The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia

By Anya Bernstein

A gripping account of the Russian visionaries who are pursuing human immortality

As long as we have known death, we have dreamed of life without end. In The Future of Immortality, Anya Bernstein explores the contemporary Russian communities of visionaries and utopians who are pressing at the very limits of the human.

The Future of Immortality profiles a diverse cast of characters, from the owners of a small cryonics outfit to scientists inaugurating the field of biogerontology, from grassroots neurotech enthusiasts to believers in the Cosmist ideas of the Russian Orthodox thinker Nikolai Fedorov. Bernstein puts their debates and polemics in the context of a long history of immortalist thought in Russia, with global implications that reach to Silicon Valley and beyond. If aging is a curable disease, do we have a moral obligation to end the suffering it causes? Could immortality be the foundation of a truly liberated utopian society extending beyond the confines of the earth—something that Russians, historically, have pondered more than most? If life without end requires radical genetic modification or separating consciousness from our biological selves, how does that affect what it means to be human?

As vividly written as any novel, The Future of Immortality is a fascinating account of techno-scientific and religious futurism—and the ways in which it hopes to transform our very being.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Jun 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9780691185958

Book preview

THE FUTURE OF IMMORTALITY

PRINCETON STUDIES IN CULTURE

AND TECHNOLOGY

Tom Boellstorff and Bill Maurer, Series Editors

This series presents innovative work that extends classic ethnographic methods and questions into areas of pressing interest in technology and economics. It explores the varied ways new technologies combine with older technologies and cultural understandings to shape novel forms of subjectivity, embodiment, knowledge, place, and community. By doing so, the series demonstrates the relevance of anthropological inquiry to emerging forms of digital culture in the broadest sense.

Sounding the Limits of Life: Essays in the Anthropology of Biology and Beyond by Stefan Helmreich with contributions from Sophia Roosth and Michele Friedner

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Democracy’s Infrastructure: Techno-Politics and Protest after Apartheid by Antina von Schnitzler

Everyday Sectarianism in Urban Lebanon: Infrastructures, Public Services, and Power by Joanne Randa Nucho

Disruptive Fixation: School Reform and the Pitfalls of Techno-Idealism by Christo Sims

Biomedical Odysseys: Fetal Cell Experiments from Cyberspace to China by Priscilla Song

Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming by T. L. Taylor

Chasing Innovation: Making Entrepreneurial Citizens in Modern India by Lilly Irani

The Future of Immortality: Remaking Life and Death in Contemporary Russia by Anya Bernstein

The Future of Immortality

REMAKING LIFE AND DEATH

IN CONTEMPORARY RUSSIA

ANYA BERNSTEIN

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON & OXFORD

Copyright © 2019 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press

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All Rights Reserved

LCCN: 2019932296

ISBN: 978-0-691-18260-5

ISBN: (pbk.) 978-0-691-18261-2

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Editorial: Fred Appel & Thalia Leaf

Production Editorial: Ali Parrington

Jacket/Cover Design: Layla MacRory

Jacket/Cover Art: Janusz Jurek, Papilarnie III (2015)

Production: Erin Suydam

This book has been composed in Arno

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

To my father, Lev Bernstein (1951–2014)

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations    ix

Acknowledgments    xi

Bibliography    233

Index    255

ILLUSTRATIONS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FIRST AND FOREMOST, I thank my ethnographic consultants in Russia, who gave generously of their time serving as my guides through the diverse but interconnected communities of Russian immortalism. Ever since I first appeared in Moscow in the summer of 2013 armed with only a few newspaper clippings about the scandalous business of Russian cryonics, six people in particular worked tirelessly to expand my understanding of their causes, imaginaries, and projects. Our discussions, often lasting for hours into the night, helped me overcome many a preconceived idea, as I hope this book will do for my readers. All mistakes and misinterpretations, of course, are my own.

