It looks like a neglected zoo. But the Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy has its own macabre chapter in the history of the Soviet Union. Shaun Walker reports from Sukhumi, Abkhazia

Work at the institute was instrumental in the creation of a Soviet polio vaccine, and its scientists worked on all the major diseases of the 20th century

From the old railway station, now a hollow shell covered in weeds, a long concrete stairway, sheltered by sub-tropical foliage, winds from the centre of Sukhumi up to a collection of buildings, many pocked with bullet holes or crushed by bombs.

The first thing that registers is the putrid smell of animal faeces, then from inside one building comes a primeval squawking that sounds like a child being tortured. Cage after cage of distraught-looking monkeys come into view, nearly 300 in all, gnawing at mandarins and scampering around their enclosures.

This is what remains of the Institute of Experimental Pathology and Therapy, the first primate testing centre in the world, and possibly the site of a macabre Stalinist experiment to breed a human-ape hybrid. Set amid palm trees and lush greenery on a hill just outside the centre of Sukhumi, it was once the envy of the West. Its behavioural and medical experiments set it at the forefront of groundbreaking medical discoveries, and trained monkeys for space travel.

But the years of Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika, then the Georgian-Abkhaz war, took a heavy toll on the centre. Most of its scientists left to set up a new centre in Russia, along with most of the monkeys that were not killed. What is left today is a disturbing shadow of the institute's former glory.

Legend has it that the institute, which opened in 1927, was born of a secret Soviet plan to create a man-ape hybrid that would become a Soviet superman and propel the Soviet Union ahead of the West. The Soviet elite, goes the apocryphal tale that has appeared widely in Russian media, wanted to create a prototype worker that would be inhumanly strong and mentally dulled, to carry out the gruelling work of industrialising the vast expanses of newly Sovietised territory.

Scientists at the institute today admit that these experiments did go on at the institute, though they deny it was part of any overarching plan for the creation of a new race. The tests were performed by Ilya Ivanov, an eminent Russian biologist who had also collaborated with the Pasteur Institute in Paris. About the turn of the century he had perfected the technique of artificially inseminating mares, and had also produced cross-breeds between various different species. Then, Europe was alive with ideas of eugenics, and the Soviets were out to prove once and for all that Darwinism had superseded religion.

"Professor Ivanov started these experiments in Africa and continued them here in Sukhumi," says Vladimir Barkaya, who started at the institute in 1961 and is now scientific director. "He took sperm from human males and injected it into female chimpanzees, although nothing came of it." Professor Barkaya denies monkey sperm was used on human females, although letters were apparently received by the institution by people of both sexes offering to participate in the experiments.

In time, the institute evolved from science fiction to evidence-based practice. Work at the institute was instrumental in the creation of a Soviet polio vaccine, and its scientists worked on all the major diseases of the 20th century.

One man's name is synonymous with the centre. Boris Lapin was born in 1921 and after a heroic turn in the Second World War, started work at the Sukhumi monkey colony in 1949. In 1959 he was appointed director of the institute, and ran it up until 1992, when during the Abkhaz-Georgian war he fled along with the majority of employees and monkeys across the border to Russia. Despite being in his late eighties, he still runs the institute set up at Adler in Russia.

"My biggest achievement over all this time is that we were able to build the institute up from scratch again," he says, from his Adler office, plastered with photographs of famous visitors to the Sukhumi institute over the years, from Nikita Khrushchev to Ho Chi Minh.