Stalin's Half-Ape Army of Doom (yes, you read that right)

I saw this in my pupe friend's blog.. She got it from this website-http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,17630955-13762,00.html

Thought that its interesting.

A SECRET plan to create hordes of half-man half-ape super-warriors to conquer the rest of world has been uncovered in Moscow.

If successful, the plan would have seen humans and chimpanzees cross-breeding to create a new race of "living war machines", which ignored pain and fear and which thrived on hardship.

According to The Scotsman, the program was instigated by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin in the early 1920s. Stalin saw the scheme as an integral part of his plans to consolidate power and rapidly boost the Soviet Union's flagging power and prestige on the world stage.

The stakes were high - Stalin's battered Red Army had been gutted by years of civil war and internal purges. There was also intense pressure to find a new labour force, particularly one that would not complain, with the Soviet Union about to embark on its first Five-Year Plan for fast-track industrialisation.

Stalin threw scientists and other genetic experts into the program, providing lavish resources and funding in a bid to achieve early results.

"I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat," Stalin said, quoted by Moscow newspapers.

His cronies were not slow in supporting him. In 1926 the Politburo in Moscow passed the request to the Academy of Science with the order to build a "living war machine".

The Soviets drafted their top animal-breeding expert into the program. Ilya Ivanov, who previously had set up the world's first centre for the artificial insemination of racehorses, set off for West Africa to conduct his first experiments in inseminating chimpanzees.

Meeting little success, Ivanov turned his efforts around, setting up a facility in Stalin's home republic of Georgia to fertilise human volunteers with monkey and ape sperm. Not surprisingly, the efforts were a total failure.

All up, his efforts cost the impoverished Soviet Union many hundreds of thousands of dollars.
For his expensive failure, he was sentenced to five years' jail, later commuted to five years' exile in the Central Asian republic of Kazakhstan. Because you don't FAIL Stalin, at all, no matter what, even if he wants you to make ape-men and it's fricken impossible TO do.

A year later he died, reportedly after falling sick while standing on a freezing railway platform.