Doctor Frankenstein existed, he was in Stalin’s service

The first myths and legends already speak of half-human, half-animal creatures. The Minotaur – a human body and a bull’s head – is one of the best known. What if these hybridizations between man and animal were not just a myth? What if we could create a new being, half-man, half-monkey?

This is what was supposed to happen at 8 a.m. on February 28, 1927, when Russian biologist Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov inseminated two female chimpanzees with human sperm. Professor at the Moscow Zoological Institute, Ivanov was then an authority in the field of artificial insemination. His revolutionary techniques work so well that he can impregnate up to 500 mares with the sperm of a single stallion. He further encountered mice and rats, mice and guinea pigs, and an antelope and a cow.

The creation of a hybrid creature from a human being and a monkey is for him only the logical continuation of his experiments on animals. He first raised this possibility at the World Zoological Congress in Graz in 1910 – and it resonated. This idea has in fact been circulating in the scientific community for a long time. She promises to learn more about the origin of man.

The anti-religious sentiment that has reigned since the 1917 revolution worked in Ivanov’s favor. The Bolshevik regime wants to suppress the clergy and the researcher is therefore in tune with the times when he asks the Academy of Sciences to support him. “If he had managed to cross a monkey and a human being and obtained viable offspring, it would have meant that Darwin was right in thinking that we are very close, explains Russian historian Ale