Soviet Union
During the Siege of Leningrad (1941–1944) in World War II, at least nine Soviet botanists starved guarding a seed bank of 250,000 food crop samples. They refused to eat a single one—rice researcher Ivanov died amid thousands of bags of rice.
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In the 1920s, Soviet biologist Ilya Ivanov tried to create a "Humanzee," a human-chimpanzee hybrid. All experiments in Africa and the Soviet Union failed. Modern genetics confirmed this is impossible: humans have 23 chromosome pairs, chimpanzees 24.
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In 1983, during the Cold War, a Soviet Union early warning system detected 5 US missile launches. Officer Stanislav Petrov judged it a false alarm — reasoning the US would launch everything if starting a nuclear war. He was right: the satellite had mistaken sunlight for launch flashes.
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