By JEROME STARKEY

Archive papers say the Kremlin chief demanded his Planet of the Apes warriors be resilient and resistant to hunger.

He said they should be of immense strength but with an underdeveloped brain. He also wanted them to work on railway construction.

Labs and ape skeletons have been found in the Black Sea town of Suchumi in Georgia by workmen building a kids playground.

It is thought the apes were among creatures captured for research during the 1920s project, which cost Stalin £8,500  more than £1million in todays money.

Scientist Ilia Ivanov was ordered to breed the mutants. He had already tried to create a super-horse by crossing the animals with zebras.

His archived reports show the Pasteur Institute in Paris let him use a research station in Guinea, West Africa, for ape-breeding research.

And he wrote to the ruling Politburo: The biggest problem is to catch living females. Researchers learned to torch trees and chase apes into cages as they scampered down.

Ivanov reported that African women had been seized to be impregnated with ape sperm, but no pregnancy resulted. Female gorillas were set to receive human sperm.

When his project failed, Ivanov was arrested in 1930. He became one of millions rounded up by paranoid Stalin and died in a labour camp in 1932.