and checking your notes and gradually arriving at truth, chiseling away at that over time. Just be like, nah, just fucking try shit, man, it's fine. Yeah, we're the best, and we're going to be even better if you just listen to me, don't worry about the logistics. Again, another thing that unfortunately has no echoes after this time. I mean, this was like such a sad chapter that closed so abruptly. Yeah, I mean, one of the best things about history is that people learn all of their lessons from it and never repeat these mistakes again. Of course, humans change, they change easily, and they change a stick, I found. So, I'm going to guess that Mao's attitude towards recklessness was probably useful to him in his career as a warlord.

That could be good if you're like running an army, to just sort of be daring and bold and stuff. A question, was he trying to impress Communist Soviet Union with like his adoption, or was it more just like, no, I also believe this and it's worked for them and I admire it, or did he want to like get in better? It certainly changed through time, but in this period, in the early period of like, you know, 49 or so when he gets into power, he's very much trying to impress them. And I think it's a mix of legitimately wanting to impress them and also wanting to be the best at communism. Right. Like, that's the, I'm going to do communism better than you fuckers.

I was wicking briefly in seventh grade because like some kids that I hung out with, like one of them got into it and I didn't really believe it. I don't know if any of us did, but we went to a magic shop and bought like source books or whatever. But I was, you know, a teacher's pet type student and in that brief two month period, I became like the best at wickingism. I like knew the whole book, I'd like correct them and being like, oh no, that's, that mojo bag positivity spell won't work like that, you know, and it won't work unless you bury it in, you know, new soil. So it wasn't that I believed it, but I did like excelling at it, you know. Yeah, you want to memorize everything.

Yeah. Yeah. Oh man. So like seventh grade Wiccan, Chairman Mao decided that his extreme knowledge of Lushenko's procedures and all of the reading he'd done of, you know, Soviet agricultural propaganda and whatnot had prepared him to reform the agricultural infrastructure of the largest and most populous nation on the planet. Now, were they going through like, I imagine their climate is not universally quite as rough as Russia's. Were they going through like terrible famine at that point?

They were, but mostly because they just been fighting a giant civil war. Right. So that fucks up the food. So yeah, most pretty much everyone who was alive in China at that point had multiple times dealt with famine in their lives. So it was like the promise that there will be no famines was very powerful and also he was fucking with something really intricate. Like Chinese agriculture, right? Like some of the oldest systems in the human planet were continually operating, you know, like ways of. And yeah, it's one of those things we saw.

We did an episode on the East India Company and when they came in, you're right. I saw the first three episodes of taboo. So yeah, I have a pretty clear. Right. So like in China, you've got a very intricate agricultural system and they decide to change everything. So like in the Soviet Union, Chinese scientists with years of experience and oppressive educations were seen as useless bourgeois specialists too cowardly and timid to make great decisions. Because again, science requires recklessness. To be a great scientist, one had to be a peasant with an intuitive understanding of the natural world and a fervent belief in the philosophical underpinnings of the party.

Even children could be great scientists. One popular propaganda book from this period was called They Are Creating Miracles. It told stories about children in an elementary school who had, quote, developed 10 more new crops on its experimental plot. This was treated as fact, not fiction. It's a story. This is what Montessori schools are basically, right? You just let the kids come up with new vegetables or whatever and as long as you don't tell them no. Make carrots, but with tomatoes on the inside.

Go do it. Just be daring, fucking children. Quote, it is a story out of a science fiction book, but no, my young friends, it is not. This is a true story. There are no fairy tale magicians, no white bearded wizards of never, never land. The heroes of our story are a group of young pioneers studying in an ordinary village primary school. It's a little excerpt from the book there. So the more Mao read of Lushenko, Williams and Maturin, those great Soviet scientists, the three great luminaries of Soviet agriculture, the more smitten with them he became.

He would have read Lushenko's journals like Agrobiologia and run across quotes that tied Lushenko's ideas to the very mind of Stalin. Here's a quote from one of the articles in Agrobiologia. Stalin's teachings about gradual concealed unnoticeable quantitative changes leading to rapid radical qualitative changes permitted Soviet biologists to discover and plants the realization of such qualitative transitions that one species could be transformed into another. So this is the shit Mao's reading, this is what he's coming to believe, like you can literally change the nature of these plants by like altering them physically, like you can change them forever. And by what you're saying Mao's not exactly doing deep dives on the science, he's not double checking numbers here, he's just kind of like skimming to the last paragraph and being like this sounds fantastic. And a lot of what he's reading is tying sort of Stalin's mind and ideals directly to the science, which is leading him to think that like well a forceful personality can almost change the nature of science by like what he understands and believes in the world. So Mao began to tell his friends of his exciting plans to have Chinese peasants plant seeds close together, saying, with company they will grow easily, when they grow together they will be comfortable. Mao, like Lushanko, felt that plants of the same type could not compete with each other. The Chinese Communist Party gained its own Lushankoist scientists Lu Tianyu, who went on to persecute all of that country's experts in genetics.

Throughout the 1940s he mandated that Soviet agricultural science and best practices had to be used. Fascist eugenicist scientists who accepted heritability were arrested or forced to denounce their old beliefs. Soviet science reigns supreme. Here's a quote from one Chinese doctor about his experience in college at the time. We were told the Soviets had discovered and invented everything, even the aeroplane. We had to change textbooks and rename things in Lushanko's honor. So the Harbing-Cushing syndrome, a disease of the adrenaline gland, became Lushanko's syndrome to show it had been discovered by him. Since genetics did not exist, we were forbidden to talk about inherited diseases such as sickle cell anemia, even to students. This meant that all through Mao's lifetime, there was no policy to stop people in the same family marrying each other and passing down their genes. A lot of idiots were born as a result. His words. Idiots!

