Russia’s bid to create an army of ‘Humanzee’ human-ape hybrid ‘super soldiers’: Scientist tried to recruit African women to be impregnated by chimpanzees as part of crazed bid to raise deadly chimeras

It was an age of exploration. In the early 20th century, the great minds of the world transformed the lives of billions with advances in emerging new fields. 

Science fiction dreamed up brave new worlds and the utopian forms they could take, and ambitious powers with newfound wealth offered the means to realise them.

At the Pasteur Institute in Paris, one rising scientist saw the opportunity to push the frontiers of modern science by taking mankind itself to the next evolutionary level. Ilya Ivanov, having made a name for himself breeding horses, sought to usher in a new age by breeding human beings with other primates.

As his native Russia embraced revolution and promised a modern, atheistic vision for the future, Ivanov found financial backing for his twisted theories and was sent around the world to conduct horrifying experiments on local populations, offering the fledgling USSR the chance to dictate the path of human evolution.

At the height of unbridled scientific fervour, Ivanov’s untamed ambition to create a new hybrid race saw some of the most flagrant breaches of modern ethics, funded and enabled by blinkered ideological ambition.

Ilya Ivanov took his idea of a hybrid ‘humanzee’ to Russia, where he won financial backing

A still from 2024 film Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes, a – fictional – story of intelligent apes becoming the dominant species on earth

A 1984 computer-generated rendering by Nancy Burson: Evolution II. Ivanov sought to create a hybrid of man and ape, believing the offspring would be smarter and stronger than either

In August 1910, Ilya Ivanov travelled to Austria to give a presentation to the World Congress of Zoologists in Graz about his radical vision for a vibrant new world.

Ilyanov had until then enjoyed a modestly successful career, leading experiments into artificial selection and breeding stronger horses for Russia’s agricultural needs.

Through his research, he had succeeded in breeding a number of hybrids or ‘chimeras’, including a zeedonk (zebra/donkey chimera) and a zubron (bison/cow).

But having recently turned 40, he arrived in Graz eager to move his ideas forward.

With Europe enjoying unprecedented wealth and scientific curiosity, Ilyanov pitched an interested audience his idea of creating a new hybrid race of human beings – to outdo their parents on brain and brawn.

Only forty years had now passed since Charles Darwin famously discovered that humans share a common ancestor with other primates. The theory of evolution threatened to shake up long-held religious beliefs about the special nature of mankind apart from the animals.

Ivanov judged that if animals could be successfully bred with their evolutionary cousins, so could humans. It was controversial, and outright offensive to believers, but was offered as a question science could now attempt to answer.

It was therefore after the Russian Revolution of 1917 that Ivanov found backing for his idea. Lenin and Trotsky’s vision for the future accommodated Ivanov’s plan as he presented it as triumph for humanism in their fight against the Church.

As the USSR sought to build a new utopia in its own ideological vision, Ivanov offered its leaders control over evolution itself. Human-ape hybrids would be more resilient than either human or ape. The possibilities for progress were limitless.

But funding would not come within Lenin’s lifetime. The USSR’s first Chairman died in 1924 and in his place stepped the merciless tyrant Josef Stalin.

According to veteran Scottish writer John Grant, Stalin was more ‘entranced by the idea that hybridisation between apes and humans held the potential for breeding a new race of uncomplaining super-warriors for the Red Army, unafraid of death and untempered by compassion’.

This is hard to verify. The – quite absurd – idea of an ape-led army of super-soldiers has since been framed as an ‘urban myth‘ in recent years. Though we do know that it was under Stalin that the first known experiments took place.

Undermining the church may have been interesting to an early Soviet Russia. But the new practical applications of rebuilding Russia’s demographics gave the plan legs.

‘For Ivanov, the very idea of ​​a superman was just a marketing ploy in order to get money to carry out his experiments, since initially his scientific experiments could not interest the state,’ FSB officer Alexander Maksimov told the Russian state-owned TV channel, Moscow 24.

‘The idea of ​​a superman was invented as a large and free labor force, a universal soldier, since at that time there was quite extensive communication with the Germans in scientific circles,’ he said. 

‘This was later picked up by Nazi Germany, which allocated crazy amounts of money for such experiments.’

With help from Lenin’s former secretary Nikolai Gurbunov, Ivanov was initially granted $10,000 in 1925 to travel to French Guinea, find some apes and pay local women to take part in his experiments. 

He took a break in Paris, briefly visited the West African nation, and then returned to Moscow to ask for more money before heading out in 1926.

With the support of the French governor, Ivanov and his team caught several live chimps and began looking for local women to artificially inseminate.

Ivanov had no luck. Locals warned him of stories of women being carried away by apes and raped, left ‘forever ostracised’ by their communities. There was no way anybody would willingly agree to such a plan.

Instead, he explored other avenues. Ivanov inseminated female chimps with human sperm, which may have been donated by his son, according to 2008 research paper published by the University of Cambridge.

He also planned to ‘inseminate black females with ape sperm without their consent, under the pretext of medical examination in the local hospital’, rightly offending the local administrators and forcing him back to Moscow.

Ivanov was unrepentant. He whined to his sponsors in Russia about the ‘primitive fears of the blacks and the bourgeois prejudices of the French’. Soon enough, his plans caught the attention of the global press, sparking both outrage and curiosity.

Scientists in the United States began to plan outrageous experiments, conflated with backwards notions about race. Howell S. England, a lawyer, brought together Ivanov’s work with the theories of German anthropologist Hermann Klaatsch, guessing that human races derived from different species of apes.

