Stalin’s space monkeys
It looks like a neglected zoo. But the Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy has its own macabre chapter in the history of the Soviet Union. Shaun Walker reports from Sukhumi, Abkhazia.
Tuesday, 15 April 200, the Independent
‘The first thing that registers is the putrid smell of animal faeces, then from inside one building comes a primeval squawking that sounds like a child being tortured. Cage after cage of distraught-looking monkeys come into view, nearly 300 in all, gnawing at mandarins and scampering around their enclosures.
This is what remains of the Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy, the first primate testing centre in the world, and possibly the site of a macabre Stalinist experiment to breed a human-ape hybrid. Set amid palm trees and lush greenery on a hill just outside the centre of Sukhumi, it was once the envy of the West. Its behavioural and medical experiments set it at the forefront of groundbreaking medical discoveries, and trained monkeys for space travel.
Legend has it that the institute, which opened in 1927, was born of a secret Soviet plan to create a man-ape hybrid that would become a Soviet superman and propel the Soviet Union ahead of the West. The Soviet elite, goes the apocryphal tale that has appeared widely in Russian media, wanted to create a prototype worker that would be inhumanly strong and mentally dulled, to carry out the gruelling work of industrialising the vast expanses of newly Sovietised territory.
Scientists at the institute today admit that these experiments did go on at the institute, though they deny it was part of any overarching plan for the creation of a new race. The tests were performed by Ilya Ivanov, an eminent Russian biologist who had also collaborated with the Pasteur Institute in Paris. About the turn of the century he had perfected the technique of artificially inseminating mares, and had also produced cross-breeds between various different species. Then, Europe was alive with ideas of eugenics, and the Soviets were out to prove once and for all that Darwinism had superseded religion.
“Professor Ivanov started these experiments in Africa and continued them here in Sukhumi,” says Vladimir Barkaya, who started at the institute in 1961 and is now scientific director. “He took sperm from human males and injected it into female chimpanzees, although nothing came of it.” Professor Barkaya denies monkey sperm was used on human females, although letters were apparently received by the institution by people of both sexes offering to participate in the experiments.’
Full story at the Independent