Lenin was a mushroom

Lenin was a Mushroom (Russian: Ленин — гриб) was a highly influential televised hoax by Soviet musician Sergey Kuryokhin and reporter Sergey Sholokhov. It was first broadcast on 17 May 1991 on Leningrad Television.^[1][2][3]

Kuryokhin proposed that the round item seen here was a psychoactive cactus and evidence of Lenin's mushroom habit.

Hoax

The hoax took the form of an interview on the television program Pyatoe Koleso (The Fifth Wheel). In the interview, Kuryokhin, impersonating a historian, narrated his supposed findings that Vladimir Lenin consumed large quantities of psychedelic mushrooms and eventually became 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.

The timing of the hoax played a large role in its notoriety, coming as it did during the glasnost period when the ebbing of censorship in the Soviet Union led to many revelations about the country's history, often presented in sensational form.^[4]

Sholokhov claimed that as a result of the show, an appeal was made by a group of 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 one of the top regional functionaries 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 Alexis Yurchak has questioned the veracity of Sholokhov’s account.^[4][5]

See also

• The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross