It seems to me that people ITT read ‘Soviet psychic dogs’, and their mind jumps to imagining cold-war shenanigans. And they completely miss the ‘1922’ right at

It seems to me that people ITT read ‘Soviet psychic dogs’, and their mind jumps to imagining cold-war shenanigans. And they completely miss the ‘1922’ right at the beginning of the article—when the SU was barely starting, Durov was living out the fame acquired under the Tsarist Russian Empire, and oldschool off-the-wall ‘science’ by enterprising gentlemen was still around. Basically the dude wanted to see the trainer do psychic stuff wtih his dogs, so he went and did. It doesn't look like the state spent millions of rubles on that, and it's not clear if Kazhinsky's reports went anywhere other than the shelf—while notably he seems to have finished some writeups in 1962, when the Cold War was going into full swing.