Do Two Wrongs Make a Right?

The more I delve into the history of the Soviet cloning program in the Lanakhidzist Revolution universe, the more my stomach turns. I'd known that they were using the geneset of disgraced secret police chief Nikolai Yezhov as their primary test bed for biomods, and that it often involved making clones and testing them to destruction, sometimes as embryos or fetuses, but also as born babies.

But now I discover that the lab in Stalingrad was also cranking out enormous numbers of baby Yezhov clones for Soviet chemical and biowarfare programs, once they had artificial uterine environments. They'd ship the "little hedgehogs" (yozhika, a play on "Yezhov,") in huge crates like day-old baby chicks -- except human babies don't have a yolk to sustain them for that day of travel, so the labs in Siberia would often find a quarter to a half of the airlifted shipment dead or dying. But they were just Yezhovs, so they were disposable.

I'm no apologist for Stalin's terror -- Nikolai Yezhov crossed a moral event horizon when he accepted Stalin's commission to be NKVD chief and ran the Terror meatgrinder at frantic speed. But I can't buy into the Asiatic principle that the crimes, however terrible, of one member of a family could stain everybody else -- not even clones, who share 100% of their Senior's genetic material. The Enlightenment principle that we are each individually responsible for our good and evil deeds, that there should be no corruption of blood (as the Founding Fathers thankfully wrote into the US Constitution) is too strongly written in my mind and heart, and I can't see all these clones of Yezhov as anything but innocent children being murdered.

Is it any wonder Kolya Voronsky is not quite completely sane -- growing up there in the Stalingrad lab, knowing full well that thousands of his clone-brothers are being made every year and shipped off to their deaths, that he is spared that fate only because Vladilen Voronsky's adoption of him severed the legal link with Yezhov?

All I can say is thank heaven that in our timeline cloning is not going to be developed as a gigantic out-of-control black project with Cold War fears or their War on Terror equivalent. We've had good, solid public discussions about the ethical issues and why we shouldn't be doing human cloning, even of great leaders, generals, inventors or whatever. It's possible that some rogue nation or sub-national actors might do human cloning once the technology for doing it with animals becomes sufficiently cheap and generally available, but hopefully we'll be able to catch them soon enough and will have the wisdom and compassion to deal humanely with their victims, just as we would a child conceived naturally through rape or any other sexual crime.