Trofim Lysenko, the Soviet scientist whose pseudoscientific rejection of genetics fueled catastrophic agricultural failures, directly contributed to the Great Leap Forward's famine in China starting in 1958. Mao Zedong implemented Lysenkoist policies like mass sparrow extermination and impossible grafting experiments, while state propaganda faked harvest records to justify exporting grain abroad even as 20 million people starved. Despite evidence of failure, Mao blamed peasants for hoarding food, leading to brutal grain seizures and continued famine until Lysenko's eventual discrediting in the USSR, leaving a legacy where political enforcers faced no punishment while his dangerous ideas resurface among modern right-wingers. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:02:06
This is an iHeart podcast.
Guaranteed human.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that.
Trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I got you.
I got you.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Groban.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Modem.
My next guest, it's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
He goes, just give it a shot.
But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Soviet Agricultural Recklessness00:15:48
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of life.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hello, everybody.
This is Robert Evans.
I'm the host of Behind the Bastards, and this is Behind the Bastards, the show where we tell you everything you don't know about the very worst people in all of history.
This is part two of our episode on Trophy and Lashenko, the scientist who got everybody killed.
And with me today, as within part one, is Max Silvestri.
Max, how you doing?
I'm doing great.
Thank you for having me back to talk more death caused by Russian.
Well, before we get into that, I want to tell you something I noticed about your last name, which is I enjoy saying Silvestri, but it's one of the rare names that I enjoy writing more than I enjoy saying.
Really?
I think it's because of the TRI.
I don't know.
Yeah, I enjoy writing Sylvester.
Oh, I've always felt it had a weird rhythm to writing it.
I don't, I get lazy by the end of it, especially my full name is Maximilian.
So it's like you've got a lot of ground to cover.
When I was a kid, I had to learn it rhythmically how to spell it.
I still kind of tap my foot.
I am my L-I-A-N.
Scantrons were not made for the likes of you.
No.
My nickname as a kid was Maximi because that's in my preschool.
That's where it cut it off.
Which, in hindsight, what kind of school like only allowed six letters?
Yeah, that is.
For a personal line.
That's not meant.
There's many common first names that hit six or more.
Yeah, it's not weird.
Well, thank you for saying that, Robert.
Maximai is a pretty cool nickname, though.
No, I did like it.
It was like my first AOL screen name, I believe, in like 1994 was Maximai with no number.
I was in early.
Nice.
Yeah.
Wow.
I mean, I feel like you had a choice to make there at some point as to whether or not to be a hip-hop artist.
And you could have taken that road.
Well, if you can believe it, my middle name, and it's Ukrainian actually, is Shaft.
It's my mom's main name.
So there was a moment.
Maximai Shaft?
Maximilian Shaft as like some sort of show biz name felt too much.
I was like, I can't do it.
It's going to feel like a bit.
No one will believe it.
Oh, my God.
Man.
I went to a family wedding this weekend, and it was my cousin with the last name Shaft.
And like, I had never thought about the whole other side of the family that got married into it.
Just like the joke of all their speeches was like, I can't believe that our daughter is becoming a shaft.
She's now a shaft.
She's marrying all these shafts.
Oh, man.
Okay.
Well, that was an enjoyable digression.
And a Ukrainian name, speaking of people who had bad things done to them by the starvation of the Ukraine.
There we go.
Man, that is a country that has just wound up getting screwed over by so many people.
It's really, it's remarkable.
There's just these nations in history.
The Congo is another one of them where it's just like, oh, you guys have just been treated really badly by everyone for the last 300 years.
Like Italy without the art or food.
You're not as excited by it.
Yeah, I mean, I like Borscht.
Oh, no, I mean, I like pierogi.
I just mean like a, you know, every street corner doesn't have a pierogi restaurant here in America.
Right, yeah, not a lot of that.
Yet.
Yeah, yet.
We need like a good Ukrainian music act to sweep the West.
The Ukrainian invasion.
Right.
But not from the war one.
That word is a little sour for them.
Yeah.
Okay.
Anyway, we're talking about Trofim Lashenko.
And where we last left off, the USSR had instituted Lushenko's policies.
He had purged the scientists of the Soviet Union, the genetic scientists who didn't agree with Leshenkoism.
And of course, millions of people had starved in Ukraine and in other parts of the Soviet Union as a result of scientific fuckery.
Sure.
That's where we wound up last time.
And this time we're taking a trip over to Chairman Mao's China to see what happened next with Lushenkoism.
Okay.
So as you will remember from part one, one of my sources for these episodes was the wonderful book Hungry Ghosts written by Jasper Becker.
One chapter in that book, which focuses on the bad science of Leshenko and his comrades, opens with a quote from a Tang Dynasty poem that I felt was just too appropriate and inspired a choice not to include as we start this episode.
Wow.
I never think of poems in books as being like, this was so necessary.
Yet this spoke to you in such a way that you want to repeat it.
Yeah, because it happens a lot in the books that I read for this.
There will often be from a poem, and I usually don't include that.
Epigraph?
What is that called at the beginning?
Yeah, epigraph, probably, right?
I just always feel like, well, oh, cool.
You know a poem.
You know, like, that is the energy that I feel when I read, you know.
Yeah, and this one is more, I think it accurately sums up the mood of the people that we're going to be talking about.
Seeing all men behaving like drunkards, how can I alone remain sober?
So, that's where we're getting into.
In 1949, Mao Zedong became the chairman of the Central People's Government.
His rise to power had included an extensive and wildly successful propaganda campaign.
Mao was the great leader, an infallible genius and brilliant Marxist, virtually incapable of making a mistake.
After decades of war and chaos in China, he promised his people that he would make their country into a perfect state, a literal heaven on earth.
I'm going to, yeah, quote from that book here.
The nation's poets, writers, journalists, and scientists, and the entire Communist Party joined him in proclaiming that utopia was at hand.
Out of China, the land of famine, he would make China the land of abundance.
The Chinese would have so much food that they would not know what to do with it, and people would lead a life of leisure, working only a few hours a day.
Under his gifted leadership, China would enter the final stage of communism ahead of every other country on earth.
If the Soviets said they would reach communism in 10 or 20 years, Mao said the Chinese would get there in a year or two.
In fact, he promised that within a year, food production would double or treble.
Wow.
It's too much food.
That is too much food.
You know, it's not good to have too much food.
You're just going to piles of rotting vegetables.
They started to worry about that.
So one of the things that was instituted as a result of their worry that there was just going to be way too much food is they instituted a program to get rid of the pests before the pests could eat all of the food that they were sure was about to be there.
And so for like a period of weeks, all of the peasants in China were turned out to murder sparrows en masse, to try to kill all of the sparrows.
Oh, man.
They did the same thing with a couple of bugs, too, where just like people would just be chasing down birds and bugs all day.
Oh, my God.
If sparrows could talk, I'm sure they would try to just be.
Guys, we're not sure that we're going to need to get rid of me.
You might want the sparrows.
You don't know.
Yeah, well, they had them a sparrow.
Too much sparrow meat.
Yeah.
So, one popular slogan at the time was, work hard for a few years, happiness for a thousand, which sounds good, right?
I think that's the problem.
Yeah.
I can think of other countries that promised happiness for a thousand years.
Was the idea that they had a plan to buckle down and that just that they would be set up with abundance forever?
Yeah, that was again this idea that you saw in the Soviet Union, that once we perfect our society, we will perfect the people in it, and then none of these problems that have been present throughout 12,000, however many years of recorded human history will happen anymore.
