“Some only appear crazy. Others are as mad as a bag of cats.”

“In her old age, Olga Lepeshinskaya became entranced by the mystical concept of the ‘vital substance’, and recruited her extended family to work in her ‘laboratory’, pounding beetroot seeds in a pestle to demonstrate that any part of the seed could germinate.”

Stalin’s more eccentric scientists are the subject of this blogpost for Faber & Faber.