When Comrade Stalin sensed the twin evils of fascism and capitalism threatening Mother Russia, he tapped the boundless ingenuity of the proletariat to create an experimental program of electrode-driven Super Soldiers. Genetic engineering? Pfft — that’s for decadent Americans like Steve Rogers.

This is Pravda’s answer to the forthcoming blockbuster Captain America.

From 1936 to 1941, Soviet scientists “implanted gold electrodes” into the brains of 300 unwitting “volunteers,” thereby “eliminating the pain center.” (Neurologists have now stopped reading this piece.) Then they were turned into cyborgs, as their “limb bones” received “titanium implants that protected the soft tissues against landmines or shells, as well as from gunshot injuries.” Because in Soviet Russia, pain feels you.

How titanium implants in someone’s bones protect his “soft tissue” from blast or ballistic trauma is cheerfully unexplained. Luckily, Pravda’s source for this is a book by “American historian Jeff Strasberg,” who appears not to exist.

Why didn’t any of these Proletarian Powerhouses transform the balance of power in the Second World War and then the Cold War? For one thing, some of them formed a “special unit” — Russkie Howlin’ Commandos? — that couldn’t withstand the Nazi assault at Brest. Afterward, “a nuclear bomb was created, and the idea of soldiers-terminators was deemed obsolete,” Pravda explains.

Two galling things about this. First, it’s way too close to Ed Brubaker’s “Winter Soldier” storyline in the Captain America comics. Cap’s old partner Bucky Barnes, long thought dead during a clandestine WWII mission, got revived by the Russkies, brainwashed, outfitted with a metal prosthetic arm and used as a secret assassin during the height of U.S.-Soviet tensions. Later, Bucky would don the mantle of Captain America himself when Steve Rogers briefly died got transported through time and space by the machinations of the Red Skull.

Second, the Soviets already had a super-soldier. No one remembers the Red Guardian, Moscow’s answer to Captain America? Worked for the KGB? Led a squad of Soviet bootleg Avengers? Had a shield that wasn’t so conducive to throwing? His bones certainly weren’t made of titanium. But the only pain he felt was the desolation of knowing the Soviet empire was doomed to collapse.

Illustration: Clayton Henry/Wikipedia