In January 1991, our country, which was then still called the USSR, was agitated by incredible news. The TV program, shown almost throughout the entire Soviet territory, said that the leader of the world proletariat, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, was actually … a mushroom that was controlled by radio waves from Mexico! The absurd statement was supported by "scientific evidence" and the boundless confidence of the people in the then TV: if they said from a blue screen, then it was true!
The killer did not look at the deceased
Of course, this version was a hoax, but its authors, musician Sergei Kuryokhin and TV journalist Sergei Sholokhov, wanted not only to deceive gullible viewers, but to prove to everyone that television is capable of manipulating people and controlling their minds.
The idea of the plot was proposed by Kuryokhin. After Sergei's death (he died in 1996 from a rare disease - heart sarcoma), his widow Anastasia told in a newspaper interview how it all began. The musician saw on TV a program about the death of Sergei Yesenin. The author of the program claimed that the poet did not commit suicide, but was killed. The evidence looked, to put it mildly, controversial. Photos from Yesenin's funeral were shown on the screen, and the voice-over said something like: this man is not looking at the deceased, is it because he is a murderer? Kuryokhin immediately concluded that any assumption could be proved in this way. The main thing is for the version to be heard “from the TV”, which the people have infinite faith in.
A little later, in a conversation between Kuryokhin and fellow musicians, the topic of the leader was raised. And some of the interviewees expressed the opinion that every leader should have traits inherent in any plant or animal. In particular, Lenin was then compared to a mushroom, and Hitler to a dolphin.
The modern philosopher Dmitry Galkovsky is sure that Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel "The Red Wheel", where Lenin is called "a mushroom in a black pot", had an influence on people who decided on this hoax. The book was published in Russian in the United States in the late 1980s - so the version of the origin of the fantastic hypothesis looks quite plausible.
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Chicken or horse?
For further narration, it is necessary to clarify at least two circumstances: what kind of person Sergei Kuryokhin was and what the then television was.
Kuryokhin was known as a musician, composer, screenwriter, and actor. In other words, the personality is versatile. As a keyboard player, he took part in the recording of several albums of the cult groups "Aquarium", "Kino" and "Alisa". At the performances of his own group, Pop Mechanics, musical numbers alternated with theatrical ones - with the obligatory elements of farce. For example, in March 1988, in the Leningrad Oktyabrsky Hall, musicians and mime artists from the Litsedei theater performed as part of one concert, a beauty contest was held, and in the finale a live cow was brought to the stage.
In 1991-1992 Kuryokhin and the leader of Aquarium Boris Grebenshchikov starred in the short film "Two Captains - 2" (written and directed by Sergei Debizhev). The film was created in a pseudo-documentary style and parodied classic Soviet action films for the younger generation.
In the early 1990s, Kuryokhin often gave parody interviews to Leningrad newspapers, posing as a person keen on science, and supporting completely absurd statements with complex terminology. So, to one of the journalists, he said with complete seriousness that he was actually a chicken, since all his habits were chicken, and only the habit of unconsciously digging holes in the ground with his feet like horses makes him think: maybe he is not a poultry?
In another interview, the musician claimed that Grebenshchikov stood at the head of the movement to transfer the capital from Moscow to Vladimir, and as soon as this happens, he, Kurekhin, will become the Grand Duke.
The journalists understood that the musician was fooling around and, as if behind a screen, was hiding his “I” behind irony. But the main thing for them was that the popular person agreed to an interview, which could increase the circulation of the publication. And similar provocative revelations of Kuryokhin were regularly published in the press.
Life after stagnation
Let's recall the events of the late 1980s - early 1990s: the Armenian pogroms in Baku, the abolition of the one-party system in the state, the election of General Secretary Gorbachev as President of the USSR, the adoption of declarations of sovereignty by a number of Soviet republics, the mass withdrawal of its former functionaries from the CPSU, the fall of the Berlin Wall, monetary reform with the urgent replacement of all 50- and 100-ruble bills, the introduction of ration cards …
After several decades of political and economic stagnation, so many changes in such a short time literally confused the people. Almost a day later, television reported on a new turn in the life of the country. The population has been trained to believe any blue screen news - even if at first it seems completely incredible.