We're just digging ourselves out of a hole because you've all been wrong.
The people.
We've been the wrong type of human.
And now we've figured it out.
Two years at most.
Five, maybe.
A couple of years, and we'll reverse this 12,000-year-old train.
Yeah.
Peasants as far off as Tibet, who'd never so much as seen an airplane, were taught to expect that in the near future, quote, practically everything would be done by machines.
In fact, a time would come when our meals would be brought by machines right up to our mouths.
Wow.
So this is like fully automated luxury communism that you've been taught to expect here.
And as they say in The Simpsons, people will be needed to clean and maintain those robots or whatever.
You know, like people will still have a purpose.
But they won't need to suffer.
They won't need to labor miserably in the fields and they won't starve in the winter.
We'll still be a place for people, but it'll be in a perfect utopian state.
So Mao intoxicated China with his view of what the future could be.
And it's easy to see why that would be intoxicating after decades of brutal civil war and the Japanese invasion and basically a genocide being waged and a huge chunk of, like, China had gone through a lot of shit.
Yeah.
It hadn't been a good run for them lately.
Right.
So they were eager for this.
Neither did they rear.
Unfortunately for everyone, the scientific underpinning of the brave new world Mao envisioned was Leshenkoism.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, see, Mao had spent years fighting as a guerrilla warlord against the other men who aimed to dominate mainland China.
In the years before he won, he'd become a voracious consumer of Soviet propaganda.
Much of this propaganda had to do with the spectacular record harvests the USSR was supposedly, but not really, having, because remember, they were lying about that.
Torfin Lishenko was billed as the greatest scientific mind of the age, and Mao believed the propaganda.
Not just because he thought it was literally true, but because it ran intoxicatingly in line with what he already believed about the world.
See, Mao was not a big scientific reality guy.
One of his catchphrases was, quote, we should be like Marx entitled to talk nonsense.
He lectured people about needing to make science more imaginative, saying stuff like, science is simply acting daringly.
There is nothing mysterious about it.
And there is nothing special about making nuclear reactors, cyclotrons, or rockets.
You shouldn't be frightened of these things.
As long as you act daringly, you will be able to succeed very quickly.
You need to have spirit to feel superior to everyone, as if there was no one beside you.
You shouldn't care about any first machine building ministry, second machine-building ministry, or King Haw University, but just act recklessly, and it will be all right.
Yeah, dream big, you know, Baron Munchausen style.
Just like, if you will it, come on.
Yeah, just balls to the wall, go crazy.
Like, science is about recklessness.
I'm not going to sit down with a notebook and mumbo-jumbo figure out what all this is, you know?
Poor shit and beakers.
Get on with it.
Corn should be bigger.
Do it.
Do it.
Make the fucking corn bigger.
You can see why it would be fun, like in a world where people have been taught, no, science is about like painstaking research and checking your notes and gradually arriving at truth, chiseling away at that over time, just be like, no, just fucking try shit, man.
It's fine.
Yeah, we're the best, and we're going to be even better if you just listen to me.
Don't worry about the logistics.
Again, another thing that unfortunately has no echo after this time.
I mean, this was like such a sad chapter that closed so abruptly.
Yeah, I mean, one of the best things about history is that people learn all of their lessons from it and never repeat these mistakes against it.
Of course, humans change, they change easily, and they changes stick, I found.
So I'm going to guess that Mao's attitude towards recklessness was probably useful.
to him in his career as a warlord.
That can be good if you're like running an army to just sort of be daring and bold and stuff.
A question, was he trying to impress communist Soviet Union with like his adoption, or was it more just like, no, I also believe this and it's worked for them and I admire it?
Or did he want to like get in better?
It's certainly changed through time, but in this period, in the early period of like, you know, 49 or so when he gets into power, he's very much trying to impress them.
And I think it's a mix of legitimately wanting to impress them and also wanting to be the best at communism.
Right.
Like that's the like, well, I'm going to do communism better than you fuckers.
I was Wiccan briefly in seventh grade because like some kids that I hung out with, like one of them got into it and I didn't really believe it.
I don't know if any of us did, but we went to a magic shop and bought like source books or whatever.
But I was a teacher's pet type student.
And in that brief two-month period, I became like the best at Wiccanism.
I knew the whole book.
I'd like to correct them and being like, oh, no, that mojo bag positivity spell won't work like that.
And it won't work unless you bury it in new soil.
So it wasn't that I believed it, but I did like excelling at it.
Yeah, you want to memorize everything.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, man.
So like seventh grade Wiccan, Chairman Mao decided that his extreme knowledge of Leshenkoist procedures and all of the reading he'd done of Soviet agricultural propaganda and whatnot had prepared him to reform the agricultural infrastructure of the largest and most populous nation on the planet.
Now, were they going through like, I imagine their climate is not universally quite as rough as Russia's, were they going through like terrible famine at that point?
They were, but mostly because they'd just been fighting a giant civil war, right?
So that fucks up the food.
So yeah, most pretty much everyone who was alive in China at that point had multiple times dealt with famine in their lives.
So it was like the promise that there will be no famines was very powerful.
And also he was fucking with something really intricate, like Chinese agriculture, like some of the oldest systems in the human planet were continually operating, you know, like ways of yeah, it's one of those things we saw.
We did an episode on the East India Company and when they came in.
Right.
I saw the first three episodes of taboo.
So yeah, I have a pretty clear understanding.
Right.
So like in China, you've got a very intricate agricultural system and they decide to change everything.
So like in the Soviet Union, Chinese scientists with years of experience and oppressive educations were seen as useless bourgeois specialists too cowardly and timid to make great decisions because again science requires recklessness.
To be a great scientist, one had to be a peasant with an intuitive understanding of the natural world and a fervent belief in the philosophical underpinnings of the party.
Even children could be great scientists.
One popular propaganda book from this period was called They Are Creating Miracles.
It told stories about children in an elementary school who had, quote, developed 10 more new crops on its experimental plot.
This was treated as fact, not fiction.
It's a story.
This is what Montessori schools are, basically, right?
You just let the kids come up with new vegetables or whatever, and as long as you don't tell them no.
Make carrots, but with tomatoes on the inside.
Go do it.
Just be daring, you fucking children.
Quote, it is a story out of a science fiction book.
But no, my young friends, it is not.
This is a true story.
There are no fairy tale magicians, no white-bearded wizards of Never Neverland.
The heroes of our story are a group of young pioneers studying in an ordinary village primary school.
It's a little excerpt from the book there.
Yeah.
So the more Mao read of Leshenko, Williams, and Machurin, those great Soviet scientists, the three great luminaries of Soviet agriculture, the more smitten with them he became.
He would have read Leshenkoist journals like Agrobiologia and run across quotes that tied Leshenko's ideas to the very mind of Stalin.
Here's a quote from one of the articles in Agrobiologia.
Stalin's teachings about gradual, concealed, unnoticeable quantitative changes leading to rapid, radical, qualitative changes permitted Soviet biologists to discover in plants the realization of such qualitative transitions that one species could be transformed into another.
So this is the shit Mao's reading.
This is what he's coming to believe.
Like you can literally change the nature of these plants by like altering them physically.
Like you can change them forever.
And by what you're saying, Mao's not exactly doing deep dives on the science.
He's not double-checking numbers here.
He's just kind of like skimming to the last paragraph and being like, this sounds fantastic.
And a lot of what he's reading is tying sort of Stalin's mind and ideals directly to the science, which is leading him to think that like, well, a forceful personality can almost change the nature of science by like what he understands and believes about the world.
So Mao began to tell his friends of his exciting plans to have Chinese peasants plant seeds close together, saying, with company they will grow easily.
When they grow together, they will be comfortable.
Mao, like Leshenko, felt that plants of the same type could not compete with each other.
The Chinese Communist Party gained its own Leshenkoist scientists, Liu Tianyu, who went on to persecute all of that country's experts in genetics.
Throughout the 1940s, he mandated that Soviet agricultural science and best practices had to be used.
Fascist eugenicist scientists who accepted heritability were arrested or forced to denounce their old beliefs.
Soviet science reigned supreme.
Here's a quote from one Chinese doctor about his experience in college at the time.
We were told the Soviets had discovered and invented everything, even the aeroplane.
We had to change textbooks and rename things in Leshenko's honor.
So the Harving-Cushing syndrome, a disease of the adrenaline gland, became Leshenko's syndrome to show it had been discovered by him.
Since genetics did not exist, we were forbidden to talk about inherited diseases such as sickle cell anemia, even to students.
This meant that all through Mao's lifetime, there was no policy to stop people in the same family marrying each other and passing down their genes.
Potato Experiments and Lies00:05:42
A lot of idiots were born as a result.
His words.
Idiots.
No, no, in the traditional sense of the word.
I don't mean idiots like they bother me at parties.
I mean, like, they're true idiots.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
Did China have at that point, 49 or whatever?
Like, was there a tradition of bourgeois scientists that were following a kind of world stage Western style of scientific method?
I think it was more that scientists in China, like scientists everywhere, connected with other scientists around the world to learn what they were doing and try to uncover truth better.
And those scientists probably were not dogmatic about much of anything, because good scientists.
I mean, before they died, it must have been so annoying to scientists, which was relatively, in the scheme of history, a new thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They're like, no, none of that.
We're not doing magic anymore.
Now we got science.
And then the new scientists be like, actually, we're going to do some magic.
Yeah, it's going to be pretty magical.
It's going to be magic.
Children are scientists now.
Anyway, you have to die.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
Leshenkoist theory demolished Chinese agriculture just as it had Russian agriculture.
A potato blight hit in the 1950s.
Under Lushenkoism, the cause of the blight was assumed to be environmental, not the result of a stunning lack of biodiversity among the potatoes.
Good research that was done into the blight was suppressed for decades when the findings contradicted scientific orthodoxy.
As a result, Mao-era China grew, by some accounts, half as many potatoes as it should have during this period.
I don't want to get too deep into the woods on communist botany in the mid-20th century.
I do like the idea that someone was like, this is how many potatoes they should have grown.
Well, you can look at like, this is how much land they dedicated to potatoes and how many potatoes they need to make rather than not die from lack of potatoes.
Oh, man.
Yeah.
I talked to the Irish about that.
One of the things that was really big in communist botany in this period was grafting and crossing different species with one another.
It wasn't useful for mass agriculture, but countless peasant scientists would be lauded in the press for like growing grapes on a persimmon tree or apples from a pear tree, where you're just splicing off pieces of trees.
And so you have one tree that grows multiple fruits.
Right.
Like it's a thing you can do in your yard, and it's cool.
You can?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Oh, I would be like, oh, another example of magic that's not true, the idea of having two citrus fruits on one tree.
No, you can totally do that.
Oh, my God.
I don't know.
Not every plant can be done that way, but there are a lot of people who are.
I wish I had him burned the guy that I saw that had that in his yard.
You just saw an apple and a pear on the same tree and started lighting fires.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
His poor house.
Oh, my God.
There's nothing but ash.
No, like, to an extent, you can do that.
But, like, it's not.
It's not a solution for more production or anything.
It's a neat thing for your own garden.
It's not something that is really useful in a mass agricultural scale, right?
It takes a lot of time.
Right.
It's not like you might as well just grow a different field of apples and a field of persimmons and whatnot.
There's no reason not to.
But it was cool and it was impressive to people at the time, and they were just figuring this out.
So like that's one of the things that would make the news a lot is they talk about like, look at all these scientists who have crossed these two different fruits and whatnot together.
I had Mezcal this weekend that had a pear in the bottle, like a full pear.
Ooh.
And we were trying to figure out very briefly and drunkenly how they got the pear.
And I was like, well, it's not some sort of ship in a bottle type situation where they, you know, had a flat pear and then it got fat.
I was like, maybe they put a dried pear in and the mezcal, what they do is they have the tiny little pear in the tree.
They hang the tree with the bottles so that it grows inside.
And I was like, that is cool, but also not the most efficient way to bottle alcohol or grow pears to have a handful of trees or perhaps a whole field of them with bottles on the end.
It seems novel rather than super useful.
Well, I mean, yeah.
I mean, it was delicious.
Mezcow went down so smooth.
I didn't even need a lime one.
Did you eat the pear?
You know, we didn't drink that much, and luckily.
I mean, would you break the bottle?
I guess not.
Yeah, I mean, you'd have to, like, get a glass saw or something like that.
Get a little bit of glass in here, right?
I just want to drink a mezcaled up pear.
That sounds delicious.
Yes, that sounds fantastic.
Yeah.
Okay.
So grafting and crossing all these plants and stuff became something of a meme in Red China.
And soon the state news filled with fanciful stories of pumpkins crossbred with papaya, corn crossed with rice, and other such nonsense, which you can't do.
You can't make corn rice.
Corn movement.
You can't make corn rice.
Because it had an ear of corn has rice in it.
Cooked rice instead of kernels?
Unclear.
Okay.
It would be kind of cool either way.
Yes, totally.
Yeah, but it didn't happen.
Neither would really fulfill a need that I have.
No.
I go in for different reasons when I'm going for both of those two.
Never again will man have to go to two different places for rice, grain, and corn cob.
I'm tired of when I eat rice that there's nothing to rotate.
Yeah.
And so that would have solved that problem.
That's really frustrating.
So different districts would compete with each other for like claiming wild successes and things that could go in the local newspapers and stuff.
There were stories of like 130-pound pumpkins and whatnot, most of which were complete lies.
I feel like that's still a thing we're covering in the news today.
Yeah, somebody grows a really big fruit and you're like, look at this big fruit.
Yes, exactly.
I mean, I almost feel like it's pre-social media American Heartland memes was like 10 times forwarded emails that had just like, look at this giant pumpkin the size of a man.
This is that, and this is kind of how the craze over this new science starts to sweep China.
You know, at first it's not super negative.
Like, yeah, I mean, they're definitely not growing as many potatoes, but like it's mostly just people being like, well, I can be a scientist.
Look at what I did to this tree.
Look what I'm doing.
Look at this photo of my husky son next to a potato as tall as he is.
You know, come on.
This will inspire people for a decade.
Yeah, a mix of actual neat little experiments and just lies.
Yeah.
So we're going to get into the Great Leap Forward next, which was not a great time for most people.
But it's called the Great Leap Forward.
Giant Fruit Craze Sweeps China00:03:46
I know, I know.
Sometimes advertisements are not true.
But in this case, the advertisements are true because they're the ads for our show and they're great.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
Woo, My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, And dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanksgiving on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach, murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that.
Jeffrey Hood did it.
July 2003.
Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chambers ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I screamed, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
Get down.
A charismatic politician.
You know, he just bent the rules all the time, man.
I still have a weapon.
And I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say that, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and on Mostly Human, I go beyond the headlines with the people building our future.
This week, an interview with one of the most influential figures in Silicon Valley, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Sam Altman on AI Responsibility00:15:28
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to products we put out in the world.
From power to parenthood.
Kids, teenagers, I think they will need a lot of guardrails around AI.
This is such a powerful and such a new thing.
From addiction to acceleration.
The world we live in is a competitive world, and I don't think that's going to stop, even if you did a lot of redistribution.
You know, we have a deep desire to excel and be competitive and gain status and be useful to others.
And it's a multiplayer game.
What does the man who has extraordinary influence over our lives have to say about the weight of that responsibility?
Find out on Mostly Human.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
And we're back.
We're talking when we were about to talk about the Great Leap Forward, which started in 1958.
It was Chairman Mao's big sort of plan to rapidly turn China into an industrial and agricultural powerhouse.
Now, one aspect of the leap that's probably most famous was the creation of countless backyard furnaces and steel smelting plants in peasant villages, designed to sort of.
The idea was, like we don't need to all like move into cities and make big factories like the rest of the world, we can just have our peasants be like producing this sort of.
They didn't make good steel, turns out, farmers don't make great steel in their backyards.
Well, we are going to need that steel for when all the robots do all the tasks.
In the near, near future, we might as well start building the steel.
We might not have the robots yet.
Yeah, we get the steel ready, the robots will yeah, anyway.
Uh, it also involved an eight-point blueprint for Chinese agriculture, written up by Mao himself and based heavily in Leshenko's theories.
The eight points included close planting and deep plowing yeah, real deep plowing.
Two things that by 1953, the Soviet Union knew did not work.
Because again, they had this data.
They just weren't sharing it because they didn't want to embarrass themselves by admitting that they'd starved a lot of people unnecessarily with bad science.
So they hadn't shared it.
But were they like quietly changing practices?
They were starting to by the mid 50s or so, like by yeah, certainly by the late 50s some of this had started to change in the Soviet Union, but they weren't letting people know, and so China was just like, I guess this stuff works, we'll give it a shot ourselves.
So prior to, they would have told us, yeah, they would have told us if this was killing people.
Prior to Leshenkoism, 1.5 million seedlings had been spread per 2.5 acres of farmland in China.
Right in 1958, as part of the great leap forward, Chinese farmers were ordered to plant six and a half million seedlings per two and a half acres.
So that's, I mean 1.5 million seedlings to six and a half million seedlings.
That's a lot more seeds being planted in the same amount of dirt.
And in 1959 the government increased the number of seedlings to between 12 and 15 million per two and a half acres.
So they're just dowsing way too many fucking seeds in the land and they're gonna hoping that these seeds start talking to each other and be like, you know what?
We gotta start growing differently like people.
Seeds are stronger together.
Yes exactly yeah, good dynamics.
I remember something about um.
Every important crop in China was planted using this method and across the board, almost all of the seedlings died.
State propaganda photographers would do things like, find a field of wheat that was growing, hide a bench inside it and have kids stand on the bench so that they could at least claim that the wheat was growing so dense that children could walk across the top of a field of wheat.
Wow, so like in reality, they're having huge trouble getting stuff to grow and in the areas where it is growing it's not growing any denser than it Ever came in before, but they're essentially faking it.
They're cropping the photos in a way that it makes it look like their, you know, potato inauguration is far more populated with potatoes than perhaps it actually is.
Yeah, and many people didn't know this was bullshit.
Millions of farmers were watching crops die.
The propagandists who, you know, stuck benches inside of fields knew that they were faking yields.
This was all essentially a play put on for Chairman Mao out of what was probably a mix of genuine desire to please the chairman and fear of what would happen if their yields didn't match what he'd already declared to be reality.
One witness to a visit from Mao to the Xin Li experimental field outside Tianjin in 1958 recalled that before he arrived, everyone grabbed rice plants from other fields and shoved them together so tightly that you really could walk across them.
Once Mao left, the rice was replanted.
Mao's doctor recalled seeing the same thing done in a different city the chairman visited.
He later stated, All of China was a stage, all the people performers in an extravaganza for Mao.
So everybody's just like, this is the guy.
We've got to make it look like this shit's working.
And weirdly, like, walking on it is the way we've all decided that it is weird memes spread like, it's going to grow so dense we can walk across the thing.
We're committing to that?
How else can you say it's growing a lot of fucking corn?
Were there purges happening?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I know as a thing, people were murdered that didn't fall.
There were definitely purges.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, he's purging.
He's purging during this period.
So Mao also fell in love with the idea that that Soviet scientist Williams had come up with, basically that planting seeds super deep was a good idea.
But where Stalin had been content to find scientists whose theories agreed with his own theories, Mao saw himself as an innovator.
So he figured that if planting seeds deep was good, planting seeds even deeper was even better.
Oh my god, yeah, why stop there?
These scientists didn't have the ambition of his imagination of planting it way too deep.
Hi guys, we all know that ground is this deep, but what if, I'm just saying, even deeper?
Yeah, even deeper.
As deep as you possibly can.
Often, he would have basically whole armies of peasants dig enormous furrows in the land, sometimes 10 feet deep, in order to plant seeds.
It's like how I, as a comedian, know that wearing two hats is very funny, but you know what's even funnier than that?
Wearing three hats.
Three hats.
Just go bigger.
Yeah.
And Mao would be walking into the room with like 40 or 50 hats on.
And everyone would also be like, we also need to put these hats.
Everybody get on that many hats.
How dare you not have 30 hats?
Walk across the hats.
In one province, 5 million people were ordered to plow for 45 straight days in order to prepare 3 million hectares of land.
In the north, where the soil was too frozen to dig into, holes were blasted with dynamite in order to help them dig deeper.
This logic also applied to rice patties, which meant peasant farmer women had to wade deeper into the patties than they'd ever gone before, often catching infections as a result.
In at least one province, farmers had to tie ropes around their waists to avoid drowning in the rice patties because they were just going so deep.
Oh my god.
Yeah, just way too deep.
Leshenkoist agrobiology also meant that Chinese farmers couldn't use chemical fertilizers anymore.
Mao had the government end all its spending to build new chemical plants and instead tried the same sort of bullshit fertilizer recipes the Russians had used.
Generally a mix of 10% manure and 90% normal dirt.
According to Leshenkoism, the manure would magically transfer all its properties to the regular dirt.
This practice led to farmers just mixing in random garbage with dirt.
Here's a quote from Hungry Ghosts.
People in Guangzhou took their household rubbish to the outskirts of the city where it was buried for several weeks before being put out on the fields.
Near Shanghai, peasants dumped so much broken glass that they could not walk across the fields in bare feet.
Others broke up the mud floors of their huts and their brick stoves and even pulled down their mud walls to use as fertilizer.
You know, to Mao's credit, I know that's maybe not right, but if I were to put a little of my own manure into, say, a bowl of mashed potatoes and mix it together, I would kind of be like, that's all manure now.
I wouldn't be like, well, there's still, there are a lot of good mashed potatoes in there.
When you are mixing poop with food, yes, 10% poop means all of the food.
Really, it's all poop food.
It's all poop now.
100%.
That is a fair point.
But it doesn't work that way when you're trying to create fertilized soil.
So Mao's government expected crop yields to triple after all of this heroic innovation, but that meant they were also going to have to deal with a surge in pests, as I mentioned.
So yeah, in 1958, he ordered farmers to run around banging pots and pans to exhaust all of the sparrows to death.
We already went over that.
Clearly, this is all like a plot from someone inside the government that hates sparrows.
