There are plenty of claims that Soviet scientists/doctors performed unethical human experiments akin to torture, and that whistleblowers of this were imprisoned or killed to keep them silent. Seeing how most reports of this in mainstream media don’t link to citations or primary sources and are from capitalist countries with a clear incentive to make communists seem like villains (either on purpose or because they were also duped into the propaganda), it seems pretty fishy to me, but I don’t have much knowledge on USSR history to provide a reliably sourced and articulate defence when I see it discussed. I know this community, especially Dessalines, is good at curating linked sources debunking anti-communist claims, does anyone have one of those lists for this claim?
i have literally never come across this claim. in researching it now, the closest i found was an allegation that the NKVD tested lethal poisons on prisoners to find one that would not be detected during autopsy. the sources for these claims were:
1.a book written by boris volodarsky, who “is a regular contributor to the Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Voice of America, ITV, and John Batchelor Show”2.a book by vadim j. birstein, a geneticist. i can’t find the bibliography to examine the sources myself, but even if i could, (conveniently) the sources are “formerly secret documents” of which the originals are “still unavailable”. he writes in the introduction that he will primarily be focused on biology and medicine but he seems far more focused on arguing that the soviets were like the nazis-
he claims that stalin waged a “war against the Jews”, ran “official anti-semitic campaigns” and told the nazis “they were uninterested in saving Polish Jews” because “Soviet leaders were just waiting until there were enough non-Jewish intellectuals so that they could end the overwhelming presence of Jews in the Soviet administration”.
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he says that stalin was inspired by hitler and “considered sending Soviet Jews into exile and prison camps” in 1951-'52. it is worth noting that the section with all these claims has a single citation (and for all we know that citation only backs part of a single assertion).
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he mentions the nazis every chance he gets instead of focusing in and then making comparisons
he also clearly makes assumptions:
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he often writes phrases like “seems true”
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he implies certain things may have happened that are then contradicted (e.g. implies mustard gas was applied on skin but then uses quote saying it was ingested)
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says things like “evidently, stalin agreed” (because someone was allegedly killed means stalin was personally involved, according to this dude)
3.wikipedia also cites this paper i can’t access but perhaps someone else can find it. it’s worth noting that one of the paper’s authors, dany shoham, is “a former senior analyst in IDF military intelligence” and, no joke, is one of the biggest proponents of the “covid-19 is a bioweapon that came out of a chinese lab” narrative.sorry i couldn’t be of more help. it’s hard to refute stuff like this without access to the sources they (people listed above) used. if there is a specific claim you have heard, i’m happy to look into it
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I couldn’t find anything, but bump because this is an important question.
Some “historians” claimed Stalin tried to raise an army of human-chimpanzee hybrids. It’s mostly anticommunist fantasies