Another fact, which few people remember now, was key to our story: on July 14, 1990, President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev signed a decree "On democratization and development of television in the USSR", which canceled preliminary censorship. The content of many programs has become much sharper. TV reporters have been actively exposing the dark sides of the country's recent communist past.
One of the most popular television products was the Leningrad publicistic program "The Fifth Wheel", which aired twice a week and consisted of author's blocks on various topics. Editor-in-Chief Bella Kurkova challenged the staff to rethink the realities of the Soviet period. The program regularly featured opposition politicians at that time, Anatoly Sobchak and Boris Yeltsin, her literary and artistic block provided air to writers and musicians whose work had not previously been recommended for display and discussion.
Both the mushroom and the radio wave
In January 1991, TV presenter Sergei Sholokhov, in his part of the "Fifth Wheel" program, talked with Sergei Kuryokhin. The conversation was previously discussed only in general terms, so the broadcast was based on improvisation. The musician came up with, the presenter supported in agreement.
Kuryokhin said that he had finally become aware of the main secret of the October Revolution. It consisted in the fact that Lenin ate mushrooms in large quantities - and in the end he himself turned into a mushroom.
The musician did not skimp on "scientific evidence":
- Once I came across a phrase from a letter from Lenin. The phrase sounds like this: "Yesterday I ate mushrooms, I felt amazing."
As other serious "arguments" Kuryokhin cited the fact that the figure of the leader on the armored car in an inverted form resembles a mushroom mushroom, and the word "ninel" (that is, "Lenin", read from right to left) supposedly means the French name of a popular mushroom dish.
The musician did not come to the interview empty-handed - he brought and showed the photographs to viewers. True, Lenin was absent from most of them, but Kuryokhin skillfully created the impression that all the photographs were directly related to the life of the leader. Some of the pictures showed a boy. Sergei Kuryokhin named him Sasha and claimed that he took Lenin to the mushroom places, and the pictures where he is not near Vladimir Ilyich convincingly prove that Sasha went for forest gifts for the great friend of all children.
In addition, Kuryokhin noted, there are books about mushrooms in the Lenin Library - and this cannot be a coincidence.
Sergey also talked about his trip to Mexico, where he learned that some Indians eat cacti, which resemble mushrooms in their qualities. And the inventor of the radio, Alexander Popov, allegedly discovered that all such plants have the properties of radio waves. Therefore, the mushroom man could be radio-controlled. The musician referred to the frescoes in the Mexican temple, which are very reminiscent of posters and newsreels of the October Revolution, and concluded that such people, who are both mushrooms and radio waves, could have been manipulated from Mexico.
A mammal cannot be a plant
During the recording of the program, Sholokhov and Kuryokhin did not always manage to restrain their laughter, they covered their mouths with their palms, imitating a cough. Because of this, many episodes of the program had to be re-filmed.
But the hoax succeeded. The program was broadcast almost all over the country, and millions of people believed the fictional sensation.
In December 2008, in an interview with the Krestyanka magazine, Sergei Sholokhov said that the next day, a delegation of old Bolsheviks came to the head of the ideological sector of the Leningrad Regional Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Galina Barinova. They demanded to answer: is it true that Lenin was a mushroom? Barinova said: of course not, because a mammal cannot be a plant.
This fact became known to Sholokhov, and he, continuing the hoax, published an article with a refutation in the local newspaper Smena. Say, mushrooms are both plants and animals, which Kuryokhin convincingly proved in the transmission.
Later, when it became clear to everyone that it was a joke, the plot continued in folk tales. There are cases when foreigners, seeing containers with kombucha in the apartments of our citizens, asked what it was. And they, as if in secret, were answered: these are the eternally living particles of Lenin's grandfather - once all the inhabitants of the USSR were forced to cultivate them in order to drink an infusion, from which the ideas of communism are better perceived.
And in 1991, the debate about whether the leader of the world proletariat was a mushroom pretty quickly overshadowed an event of a much more serious scale - the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Author: Platon Viktorov