Just a long play to get rid of sparrows.
And I'll show you how many people starve if we get rid of those goddamn birds.
Get off my roof.
Wacky as this all was, for a while things looked like they were going great.
1958 was a good year for weather, and rampant lying made it look like the autumn harvest had quadrupled.
Mao and his comrades started discussing how to handle the massive food surplus they knew they were soon going to have.
It was reported that fields had been producing less than 330 pounds of grain per one-fifth of an acre now produced 45 to 53,000 pounds of grain, which, if true, would be an amazing rate of income.
They have too much food.
They should just start destroying the food they have now just to make room for the new food coming in.
It's weird that you predicted exactly what happens next.
Oh no, you're going to need that food.
So all of that information on how much grain they were growing was lies.
The state statistical bureau had been shuttered and replaced by good news reporting stations, which just spouted increasingly lurid lies about the harvest.
And so for a little while, China thought it had more food than it knew what to do with.
So in the autumn of 1958, Chinese citizens were told to eat like it was going out of style.
One slogan at the time was, eat as much as you can and exert your utmost in production.
Peasants in a village called Zhengdu told anthropologists later that, quote, everyone irresponsibly ate, whether they were hungry or not.
And in 20 days, they had finished almost all their rice they had, rice which should have lasted six months.
Oh my God.
I do now feel guilty that that is my attitude to eating three to five times a day.
It's like, well, when it starts to hurt, that's when you stop.
That's when you stop until it hurts.
Man, and I'm not getting out in the fields and doing any labor.
No, I mean, one of the good rules of thumb with life is that if you do whatever you're doing until it hurts, about 50% of the time, that will be the right thing to do.
Your body has a way of telling you to stop, which is causing you physical discomfort.
Yeah, so if you work out till it hurts.
Yeah, right?
Pain is just weakness leaving the body.
That's what we're always saying.
And the same thing is true with eating or with snoring a lot of cocaine.
Right.
You know, do Coke until you start to bleed too much to do more Coke, and then it's time to stop doing it.
Switch nostrils, right?
Switch nostrils, switch drugs.
Yeah.
You know?
Move to the butt.
Till your veins collapse.
Yeah, do it till it hurts.
Advice for all of our listeners.
So, Wei D, a survivor of the Great Leap Forward, later recalled, we lived well.
We ate a lot of meat.
It was considered revolutionary to eat meat.
If you didn't eat meat, it wouldn't do.
People even vied with each other to see who could eat the most.
So they're having eating contests.
They are being ordered basically to eat their entire winter supply of food in a couple of weeks.
Just because.
Why not?
Right.
There's going to be so much food.
I know it's going to take a hard right turn, Robert, but this is all sounding pretty nice to me right now.
It does.
Come on, it's coming down from on high.
And if you're one of these peasants after years of war and privation, eat as much meat as you can.
Like, you're feeling great.
You're feeling like this fucking communism thing, there's no downsides.
Yeah, I mean, up, up, up, up.
I can't imagine the graph changing.
Yeah, we got plenty of meat, plenty of grain.
That's really all we care about.
Like, other than the stuff we have that's not meat and grain.
But anyway, it seems great for a while.
People ate so much that by the time winter came around, the granaries were empty, and most of China was running out of food.
So there's that hard-right turn.
The state still had full granaries, but rather than hand out food to the people, Mao convinced himself that the peasants were hiding grain to be counter-revolutionary.
It was very important to him that communism seemed to be doing well in China.
He didn't want to look bad to the USSR.
So he had China double her grain exports and cut down on imports.
That way, it would at least look like a success.
Now.
Oh, man, this is like a rom-com where like two characters hate each other or like are too afraid to tell the other person the truth because they don't want to look bad.
Really, like if they just came together and had a sit-down conversation, which they might at the end of this film, they'd be like, we have a lot in common.
I don't have any grain.
Do you have any grain?
Oh, my God.
I've been trying to impress you this whole time.
It would be really fun to do a nice romantic comedy set during just as 20 million people starve to death.
Stalin and Mao having a meet cute and just being like, oh my God, what a cute movie that would be.
Or a Stalin and Mao buddy cop comedy where it's the 1980s and they both live in Hawaii and they've got to take down a cocaine smuggling ram.
Maybe a road movie where they're just like going to get more grain to get something where it's just like they have to spend a lot of time in a truck together.
In a car together.
There's a lot of fun potential in that premise.
Yeah.
Okay.
So the collective farming system that Mao and his regime had induced meant that the farmers were never actually in direct control of the food that they grew and harvested.
It went into communal granaries and was cooked in communal kitchens.
All this meant that it was under the direct control of party functionaries who all wanted to deliver record-breaking allocations to the government.
So food that could have fed people was given to the government for the sake of individual party members' careers, and Mao then shipped it out of the country for the sake of his own ego.
1958's harvest had been the highest in a decade, but by the spring of 1959, more than 24 million people were starving in China.
Mao, being Mao, was incapable of attributing his nation's growing problems to his own policies.
The increasingly evident failures of the Great Leap Forward were only, quote, tuition fees that must be paid to gain experience.
So that's an artful way of putting it.
Yeah, I mean, he does have a similar attitude towards tuition as a lot of people in this country today.
Yeah.
The lenders in this country today.
Yeah.
When his braver aides brought up just how bad things were starting to look in the countryside, Mao said, quote, come back in 10 years and see whether we were correct.
China is not going to sink into the sea and the sky won't tumble down simply because there are shortages of vegetables and hairpins and soap.
Imbalances in market problems have made everybody tense, but this tension is not justified, even though I am tense myself.
No, it wouldn't be honest to say I'm not tense.
If I am tense before midnight, I take some sleeping pills and then I feel better.
You ought to try sleeping pills if you feel uptight.
So.
Wait, that's a real quote?
Yeah, that's Mao's advice when his guys are like, you know, tens of millions of people are starving.
And he's like, try some drugs.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
I think I follow someone like him on Instagram.
I think I am someone like him a lot of the time, but I've never tried to reform a continent's farming practices.
Oh, man, we're just going to do it.
I just get high along.
Was Mao at all like, when these things, when he saw that they were not going well, did any part of him feel like it's the people's fault for not allowing the system to change them or to not forging themselves into newer, better, you know, versions?
Or was he just sort of like, oh, bad weather?
I don't know enough about him to say what was going on in his own internal heart, but the things that he said and the practices that he put out as a result of like these problems portray a man who believes that the issues in his plan are due to selfish people who are not following the plan, who are hoarding grain, who are refusing to give up what they owe to the government and whatnot.
Like that's the issue.
Right.
So in the long term, if he just like keeps a strong hand or a stronger one, it'll all work out.
Because they're not really starving.
They're hiding food because they don't want to give it to the government and they're eating in secret and stuff like that.
That's his what he kind of.
Were they rounding up fat children and just being like, you are hiding grain and eating?
I don't think they were fat children.
Oh, right.
So at this point, disaster probably could have been averted.
The government had a lot of food in storage, and if the flaws in the system had been admitted, the bad practices halted and changed back to normal, things might have been okay for Chinese agriculture.
But that would have meant Mao and his comrades admitting to flaws in their ideologically consistent scientific theories.
It also would have meant backpedaling on all of the propaganda they'd put out.
So rather than admit any error, Mao doubled down.
Anyone who does not make a great leap is a rightist conservative.
Some people think that a leap is far too adventurous.
It is new.
It may not be perfect, but it is not an adventure.
