Lenin was a mushroom
Lenin was a Mushroom 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.
Hoax
The hoax took the form of an interview on the television program Pyatoe Koleso. In the interview, Kuryokhin, impersonating a historian, narrated his supposed findings that Vladimir Lenin consumed large quantities of psychedelic mushrooms and as a result, transformed himself into 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", creating the illusion of a reasoned and plausible logical chain. Proof included such "arguments" as the similarity between the cross-section of the armored car from which Lenin spoke and the mushroom spawn of a fly agaric and the claim that "ninel" is a French mushroom dish.Background
Kuryokhin's widow, Anastasia, explained the origin of the hoax in an interview with Komsomolskaya Pravda:Impact
The timing of the hoax played a large role in its notoriety, coming as it did during the height of the glasnost period, which was characterized by the ebbing of censorship in the Soviet Union; many facts about Soviet history that were previously inaccessible and classified were being made public, leading to many controversial revelations about the country's history, often presented in sensationalistic form.Sholokhov claimed that as a result of the show, an appeal was made by a group of older Communist 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.