Eric Michael Johnson, formerly of Primate Diaries, writes:
"Scientific Ethics and the Myth of Stalin's Ape-Man Superwarriors".
The title refers to the myth that Stalin was involved in the research by Ilya Ivanov to artificially inseminate chimpanzees with human sperm ("King Kong humanzee trivia"). The story has been repeated by many sources, and while Ivanov's research was real, the link to Stalin is not. Johnson has a nice description of the background to Ivanov's research, with references.
We were watching MonsterQuest on the History Channel the other night, and they were showing the one about "Stalin's Ape Men". I rather like MonsterQuest because they usually end up acknowledging in the last five minutes that there's no evidence for what they were looking for. Not always, mind you, and of course it's manipulative because they've edited it that way. In this case, they concluded the episode with the historian explaining that there was no evidence at all that Stalin had any interest in ape-human hybrids.
But what really stuck with me was the animation of clone-looking gorilla-men marching through Red Square. That would have been the most ludicrous army of all time!
