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Stalin, King Kong

Monkeying with monkeys, Stalin style

By Judi McLeod
Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Hollywood Director Peter Jackson is not the only person who tried to revive King Kong.

after finishing off the third and final installment of Lord of the Rings, Jackson hoped to drag Hollywood out of its box office slump by remaking King Kong, the movie.

Soviet dictator Josef Stalin wanted a whole army of King Kongs, who, insensitive to pain and hardship, could win him the world.

according to recently unearthed secret documents, Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes.

“Moscow archives show that in the mid-1920s Russia's top animal breeding scientist, Ilya Ivanov, was ordered to turn his skills from horse and animal work to the quest for a super-warrior.” (Scotsman.com).

In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the academy of Science with the order to build “a living war machine”. The order came at a time when the Soviet Union was embarked on a crusade to turn the world upside down, with social engineering seen as a partner to industrialization: new cities, architecture, and a new egalitarian society were being created.

The Soviet Union was struggling to rebuild the Red army after bruising wars.

and there was intense pressure to find a new labour force, particularly one that would not complain, with Russia about to embark on its first Five-Year Plan for fast-track industrialization,

a star of the Tsars, when in 1901 he established the world's first centre for the artificial insemination of racehorses, Ivanov was held in high esteem.

With high hopes packed in his luggage, Soviet planners dispatched Ivanov in 1926 to West africa with the then king's ransom of $200,000 to conduct his first experiment in impregnating chimpanzees.

While Ivanov busied himself with the chimps, a centre for the experiments was set up in Georgia-Stalin's birthplace-for the apes to be raised in comfort.

Though no one followed him into the jungle, Ivanov's experiences failed and when he returned to the Soviet Union, monkey sperm in human volunteers was going nowhere, too.

The tale of the army of apes took a titillating turn when a Cuban heiress was persuaded to lend some of her monkeys for further experiments. But when the New York Times reported on the story, the publicity-shy heiress reneged.

Star of the Tsars Ivanov was now in disgrace and disfavour. Not only were his experiments failing, the big plan to collectivize farms was punctuated with 1932's tragic famine in which at least four million died.

Ivanov was sentenced to a five-year prison term, which was later commuted to five year's exile in the Central asian republic of Kazakhstan in 1931. Death saved him from desolate exile just one year later. He had reportedly died after falling ill while standing on a freezing railway platform.

Stalin's failures in business ventures also came to bad luck. Indeed, the dictator's foray into wine making followed him all the way to the 21st century, when Sotheby's could not successfully auction off vintage wines labeled by tsars and added to by Stalin.

The vintage wines came from the imperial winery at Massandra, near Yalta, on the southern coast of Crimea.

When his troops stormed Massandra in 1920, Stalin decided to continue with production. Under the threat of Nazi invasion in 1941, the entire collection was removed from Yalta to three secret locations.

Meanwhile, monkeying with monkeys ended in disaster for Stalin whose dream of Planet of the apes-like troops was to later become upstaged by Tinsel town.


Canada Free Press founding editor Most recent by Judi McLeod is an award-winning journalist with 30 years experience in the print media. Her work has appeared on Newsmax.com, Drudge Report, Foxnews.com, Glenn Beck. Judi can be reached at: judi@canadafreepress.com


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