No, in the traditional sense of the word. I don't mean idiots like they bother me at parties. They're two idiots. What did China have at that point of 49 or whatever? Was there a tradition of bourgeois scientists that were following a kind of world-stage western style of scientific method? I think it was more that scientists in China, like scientists everywhere, connected with other scientists around the world to learn what they were doing and try to uncover truth better. And those scientists probably were not dogmatic about much of anything, because good scientists aren't dogmatic. Before they died, it must have been so annoying to scientists, which was relatively, in the scheme of history, a new thing. They're like, no, none of that. We're not doing magic anymore. Now we've got science, and then the new scientists will be like, actually... We're going to do some magic. Yeah, it's going to be pretty magical.

It's going to be magic. Children are scientists now. Anyway, you have to die. Yeah. Lushenko's theory demolished Chinese agriculture just as it had Russian agriculture, a potato blight hit in the 1950s. Under Lushenkoism, the cause of the blight was assumed to be environmental, not the result of a stunning lack of biodiversity among the potatoes. Good research that was done into the blight was suppressed for decades when the findings contradicted scientific orthodoxy. As a result, Mao Erichina grew, by some accounts, half as many potatoes as it should have during this period. I don't want to get too deep into the woods on communist botany in the mid-20th century. It's just the idea that someone was like, this is how many potatoes they should have grown. Well, you can look at, like, this is how much land they dedicated to potatoes and how many potatoes they need to make.

Right. They would not die from lack of potatoes. Oh, man. Yeah. I talked to the Irish about that. One of the things that was really big in communist botany in this period was grafting and crossing different species with one another. It wasn't useful for mass agriculture, but countless peasant scientists would be lauded in the press for, like, growing grapes on a persimmon tree or apples from a pear tree. Where you're just splicing off pieces of trees, and so you have one tree that grows multiple fruits. Right.

Like, it's a thing you can do in your yard, and it's cool. You can? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, I would be like, oh, another example of magic that's not true, the idea of having two citrus fruits on one tree. No, you can totally do that. Oh, my God. Like, I don't know, it's, like, not every plant can be done that way, but there are a lot of different... I wish I hadn't burned the guy that I saw that had that in his yard.

You just saw an apple and a pear on the same tree and started lighting fires. Yeah, yeah, yeah. His poor house. Oh, my God. There's nothing but ash. No, like, to an extent you can do that, but, like, it's not... It's not a solution for production or anything. Yeah, it's a neat thing for your own garden. It's not something that is really useful in a mass agricultural scale, right? It takes a lot of time. Right.

It's not, like, you might as well just grow a different field of apples and a field of persimmons and whatnot. Right. There's no reason not to. But it was cool, and it was impressive to people at the time, and they were just figuring this out. So, like, that's one of the things that would make the news a lot, is they'd talk about, like, look at all these scientists who have crossed these two different fields. Right. Fruits and whatnot together. I had mezcal this weekend that had a pear in the bottle, like a full pear.

Ooh. And we were trying to figure out, very briefly and drunkenly, how they got the pear. And I was like, well, it's not some sort of ship-and-a-bottle type situation where they, you know, had a flat pear and then it got fat. I was like, maybe they put a dried pear in the mezcal. What they do is they have the tiny little pear in the tree. They hang the tree with the bottles. Oh, that's cool. So that it grows inside.

And I was like, that is cool, but also not the most efficient way to bottle alcohol or grow pears to have a handful of trees or perhaps a whole field of them with bottles on the end. It seems novel rather than super useful. Well, I mean, yeah. I mean, it was delicious. Mezcal went down so smooth. I didn't even need a lime with it. Did you eat the pear? You know, we didn't drink that much, and luckily.

I mean, would you break the bottle? I guess so. Yeah, I mean, you have to. Like, get a glass or something like that. Get a little bit of glass in there. I just want to drink a mezcaled up pear that sounds delicious. Yes, that sounds fantastic. Yeah.

Okay, so grafting and crossing all these plants and stuff became something of a meme in red China. And soon the state news filled with fanciful stories of pumpkins crossed bread with papaya, corn crossed with rice and other such nonsense, which you can't do. You can't make corn rice. Corn? You can't make corn rice. Is it that an ear of corn has cooked rice instead of kernels? Unclear. Okay.

It would be kind of cool either way. Yes, totally. Yeah, but it didn't happen. Neither would really fulfill a need that I have. No. I go in for different reasons when I'm going for both of those two. Yeah. Never again will man have to go to two different places for rice grains and corn cob.

I'm tired of when I eat rice that there's nothing to rotate. Yeah. And so that would have solved that problem. That's really frustrating. So different districts would compete with each other for like claiming wild successes and things that could like go in the local newspapers and stuff. There were stories of like 130 pound pumpkins and whatnot, most of which were complete lies. I feel like that's still a thing we're covering in the news today.

Yeah, somebody grows a really big fruit and you're like, look at this big fruit. Yes, exactly. I mean, I almost feel like it's pre-social media. Yeah. You know, American Heartland memes was like 10 times forwarded emails that had just like, look at this giant pumpkin the size of a man. This is that. And this is kind of how the craze over this new science starts to sweep China.

You know, at first it's not super negative, like, yeah, I mean, they're definitely not grown as many potatoes, but like it's mostly just people being like, well, I can be a scientist. Look at what I did to this tree. Look at this photo of my husky son next to a potato as tall as he is, you know? Come on, this will inspire people for a decade. Yeah. A mix of actual neat little experiments that just lies. Yeah.

