Today in History - May 17: Russian TV audience tricked into believing Lenin was a mushroom

Russian television viewers were stunned, baffled, bemused or alarmed by a live news report making a bizarre accusation about an iconic former leader on May 17, 1991.

A historian interviewed on current affairs program Pyatoe Koleso made an elaborate explanation about a previously unreported claim about Vladimir Lenin.

The claim was that Lenin and others in the early communist movement consumed so many psychedelic mushrooms that they themselves turned into mushrooms.

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"The mushrooms, as they were consumed by these people, displaced their personalities, and people became mushrooms. 

"So, I am simply trying to say that Lenin was a mushroom. And not just a mushroom; he was also a radio wave."

The broadcast was obviously a hoax with the intent of poking fun at conspiracy theorists.

But after decades of Soviet television, where satire was verboten and news programs were taken deadly seriously, many viewers did not pick up on the joke.

Unflattering reports about politicians like Lenin were strictly forbidden up until the fall of the Soviet Union.

And as a consequence, many shocking truths were only coming to light as the government loosened its censorship laws.

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Reporter Sergey Sholokhov recounted how a group of old Communists demanded an explanation.

"The day after the broadcast, a delegation of Old Bolsheviks came to Galina Barinova, who was in charge of ideology at the regional party committee, and demanded an answer to the question: is it true that Lenin is a mushroom?" Sholokhov said. 

"'No!' said Galina Barinova. 'But how could that be? They said so on TV yesterday'." 

The hoax was a collaboration between Sholokhov and Sergey Kuryokhin, an experimental musician and artist.

In the live and largely improvised broadcast, Kuryokhin played the purported historian and Sholokhov the interviewer.

Sholokhov later described the episode's ratings as "truly astonishing".

Nowadays, Russians will recount watching the episode but few will admit to being fooled.

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