How a 1991 TV Prank Convinced Soviet Viewers Lenin Was a Mushroom

On 17 May 1991, an hour-long interview on a Russian television show left part of the country believing something extraordinary: that Vladimir Lenin had turned into a mushroom. Lenin had led the 1917 October Revolution, became the first head of the Soviet Union in 1922 and died of a stroke in 1924 at the age of 53. He was, by every ordinary measure, a man. The mushroom story was a prank, and plenty of viewers did not realise it.

A letter, a photo and a mushroom-shaped armoured car

The guest was introduced as a famous political figure and movie actor. His name was Sergey Kuryokhin. He sat in an office lined with bookcases, with documents piled on a desk to give the proceedings an air of serious research, and explained his theory without cracking a smile.

Mushrooms, he said, were made of radio waves and had personalities of their own, so eating them replaced Lenin's human personality with the collective mind of the fungi. The change, he claimed, had taken place before the revolution.

He then produced what he called evidence:

• A letter from Lenin in which he mentioned feeling good after eating some mushrooms.
• A photograph that seemed to show a mushroom on Lenin's desk.
• A diagram showing that the shape of the armoured car from which Lenin once gave a speech strongly resembled mushroom roots.
• Lenin's name spelled backwards, "ninel", which Kuryokhin said was a French dish made of mushrooms.

There was also a short, pre-recorded interview with a biologist who specialised in fungi. It added a studious flavour to the broadcast, but it did not mention Lenin, radio waves, or the possibility of a person turning into a mushroom.

Why the joke was believed

The programme, The Fifth Wheel, was watched by millions and had a reputation for serious investigative journalism. It had revealed hidden details about Soviet history, so its viewers had learned to take it seriously.

The timing mattered too. This was the era of perestroika, or restructuring, and glasnost, or openness: reforms that cut state censorship and encouraged open discussion. The Soviet Union was only months away from collapsing, and many people no longer treated the communist regime and its past as beyond question.

So the mushroom claim landed in a strange gap. It was so ridiculous that it might be true, and exactly the kind of secret the authorities would have covered up. Even the sight of the two men breaking into laughter halfway through the broadcast did not give the game away.

The pranksters and the official answer

Kuryokhin was not really a politician or a movie actor. He was an avant-garde musician and artist who liked to provoke people. The host, Sergey Sholokhov, had devised the whole interview to test how much his audience would believe, and to show the dangers of trusting the media without thinking.

The test worked. The station was soon flooded with concerned and bewildered calls. Sholokhov later claimed that a group of ageing communists visited their local party headquarters in Leningrad to demand an answer. An exasperated official had to assure them that Lenin had never been a mushroom, on the grounds that "a mammal cannot be a plant".