
How Vladimir Lenin Became a Mushroom - lermontov
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/lenin-mushroom-hoax-russia
======
kenning
There's something special about documentaries -- you can convince the audience
of practically anything if you're a good enough director.

My favorite case is the Errol Morris documentary Mr. Death. It follows the
story of a man who went from an electric chair technician to a holocaust
denier. Morris attempted to direct the movie from the subject's perspective so
that the audience could understand how you could slowly become a holocaust
denier.

When he showed the movie to a Harvard film class, half the class believed that
Morris himself was a holocaust denier, and the other half of the class
believed the subject's (holocaust denying) side of the story, specifically
that the Auschwitz gas chambers never actually had poison gas in them.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Death:_The_Rise_and_Fall_o...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Death:_The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Fred_A._Leuchter,_Jr.#Background)

~~~
hansjorg
Another good one is Dark Side of the Moon where amongst others Henry
Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld and Alexander Haig explain how the Apollo 11 moon
landing was faked.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Side_of_the_Moon_(film)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Side_of_the_Moon_\(film\))

~~~
flukus
I must confess to falling for that one briefly (In my defense, I was half
asleep at the time), they start off using very cagey language so it seems like
what you'd expect in a real interview but by the end theiry're blatant enough
to be unbelievable.

A more recent one was a Mermaid mockumentary, even though they are honest
about being completely fictional in the credits there are still people that
believe they were real documentaries sadly.

------
igivanov
There were no storms. I lived in the USSR at the time and once even went to a
show where Kuryokhin performed. Thankfully his performance wasn't the whole
show (it was Viacheslav Polunin why I went there) because it was extremely
lame IMHO, though it appears he wasn't so bad at pulling people's leg.

The mushroom thing was just a silly joke and a not very popular one at that.

~~~
romwell
It might have not been very popular, but plenty of people are aware of it to
this day (which is what the article says anyway ).

I personally think it was brilliant, but I have a knack for absurdities.

More info (in Russian):
[https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9B%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BD...](https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9B%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BD_%E2%80%94_%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B1)

A less formal article:
[http://lurkmore.to/%D0%9B%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BD_%E2%80%94_...](http://lurkmore.to/%D0%9B%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BD_%E2%80%94_%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B1)!

------
avodonosov
"storm" is a huge exaggeration of course. The joke is fairly strained; they
are even laughing in the end of the video. I don't think many people seriously
believed it.

BTW, another similarly popular joke is that Putin is a crab.
[https://google.com/search?&q=putin+crab](https://google.com/search?&q=putin+crab)

In early 90-ies freedom of speech, I was impressed by a newspaper which was
proving that apes evolved from human (and lower animals evolved from apes).
Arguments were taken from school biology textbook (gills in human embryos,
fossils, etc).

------
wimagguc
I learned about this video from HN last year or so. The relevant discussion is
here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11952927](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11952927)

...and the Youtube links still work too!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2cs8QLnxlU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2cs8QLnxlU)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExXDxpBFFR0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExXDxpBFFR0)

------
EugeneOZ
It was not “theory”, nothing about conspiracy. It was joke and everybody (kids
and adults) were understanding it’s a joke. Article is full of lies.

------
rdtsc
I really don't remember this one. Granted I was young then but Lenin being a
mushroom is something I would have remembered.

It was a time when commercial advertisements, tabloids, rumors like that were
starting to become popular and people who haven't dealt to seen those things
before were really fooled into believing them.

They were used to government propaganda and were inoculated and skeptical
against that alright. Lenin being a mushroom, or the story about scientists
who drilled the deepest borehole and hit hell and a creature with red eyes
popped out of there. Or aliens landing. Or anyone remember
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Kashpirovsky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Kashpirovsky)?
people were glued to their TV waiting for their diseases to be cured.

There was also other more insidious propaganda from years before manufactured
by KGB. It had a department devoted to planting fake stories in western media
to undermine credibility of Western countries. One evil one they created was
that AIDS was created by the American scientists to kill black people
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION)

------
205guy
I find the interpretation of the event to be interesting. The atlas obscura
link here and the Wikipedia link in the other HN thread both make it sound
like the intention was to be a hoax, to make people believe something false.
But most of the Russian observers of the actual event that are commenting here
say it hardly "fooled" anyone, it was just funny. I wonder if the show was
meant more as satire or parody, as in "let me make fun of the stuff they used
to feed us on TV, now that access to media is more open." So it would've been
a very self-aware performance, aimed at an audience that was attuned enouh to
pick up on the humor. The cognitive dissonance of the mushroom Lenin was a
parody of the years of cognitive dissonance from the official propaganda on
tv.

I'm not sure where the hoax interpretation comes from. The atlas obscura
article seems mostly sourced from Wikipedia, or vice versa, it's hard to tell.
Calling it a hoax may be more of a western misinterpretation, one that reveals
a bias in believing the Russian public was unsophisticated and easily fooled.

Also sometims truth is stranger than fiction. Nature's prior art is a mushroom
that takes over ants:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis)

The following article explains how the game The Last of Us expands this
concept until human victims turn into mushrooms:
[https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/but-not-simpler/the-
fun...](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/but-not-simpler/the-fungus-that-
reduced-humanity-to-the-last-of-us/)

------
emmelaich
Contrary to the claim in the article, I suspect people are much more gullible
coming through a social upheaval such as that in 1990's USSR.

 _" Yurchak says that it wasn’t that the viewing audience was any more or less
gullible than they are today, it’s just that people, everywhere in the world,
have a tendency to believe what the TV says"_

------
baybal2
This keeps popping on HN now and then.

>So it would've been a very self-aware performance, aimed at an audience that
was attuned enouh to pick up on the humor.

Except they didn't. Up until today, there are people - equivalent of American
lizardmen believers going around preaching around that the story was true.

>Calling it a hoax may be more of a western misinterpretation, one that
reveals a bias in believing the Russian public was unsophisticated and easily
fooled.

And the Western commentators were 100% correct in that. There was and still is
a class of public in Russia that will believe anything coming from a
"reputably looking official in a suite." This was the extend of Soviet three
letter services brainwashing powers. They learned a lot from herr Goebbels.

Now look, these former three letter services servicemen are doing the exact
thing in US. Russian propaganda in US does not target any much normally
politically active population, no they target the kind of people believing in
bizarre stuff, and with a remarkable success. The still raging, so called,
"pizzagate" is a proof.

------
jwilk
> Because a mammal cannot be a plant.

But mushrooms aren't plants.

