"Stalin Planned Army of Ape-Man Super-Warriors"

Here's one from the Old Cold War files. A story originally running in The Scotsman claimed that Uncle Joe wanted to breed a race of hybrid ape-humans to employ in battle. As we know, Russia and the Soviet Union were on the bruising ends of two global wars in the twentieth century, a big reason for mirroring Kaiser Wilhelm II's strategy of conquering eastern Europe and making it regime-friendly satellite states. The ape-man warriors might have made a fine replacement for the millions of conscripted soldiers who died in the First and Second World Wars, assuming you could successfully demobilize them after combat, something Wilhelm had a little trouble doing after the Great War. And of course nothing bad came of that...

But I digress. This article is almost two years old. Can anyone vouch for the authenticity of the claims? I will ask our resident Muscovite when he returns from Moscow. In the meantime, here are the links to the MosNews and the original from The Scotsman.

C. Rice: There is no new Cold War

Depending on how much weight you put in what the Bush Administration says, it appears that we've been rejected even before we got off to a start. While in Moscow for talks with her counterpart Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice rejected the notion that the tensions between the two nations are anything like what they were during the Cold War. We agree. The two superpowers are no longer threatening to kill each other over deep ideological matters. But the new missile defense tensions are something different from the many systems that were proposed and tested during the Cold War. The last of them, the Strategic Defense Initiative, would have been based on a massive network of orbiting satellites with laser beans. While still in violation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty of 1972, it was a different game from what proposal of having the new system based in Poland and the Czech Republic. The laser beams would be in space, not on the ground. Either way, it never went forward despite billions of dollars being spent on research for it.

Although the Arms Control Association hailed the November 2006 takeover of the U.S. Congress by Democrats as a "coup de grace" to Bush's desire to withdraw from the ABM Treaty, Bush's crew still still talking about it and working on it. His talk of withdrawing from the treaty was one thing which sparked an interest in this blog. And we should know by now, does the fact that two of the world's most powerful governments saying there's no new Cold War mean there's not one?

Certainly not. As I've said for some time, this one's going to be even bigger and better than the last one. Even Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is evening dressing up for it!

We are not the only ones who think there's more to it than Ms. Rice or Mr. Lavrov would like to give credit for. Andrei Illarionov, former aide to Russian President Vladimir Putin, told a Russian radio station that a keynote speech Putin delivered on 10 May 2006 to Russia’s Federal Assembly "shows that Russia has chosen a course towards militarization and sends out a clear signal to restore Soviet-era values and prepare for confrontation with the West." [Link.]