All must have revolutionary optimism and revolutionary heroism.
So, y'all are just too scared of the future.
Mao Doubles Down on Propaganda00:06:10
Yeah.
And that's why this is having some growing pain.
I'm a revolutionary.
We all got to be a little.
We all got to be revolutionaries.
Those growing pains might feel a lot like hunger pains, but it's growing.
I mean, not for me or the other cadres, the members of the Communist Party in China, because we all are eating well.
We have a disgusting amount of grain.
If I see one more bowl of grain, I am done.
Yeah, I threw out more than I eat.
Yeah.
My dog lives like a king.
So the autumn of 1959 harvest was 30 million tons lower than the 1958 harvest had been.
Officials, however, reported that the harvest was the highest ever.
This saved them from reporting failure to Mao, but it also meant that the government based its taxes that year on the expectation the country had grown more food than ever.
And so in 1959, a year of famine, the Chinese government levied the highest taxes in recent history.
Peasants were required to turn over 40% of their total output.
And since that total output was a fake number calculated via nonsense math, they were basically ordered to hand over all of their food and, in many cases, more food than they actually had.
So.
Well, those numbers just aren't going to work out, Robert, for anybody.
No, they don't.
No.
And I bet they get all mad when they don't pay their taxes.
Yeah, they sure do.
I didn't pay my taxes for five years.
I didn't file, and it took five years for me to hear anything about it.
I bet that's not what the case was then.
No, no, no.
Actually, I will say this.
Everybody whines about the IRS.
Like, I grew up in a pretty conservative part of the world, and they're always talking about how horrible it is.
As someone who's been late on his taxes a few times, they're actually pretty easy to deal with.
Yeah, they try to find a solution.
They really want you to give them something and they'll work with you.
Look at us just defending the IRS here and their reasonable policies.
I mean, I like roads.
Yeah, I like ambulances.
Don't we?
Okay, speaking of something else I like: products and services that support the show.
And let's let those products and services advertise to us and irritate the ghost of Mao Zedong.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ego Modem.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network.
It's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through it.
I know it's a place they come look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Yeah.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.
10-10 shots fired.
City hall building.
A silver .40 caliber handgun was recovered at the scene.
From iHeart Podcasts and Best Case Studios, this is Rorschach: murder at City Hall.
How could this have happened in City Hall?
Somebody tell me that, Jeffrey Hood did.
July 2003, Councilman James E. Davis arrives at New York City Hall with a guest.
Both men are carrying concealed weapons.
And in less than 30 minutes, both of them will be dead.
Everybody in the chamber's ducks.
A shocking public murder.
I scream, get down, get down.
Those are shots.
Those are shots.
A charismatic politician.
You know, you just bent the rules all the time.
I still have a weapon, and I could shoot you.
And an outsider with a secret.
He alleged he was a victim of flat down.
That may or may not have been political.
That may have been about sex.
Listen to Rorschach, murder at City Hall on the iHeartRadio app.
Apple Podcasts are wherever you get your podcasts.
There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends...
Oh my god, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
They said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hey, I'm Nora Jones, and I love playing music with people so much that my podcast called Playing Along is back.
I sit down with musicians from all musical styles to play songs together in an intimate setting.
Every episode's a little different, but it all involves music and conversation with some of my favorite musicians.
Over the past two seasons, I've had special guests like Dave Grohl, Leve, Mavis Staples, Remy Wolf, Jeff Tweedy, really too many to name.
And this season, I've sat down with Alessia Cara, Sarah McLaughlin, John Legend, and more.
Check out my new episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Shari, stay with me each night, each morning.
Lushenko Affair and Epigenetics00:15:40
Say you love me.
You know I.
So come hang out with us in the studio and listen to Playing Along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
And we're back.
Boy, those were some good products.
Oh my God.
I mean, for the ones that meet my needs, I'm definitely going to think about exchanging goods or money for them.
Oh, yeah, goods or money.
Yeah.
They'll take both, usually.
Yeah, trade's big.
Trade is barter.
Oh, my God.
I'm all about barter.
Oh, my God.
Waited to see these clamshell necklaces that I make.
Oh, my God.
Okay.
So, we just talked about the autumn 1959 harvest, which was 30 million tons lower than it had been the year before, and the fact that they calculated the taxes based on sort of nonsense math of what they hoped it would be.
And so they wound up essentially taxing most peasants more than they'd actually grown.
I'm going to read another quote from Hungry Ghosts here.
In many places, the entire harvest was seized.
Sometimes, officials reported a harvest so big that even after taking away everything they could, including all livestock, vegetables, and cash crops, they still continued to search from house to house.
Mao had ordered officials not only to deliver the grain quotas, but also to set quotas for pigs, chickens, ducks, and eggs.
Party leaders went from village to village, leading the search for hidden food reserves.
It was a brutal and violent campaign in which many peasants were tortured and beaten to death.
So, again, IRS isn't sounding so bad now.
No.
So, this is a real dumb question, but like, money taxes pay for things the state needs.
You give the government dollars, and they use the dollars to pay a guy to make sure the roads don't fall.
Absolutely.
That's my understanding.
So when they're taking the food on principle, on principle that like, well, we're all afraid of saying that what the truth is.
Is it just so that the capital has a ton or are they selling it?
Is there global trade going on where it's somehow like benefiting?
The idea is both that the state is supposed to take care of everyone's food needs.
So you give all your food to the state and then it redistributes it to.
This is how it's supposed to perfectly work.
And of course, also, they're not just exporting to the Soviet Union.
They're supporting North Korea at this point.
Because it's this idea that the food that we produce will be used.
Some of it we will have to sell for resources so that we can buy things that we can't yet make ourselves and we can continue to expand and eventually create this wonderful socialist block that can compete against the decadent, you know, the terrible West and whatnot.
With our spread out seeds, with our smudgily spread out.
They're fucking horrifically spread out seeds.
Oh my god.
So much rain.
So much soil around them.
Oh, goddamn fertilizer.
Swimming in it.
Oh, boy.
Okay, so obviously willful denial of reality can only last for so long, as we in the West learned with a little war called All of the Wars We Fought in the Last 70 Years.
Eventually it became clear that even the heavy-handed methods used by the government weren't turning up as much food as they ought to have.
Since Russian agricultural science was obviously flawless, Mao came to the conclusion that the peasants were just burying their grain underground to hide it.
He accused them of eating turnips and pretending to starve by day and eating rice secretly at night.
In reality, most people were subsisting on gruel served in communal kitchens that was made mostly out of grass and inedible plants.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
Well, what else are you going to do?
I think those are now called grain bowls in LA.
Yeah.
Well, no, now you would pay $14 to have one of those out of a truck.
Nuts and seeds your body can't digest.
That's the food of this city.
At the end of the year, while tens of millions of people starved, the People's Daily newspaper advised peasants to, quote, practice strict economy, live with the utmost frugality, and only eat two meals a day, one of which should be soft and liquid.
Which, again, sounds pretty much like California, right?
Come on.
How does soil on the run?
You will be glad to know that while tens of millions of people were starving, Mao gave up meat.
Oh, that's good.
You know, follow the leader, come on.
Exactly.
Everybody give up meat.
Oh, we took all the meat.
Right.
And we beat half of you to death because you didn't give us your chickens.
Oh.
Oh, life's funny sometimes.
The Great Famine would last until 1961 and go down as the deadliest peacetime disaster in Chinese history.
During this entire time, Mao's government continued to export grain to North Korea, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere.
