Chapter 34
When it comes to zombies, either you go full Beelzebub, or you don’t. You either stick with E=MC2 science or 666 superstition to explain their shuffling existence. You can’t have both. When restless explorer (and occasional cannibal) William Seabrook jumpstarted the zombie craze in 1929 with his story “The Magic Island,” he established the trope of the living dead borne by the malefic practices of this mundane world and not a mystical one. Ethnobotanist Wade Davis’s “The Serpent and the Rainbow” found even more evidence that zombies, unlike shambling mummies, snarling wolfmen, or sparkling vampires, had their origins in the realm of folk pharmacology wielded by earthly villains.
Zombies had enough grounding in reality to serve efforts like political scientist Daniel Drezner’s “Theories of International Politics and Zombies” and the Centers for Disease Control’s “Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic” graphic novel. Both used undead plagues as the perfect metaphor for how nations act and contagions are checked.
That’s why the Soviet Union’s attempt to create the living dead in the workers’ paradise seems so plausible. It echoes a popular trope in 1920s Russia that the frontiers of science were being pushed back so quickly, even Lenin, who died in 1924, might soon be revived. It also parallels those stories, whose verifiable elements have been stretched like an elastic waistband, that maximum psychopath Joseph Stalin bankrolled a program to create “ape-man Superwarriors” intended to crush the soft and pampered armies of the capitalists. Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov, a Russian expert in the fields of artificial insemination and interspecies hybridization, had begun to tamper with the idea of crossing man and ape in a presentation he gave to the World Congress of Zoologists in Graz, Austria, in 1910. Sixteen years later in 1926, Ivanov and his son journeyed to French Guinea in Western Africa to attempt artificial insemination between man and beast. There, far from prying eyes, Ivanov inseminated a trio of infant chimpanzees stolen in infancy a few years before from their families with human sperm. When the crossbreeding failed, a frantic Ivanov went full Dr. Moreau, attempting to impregnate African women with chimpanzee sperm—without their full knowledge or informed consent as to what he was actually doing with their bodies.
But Ivanov was only runner-up in the Soviet Mad Scientist Pageant. Sergei Bryukhonenko surpassed him by light-years by deciding, as the poet Shelly wrote in “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats,” to “No more let Life divide what Death can join together.” In his case, this meant zombie dogs.
Bryukhonenko, an expert in blood transfusions, used medical exhibitions to showcase the remarkable advances he made in his field. He impressed his colleagues at the 1925 conference of the Second Congress of Russian Pathologists, demonstrating the autojektor, a heart-lung machine he had constructed for his collection of severed dogs’ heads. Sucking out blood from the dogs’ skull, the autojektor delivered the life-giving fluid to a glass compartment. After it was warmed up and oxygenated in the transparent confines, the blood was pumped back into the dog, hovering now in that division between life and death. With the machine’s assistance, Bryukhonenko could keep a dog’s head alive for about 100 minutes. The next year, at the 1926 Congress of Russian Pathologists, he again demonstrated the autojektor, presenting the slow but steady headway he had made in keeping the dogs alive. With the Soviet government subsequently funding Bryukhonenko, he reported again on the experiments’ progress at the Congress of Soviet Physiologists in 1928.
Bryukhonenko’s goal was honorable in that way they give Nobel prizes for: to invent a heart-lung machine that would sustain a continuous supply of oxygenated blood to patients in adverse conditions—such as being dead. Then he transgressed into territory occupied by “Herbert West—Reanimator.”
In 1934, Bryukhonenko and his assistants tried to resuscitate a man three hours after he had hanged himself. Little by little, the scientist’s autojektor siphoned blood from the stiffening cadaver, then returned it to the lifeless body, flush with warmth and dense with oxygen. The process was slow; the wait agonizing. After several hours, the man’s heart began to beat. A sound burbled in his throat. His eyes flickered as if awakening from a dream. He seemed to gaze directly at the researchers, like Lazarus looking up at his fellow villagers in Bethany. The resurrection, though, was short. Mercy overcame curiosity, and the scientists turned off the machine and let their subject slide back into the dark. (The victim was probably no more alive than the dead frogs that twitched and jumped when Luigi Galvani shocked the lifeless amphibians in the eighteenth century. Probably. )
Bryukhonenko’s reputation was cemented at another exhibition. When the Congress of American-Soviet Friendship met in New York in 1943, the main attraction was a 19.5-minute film, “Experiments in the Revival of Organisms.”
As black and white as a police car, the film depicts Bryukhonenko’s team providing a severed canine head with oxygenated blood. They poke it, tickle it with a feather, dab its nose and gums with citric acid, and pound the surface around the head with a hammer, all of which elicits twitching and licking movements. For the coup de grace, another dog on an operating table is killed by draining it of blood. After letting the body sit for 10 minutes, the surgeons attach Bryukhonenko’s autojektor to it. When the process of refreshing and returning the blood back to its owner is completed, stirring classical music plays. “After 10 to 12 days,” the film’s narrator assures us, “the dog returns to its normal state. After the experiments, dogs live for years. They grow. They put on weight, and have families.” The pooch frolics about, oblivious to its abbreviated romp in the hereafter. All that was left out was “The Bride of Frankenstein’s” famous toast: “To a new world of gods and monsters!”
While the film is still controversial, Bryukhonenko’s experiments were well-documented enough that the movie is possibly more a re-creation than a fake. Its goal was to impress, rather than inform, and it succeeded wildly. The exhibition’s massive audience of 1,000 scientists finished what the other shows began, cementing Bryukhonenko’s reputation and burnishing his legend.