So we're going to get into the Great Leap Forward next, which was not a great time for most people. But it's called the Great Leap Forward. I know, I know, sometimes advertisements are not true. But in this case, the advertisements are true because they're the ads for our show and they're great. 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.

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Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. We're talking when we were about to talk about the Great Leap Forward, which started in 1958. It was Chairman Mao's big sort of plan to rapidly turn China into an industrial and agricultural powerhouse. Now, one aspect of the leap that's probably most famous was the creation of countless backyard furnaces and steel smelting plants and peasant villages. Designed to sort of the idea was like, we don't need to all like move into cities and make big factories like the rest of the world. We can just have our peasants be like producing this sort of, they didn't make good steel. Turns out farmers don't make great steel in their backyards. Well, we are going to need that steel for when all the robots do all the tasks in the near near future.

We might as well start building the steel. We might not have the robots yet. Yeah, we get the steel ready, the robots. Anyway, it also involved an eight point blueprint for Chinese agricultural written up by Mao himself and based heavily in Lushankos theories. The eight points included close planting and deep plowing. Yeah, real deep plowing. Two things that by 1953, the Soviet Union knew did not work. Because again, they had this data, they just weren't sharing it because they didn't want to embarrass themselves by admitting that they'd starved a lot of people unnecessarily with bad science. So they hadn't shared it, but were they like quietly changing practices? They were starting to by the mid fifties or something. But yeah, certainly by the late fifties, some of this had started to change in the Soviet Union, but they weren't letting people know.

And so China was just like, I guess this stuff works. We'll give it a shot ourselves. They would have told us if this was killing people. Prior to Lushankos, 1.5 million seedlings had been spread per 2.5 acres of farmland in China. In 1958, as part of the Great Leap Forward, Chinese farmers were ordered to plant 6.5 million seedlings per 2.5 acres. So that's 1.5 million seedlings to 6.5 million seedlings. That's a lot more seedlings being planted in the same amount of dirt. And in 1959, the government increased the number of seedlings to between 12 and 15 million per 2.5 acres. So they're just dousing way too many fucking seeds in the land. I'm hoping that these seeds start talking to each other and be like, you know what, we gotta start growing differently.

Like people, seeds are stronger together. Yes, exactly. Group dynamics, I remember something about that. Every important crop in China was planted using this method, and across the board almost all of the seedlings died. State propaganda photographers would do things like find a field of wheat that was growing, hide a bench inside it, and have kids stand on the bench so that they could at least claim that the wheat was growing so dense that children could walk across the top of a field of wheat. Wow. So like in reality, they're having huge trouble getting stuff to grow, and in the areas where it is growing, it's not growing any denser than it ever came in before, but they're essentially faking it. They're cropping the photos in a way that it makes it look like their potato inauguration is far more populated with potatoes than perhaps it actually is.

Yeah, and many people didn't know this was bullshit. Millions of farmers were watching crops die. The propagandists who stuck benches inside a field knew that they were faking yields. This was all essentially a play put on for Chairman Mao, out of what was probably a mix of genuine desire to please the chairman and fear of what would happen if their yields didn't match what he'd already declared to be reality. One witness to a visit from Mao to the Xinli experimental field outside Qianzhen in 1958 recalled that, before he arrived, everyone grabbed rice plants from other fields and shoved them together so tightly that you really could walk across them. Once Mao left, the rice was replanted. Mao's doctor recalled seeing the same thing done in a different city the chairman visited.

He later stated, All of China was a stage, all the people performers in an extravaganza for Mao. Wow. Everybody's just like, we gotta, this is the guy, we've gotta make it look like this shit's working. And weirdly, walking on it is the way we've all decided that things are going great. Yeah, it is weird meme spread like, it's gonna grow so dense we can walk across it. Right, right, right. This is the thing.

We're committing to that? How else can you say it's growing a lot of fucking corn? Were there purges happening yet? Yeah. I mean, I know as a thing, people were murdered that didn't quite follow mine. There were definitely purges. Oh yeah, yeah, he's purging. He's purging during this period.

Okay. So Mao also fell in love with the idea that that Soviet scientist Williams had come up with, basically that planting seeds super deep was a good idea. But where Stalin had been content to find scientists whose theories agreed with his own theories, Mao saw himself as an innovator. So he figured that if planting seeds deep was good, planting seeds even deeper was even better. Oh my God. Yeah, why stop there? These scientists didn't have the ambition of his imagination. Of planting it way too deep.

Hi guys, we all know that ground is this deep, but what if I'm just saying even deeper? Yeah, even deeper is deep as you possibly can. Often he would have basically whole armies of peasants dig enormous furrows in the land, sometimes 10 feet deep in order to plant seeds. It's like how I as a comedian know that wearing two hats is very funny, but you know what's even funnier than that? Wearing three hats. Three hats. Just go bigger. Yeah, and Mao would be walking into the room with like 40 or 50 hats on.

And everyone would also be like, we also need to put these hats on. Everybody get on that many hats. How dare you not have 30 hats. Walk across the hats. In one province, 5 million people were ordered to plow for 45 straight days in order to prepare 3 million hectares of land. In the north, where the soil was too frozen to dig into, holes were blasted with dynamite in order to help them dig deeper. This logic also applied to rice paddies, which meant peasant farmer women had to dig deeper into the paddies than they'd ever gone before, often catching infections as a result.

In at least one province, farmers had to tie ropes around their waists to avoid drowning in the rice paddies, because they were just going so deep. Oh my God. Yeah, just way too deep. Lushenkoist agrobiology also meant that Chinese farmers couldn't use chemical fertilizers anymore. Mao had the government end all its spending to build new chemical plants, and instead tried the same sort of bullshit fertilizer recipes the Russians had used. Generally a mix of 10% manure and 90% normal dirt. According to Lushenkoism, the manure would magically transfer all its properties to the regular dirt.