As a result of their desire to hide the famine and put on a successful face, the provinces that grew the most food during the famine were the provinces where the most peasants starved.
Oh, God.
Yeah, so the people who are actually making the most food are the people who are most likely to die.
In the end, conservatively, 25 to 30 million people died from the famines that came from the Great Leap Forward.
You will hear higher numbers as well.
It is a very politicized death toll, both because people, conservatives in the West, have a vested interest in making it seem higher.
So you'll sometimes hear 50 million, 60 million.
And also people who are further to the left or even Maoists today have a desire in downplaying the famine.
25 to 30, maybe 35 million seems like a very fair estimate based on what I've read, which is obviously a nightmare.
It's a big range, but it's all bad.
It's probably roughly half the death toll of World War II, starved to death during this famine.
That didn't need to happen.
Oh, my God.
You know?
So these deaths were the result of many different bad policy decisions.
The idea to make steel in backyard furnaces and stuff was not great.
I've tried to smelt, and I'm just a good person.
I tried, you know, amateur.
You know, you go online, you watch these videos.
You set it up in your backyard, you melt down your plowshares.
Of course, that's liquid, and then you let it cool into the shape you want.
I tried.
It never works.
Yeah, no, it's not great.
So there were a lot of factors in the Great Leap Forward and why so many people starved, but Leshenkoism was maybe the number one contributing factor to this famine.
Wow.
The blame for many of these deaths then must land on the head of Trofim Lushenko.
It is very likely, although impossible to prove to 100% certainty, that Lushenko was responsible for more deaths than any other scientist in human history.
Although there's still time for the guys who made the atom bomb to take that, you know, right?
Come on.
But right now, it's probably Lushenko.
Where is he right now again?
Oh, he's back in the Soviet Union.
That's about where we're about to go back.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So Trofim's dominance in the Soviet agricultural science started to degrade in 1953 after the death of Stalin.
Some of this was due to the millions of people who'd starved, but a lot of it had to do with some very public post-World War II failures.
Right after the war ended, Lushenko launched the great Stalin plan for the transformation of nature.
He believed that he could change Russia's climate and make it warmer by growing millions upon millions of trees.
That might work if you could do it.
I don't know.
Yeah.
It seems like it might actually work.
But because he was Lushenko, he ordered all of the seeds and saplings to be planted incredibly close to each other, and all of the plants died.
You know, I feel like if you're trying to grow things, the essential thing is to grow them right.
He has all these other big ideas, but can't actually nail just.
It's like people have been growing trees for forever.
Like, we know.
We know.
There's forests everywhere you look.
Come on, you don't need to change that up.
So, yeah, he tries to plant millions and millions of trees really, really close together, but the plants all died, of course.
Of course, they didn't die before the composer Shashkovich had written his choral symphony, The Song of the Trees, and Bertold Brecht had pinned this poem about the forest that was supposed to happen, but never wound up actually growing because...
Anyway.
Don't put your poem before the forest is what I always say.
You know, let the forest grow and then rise.
There's a lot of wisdom there.
Don't put your poem, but well, I'm going to read the poem for this non-existent forest anyway.
So let us, with ever newer arts, change this earth's form and operation, gladly measure thousand-year-old wisdom by new wisdom one year old.
Dreams, golden if, let the lovely flood of grain rise higher.
So.
All the more tragic.
Yeah.
Beauty wasted on science not working.
Really bad science.
If only he'd just known he just needed to have cars with not catalytic converters instead of trees or whatever, he probably could have accomplished.
Oh, yeah, that would have the same thing in, I don't know, warming Russia.
Just to have everyone pollute a lot.
Exactly, yeah, yeah.
Well, they're getting that anyway.
The way the Chinese ate rice, we just needed to drive pointlessly in Russia.
Come on, everyone.
It's your duty to just go in circles.
Just go in circles on the one road.
In 1962, the first generation of post-purge Soviet scientists began to carefully try to dismantle the myth of Lushenko.
Nikita Khrushchev, Stalin's successor, protected Lushenko for a little while, but Khrushchev lost his job in 1964.
And that same year, physicist Andrei Sakharov denounced Lushenko to the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Quote, he is responsible for the shameful backwardness of Soviet biology and of genetics in particular, for the dissemination of pseudo-scientific views, for adventurism, for the degradation of learning, and for the defamation, firing, arrest, and even death of many genuine scientists.
So, Sakharov is spitting some fire against Lushenko.
Damn.
Yeah, that's pretty damning.
In 1965, Lushenko was removed from his position as the director of the Institute of Genetics and forced onto a tiny experimental farm where he was allowed to continue his mostly lie-based research alone.
That same year, the president of the Academy of Sciences declared that Lushenkoism was no longer immune to criticism because it had been legally immune to criticism since I think 46.
An expert commission was sent to look into Lushenko's experimental farm and study his methods.
They found that he was an obvious and tremendous fraud.
These results were published, permanently demolishing Lushenko's career and reputation.
Oh, I mean, I have truly no sympathy for this man and who he killed.
But the image of, you know, this deeply fallen from gray scientist on a small little experimental farm trying to make Grain or CMG.
Yeah, yeah, trying to do whatever.
Maybe the seed should be even close.
What if I eat even more seeds?
Maybe the problem is we're not digging deep enough.
You guys give me too few seeds, and now everything's growing.
Okay, so Trofim attempted to defend himself from this attack.
He wound up in a six-hour debate with the Experts Commission, where he basically argued that what he fed his animals and how he altered his compost for different experiments, his utter lack of control groups, all of that was meaningless.
The details of his experiments shouldn't matter.
What should matter was his results, which he reported, and they should basically just trust what he reported as the truth.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, why would he lie as a scientist?
Exactly.
He's a scientist.
Just go to the last page.
Yeah.
Don't make me show my work.
The point is, whether I have a calculator or not a calculator, the answer is right.
I'm going to quote from a book called The Leshenko Affair here.
He had never troubled himself to be precise, and he insisted that precise data were not essential.
Shrilly, he called attention to biological theory, to the progressive biological theory that had been developed, quote, in unity with the practice of collective and state farms, and that had always enjoyed the support of the party and state.
Basically, he whined that his theories were correct with communism and the party had always supported him.
So why were they suddenly being so mean and asking for proof?
Which, if you're Leshenko, this has got to be confusing.
Yeah, you're like, you guys like me so much.
It was crazy.
Some of the times I'm like, well, they're not going to like this one.
And then you liked it, even though they're not going to plant even more seeds closer together.
Okay, well, they know.
Yeah.
Here's another quote from the Lushenko affair.
The specialists stuck to their narrow task with devastating effect, for Leshenko and his colleagues were simply incapable of sustained reasoning with facts and figures.
Their favorite devise, as the chairman of the investigating commission put it, was to, quote, to say a single thing and hush up all the rest, as long as everything looks good.
This was a perfectly obvious and deadly accurate characterization and would have been with respect to any of Lushenko's recipes at any time beginning in 1929 when he first became prominent with his scheme for vernalizing grain.
But that perfectly appropriate response to Leshenkoism was 35 years overdue.
Which we know what happened now in those 35 years.
Yeah.
Like 40 million people died.
Oh, so many.
About a million people a year, maybe.
Yeah.
It's hard to get.
A lot of that was Stalin wanting to kill the Ukrainians and the Kulaks and stuff.
Like there was other shit wrapped into that.
It's an impressive sustained production.
You know, like I feel like a lot of the big death tolls ascribed to one person are like in a bit of a tighter window.
And this is just like to just keep pumping out deaths.
