![hearts of iron 4 ussr hearts of iron 4 ussr](https://cdn.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/steamcommunity/public/images/clans/9948323/509d6f893f7abf34dda8bdba284fece5cc86907d.png)
In May 1958, Demikhov gave a public lecture in Leipzig, East Germany, and even performed several heart transplant surgeries (on dogs) in Leipzig by that December. That didn’t keep his footage from sparking fears of reanimated bodies, of life artificially extended beyond the grave-and the Cerberus film wasn’t as easily dismissed. While he had successfully isolated certain organs, many of his other claims served only as propaganda, suggesting that Russian science would lead to human immortality.
![hearts of iron 4 ussr hearts of iron 4 ussr](https://media.moddb.com/images/mods/1/37/36967/Khruschev_part_1.jpg)
His experiments had been half-real chimeras. This motley circus belonged to Sergei Bryukhonenko, a man both hailed for his groundbreaking research into blood transfusion and later reviled (outside Russia) as a surgical charlatan. The film presented medical centers with whole departments dedicated to isolated organs: hearts beating on their own, lungs breathing by use of a bellows, the head of a dog supposedly kept alive by machines. Some dozen years before, Russia had released another film, its first ever produced for Western audiences, called Experiments in the Revival of Organisms. Keystone-France/Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
![hearts of iron 4 ussr hearts of iron 4 ussr](https://www.keengamer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/67929-780x439.jpeg)
Might it not be a hoax? Vladimir Demikhov, pictured here in 1970, believed that his surgical experimentation on dogs could be translated to humans. (He succeeded but the dog died, and he had an effigy stuffed and paraded about campus.) News also reached the surgeons at Boston’s Peter Bent Brigham, though Joseph Murray, the young doctor on the cutting edge of early transplantation efforts, wasn’t convinced of its veracity. The footage reached as far as Cape Town, where Christiaan Barnard (already working on the first human heart transplant) felt compelled to try and repeat Demikhov’s experiments. And yet the flickering images sent a tremor round the surgical world. The film and the physiologist behind it, Vladimir Demikhov, emerged from behind the Iron Curtain, inexplicable, macabre, and without much context. No one speaks in the footage if they had, most of the wider world wouldn’t have been able to understand. Cerberus, named after the mythical three-headed hound of Hades, parades before the camera, a surgically remastered two-headed dog. Offered a saucer of milk, both heads drink for an applauding group of onlookers close-cut angles reveal the bandages and stiches. The second head lolls to one side, tongue panting, legs hanging askew over the shoulders of his larger mate. He leads the creature into the light of a courtyard, revealing a strange composite body: a large mastiff dog with a strange and cockeyed mini-body projecting from his back. A man in a long white lab coat gestures to a corner, where a figure waits, shadowy and indistinct. Butcher: A Monkey’s Head, the Pope’s Neuroscientist, and the Quest to Transplant the Soul, published in March 2021 by Simon & Schuster.Ī grainy black-and-white film shuddered across television screens in the last days of May 1958. This story is excerpted and adapted from Brandy Schillace’s Mr.