This practice led to farmers just mixing in random garbage with dirt. Here's a quote from Hungry Ghosts. People in Guangzhou took their household rubbish to the outskirts of the city where it was buried for several weeks before being put out on the fields. Near Shanghai, peasants dumped so much broken glass that they could not walk across the fields and bare feet. Others broke up the mud floors of their huts and their brick stoves and even pulled down their mud walls to use as fertilizer. You know, Mao's credit, I know that's maybe not right, but if I were to put a little of my own manure into, say, a bowl of mashed potatoes and mix it together, I would kind of be like, that's all manure now.

I wouldn't be like, well, there's still a lot of good mashed potatoes in there. Yeah, when you are mixing poop with food. Yes, 10% poop means all the food. Really, it's all poop now. 100%. That is a fair point. But it doesn't work that way when you're trying to create fertilized soil. So Mao's government expected crop yields to triple after all of this heroic innovation,

but that meant they were also going to have to deal with the surge in pests, as I mentioned. So yeah, in 1958, he ordered farmers to run around banging pots and pans to exhaust all of the sparrows to death. We already went over that. Clearly, this is all like a plot from someone inside the government that hates sparrows. Just a long play to get rid of sparrows. I'll show you. I'm sure how many people starve if we get rid of those goddamn birds. Get off my roof.

Wacky as this all was for a while, things looked like they were going great. 1958 was a good year for weather, and rampant lying made it look like the autumn harvest had quadrupled. Mao and his comrades started discussing how to handle the massive food surplus they knew they were soon going to have. It was reported that fields had been producing less than 330 pounds of grain per one-fifth of an acre, now produced 45 to 53,000 pounds of grain, which, if true, would be an amazing rate of increase. They have too much food. They should just start destroying the food they have now, just to make room for the new food. It's weird that you predicted exactly what happens next. Oh, no. You're going to need that food.

All of that information on how much grain they were growing was lies. The State Statistical Bureau had been shuttered and replaced by good news reporting stations, which just spouted increasingly lurid lies about the harvest. For a little while, China thought it had more food than it knew what to do with. So in the autumn of 1958, Chinese citizens were told to eat like it was going out of style. One slogan at the time was, eat as much as you can and exert your utmost in production. Peasants in a village called Zengdu told anthropologists later that, quote, everyone irresponsibly ate, whether they were hungry or not,

and in 20 days they had finished almost all the rice they had, rice which should have lasted six months. Oh, my God. I do now feel guilty that that is my attitude to eating three to five times a day. It's like, well, when it starts to hurt, that's when you stop. That's when you stop eating till it hurts. Man, and I'm not getting out in the fields and doing any labor. No, I mean, one of the good rules of thumb with life is that if you do whatever you're doing until it hurts, about 50% of the time that will be the right thing to do. Your body has a way of telling you to stop, which is calling you physical discomfort.

Yeah, so if you work out till it hurts, that's good. Yeah, right? Pain is just weakness leaving the body. That's what we're always saying. And the same thing is true with eating or with snorting a lot of cocaine, you know? Do coke until you start to bleed too much to do more coke and then it's time to stop doing coke. Switch nostrils. Switch nostrils, switch drugs, you know? Move to the butt. Until your veins collapse. Yeah, do it till it hurts.

Advice for all of our listeners. So, Wade D, a survivor of the Great Bleep Forward, later recalled, We lived well. We ate a lot of meat. It was considered revolutionary to eat meat. If you didn't eat meat, it wouldn't do. People even abide with each other to see who could eat the most. So, they're having eating contests. They are being ordered basically to eat their entire winter supply of food in a couple of weeks. Oh my gosh.

Just because, why not? Right. There's going to be so much food. I know it's going to take a hard right turn, Robert, but this is all sounding pretty nice to me right now. It does. Come on. It's coming down from on high. And if you're one of these peasants after years of war and privation, eat as much meat as you can. You're feeling great.

You're feeling like this fucking communism thing. There's no downsides. Yeah. Up, up, up, up. I can't imagine the graph changing. Yeah. We got plenty of meat, plenty of grain. That's really all we care about other than the stuff we have that's not meat and grain. But anyway, it seems great for a while. People ate so much that by the time winter came around, the grainaries were empty,

and most of China was running out of food. So, there's that hard right turn. The state still had full grainaries, but rather than hand out food to the people, Mao convinced himself that the peasants were hiding grain to be counter-revolutionary. It was very important to him that communism seemed to be doing well in China. He didn't look bad to the USSR. So, he had China double her grain exports and cut down on imports. That way, it would at least look like a success. Now, oh man, this is like a rom-com where two characters hate each other or are too afraid to tell the other person the truth because they don't want to look bad,

but really, if they just came together and had a sit-down conversation, which they might at the end of this film, they'd be like, we have a lot in common. I don't have any grain. Do you have any grain? I'm gonna impress you this whole time. It would be really fun to do a nice romantic comedy set during just as 20 million people starve to death. Stalin and Mao having a meet-cute. Oh my God, what a cute movie that would be. Or a Stalin and Mao buddy cop comedy where it's the 1980s and they both live in Hawaii and they've got to take down a cocaine smuggling ring.

Maybe a road movie where they're just going to get more grain to get, or something where they have to spend a lot of time in a truck together. In a car together, yeah. There's a lot of fun potential in that premise. Okay, so the collective farming system that Mao and his regime had induced meant that the farmers were never actually in direct control of the food that they grew and harvested. It went into communal granaries and was cooked in communal kitchens. All this meant that it was under the direct control of party functionaries who all wanted to deliver record-breaking allocations to the government.

