Alexei Yurchak, “A Parasite from Outer Space: How Sergei Kurekhin Proved That Lenin Was a Mushroom,” Slavic Review, 2011.
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Kurekhin began to formulate his famous thesis: “Reading the correspondence between [Vladimir] Lenin and [Iosif] Stalin I came across one phrase: ‘Yesterday I ate too many mushrooms, but I felt great.’” Bolshevik leaders ate a lot of mushrooms, Kurekhin mused, and some of them surely had hallucinogenic properties. If consumed for many years, these mushrooms can permanently change an individual’s personality. Indeed, Kurekhin continued in an unwavering scholarly tone, “I have absolutely irrefutable proof that the October revolution was carried out by people who had been consuming certain mushrooms for many years. And these mushrooms, in the process of being consumed by these people, had displaced their personalities. These people were turning into mushrooms. In other words, I simply want to say that Lenin was a mushroom.”
Because the subject of this audacious claim was the leader of the communist revolution, about whom public criticism and irony had always been taboo, the claim itself became even more believable. Had Kurekhin been speaking of anyone else, his words would easily have been dismissed as a joke. But Lenin! How could one joke about Lenin? Especially on Soviet television. Audiences could not help but attribute some credibility to the revelation. During the broadcast, which lasted over an hour, the audience received no explanation of whether this was an ironic prank or a serious program. Millions of television viewers found themselves at a loss.
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