Since the mid-2000s reports have surfaced of a secret Soviet program initiated by Joseph Stalin to create an army of ape-man super-soldiers. Unfortunately, sometimes fact is not as strange as fiction. None the less, fact is still strange, not to mention disturbing and unethical.
The claims of Stalin's super ape-man army originally surfaced in 2002 in the academic journal Science in Context. Though a Russian scientist funded by a Soviet research grant did in fact attempt to crossbreed humans with apes there is no evidence that Stalin approved or even knew about the program.
The research project was initiated by Russian scientist Il'ya Ivanov who began his experiments to artificially inseminate apes with human sperm as far back as 1910. After numerous failed attempts to inseminate apes, Ivanov attempted to inseminate African women without their consent. Ivanov did eventually find one Russian woman who voluntarily agreed to artificial insemination with ape sperm, but the Soviet Academy of Science condemned Ivanov and eliminated all financial support before any experimentation began.
The various social and ethical consideration of the ape-man hypridization program, and the politicization of the program by the religious right, is fascinatingly detailed in Eric Michael Johnson's November, 2011 Scientific America article Scientific Ethics and Stalin's Ape-Man Superwarriors. The full article can be found at the link below:
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/primate-diaries/2011/11/10/stalins-ape-man-superwarriors/
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