I am not sure if telling it second-handedly would make any sense. Actually, even watching it translated to english hardly would be the same experience. Basically, to any intelligent person it was an obvious joke, but quite a good one. The most powerful part of it wasn't what he was telling, actually, but how he was doing it: you know, some sane-looking person, a fluent, eloquent speaker, is telling something so ridiculous so seriously, that you might even start to question what is true anyway. He uses some clever words, pseudo-scientific side-notes, mis-interpreted quotes, and all the time he looks deadly serious, repeatedly asking the audience: "You see what's going on here? It's absolutely unbelievable!"

To summarize it, it was something like this: he persuades you, that Lenin was heavily abusing psychodelic mushrooms, then, going through some pseudo-scientific gibberish makes a claim, that heavy use of mushrooms led to that a mushroom basically displaced human consciousness, then, by making some random observations "supporting" his claim, makes the statement "Lenin became a mushroom" more and more literal.

Anyway, I would argue that it has nothing to do with Soviet propaganda and such: it was a great performance, but not so different in it's nature from a kind of reasoning in the very modern western propaganda or quasi-documental movies about aliens and such. Only it was mockingly exaggerated on purpose.

Argument chain is mostly irrelevant here, people who fall for this simply believe anything who pretends to be an authority.

Heck, I know for one that I /could/ believe something like this. A friend of mine once convinced me that both wheels of a bicycle rotate into the opposite direction, just to test my gullibility. I totally fell for it, even though we were on the bike at that very moment. I could've easily checked or reasoned that it didn't make any sense whatsoever.

> I'm curious how someone made this outlandish claim sound plausible.

From the article:

> Soviet television had, up to that point, been regarded by its audience as conservative in style and content. As a result, a large number of Soviet citizens (one estimate puts the number at 11,250,000 audience members) took the deadpan "interview" at face value, in spite of the absurd claims presented.

I guess this had something to do with it? If people were used to TV being a certain way, and this "interview" was presented in the same way, then it would seem reasonable that it would be taken up in the same was as every other. Nothing (aside from content) made it stand out from other shows.

Saying that, the claim is crazy, and it does seem strange that it was seemingly accepted as truth. I wonder how a similar stunt could be attempted today, and what the reaction would be...

"Every revolution, he argued, is indeed an impressive visual spectacle. Although we usually assume that visual representations of a revolution happen later, after the events have already taken place, Kurekhin argued that revolutions are simply too spectacular to happen on their own. Some- one “first [has] to visualize certain images and later attempt to reproduce them in reality.” During a recent visit to Mexico, he continued, he had seen frescos that depicted the Mexican revolution of the early twentieth century in a style identical to the one used for the Russian Bolshevik revo- lution: “the same exhausted people, armed with primitive tools of labor, overthrowing some rulers.”

In order for revolutionary leaders in both places to have imagined these events in a similar manner, their minds must surely have been sub- jected to similar influences. In Mexico, the source of influence is clear. During ritualistic ceremonies, Kurekhin explained, the native peoples routinely used drinks prepared from Lophophora Williamsii or peyote— a Mexican cactus with strong psychotropic properties.2 Although Mexican cacti do not grow in Russia, Kurekhin noted, Russian forests do have an abundance of similar hallucinogens: mushrooms, most prominently the fly agaric mushroom (mukhomor).3 These mushrooms, he claimed, induce the same effects as the Mexican cacti: “people see absolutely incredible pictures very vividly and colorfully” and “enormous scenes of great events and revolutions fly before your eyes.”

Building on this premise, 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 mush- rooms, but I felt great.’” Bolshevik leaders ate a lot of mushrooms, Kure- khin 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 unwaver- ing 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 be- ing 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.”

A Parasite from Outer Space:: How Sergei Kurekhin Proved That Lenin Was a Mushroom Alexei Yurchak Slavic Review Vol. 70, No. 2 (SUMMER 2011), pp. 307-333

http://libgen.io/scimag/get.php?doi=10.5612/slavicreview.70....

This was very very early post-Soviet TV. Soviet TV had around 6 channels and everything on them was always very very bland and was supposed to be accepted outright it not believed.

Kind of gets you after 30 years of watching.

And then boom, and you have "Lenin is a Mushroom". I believe some confusion was genuine.

Was thinking the same thing. That seems like a big omission from the article unless the chain was just some sort of incoherent meandering rant...

There was no valid arguments. Just bogus claims interspersed with irrelevant quotes and a pretence of authority.

It was more like a network of connections than a chain.