How far does a cat's psychic ability stretch? Can you really make a dog with two heads,
or a human-chimpanzee hybrid? During the Soviet Union's 70-year run,
their scientists got up to some seriously disturbing stuff. Keep watching to find out more!
Many of the most disturbing Soviet experiments involved animals, particularly dogs. Decapitated
dog heads — attached to machines full of valves, tubes, meters, and electric
wires — sounds far less like government-funded science, and more like the detailed daydream
of a serial killer-in-training. What could possibly be the purpose of such an experiment?
At the very least, it supposedly provided insights into open-heart surgery.
At most, it was a way to investigate how to bring the clinically dead back to life.
"Brukhonenko shares the credit for the methods of blood transfusion,
which were first developed in the Soviet Union."
In the 1940 documentary, Experiments In The Revival Of Organisms, researchers Sergei
Brukhonenko and Boris Levinskovsky showed off their reanimation process. They removed dogs'
hearts and lungs and connected them to an external machine dubbed an autojektor, to keep them alive
and working. After 10 minutes, they rewired the machine back into the dogs' severed heads.
This reportedly gave the dogs several sustained minutes of consciousness, during which they
responded to sound by wiggling their ears, blinked their eyes and even licked their mouths.
Soviet surgeon and professor Vladimir Demikhov severed the heads and legs of puppies and grafted
them into the still-living bodies of other, larger dogs. He then tied the dogs' circulatory systems
together so that the larger dog's vessels fed the smaller dog, like some horrific parasitic twin.
Demikhov worked in East Germany during the Cold War, and using this procedure,
he created roughly 20 double-dog creations. Most of these poor, agonized animals died within days
due to tissue rejection, as the host dog's body treated the smaller dog like an incompatible
transplant. Immunosuppressants weren't widely used yet, so there was no way for Demikhov to
stop the host dog's immune system from combating the smaller dog's tissue.
Most dogs died within days, but one duo apparently lived for a month. While alive, both dogs could
move independently — as much as they could. The smaller dog still ate and lapped up water, but
because it had no stomach, the food and water just sloshed out of a tube directly onto the floor.
We turn to the final Soviet experiment involving dogs on our list, but certainly not the final
experiment which involved tormenting animals. This time, there's no supposedly pro-social aim like
heart surgery or organ transplants. The goal, brought to life during the 1970s and '80s, was
to create a group of nerve agents dubbed Novichok, which is Russian for "newcomer." As the BBC notes,
the existence of Novichok wasn't even confirmed until the 1990s when Dr. Vil Mirzayanov defected
to the U.S. and brought Novichok's chemical formula with him. Novichok, it turns out, were
fourth-generation nerve agents developed within a specific program under the codename Foliant.
Novichok was tested on dogs stuffed into cages by the hundreds,
and forced to walk on tiny treadmills with gas masks strapped to their faces.
The dogs were exposed to Novichok to test the nerve agent's effects — which in humans causes
convulsions, coma, nausea and vomiting, profuse sweating, shortness of breath,
and eventually death. It's unknown how long these tests were conducted,
they took place at the Chemical Research Institute. By 1992, the institute was abandoned.
In 2018, Novichok was deployed in a terrorist attack in the UK that left 21 hospitalized.
The target was former Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.
Then-Prime Minister Teresa May accused Russia of the attack, but unsurprisingly,
Russian President Vladimir Putin denied it.
Lest you think things couldn't get more messed up, it's time to chuck
a resident from The Island of Dr. Moreau onto our list of Soviet-era abominations.
The humanzee ticks a whole bunch of fundamentally reprehensible boxes:
animal torture, human rights desecration, interspecies impregnation — you name it.
We're sorry to say this is exactly what it sounds like. In the 1920s, Soviet biologist
Dr. Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov inseminated a female chimpanzee with human sperm in order to make
a humanzee hybrid. His goal? To create a Soviet super-soldier using female chimps and human sperm.
Why he thought he'd create the Red Guardian instead of a hairy,
untrainable soldier is unknown. Come 1929, Ivanov wanted to do the opposite: impregnate
human females with chimp sperm. This follow-up fell through despite his attempts to organize it,
and no humanzees were ever successfully born from the previous experiments.