England claimed the breeding of different species of primate with different human races could produce fertile chimeras. Early anthropology and its blinkered affixation with race contributed to enduring ideas of racial hierarchy with no basis in science – and devastating consequences.

In this milieu, a stain on history of modern scientific inquiry, demagogues won cheap support for slavery, apartheid and eugenics, perhaps most famously harnessed by the Nazi party.

File photo. Ivanov received large amounts of funding to travel to French Guinea and explore the possibilities of breeding chimpanzees (pictured) with human beings

Josef Stalin rose to the top role in 1924, ousting his opponents to replace Vladimir Lenin

Early anthropology, building on theories of racial differences between peoples, was used to justify views on racial superiority, later used by the Nazis. Pictured: Auschwitz camp, 1945

Ivanov returned to Russia in ‘terrible condition’, Moscow 24 reported. ‘Friends and students barely recognise the professor… he looks sloppy, his nose is swollen, his eyes are red, as if he had just cried.

‘There was no trace left of the triumphant man he had been when he set off for Guinea.’

His funding was significantly withheld, and he appealed to Soviet women with a new argument: instead of receiving money, their selfless volunteering would help further the noble aims of science.

Five women took part in the experiments in artificial insemination, with one letter from an apparent volunteer surviving into the present. The woman’s comments paint a bleak picture of the life of one citizen in Stalin’s USSR.

‘Dear Professor… With my private life in ruins, I don’t see any sense in my further existence… But when I think that I could do a service for science, I feel enough courage to contact you. 

‘I beg you, don’t refuse me… I ask you to accept me for the experiment.’

It is not clear what happened to the women, or what led them to volunteer themselves for his experiments, with the press now aware of his work.

Perhaps needless to say, the experiment did not work. 

Only one adult ape managed to survive in the conditions of the nursery. But Ivanov set about bringing together a new plan for insemination with gorillas.

Before he could restart his projects, Ivanov was arrested in December 1930 – on charges unrelated to his work. He was exiled to Kazakhstan and died two years later.

His nursery, according to researcher Alexander Etkind, continued to house an array of species – including some used in the Soviet space missions of the Cold War – until its closure after the collapse of the USSR, in 1992. 

While Stalin’s personal interest in creating an army of super-soldier monkey-humans has been called into question, presented as a creationist attack on the theory of evolution, there is no doubting the reach and impact of Ivanov’s work.

In the ashes of the Second World War, two emerging superpowers saw the opportunity to realise their utopian ideals through the funding of radical scientific experiments.

As the United States performed unethical experiments on enslaved African women without anaesthesia, infected patients with dangerous illnesses and conducted drug trials on unconsenting subjects, the USSR also began a programme of horrifying trials lifted from the pages of science fiction.

Among them, one Alexander Bogdanov – inspired by the fiction writing of Mikhail Bulgakov – sought to achieve immortality through experiments in blood transfusions.

A popular story about a scientist discovering a Martian utopia propelled to health and prosperity by regular blood exchanges saw Bogdanov carry out experiments of his own, eventually catching the eye of Stalin.

According to The Nation: ‘Bogdanov’s hope was not merely to prolong the lives of individuals; he envisioned a sanguine communism in which all were granted an equal share of society’s collective health through blood exchanges.’ 

Bogdanov died after exchanging blood with a patient in 1928, known to have malaria and TB. Miraculously, she was reported to have made a full recovery.

A 1937 report in Nature also cites a Soviet-era experiment by a Dr Segei Briukhonenko, who ‘removed the head of a dog’ and attached it to a machine circulating blood, which he apparently used to keep the severed head alive for six months.

Shocking video of the ‘Experiments in the Revival of Organisms’ shows quite harrowing footage of what appears to be a dog’s head severed from its body with eyes open and still responding to stimuli. 

Years later, the report continues, Briukhonenko managed to resuscitate a ‘whole animal’ after stopping a dog’s heart.

Soviet biologist Ivan Ivanovich Ivanov was convinced he could make a hybrid work, remained undeterred by setbacks throughout his career

In 2023, scientists reported the first live birth of a ‘chimeric’ monkey with stem cells taken from two embryos. The embryos come from genetically distinct macaques

File photo. Limbani the chimp paints a picture using a paintbrush in January 2023

Scientific discovery in the 20th century changed life on earth as never seen before. The flight of the Zeppelin and the Wright brothers’ engine-powered plane saw humans transcend the earth. The radio, television and the internet helped spread information around the world at unprecedented speeds. Penicillin, ultrasound technology and vaccines helped save millions of lives.

Advances also came at great cost, often motivated by prevailing ideologies at the expense of patients and subjects. Today, agreed ethical guidelines are in place to temper the pursuit of knowledge at all costs.

But human curiosity continues to inspire inquiry into the weird and wacky. In 1993, Richard Dawkins maintained that even today ‘if somebody succeeded in breeding a chimpanzee / human hybrid the news would be earth-shattering’. 

‘Bishops would bleat, lawyers would gloat in anticipation, conservative politicians would thunder, socialists wouldn’t know where to put their barricades…

‘Politics would never be the same again, nor would theology, sociology, psychology or most branches of philosophy.’

But in 2021, a team of scientists from the US, China and Spain claimed that they had created the first embryos ‘that were part human and part monkeys’, keeping them alive ‘for up to 20 days in laboratory dishes’.

While the embryos were never implanted into the uterus of any animal, experts warned of the future ethical implications of taking the research any further.

‘It’s a first-in-kind experiment,’ Nita Farahany, professor of law and philosophy at the Duke School of Law, told STAT. 

‘Whenever you cross a major technological or biological hurdle like this one, it’s a good moment to stop and reflect.’