Interestingly, many modern articles about Ivanov portray his work as a religiously motivated crusade. He should have been so lucky as to have the government come to him with an offer, much less an order.
Ivanov's entire career could be fairly characterized as a constant fundraising effort, desperately seeking resources for his hybridization dream and other projects, and failing nine times out of ten. The new Soviet government was committed to technical innovation and science, but it took seven long years for Ivanov to rebuild his network of support. However, before he could make any progress, Ivanov's work came to an abrupt halt in 1917 with the Russian Revolution, which effectively dissolved most existing government programs and eliminated all of his funding. His artificial insemination experiments successfully crossed many closely related species: donkeys and zebras, mice and rats and other rodents, birds, and various species of cattle.Īs early as 1910, Ivanov lectured on the possibility of crossing humans and apes, citing artificial insemination as the method of choice due to prevailing ethical objections to, well, interspecies partying, for lack of a better term. Primarily funded by the Veterinary Department of the Russian Interior Ministry, Ivanov carried this technology to its next logical step, the creation of specialized hybrid animals for agricultural and industrial purposes, as well as for the sake of advancing the science. For a preindustrialized nation, this was a tremendous economic accomplishment. Around 1900 he gained great fame and national acclaim with his work on artificially inseminating horses, increasing the number of horses that could be bred by a factor of about twenty. It's no secret that a renowned Russian biologist, Il'ya Ivanovich Ivanov, spent much of his career working on just this. But how much of this is true, and how much of it is the invention of modern writers and filmmakers looking for the sensational story? Stalin's goal, according to modern mythology, was no less than a slave race of scientifically bred beings that were half human and half ape a race he hoped would combine tremendous physical strength, dumb loyalty, and a human's ability to follow direction and perform complex tasks. A force to carry the Soviet Union through its Five-Year Plan for economic development, and to make the nation invincible in war.
Workers who could do the labor of ten men without complaint, with no thought of personal time off, and no desire for pay. It was the Soviet dictator's dream: Soldiers with no fear, with superhuman strength and endurance, who would follow any order, eat anything, and ignore pain or injury.
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