The food that could have fed people was given to the government for the sake of individual party members' careers and Mao then shifted out of the country for the sake of his own ego. 1958's harvest had been the highest in a decade, but by the spring of 1959 more than 24 million people were starving in China. Mao being Mao was incapable of attributing his nation's growing problems to his own policies. The increasingly evident failures of the Great Leap Forward were only, quote, tuition fees that must be paid to gain experience. Yeah, I mean he does have a similar attitude towards tuition as a lot of people in this country today.

The lenders in this country today. When his braver aides brought up just how bad things were starting to look in the countryside, Mao said, quote, come back in 10 years and see whether we were correct. China is not going to sink into the sea and the sky won't tumble down simply because there are shortages of vegetables and hairpins and soap. Balances and market problems have made everybody tense, but this tension is not justified, even though I am tense myself. No, it wouldn't be honest to say I'm not tense. If I am tense before midnight, I take some sleeping pills and then I feel better.

You want to try sleeping pills if you feel uptight. Wait, that's a real quote? Yeah, that's Mao's advice when his guys are like, you know, tens of millions of people are starving and he's like, try some drugs. Oh my god, I follow someone like him on Instagram. I think I am someone like him a lot of the time, I've never tried to reform a continent's farming practices. I just get high a lot.

Was Mao at all like, when these things, when he saw that they were not going well, did any part of him feel like it's the people's fault for not allowing the system to change them or to not forging themselves into newer, better, you know, versions? Or was he just sort of like a bad weather? I don't know enough about him to say what was going on in his own internal heart, but the things that he said and the practices that he put out as a result of like these problems, portray a man who believes that the issues in his plan are due to selfish people who are not following the plan, who are hoarding grain,

who are refusing to give up what they owe to the government and whatnot. That's the issue. Right, so in the long term, if he just like keeps a strong hand or a stronger one, they'll all work out. Yeah, because they're not really starving, they're hiding food because they don't want to give it to the government. They're eating in secret and stuff like that. Oh man.

Were they rounding up fat children and just being like, you are hiding grain and eating it? I don't think they were fat children. All right, yeah, yeah. So at this point, disaster probably could have been averted. The government had a lot of food and storage, and if the flaws in the system had been admitted, the bad practices halted and changed back to normal, things might have been okay for Chinese agriculture,

but that would have meant Mao and his comrades admitting to flaws and their ideologically consistent scientific theories. It also would have meant backpedaling on all of the propaganda they put out. So rather than admit any error, Mao doubled down. Anyone who does not make a great leap is a rightist conservative. Some people think that a leap is far too adventurous. It is new. It may not be perfect, but it is not an adventure.

Almost have revolutionary optimism and revolutionary heroism. So y'all are just too scared of the future. Yeah. And that's why this is having some growing pains. I'm a revolutionary. We all gotta be a little... We all gotta be revolutionaries. Those growing pains might feel a lot like hunger pains, but it's growing pains.

I mean, not for me or the other cadres, the members of the Communist Party in China, because we all are eating well. We have a disgusting amount of grain. If I see one more bowl of grain, I am done. Yeah. I throw out more than I eat. Yeah. My dog lives like a king.

So the autumn of 1959 harvest was 30 million tons lower than the 1958 harvest had been. Officials, however, reported that the harvest was the highest ever. This saved them from reporting failure to Mao, but it also meant that the government based its taxes that year on the expectation that the country had grown more food than ever. And so in 1959, a year of famine, the Chinese government levied the highest taxes in recent history. Peasants were required to turn over 40% of their total output. And since that total output was a fake number calculated via nonsense math, they were basically

ordered to hand over all of their food and, in many cases, more food than they actually had. So... Well, those numbers just aren't gonna work out, Robert, for anybody. No. They don't. Oh, no. And I bet they get all mad when they don't pay their taxes.

Yeah, they sure do. I didn't pay my taxes for five years. I didn't file, and it took five years for me to hear anything about it. I bet that's not what the case was then. No, no, no. Actually, I will say this. Everybody whines about the IRS. Like, I grew up in a pretty conservative part of the world, and they're always talking

about how horrible it is. As someone who's been late on his taxes a few times, they're actually pretty easy to deal with. Yeah, they try to find a solution. Like, they really want you to give them something and they'll work with you. Look at us just defending the IRS here, and they're reasonable of policies. I mean, I like roads. I like ambulances.

Totally. Okay, speaking of something else I like, products and services that support the show, and let's let those products and services advertise to us and irritate the ghost of Mao Zedong. 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 in the good and bad ass 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. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. 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 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? 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 in 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 iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back.

Boy, those were some good products. Oh my God. I mean, for the ones that meet my needs, I'm definitely going to think about exchanging goods or money for them. Oh yeah. Goods or money. They'll take both usually. Yeah.

Trade is big. Trade is bit barter. Oh my gosh. I'm all about barter. Oh my gosh. Way to the CDs clamshell necklaces that I make. Oh my God. Okay.

So we just talked about the autumn 1959 harvest, which was 30 million tons lower than it had been the year before. And the fact that they calculated the taxes based on sort of nonsense math of what they hoped it would be. And so they wound up essentially taxing most peasants more than they'd actually grown. I'm going to read another quote from Hungry Ghosts here. In many places, the entire harvest was seized. Sometimes officials reported a harvest so big that even after taking away everything they

could, including all livestock, vegetables, and cash crops, they still continued to search from house to house. Mal had ordered officials not only to deliver the grain quotas, but also to set quotas for pigs, chickens, ducks, and eggs. Party leaders went from village to village leading the search for hidden food reserves. It was a brutal and violent campaign in which many peasants were tortured and beaten to death. So, again, IRS isn't sounding so bad now.

