Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov : The Russian behind the 'humanzees'

Despite the collapse of the Soviet Union, the communist enclave's horror history of science lives on

Strangely, Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov was the Soviet biologist who worked on cross-species breeding in the early 20th century.

The scientist was controversially linked to efforts to create a human-ape hybrid – known as"humanzees".

In the 1920s, Ivanov carried out a series of experiments. Bizarrely, these involved artificially inseminating female chimpanzees with human sperm.

The man failed to achieve his goal, but he refused to give up.

In 1929, he organised other experiments to inseminate female humans with ape sperm. However, the death of his last orangutan caused a delay.

Not long after this, the Soviet government decided to exile him to the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic, where he died just two years later from a stroke.