An opening sentence you don’t get to write every day: “The Soviet dictator Josef Stalin ordered the creation of Planet of the Apes-style warriors by crossing humans with apes, according to recently uncovered secret documents.”
Weirdly, this is the second article I’ve run across in the last week on early-20th-century Soviet mad scientist Ilya Ivanov, who was the USSR’s top man when it came to human-animal crossbreeding. There was also this King Kong-themed piece in the NYT. Interesting, the two pieces look at the same chain of events but ascribe totally different motives — either a desire to stamp out religion or to create ape superwarriors.