I know. So this is a real dumb question, but money taxes pay for things the state needs. You give the government dollars and they use the dollars to pay a guy to make sure the road's not falling apart. Absolutely. That's my understanding. So, taking the food on principle that we're all afraid of saying what the truth is. Is it just so that the capital has a ton, or are they selling it?

Is there global trade going on where it's somehow benefiting? The idea is both that the state is supposed to take care of everyone's food needs. So you give all your food to the state and then it redistributes it. Is that what's supposed to perfectly work? And, of course, also they're not just exporting to the Soviet Union, they're exporting North Korea at this point, because it's this idea that the food that we produce will be used, some of it we will have to sell for resources so that we can buy things that we can't yet make ourselves and we can continue to expand and eventually create this wonderful socialist

block that can compete against the terrible West and whatnot. With our spread out seeds, with our sluttily spread out seeds, they're fucking horribly spread out seeds, they're filthy, goddamn corn, so much soil around them, goddamn fertilizer. So obviously willful denial of reality can only last for so long as we in the West learned, with a little war called all of the wars we fought in the last 70 years. Eventually it became clear that even the heavy handed methods used by the government weren't turning up as much food as they ought to have. Since Russian agricultural science was obviously flawless, Mao came to the conclusion that

the peasants were just burying their grain underground to hide it. He accused them of eating turnips and pretending to starve by day and eating rice secretly at night. In reality, most people were subsisting on gruel served in communal kitchens that was made mostly out of grass and inedible plants. Oh god. Yeah, well, what else are you going to do? I think those are now called grain bowls on LA.

Yeah. Well, now you would pay $14 to have one of those out of a truck. Nuts and seeds your body can't digest. That's the food of this city. At the end of the year, while tens of millions of people starved, the People's Daily Newspaper advised peasants to, quote, practice strict economy, live with the utmost frugality and only eat two meals a day, one of which should be soft and liquid, which again, sounds pretty much like California right now.

Yeah, come on. Have a soiling on the run, you know. You will be glad to know that while tens of millions of people were starving, Mao gave up meat. Oh. That's good. You know, follow the leader. Come on.

Exactly. Everybody give up meat. Oh, we took all the meat. Right. And we beat half of you to death because you didn't give us your chickens. Oh. Oh, life's funny sometimes. The Great Famine would last until 1961 and go down as the deadliest peacetime disaster

in Chinese history. During this entire time, Mao's government continued to export grain to North Korea, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere. As a result of their desire to hide the famine and put on a successful face, the provinces that grew the most food during the famine were the provinces where the most peasants starved. Oh, God. Yeah.

So the people who are actually making the most food are the people who are most likely to die. In the end, conservatively, 25 to 30 million people died from the famines that came from the Great Leap Forward. You will hear higher numbers as well. It is very politicized, death toll, both because people, conservatives in the West, have a vested interest in making it seem higher, so you sometimes hear 50 million, 60 million. And also people who are, you know, further to the left, or even Maoist today, have a

desire in downplaying the famine, 25 to 30, maybe 35 million seems like a very fair estimate based on what I've read, which is obviously a nightmare. It's a big range, but it's all bad. It's probably roughly half the death toll of World War II, starved to death during this famine, that didn't need to happen. Oh, my God. You know? So these deaths were the result of many different bad policy decisions, you know, the idea

to, like, make steel in backyard furnaces and stuff was not great. I've tried to smelt, and I just, I've been back for, you know, I've tried, you know, amateur, you know, you go online, you watch these videos, you know? Yeah, you get set it up in your backyard, you melt down your plow shares, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, hot, so that's liquid, and then you let it cool into the shape you want. Oh, man. I tried, but it never works.

Yeah, no, it's not great. So there were a lot of factors in the Great Leap Forward and why so many people starved, but Lushenkoism was maybe the number one contributing factor to this famine. The blame for many of these deaths then must land on the head of Trofim Lushenko. It is very likely, although impossible to prove to 100% certainty, that Lushenko was responsible for more death than any other scientist in human history. So, there's still time for the guys who made the atom bomb to take that, you know? Yeah, right.

Come on. But right now, it's probably Lushenko. Where is he right now again? Oh, he's back in the Soviet Union. That's about where we're about to get back to. Oh, good, good, good, good, good, good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Trofim's dominance in the Soviet agricultural science started to degrade in 1953 after the

death of Stalin. Some of this was due to the millions of people who'd starved, but a lot of it had to do with some very public post-World War II failures. Right after the war ended, Lushenko launched the Great Stalin Plan for the transformation of nature. He believed that he could change Russia's climate and make it warmer by growing millions upon millions of trees. That might work, if you could do it.

I don't know. Yeah. It seems like it might actually work. But because he was Lushenko, he ordered all of the seeds and saplings to be planted incredibly close to each other, and all of the plants died. You know, I feel like if you're trying to grow things, the essential thing is to grow them right. He has all these other big ideas, but can't actually nail just...

It's like people have been growing trees for forever. Yeah. Like, we know. We know. There's forests everywhere you look. Yeah. It seems that up. So, yeah, he tries to plant millions and millions of trees really, really close together, but

the plants all died, of course. Of course, they didn't die before the composer, Shashkovic, had written his choral symphony, The Song of the Trees, and Bertold Brecht had penned this poem about the forest that was supposed to happen, but never wound up actually growing, because anyway... Don't put your poem before the forest is what I always say, you know, let the forest grow and then write the poem. There's a lot of wisdom there. I know.

Don't put your poem... Well, I'm going to read the poem for this non-existent forest, anyway. So, let us, with ever newer arts, change this earth's form and operation. Gladly measure thousand-year-old wisdom by new wisdom, one-year-old. Dreams, golden if, let the lovely flood of grain rise higher. So... Oh, all the more tragic. Yeah.

