Lenin was a mushroom () was a televised hoax by Soviet musician Sergey Kuryokhin and reporter Sergey Sholokhov. It was first broadcast on 17 May 1991 on Leningrad Television, in a form of an interview about the supposed findings that Vladimir Lenin was in fact a mushroom.
Hoax The hoax took the form of an interview on the television program . In the interview, Kuryokhin, impersonating a historian, narrated his supposed findings that Vladimir Lenin consumed large quantities of psychedelic mushrooms and as a result, transformed himself into a mushroom and a radio wave. Kuryokhin arrived at his conclusion through a long series of logical fallacies and appeals to the authority of various "sources" (such as Carlos Castaneda, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Konstantin Tsiolkovsky), creating the illusion of a reasoned and plausible logical chain. Proof included such "arguments" as the similarity between the cross-section of the armored car from which Lenin spoke and the mushroom spawn of a fly agaric and the claim that "ninel" (Lenin spelled backwards) is a French mushroom dish.
Background Kuryokhin's widow, Anastasia, explained the origin of the hoax in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda:
Impact The timing of the hoax played a large role in its notoriety, coming as it did during the height of the glasnost period, which was characterized by the ebbing of censorship in the Soviet Union; many facts about Soviet history that were previously inaccessible and classified were being made public, leading to many controversial revelations about the country's history, often presented in sensationalistic form.
Sholokhov claimed that as a result of the show, an appeal was made by a group of older Communist Party members to the Leningrad Regional Committee of the CPSU to clarify the veracity of Kuryokhin's claim. According to Sholokhov, in response to the request, a former agitprop functionary, director of the Leninrad Lenin museum stated that Lenin could not have been a mushroom because a mammal cannot be a plant. (Modern taxonomy classifies mushrooms as fungi, a separate kingdom from plants.) Sociologist Alexei Yurchak has questioned the veracity of Sholokhov's account.Обманули дурака?, Izvestiya, 1996, no. 65(24672), p. 5
See also The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross
References
Further reading
External links Part 1, Part 2 of a subtitled, shortened version of the video Partial transcript Full program