The scientists were 'unbearably horrified' by what they had done, reports Salon, and after that Brukhonenko experimented with animals instead.

In later life, he would be commended as one of the leaders of the Research Institute of Experimental Surgery, carrying out the first Soviet open-heart surgery in 1957. And after a lifetime of achievements, he would be posthumously awarded the Lenin Prize for his advances in artificial blood circulation.

But Brukhonenko shaped his understanding of artificial life support through a series of well-documented experiments on dogs. While shocking for their content, the research dazzled his international peers. After a viewing in London in 1942, a 1940 film of his experiments was shown to scientific audiences in the US in 1943.

A contemporary article in TIME magazine describes the scene: 'A thousand U.S. scientists in Manhattan last week saw dead animals brought back to life...'

The premise was shocking. It had barely been a decade since James Whale reanimated Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein' for the silver screen - and audiences were still captivated by daring flirtations with controlling mortality.

The film begins with a brief preamble from British scientist J. B. S. Haldane - a founder of neo-Darwinism, credited with the 'primordial soup' theory of evolution - who claims to have witnessed the experiments in Russia first hand in a vote of authenticity.

A short animation explains how the 'autojector' will working, filling in for the heart and lungs of a deceased animal, before a researcher gives a demonstration.

In the view of Gavan Tredoux, Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute: 'The device looks exactly as one would expect an apparatus in the laboratory of a deranged scientist to look.'

A dog's head is seen on a table, detached from the body. The action starts in medias res, the scientists applying citric acid to the already reanimated animal, which appears to contort and react to the stimulus.

The dog licks its nose and blinks several times as the acid is swabbed around the mouth, appearing uncomfortable with the sensation.

The scientists then show the dog can still hear, taking a hammer and banging it on the table next to the dog and further away. Again, the dog's ears twitch and the head appears to turn to identify the source of the noise.

The film moves on from 'the revival of separate organs' to the revival of 'a whole organism', showing a dog lying on a table, at first apparently unresponsive. An 'autojector' then whirrs into life, pumping liquids through elaborate glass pipes and containers.

A heartbeat monitor shows the beginnings of life as the machine continues to turn over, getting stronger and stronger until, at last -- movement.

The dog moves its head as its vital signs burst into life. Breathing makes gradual progress. Scientists poke at the dog's eyes, which now start to respond and blink instinctively.

'A few days later', the dog is seen walking and interacting with a scientist without prompt. It pants, wags its tail, and eats treats. The dog appears to be well, alive and healthy.

'After ten to twelve days, the dog returns to its normal state... After the experiment, the dogs can live for years, they grow, they put on weight, and have families.' 

The scientific community was astonished by Brukhonenko's work. TIME assessed that audiences felt 'this work might move many supposed biological impossibilities into the realm of the possible'.

Offering a glimpse into the mindset of Soviet-era scientific fascination, the magazine reported that schoolchildren in the USSR were 'constantly confronted' with posters heralding science as the answer to all worldly problems. 

'Red science is a vast, centrally directed enterprise... no scientific frontier is neglected. 

'Red scientists are well paid, get special vacation privileges, are rewarded with prizes up to 200,000 rubles for outstanding work, rank with writers in prestige.'

The CIA gives the average annual salary of a worker in the USSR as 4,940 rubles in 1943. 

Acknowledging the presentation, Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw reflected: 'I am even tempted to have my own head cut off so that I can continue to dictate plays and books without being bothered by illness, without having to dress and undress, without having to eat, without having anything else to do other than to produce masterpieces of dramatic art and literature.' 

While interesting, the research and its presentation did attract some controversy. In a 1945 appraisal, the Canadian Medical Association Journal judged the film 'well photographed and well arranged' but 'inappropriate for the general public'.

The authenticity of the video itself was also scrutinised by viewers in the years that followed. Historian Charles Pappas suggested that the goal of the film was to 'impress, rather than inform' and may, as such, have been a re-creation (but not a fake).

Tredoux, writing in 'Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday: The Genius Who Spied for Stalin' poked at the TIME article as reading 'like a press release from the Soviet press agency' in its praise of 'red science'. 

He noted Brukhonenko had made 'rather more modest claims' in his 1928 research, not citing reanimation, but 'fell victim to the relentless escalation of Soviet expectations'.

In 1937, Nature appeared to lend credibility to the experiment, citing a report some ten years prior on Brukhonenko's work leading up to the film.

'He removed the head of a dog and attached to it an apparatus which he called the autojector for artificial circulation of the blood, with the result that the severed head was kept alive for six months, reacting to all stimuli.

'Some years later, Dr Brukhonenko succeeded in resuscitating a whole animal.' 

Research continued in a similar vein for some time. Throughout the 1950s, 'transplantologist' Vladimir Demikhov recorded 23 surgeries on dogs before LIFE Magazine picked up the story of a two-headed Russian dog apparently showing normal functioning.

Brodyaga, a German Shepherd, successfully hosted the head of Shavka, a smaller dog, with both heads able to see, smell and swallow.

Shavka's head was not attached to Brodyaga's stomach, and anything she drank spilled out onto the floor.

Again, Demikhov's success with experimental coronary artery surgery and organ transplantations built his legacy as a pioneer of modern medicine. But beyond this, his experiments into the colourful and the strange reflect a very different scientific milieu to ours in the early 21st century.

The outstanding reach of early 20th century science pushed limits - inevitably showing us at our best, and our worst. It was in this environment we first entertained the possibility of interplanetary exploration, conquered nature through applications of medicine - and started mass-producing cans of beer.

But the period also saw scientists conduct horrifying experiments in the name of 'progress' - eugenic science and sterilisations on an industrial scale, the deliberate testing of disease on the infirm and unconsenting, and the development of bombs that could raze cities.

In an extraordinarily niche paper on the trope of isolated heads in early Soviet science and fiction, Russian historian Nikolai Krementsov assessed that the fascination stemmed from 'anxieties about death, revival, and survival' in post-Revolutionary Russia.

Krementsov judged that the interest had developed from 19th century scientific research, but was recast by the revolution-inspired belief 'that anything was now possible, and "newly born" Soviet citizens could now control their own destiny'.

Brukhonenko's work not only captured the attention of the public and his peers, but was rewarded with great sums from state sponsors until his research stagnated operating on human cadavers.

His ten-minute film, and the interest it generated, therefore not only provides a window into his narrow field of work - but a deeper insight into the feeling of the time: that life and death were themselves controllable through the unfettered searchings of science.

The start of the 20th century saw the buds of industrial and enlightenment progress blossom into grandiose new superstructures - ideologies and fields of research capable of creating and destroying life with cold, scientific reliability. More than hopes of space-travel, better health or tinned beer, it is this obsession with morality that best reflects our base nature - and brings interest back to a small laboratory in Moscow 85 years on.