Beauty wasted on science. Yeah. Not working. Really bad science. If only he just knew, and he just needed to, like, have cars with not catalytic converters instead of trees or whatever, he probably could have accomplished. Oh, yeah, that would have... The same thing.

I don't know. Warming Russia. Just have everyone pollute a lot, so it gets nicer. Yeah, exactly, yeah, yeah. Well, they're getting that anyway. So, you're welcome. The way the Chinese ate rice, we just needed to drive, pointlessly, in Russia. Come on, everyone.

It's your duty to just go in circles. Just one big road. Just go in circles on the one road. In 1962, the first generation of post-Purge Soviet scientists began to, carefully, try to dismantle the myth of Lushenko. Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's successor, protected Lushenko for a little while, but Khrushchev had lost his job in 1964. In that same year, physicist Andrey Sakharov denounced Lushenko to the Russian Academy

of Sciences. Quote, he is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo-scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation firing, arrest, and even death of many genuine scientists. So Sakharov has spent some fire against Lushenko. Yeah. Damn. Yeah, that's pretty damning.

In 1965, Lushenko was removed from his position as the director of the Institute of Genetics and forced onto a tiny experimental farm where he was allowed to continue his mostly live-based research alone. That same year, the president of the Academy of Sciences declared that Lushenkoism was no longer immune to criticism, because it had been legally immune to criticism since 1946. An expert commission was sent to look into Lushenko's experimental farm and study his methods.

They found that he was an obvious and tremendous fraud. These results were published, permanently demolishing Lushenko's career and reputation. Oh, I mean, I have truly no sympathy for this man and who he killed, but the image of, you know, this deeply fallen from grace scientist on a small little experimental farm trying to make, imagine, a grain or something, trying to do whatever, maybe this heat should be even close. What if I do? Even more seeds.

Yeah, maybe the problems were not digging deep enough. You guys give me too few seeds and now everything's growing. Okay, so Trofim attempted to defend himself from this attack. He wound up in a six-hour debate with the experts commission where he basically argued that what he fed his animals and how he altered his compost for different experiments, his utter lack of control groups, all of that was meaningless. The details of his experiments shouldn't matter. What should matter was his results, which he reported, and they should basically just

trust what he reported as the truth. Yeah. Yeah. He's a scientist. Exactly. He's a scientist. Just go to the last page. Yeah.

Tell me if we show my work. The point is whether I have a calculator or not a calculator, the answer is right. Yeah. I'm going to quote from a book called The Lushenko Affair here. He had never troubled himself to be precise and he insisted that precise data were not essential. Shrilly he called attention to biological theory, to the progressive biological theory that had been developed, quote, in unity with the practice of collective and state farms,

and that had always enjoyed the support of the party and state. Shrilly he whined that his theories were correct with communism and the party had always supported him. So why were they suddenly being so mean and asking for proof? Which if you're Lushenko, this has got to be confusing. Yeah. You're like, you guys like me so much. It was crazy.

Some of the times I'm like, well, they're not going to like this one and then you like it even more. They're not going to put in even more seeds closer together. What? All right. Okay. Well, they know. Yeah.

Here's another quote from Lushenko Affair. The specialist stuck to their narrow task with devastating effect, for Lushenko and his colleagues were simply incapable of sustained reasoning with facts and figures. Their favorite device, as the chairman of the Investigating Commission put it, was to quote, to say a single thing and hush up all the rest as long as everything looks good. This was a perfectly obvious and deadly accurate characterization and would have been with respect to any of Lushenko's recipes at any time beginning in 1929 when he first became prominent with his scheme for vernalizing grain.

But that perfectly appropriate response to Lushenkoism was 35 years overdue, which we know what happened now in those 35 years. Yeah. Like 40 million people died. So many. Like a million people a year, maybe. Yeah. It's hard to, you know.

A lot of that was Stalin wanting to kill the Ukrainians and the Kulaks and stuff, like there was other shit wrapped into that, but. It's an impressive sustained production, you know, like I feel like a lot of the big death tolls ascribed to one person are like in a bit of a tighter window, and this is just like to just keep pumping out deaths. Yeah. Because you look at like the Nazis and they were murder sprinters, you know, most of the killing they did was like 42 to 45.

And then they were sort of out of gas with Shanko's killing people for a really long time. Right. You know, you kill a man's fish. He starves for a day. You teach a man to kill his fish accidentally, then you've got multiple generations of people with no fish. Think of the long game.

So finally, at least the Soviet Union's agricultural scientists were able to do actual science again. Quote, the confusion of political and technical authority was now declared to be a mistake. Specialists were to resume their laborious efforts to distinguish really worthwhile methods from those that only seemed so. Period. The 35 year era was not to be examined or analyzed. So they've understood Lushankoism was wrong.

They denounced Lushanko, but they weren't willing to like look back and really analyze how many people had died or how fucked up things had gotten because of their belief. Right. Because that was still, you know, post Stalin's Soviet Union was a bit more open, but they still weren't willing to like dig into just how fucked up things had gone. For sure. And other people were, you know, shared some responsibility. Yeah.

You know, a lot of people shared responsibility. It has been suggested by some historians that Trofim Lushanko, maybe the single individual most responsible for the fall of the USSR, the true extent of the damage he did to mankind is incalculable. Lushanko died in Moscow in 1976. The government waited two days to even announce his death. So in the end, he died obscuring discredited, but the politicians and officials who enforced his shitty science and praised him while he was Stalin's favorite were not punished.

