SHROOM LORE: NO. 01

The year was 1991. The Soviet Union was unravelling. State television was still state television which meant trusted, authoritative, the kind of thing your grandparents watched without question.

And then musician Sergey Kuryokhin appeared on the program Fifth Wheel.

For nearly an hour, Kuryokhin delivered a straight-faced, meticulously structured argument— weaving together real scientific facts, philosophical references, obscure historical footnotes— to arrive at one conclusion: Vladimir Lenin had, over the course of his life, consumed so many psychedelic mushrooms that he had gradually become one.

Not metaphorically. Biologically. A fungus.

The logic was designed to sound airtight. Real citations. Confident delivery. The kind of performance that tricks the brain into nodding along before it has time to catch up.

And people believed it. Reportedly, the program received calls from concerned viewers. Newspapers ran pieces addressing the claim. A generation raised on the authority of state media encountered, possibly for the first time, something broadcast as fact that was entirely, magnificently, fake.

It was performance art. A hoax. A piece of absurdist genius dressed up in the grammar of a documentary. And mushrooms were at the centre of it.

WHY DO MUSHROOMS KEEP SHOWING UP IN THE STRANGE CORNERS OF HISTORY?

The Lenin stunt was absurd, sure, but it wasn't random. Fungi have always occupied a peculiar space in human mythology. They appear where they shouldn't. They defy easy categorisation. They're not plants, not animals, not quite like anything else.

A few more moments from the long, strange history of mushrooms and the human imagination:
The Ancient Egyptians called them the sons of the gods. Born from lightning, not from seed. Because they appeared overnight and without obvious origin, mushrooms were thought to be supernatural phenomena. Too sudden, too mysterious to be ordinary.

In medieval Europe, rings of mushrooms in fields (now known to be the fruiting bodies of underground mycelial networks) were called fairy rings. Standing inside one was said to make you invisible to humans, or trap you in the fairy realm for a hundred years. The science (a single fungal organism slowly expanding outward from a central point) is somehow both more and less magical than the legend.

The ancient Aztec name for psilocybin mushrooms was teonanácatl : flesh of the gods. Consumed in ritual ceremonies by healers and priests, they were believed to open a channel between the human world and the divine. When Spanish colonisers arrived and witnessed these ceremonies, they tried to suppress them entirely. The mushroom, of course, survived.

In Japan, the matsutake mushroom is so deeply tied to ideas of impermanence and the passing of seasons that it appears in poetry and art going back over a thousand years. It resists cultivation to this day. It grows only where it chooses. There's something the Japanese sensibility has always understood about fungi that Western science is only beginning to catch up with.

And then there's mycelium itself. The vast underground network that connects trees in a forest, passing nutrients and chemical signals between them, allowing a mother tree to feed its seedlings through the soil. Scientists now call it the Wood Wide Web. Indigenous communities across the world had already understood it for centuries. 

WHAT KURYOKHIN ACTUALLY UNDERSTOOD

The Lenin broadcast was a prank. But it worked because mushrooms already lived in the cultural imagination as something slightly unreal. Something that bends the rules. Something you could almost believe anything about.

Kuryokhin didn't just troll a nation. He revealed something true about the fungal kingdom: it is strange enough that the stories feel possible. Mycelium spreads invisibly beneath everything. Mushrooms appear from nowhere. A single organism can span acres underground and live for thousands of years.

When you know all that, the idea that a revolutionary leader might slowly, over decades, have fused with the fungal world feels... not entirely out of the question.

(It was still a hoax. Just to be clear.)