Mikhail Batin expanded my view of aging and anti-aging, in addition to introducing me to many of the other key characters in this book. A self-appointed gatekeeper of scientific transhumanism, he was often concerned that this anthropologist might be veering off track into the dubious terrain of pseudoscience and periodically attempted to correct it, all with his excellent sense of humor. Valerija Pride and Danila Medvedev made me see cryonics in a completely new light, less an allegedly neoliberal practice of investment in the self and more as an instance of intergenerational caregiving. Anastasia Gacheva spent countless hours with me discussing Nikolai Fedorov’s philosophy, the history of the Fedorovian movement, and the relevance of the philosopher’s ideas and their possible applications today. Her courage, wit, and everyday practice of living not for oneself and not for others, but with everyone and for everyone—despite the myriad obstacles presented by daily life—left the deepest impression. Lev Regel’son likewise expanded my understanding of the Fedorovian legacy, while sharing his lifetime of thinking on science and religion. Pavel Luksha helped me understand the place of spirituality in technofuturist endeavors, never ceasing to impress with his vast erudition and creative spirit. My special thanks for sharing their thoughts and ideas also go to Alexey Turchin, Igor’ Artiukhov, Timour Shchoukine, Daria Khaltourina, Elena Milova, Igor’ Kiriliuk, Maria Konovalenko, Dmitry Itskov, Denis Rysev, Vladimir Skulachev, Aleksandr Marusev, Boris Rezhabek, Valerii Borisov, Alexander Khaliavkin, Maxim Kholin, Petr Fedichev, Igor’ Nezovibat’ko, Mikhail Baranov, Ivan Kondrat’ev, Viktor Zykov, and Andrei Afanas’ev, among many others. I also thank Anna Gorskaia of the Fedorov Museum-Library for her warm welcome and assistance. Andrei Konstantinov, Yuri Lapshin, Tanya Konstantinova, Elena Sokolova, and Marina Potapova provided much-needed conversations about my ongoing research and kept me current on science fiction films and series. Andrei and Tanya’s kitchen was frequently the first place for me to debrief after periods of intense fieldwork, and it was the perfect platform for debating many of the issues covered in this book outside of academic contexts.

In the academy, many colleagues have read versions of the manuscript, as well as individual chapters. Bruce Grant was an endless source of encouragement and fascinating ideas for new directions, as he has been so steadfastly in all the time I have known him. My hope is to be as good a mentor to others. Michael Gordin and Serguei Oushakine provided invaluable feedback during my book conference at Princeton University. Michael remains my guru in all things in the history of science, pseudoscience, and science fiction, and I am especially thankful to him for indulging my neophyte enthusiasm for his own discipline, the history of science. He responded—and at the speed of light—to my endless email queries on issues ranging from cybernetics to evolutionary biology to the philosophy of time. Vadim Gladyshev, biogerontologist at Harvard University, has been a cherished consultant on issues in the biology of aging, and he provided invaluable feedback on chapter 3. I have yet to align our schedules for a trip with my students to his Harvard lab to see his naked mole rats, those totemic animals of many of the characters of this book. Michael Hagemeister clarified numerous concepts regarding Russian Cosmism and was extremely generous with his time during my visit to Bochum and afterward. Alexei Yurchak and I had many productive discussions on Russian utopianism and communist necropolitics, while comparing notes on the techniques of perfusion used in cryonics and Lenin’s embalmment.

My colleagues in the social anthropology program in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University provided a wonderful environment in which to conceive and develop this book. Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Michael Herzfeld, Mary Steedly, Nick Harkness, Ajantha Subramanian, Arthur Kleinman, Ieva Iusonyte, George Paul Meiu, Laurence Ralph, Susan Greenhalgh, Byron Good, Lucien Taylor, and department chair Gary Urton, as well as Anya Bassett, the chair of my second home in the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, were the best colleagues one could ask for. I am especially grateful to Mary Steedly, whose untimely passing I continue to mourn. It was Mary in one of our many conversations who suggested the The Future of Immortality as the first part of the title of this book.

I discussed this work with a number of colleagues from other institutions, as well as other departments at Harvard, to whom I am very grateful: David Berliner, Jon Bialecki, Manduhai Buyandelger, Abou Farman, Milla Fedorova, Steve Fuller, Slava Gerovitch, Faye Ginsburg, Alaina Lemon, Donald Lopez, Fred Myers, Ahmed Ragab, Nancy Ries, Douglas Rogers, Sophia Roosth, Cameron Warner, and Yevgeniy Zhuravel. I also thank my graduate and undergraduate students in classes at Harvard (Anthropology of Death and Immortality; Grounding the Global: Anthropological Perspectives; Humans, Technology, and Biopolitics; and Religion and Secularism), as well as the students who attended the first iteration of my Anthropology of Death seminar at the University of Michigan. I am grateful to Andrew Shryock for convincing me to develop this class. This book partially grew out of my fascination with the material I discovered while first preparing for it.

I thank Fred Appel of Princeton University Press for his support and interest in this manuscript from its inception, as well as series editors Bill Maurer and Tom Boellstorff for their encouragement. Three terrific anonymous reviewers provided uncommonly generous feedback and suggestions. Don Reneau vastly improved the manuscript with his brilliant editing touches.

