Ilia Ivanov was not your normal dude. I mean sure, he was Russian, the name makes that pretty obvious, but even for a Russian he was a pretty weird guy. Ilia was a biologist who lived during the end of Czarist Russia and the beginning of the Soviet Union. No, that doesn't really make Ilia that weird either. What made Ilia weird was that from the time he was a child he was fascinated by animals fucking. Yes, that's right, Ilia was that kind of weird.
It wasn't just watching the act of animals fucking that fascinated Ilia, it was what exactly was going on inside that really got his mental gears turning. In essence, at a time when people mostly understood pregnancy as men putting their peeders in women's hoo-haws until a baby popped out, Ilya wanted to understand exactly how babies were made. Hence all the watching animals going at it, or at least, I hope to god that was the only reason. Anyways, in order to not seem like some kind of weirdo, Ilya went to university and trained to be a biologist, which gave him carte blanche to watch and study all the animal sex he wanted.....for science.
With his biology degree in hand, Ilya then spent years studying semen, including how to transport it outside of the body for prolonged periods of time and how to clean it, because obviously one does not want to be dealing with dirty semen. From this research, he developed the first method for artificial insemination, demonstrating with horses how the semen of one stallion could be used to impregnate 500 mares in a single year, whereas with natural copulation they could at best do fifty. Ilya's discovery promptly caused the whole world to lose its shit, except of course the stallions who probably felt pretty disappointed about the whole thing. Now most people would probably think ruining sex for horses everywhere would have been a good place to stop, but not Ilya. From artificial insemination, his research branched off into putting the semen of one animal into another to see if he could create any new cool hybrid animals. He created zorses (zebra-horse), zedonks (zebra-donkey), zubrons (bison-cow), and about every combination of rats, mice, guinea pigs, and rabbits you can think of.
Things began to get weird in 1910 when Ilya got up before a big science conference and declared that one could probably make a human ape hybrid, at which time everyone had a good chuckle. You know who didn't chuckle, the Soviet Union, who fifteen years later gave him a shit ton of money to do just that. Now the first thing you need for an ape human hybrid is of course apes, and not having any, Ilya went to one of the top ape research centers in the world, which of course was in Paris, to get some. It was there that Ilya met the famed surgeon Dr. Serge Voronoff, who thought it was all a grand idea. Of course, Serge was grafting splices of ape testicles onto the balls of rich old men at the time, theoretically to improve their vitality, so it shouldn't be that surprising. Serge helped Ilya transplant a human ovary into a chimp and then impregnate it with human sperm, because why the hell not at this point, then helped Ilya get some apes from Africa and sent him on his way.
Ilya returned to Russia with his chimps and then tried inseminating three of the females with human sperm.....through artificial means of course you sick bastard. It didn't work. Ilya, not to be deterred, decided that the problem was it needed to be the other way around. He scoured Russia and somehow found five women who were willing to be artificially impregnated with ape semen......you know, for science. However, before the fun could begin, all of Ilya's apes died. Ilya tried to get more, but before he could he was arrested by the Soviet secret police and sent to the gulag, though for reasons involving the Soviets just loving to arrest random people, and not because he was trying to breed ape people. Ilya died a year later.
Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Ivanov#/media/File:Ilya_ivanov.jpg