Nor were the people who'd helped export his bad ideas to China after 1953. When the Soviets knew damn well, Lushankoism did not work. But now, as yet another mark against our benighted modern age of conmen and bastards, Trofim Lushanko is enjoying a renaissance. No. Oh, I barely got to relish. That was like four minutes of him living in obscurity. Yeah.

No. And now he's back to, I mean, it's the Trofinish, Trofinaissance. Oh, Lushankinaissance. Yeah, yeah, right. They can't all be the McConaissance. No, no, no. Not all the words. You phonically worked the right way.

No. It looks better on paper. Like Trofinaissance on, I can't even pronounce it right. No. It looks like it should pronounce. Yes. You're not bailing it. It's not coming out right.

Yeah. Anyway, record yourself trying to Portmanteau, Trofim, and renaissance and send it to us on Twitter. So according to an article in Current Biology, over in Russia, the work of Lushanko has been picked up by, quote, a quirky coalition of Russian right-wingers, Stalinists, a few qualified scientists, and even the Orthodox Church. So it's coming back a little bit. Now one of the reasons for this is epigenetics, which is sort of a new finding in genetic science.

We've basically learned pretty recently that certain things that happen in the environment like living through a bad winter or a war starving for a period of time can be passed down from parents to children, meaning that to a tiny extent, some of the ideas of Lamarckian genetics are not 100% wrong. This has been seen by some as evidence that Lushanko was right all along, even though epigenetics has to do with changes in genes and Lushanko didn't believe genes existed. The other factor is that these changes always revert after a couple of generations or something. They're not permanent.

But like if you live through a famine and you have a kid like right around that time, you can pass on certain things as a result of the fact that you were in that extreme state. Wow. I mean, in this, I feel like the simple grade school version of genetics and evolution I learned did not take that into account. And I probably got answers marked wrong that perhaps. I feel like that's somewhat recent in the last 20 years.

Yeah, epigenetics is definitely pretty recent that we've really gotten an understanding of it. I don't claim to be an expert on genetics. People are still figuring this out, but like Lushanko didn't believe in genes. So it's wrong to say people who are attacking the shango weren't saying nothing has passed down like as a result of environmental changes. They were saying you can't reliably control for that when you're trying to figure out how to grow better grain.

And in fact, Lushanko had declared the entire science of genetics to be quote an expression of the senile decay and degradation of bourgeois culture. So crediting him for epigenetics is a little bit irrational. Are the people though that are like giving rise to it again, doing it out of the ideological principle of it? That is a little bit of it, I think. Some of it is because, and I'm not an expert on modern Russia, but like there's this, because obviously Russia right now is not the Soviet Union, it's not anything close to a communist

state. But there is a lot of longing for that period of time for a variety of reasons, some of which there are things that were better back then and some of which is just obviously the same way that people long for the 1950s and don't think about the fact that water fountains were segregated and stuff. So it's a complicated thing, I think, why certain groups are starting to come back to these ideas. But it is definitely scary because that means that there's the possibility that Trofim Lushanko's

very, very, very, very, very dumb science has the chance to kill somebody again. Guys, if you're listening at home, spread your seeds. Don't plant them too deep. You should be able to see them, but not too close together. I've known a lot of really good farmers in my life, none of them planted millions of seeds per acre. Oh man. It's not, yeah, but.

It's like one of those gross things you buy at a state fair that's got like a little bit of like molasses and it's just kind of like sesame seeds, it's almost like a candied apple. There's like a weird, I feel like southern dessert that's just like seeds and goo in a ball. And you know what, it's gross and I wouldn't plant it on my ground and expect to feed my family. I haven't had a seed goo ball. I mean, maybe it's just a weird thing that I was given that I was.

Somebody just put some seeds and goo together and like, let's get this Yankee some seed goo. I didn't buy it at the state fair. It was just handed to me by a man at the front desk of a motel I was staying at. I shouldn't have eaten that seed goo ball. I'm still digesting it. You just got poisoned by someone. What state were you in? I just remember like as a kid that it was like, yeah, I mean, this is not a thing that

I'm now. I would be responsible to turn down a seed goo ball now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like, this is a dessert. This feels like. I can say as a child in Texas, we played many a good game of poison the Yankee. That was everybody's favorite game growing up. Oh, in a hot day, no better way to pass the time than to kill a traveling northerner.

We just love making carpet baggers sick. Turning up glass, putting in their grits, feeding them slowly until their insides bleed out. The South. Those are better times. Oh boy. All right. Well, that's that's our episode on Trophim Lushenko.

How are you doing, Max? I mean, I know that's not your style, nor is it the style of human history, but I wish the ending had been a little more uplifting rather than quietly covered up and now resurgence. It would be nice if people ever learned lessons from history, but if there's one thing we've learned from history, it's that we don't. Thanks for having me on and depressed. Yeah, thanks for coming on and being depressed by this. You want to plug some plugables?

Sure. I have a 15 minute standup special on Netflix. Go to the comedy lineup part two and yeah, I don't know how to farm. Oh, also seedgooballs.com use promo code shaft. I now sell these balls. They're not good, but they are heavy. So yeah, if you need a heavy snack, if you need a heavy ball, shaft is your man. And I'm Robert Evans.

You can find me on the internet at I write okay on Twitter. You can find this podcast website at behind the bastards.com. You can also find us on Twitter and Instagram at at bastards pot. So check us out, follow us, tweet us your best attempts to portmanteau Trophim and Renaissance. I really feel like there's a way I'm just not getting it. Trophamasons? I don't know. Trophimish?

No, I'm not going to try it anymore. The shank of ocean? I don't know. That's closer. All right. All right. All right. Have a good day.

We'll be back next Tuesday talking about someone else terrible. And until then, I love about 40% of you. 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut, that he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space. Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass, and I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart 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, 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.