Yeah, because you look at like the Nazis and they were murder sprinters.
You know, most of the killing they did was like 42 to 45.
And then they were sort of out of gas.
Lushenko is killing people for a really long time.
You know, you kill a man's fish, he starves for a day.
You teach a man to kill his fish accidentally.
Then you've got multiple generations of people with no fish.
Think of the long game.
So finally, at least, the Soviet Union's agricultural scientists were able to do actual science again.
Quote, the confusion of political and technical authority was now declared to be a mistake.
Specialists were to resume their laborious efforts to distinguish really worthwhile methods from those that only seemed so.
Period.
The 35-year error was not to be examined or analyzed.
So they understood Lushenkoism was wrong.
They denounced Lushenko, but they weren't willing to look back and really analyze how many people had died or how fucked up things had gotten because of their belief because that was still, you know, post-Stalin Soviet Union was a bit more open, but they still weren't willing to dig into just how fucked up things had felt.
For sure.
And other people were, you know, shared some responsibility.
Yeah.
You know, a lot of people shared responsibility.
It has been suggested by some historians that Trofim Leshenko may be the single individual most responsible for the fall of the USSR.
The true extent of the damage he did to mankind is incalculable.
Lushenko died in Moscow in 1976.
The government waited two days to even announce his death.
So in the end, he died obscure and discredited.
But the politicians and officials who enforced his shitty science and praised him while he was Stalin's favorite were not punished.
Nor were the people who'd helped export his bad ideas to China after 1953, when the Soviets knew damn well Leshenkoism did not work.
But now, as yet another mark against our benighted modern age of con men and bastards, Trofim Leshenko is enjoying a renaissance.
No.
Oh.
I barely got to relish that was like four minutes of him living in obscurity.
Yeah, no, and now he's back to, I mean, it's the trophinaissance.
Oh, boo.
Leshenkinaissance.
Yeah, right.
They can't all be the McConaughey.
No, no, no.
Not all the words euphonically work the right way.
No.
It looks better on paper, like Trofinaissance on, I can't even pronounce it.
No, it looks like it should pronounce.
Yes.
I'm not coming out right.
Anyway, record yourselves trying to portmanteau trophim and renaissance and send it to us on Twitter.
So according to an article in Current Biology, over in Russia, the work of Leshenko has been picked up by, quote, a quirky coalition of Russian right-wingers, Stalinists, a few qualified scientists, and even the Orthodox Church.
So it's coming back a little bit.
Now, one of the reasons for this is epigenetics, which is sort of a new finding in genetic science.
We have basically learned pretty recently that certain things that happen in the environment, like living through a bad winter or a war, starving for a period of time, can be passed down from parents to children, meaning that to a tiny extent, some of the ideas of Lamarckian genetics are not 100% wrong.
This has been seen by some as evidence that Leshenko was right all along, even though epigenetics has to do with changes in genes and Leshenko didn't believe genes existed.
The other factor is that these changes always revert after a couple of generations or something.
They're not permanent, but like if you live through a famine and you have a kid right around that time, you can pass on certain things as a result of the fact that you were in that extreme state.
Wow.
I mean, and this, I feel like the simple grade school version of genetics and evolution I learned did not take that into account, and I probably got answers marked wrong.
That perhaps.
I feel like that's somewhat recent in the whole world.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Epigenetics is pretty, yeah, definitely pretty recent that we've really gotten an understanding of it.
I don't claim to be an expert on genetics.
Famine Effects Passed to Children00:03:17
People are still figuring this out, but like Lushenko didn't believe in genes.
So it's wrong to say people who were attacking the Shenko weren't saying nothing is passed down like as a result of environmental changes.
They were saying you can't reliably control for that when you're trying to figure out how to grow better grain.
And in fact, Lushenko had declared the entire science of genetics to be, quote, an expression of the senile decay and degradation of bourgeois culture.
So crediting him for epigenetics is a little bit irrational.
Are the people though that are like giving rise to it again doing it out of the ideological principle of it?
That is a little bit of it, I think.
Some of it is because, and I'm not an expert on modern Russia, but like there's this, because obviously Russia right now is not the Soviet Union.
It's not anything close to a communist state.
But there is a lot of longing for that period of time for a variety of reasons.
Some of which there are things that were better back then, and some of which is just obviously the same way that people long for the 1950s and don't think about the fact that water fountains were segregated and stuff.
So it's a complicated thing, I think, why certain groups are starting to come back to these ideas.
But it is definitely scary because that means that there's the possibility that Trofim Leshenko's very, dumb science has the chance to kill somebody again.
Oh, man.
Guys, if you're listening at home, spread your seeds.
Just spread your seeds.
Don't plant them too deep.
You should be able to see them, but not too close together.
I've known a lot of really good farmers in my life.
None of them planted millions of seeds per acre.
Oh, man.
It's not.
Oh, it's like one of those gross things you buy at a state fair that's got like a little bit of molasses and it's just kind of like sesame seeds.
It's almost like a candied apple.
There's like a weird, I feel like southern dessert that's just like seeds and goo in a ball.
And you know what?
It's gross, and I wouldn't plant it in my ground and expect it to feed my family.
I haven't had a seed goo ball.
I mean, maybe it's just a weird thing that I was given that I was...
Somebody just put some seeds and goo together and like Yankee some seed goo.
I didn't buy it at the state fair.
It was just handed to me by a man at the front desk of a motel I was staying at.
I shouldn't have eaten that seed goo ball.
I'm still digesting it.
You just got poisoned by someone.
What state were you in?
I just remember like as a kid that I was like, yeah.
I mean, this is not a thing that I'm now.
I would be responsible to turn down a seed goo ball now.
I just was a child.
I was like, this is a dessert.
This feels weak.
I can say as a child in Texas, we played many a good game of poison the Yankee.
That was everybody's favorite game growing up.
Oh, on a hot day.
No better way to pass the time than to kill a traveling northerner.
Oh, we just love making carpetbaggers sick.
Grinding up glass, putting it in their grits, feeding it to them slowly until their insides bleed out.
The South.
Those are better times.
Oh, boy.
All right.
Well, that's our episode on Trophim Lashenko.
How you doing, Max?
I mean, I know that's not your style, nor is it the style of human history, but I wish the ending had been a little more uplifting rather than quietly covered up and now resurgent.
It would be nice if people ever learned lessons from history, but if there's one thing we've learned from history, it's that we don't.
Damn.
Thanks for having me on and depressing.
Yeah, thanks for coming on and being depressed by this.
History Lessons We Ignore00:03:23
You want to plug some pluggables?
Sure.
I have a 15-minute stand-up special on Netflix.
Go to the comedy lineup, part two.
And yeah, I don't know how to farm.
Oh, also, seedgooballs.com use promo code shaft, but I now sell these balls.
They're not good, but they are heavy.
So yeah, if you need a heavy snack, if you need a heavy ball, shaft is your man.
And I'm Marburt Evans.
You can find me on the internet at iWriteOK on Twitter.
You can find this podcast's website at behindthebastards.com.
You can also find us on Twitter and Instagram at BastardsPod.
So check us out, follow us, tweet us your best attempts to portmanteau trophim and renaissance.
I really feel like there's a way of just not getting it.
Trophim?
I don't know.
Trofimishance?
No, I'm not going to try it anymore.
Leshenkovushin?
I don't know.
That's closer.
All right.
Have a good day.
We'll be back next Tuesday talking about someone else terrible.
And until then, I love about 40% of you.
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