By all accounts, Ivanov wasn't alone in his ambitions. According to News Corp Australia,
University of Albany professor Gordon Gallup claimed to have caught wind of humanzee
experiments conducted at Orange Park, Florida, in the 1920s. There's no evidence to back up
his claims, but Gallup stated that researchers actually succeeded, but then reconsidered the
moral and ethical ramifications and euthanised the infant. Gallup himself has also entertained
ideas of hurillas and hurangs, human-gorilla and human-orangutan hybrids, respectively.
If history has dubbed you Doctor Death, you've might've taken a wrong turn somewhere in life.
Such was the case with Grigory Mairanovsky, a Soviet biochemist who came to oversee the infamous
Laboratory No. 1 in 1939. Laboratory No. 1 was the U.S.S.R.'s first official poison laboratory,
opened in 1921 under the codename Special Office. While the facility would change its
moniker multiple times over the years, to names such as Lab X and the Chamber, its purpose was
simple. They were to create a tasteless, odorless poison which couldn't be detected in an autopsy.
For this, Doctor Death needed subjects. He turned to the Soviet gulags housing political prisoners
to provide him and his cartoonishly sinister agenda with all the subjects that he needed.
He administered variations of mustard gas, ricin, digitoxin, curare, and cyanide,
and observed them as they suffered and died. Eventually, Doctor Death created
something called carbylamine choline chloride, also known as C-2. This poison had an added
benefit — it bestowed calmness on its victims before they perished some 15 minutes later.
The Soviet government claimed in 1955 that the lab was formally abolished. However,
a KGB defector revealed numerous details about Laboratory No. 1 the following year.
While admitting that KGB agents were not permitted to enter the lab,
or even told of its whereabouts, the defector confirmed that poisons were tested on prisoners.
Eventually Mairanovsky himself was hunted by Stalin as part of a political purge.
According to the book, Biological Espionage: Special Operations of the Soviet and Russian
Foreign Intelligence Services in the West, former KGB officer Alexander Kouzminov claims
that Laboratory No. 1 was among several laboratories reactivated in the late 1990s,
"...[for the] creation of biological and toxin weapons for clandestine operations in the West."
It's currently unknown how many people have been killed in these experiments.
We've mostly described these messed-up experiments as things conducted by depraved and sociopathic
scientists cackling over corpses and spliced-up animals in laboratories.
However, Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko — who advised farmers on how to grow their
crops — may have caused more human deaths than any individual scientist in history.
Guns, cannons, plagues, poisoned gulag detainees, swathes of dead dogs, even atomic weaponry itself:
nothing took as many lives, indirectly, as Lysenko's food-based experiments.
"There was such hunger in our village, that finally, cannibalism developed there."
Illiterate until the age of 13, Lysenko made his way into agriculture school
following the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. He embellished some experimental results,
got praise from a state-run newspaper in 1927, and was put in charge of all of Soviet
agriculture by the 1930s. The Soviet people and government praised him for his undereducated,
salt-of-the-earth authenticity, and dubbed him the barefoot scientist. For his part, Lysenko
didn't believe that genes existed, and called such scientific knowledge reactionary and evil.
He denied farmers the use of fertilizers and pesticides, and outlined a new way to
plant seeds based on what he called the Law of the Life of Species. In other words, plants of
various categories shouldn't — much like communist farmers themselves — compete with each other.
His methodology was later adopted by Communist China in the late 1950s,
which led to even larger famines than what had occurred within Russia. In the end,
30 million people died of starvation because of Lysenko's real-life experimental tinkering.
You wouldn't think that state-sanctioned vampirism would be one of the less ghoulish items on this
list. But strangely enough, it is — if only because its effects were limited to one person:
project lead, Alexander Bogdanov. Unlike Doctor Death, Bogdanov wasn't a secret,
sinister scientist. He was a fairly well-known researcher and,
of all things, a science fiction writer during the early days of the Soviet Union.
He was around for the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and in his fiction, wrote of utopias managed
by automated machines that gave citizens greater liberties of labor and free time.
Unfortunately, Bogdanov also believed that the blood of the young would prevent him from aging.
We're not talking Elizabeth Báthory's levels of sadism — in case you need a refresher, she was
a Hungarian noblewoman in the 1500s who tortured and slaughtered hundreds of female children, aged
10 to 14. Though unlike Báthory — since he only took willing participants — Bogdanov transfused
the blood of 11 individuals directly into himself in a bid for immortality. As a result,
he actually wound up completing some of history's first successful blood transfusions. In the 1930s,
Soviet surgeon Sergei Yudin would carry the baton onward, towards viable medical purposes.