~~~
vadimberman
Funny, because that was exactly the response to that functionary.

------
iamthirsty
His body has been on display for almost a century. Some conspiracy theories
make no sense but some will believe whatever they're told.

------
cormullion
I wonder whether the idea had its origins here:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Mushroom_and_the_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Mushroom_and_the_Cross)

------
JackNichelson
Repost. Also off topic.

~~~
jwilk
From the HN guidelines:

 _Please don 't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is
spam or off-topic, flag it._

------
mirimir
I don't know. I mean, if Lenin did use psychedelic mushrooms, maybe it did
boost his charisma, creativity, etc.

But the title? It's just silly.

~~~
gk1
Read the story. The hoax is that Lenin literally became a mushroom.

~~~
mirimir
I did read the story. Here's the punchline:

> Correlating the existence and use of hallucinogenic mushrooms in both Russia
> and Mexico, Kuryokhin posited that drugs had ultimately inspired the
> successful propaganda of the Russian revolution. In fact, Lenin had consumed
> so many mushrooms that their fungal “consciousness” had completely consumed
> him in return. By the end, Kuryokhin put it plainly, saying, “I have
> absolutely irrefutable proof that the October Revolution was carried out by
> people who had been consuming certain mushrooms for many years. And these
> mushrooms, in the process of being consumed by these people, had displaced
> their personalities. These people were turning into mushrooms. In other
> words, I simply want to say that Lenin was a mushroom.” He also made
> references to mushrooms being made out of radio waves, as if he didn’t
> already sound crackpot enough.

So no, "Lenin was a mushroom" was just a figure of speech.

Edit: The hoax was that he used psychedelic mushrooms, and that they "inspired
the successful propaganda of the Russian revolution".

~~~
int_19h
It was not a figure of speech. The guy said, numerous times, that Lenin was
literally a mushroom (and also literally a radio wave). That was the whole
point of the piece!

~~~
goialoq
According to modern physics, all of us are wave oscillations.

~~~
int_19h
Those would be de Broglie waves, though, not electromagnetic.

------
nradov
It's depressing to see how gullible some supposedly intelligent and educated
people can be. Perhaps colleges need to add a new question on their admission
applications: "Was the Holocaust a real event where the Nazis actually
murdered over 6M innocent people? Yes/No.” And then anyone who answers No can
be sent back for remedial history class.

~~~
mulmen
Or you know, they could take the opportunity to _educate_ those students?

~~~
nradov
Someone who failed to learn such a basic historical fact in high school isn't
ready for college. It's akin to being illiterate or unable to do basic
arithmetic.

~~~
nerdponx
[https://www.xkcd.com/1053/](https://www.xkcd.com/1053/)

~~~
saagarjha
The issue with this is that the "diet coke and mentos thing" is generally not
a requirement to be taught at school, while the Holocaust is.

~~~
flukus
Not universally. We were taught in school but it was very brief, anyone that
was off sick that day would not have learned about the holocaust (or several
other WW2 atrocities) in school. It never featured on any tests.

~~~
saagarjha
Interesting. In California it appears to be part of the requirements for 10th
grade history, and we had a unit on it at school.