Incompatible blood types being what they are, Bogdanov died from his experiments. Besides this,
his test subjects all suffered from varying diseases, even tuberculosis.
This next entry appears mild, but is horrifying in its implications.
Given all the aforementioned macabre and sadistic Soviet experiments conducted on
animals and people, if the following research had ever gotten to a true experimental phase,
it could have produced monstrosities straight out of a body horror film.
In 1924, Soviet biochemist Alexander Oparin pitched what we've come to know
as the primordial soup theory. Oparin believed that there was no fundamental
difference between living organisms and lifeless matter. Working backward
from Darwin's theory of natural selection, Oparin outlined how the right combination
of organic chemicals produced the first membraned cells in Earth's ancient oceans.
He sought to overturn one of biological life's most fundamental principles: life comes from life.
Oparin created artificial cells that could house enzymes, and more or less wanted to
create a starter kit for life using non-living materials. He became a biochemistry teacher
at Moscow State University in 1927, and was a well-respected researcher, won numerous awards,
and organized the world's first international Meeting of the Origin of Life in Moscow in 1957.
While he would die without taking his research to its next organism-creating step, researcher Olga
Lepeshinskaya took the baton. She claimed that dead cells produced matter that could be harvested
into a vital substance used for the creation of new life. She was later proven to be a fraud.
Getting back to the grotesque and absurd, we're combining two of the
Soviet Union's favorite pastimes: animal torture and espionage. And
this time, the espionage takes on a particular X-Files kind of flavor.
"What is it?"
"I think it's a cat."
As described in the original 1977 article in The New York Times by journalist Flora Lewis,
Soviet expatriate August Stern worked in a secret Siberian lab investigating something called
psi [SIGH] particles — physical, measurable particles responsible for parapsychological
abilities. Now, we're not saying psi particles sound suspiciously like the midi-chlorians
from the Star Wars prequels, but still, maybe George Lucas read this article back in the day.
The Soviets investigated four discrete abilities:
Extrasensory perception — or ESP — telepathy, telekinesis, and clairvoyance.
Stern and his team of 60 researchers were recruited from around Russia and given nearly
unlimited resources to plumb the truth of the paranormal. Around the same time, the CIA would do
the same thing, with their experiments eventually being cataloged in the non-fiction book,
The Men Who Stare at Goats, by Jon Ronson — which was adapted into a fictionalized film in 2009.
By itself, this may sound more wacky than sinister. However, in order to test their
theories, Soviet researchers took to cruel absurdities. They shocked newborn kittens to
see if their mothers — who were three floors above — reacted. They implanted electrodes in a mother
rabbit's brain, took her babies to a submarine and killed them one by one to see if she psychically
felt it. They tested photonic waves using frog eyes, placed monkeys inside powerful magnetic
fields, and more. And if you're ready to get off this crazy train, we've got one last stop.
Our last entry isn't a single, standalone event,
but rather a pervasive, nationwide experiment in child education. Loraine de la Fe,
Professor of History at Florida International University, has stated,
"The official discourses of Bolshevism, such as work, collectivity, and modernity
also included praises of youth. [...] The aim was to convince children of
their ‘Happy Childhood’ in the Soviet Union by producing various forms of literature,
fiction, nonfiction, children’s journals and school curricula and activities."
The U.S.S.R. deployed their burgeoning child science to turn entire generations
into experimental fodder. During the 1920s and '30s, homogenization was a key goal.
Faults of character determined within children — such as deceit,
laziness and fidgeting — were placed side-by-side with physical conditions,
psychological disorders, and mental disabilities. By 1936, an entire sub-discipline of defectology
cropped up within the U.S.S.R., where those children who were considered imperfect were
separated and shipped off to sanatoriums. Orphans were also included in this list.
The fallout from such practices has been severe, most notably in Romania. Romania
was occupied by the U.S.S.R. from 1945 to 1989, and modeled itself on the Soviets, right down
to its Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu. In the aftermath of the Romanian Revolution,
the world was finally made aware of the 170,000 abandoned infants, children, and teens that
were being raised inside Ceausescu's network of child gulags — victims of Soviet defectology.
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