I presented versions of several chapters of this work as invited talks at the following institutions: the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia, New York University; the Department of Anthropology, Columbia University; the Department of Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley; the Science, Religion, and Culture Program of the Harvard Divinity School; the Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen; the Department of Anthropology, University of Aarhus, Denmark; the Bioethics Group of the Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; the Laboratory of Anthropology of Contemporary Worlds at the Institute of Sociology, Free University of Brussels, Belgium; the Medical Anthropology Group, Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow; and the Center for the Anthropology of Religion, Department of Anthropology, European University, St. Petersburg. I also presented parts of this work at the following workshops and conferences: Thinking about Science, Religion, and Secularism, Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, University of California, Berkeley; Beyond Disenchantment: Science, Technology, and New Religious Movements, Williams College; Signs of Life panel, American Anthropological Association, Minneapolis; Russian Politics beyond the Kremlin conference, Yale University; Scientific Utopias in the Soviet Union: Fiction, Science, and Power (1917–1991), CNRS and Institute for Advanced Studies, Paris; and From Humanism to Post- and Transhumanism, hosted by the Beyond Humanism network, Ehwa Women’s University, Seoul, Korea. I am extremely grateful to the panel organizers, discussants, and audiences at these events, who offered many helpful thoughts and suggestions.

The research for and writing of this book were generously supported by grants from Harvard’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs; the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies; the Dean’s Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship at Harvard; the John F. Cogan Junior Faculty Leave Program; the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies; the John L. Loeb Associate Professor Annual Research Grant; the National Science Foundation; and the Luce/ACLS Fellowship in Religion, Journalism, and International Affairs with residence at the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University.

An earlier version of chapter 1 appeared as Freeze, Die, Come to Life: The Many Paths to Immortality in Post-Soviet Russia, American Ethnologist 42, no. 4 (2015): 766–81. I thank the publisher for kindly allowing me to reprint it.

I am grateful to my family, and especially to my mother, Elena, and grandfather Ayzik, for their continued love and support, and to Auriel, who never lets me forget what is truly important in life. I am also grateful to my brilliant friends, who have endured me talking about the same issues for years. Finally, this book would not have been the same without the constant support of my dear friend Wladd Muta, whose lively imagination, erudition, and similar interests come from the perspective of an artist and provided a platform for almost daily discussions of all things human, posthuman, and transhuman, alongside thoughts of what the human might become.

One person who was eagerly awaiting the results of this research was my father, Lev Bernstein, my first and foremost supporter in all of my endeavors. His untimely passing at the age of sixty-three in 2014, in the early stages of research, meant that he did not get to see me develop an active interest in the hard sciences, as he was fond of goading me to do. He did not get to hear about the fascinating people, many of them scientists, I met during my research year in Moscow. This means that now, as I find myself increasingly fascinated by chemistry—his main field of specialty—and physics and biology, in which he was also very knowledgeable, I cannot pick up the phone and ask him the endless questions that arise as I continue pondering the main themes of this book. These conversations would be for another time, another place. In the meantime, as my dad is such a big part of me, I continue having them inside my head and in my dreams. This book is dedicated to his memory.

THE FUTURE OF IMMORTALITY

Introduction

ON A WARM fall day in 2012, in front of the Karl Marx monument on Theater Square, right across from the Bolshoi in the heart of Moscow, a few dozen people gathered for a demonstration. It’s the square with the only remaining grand statue of Marx in the city and a popular place for rallies. But this was not your average political rally, at least not if you mean by that one with immediately recognizable political affiliations. A middle-aged man held a poster demanding Old People Should Live. Others read, We Are for Regenerative Medicine and I Want to Be a GMO. One young man rode a futuristic-looking electric unicycle around the giant rock slab with Marx’s torso emerging out of it, held up by the inscription Proletarians of the world, unite! A fifty-something woman walked by with a sign declaring We Are for Immortality.

Addressing the rally was Anastasia Gacheva, a woman also in her fifties and a prominent member of the so-called Fedorov movement, or Cosmists, followers of the nineteenth-century Russian Orthodox philosopher Nikolai Fedorov. All social doctrines, she said, "all the social utopias humanity has tried to achieve have stumbled up against the short-breathedness [korotkodykhannost’] of man."¹ Short-breathedness is an impossible translation of an impossible term. She meant by it something like a fundamental physical and spiritual limitation.

The utopias stumbled on man’s deepest misfortune, which is his mortality. Mortal man cannot be made happy. This is why communism did not succeed. . . . Communism wanted to build universal happiness, but it failed, because a mortal man, a being ridden with contradictions, will never be capable of harmony.

The idea of immortalism as humanity’s common future has been advanced by a long line of Russian philosophers, continued the speaker. Anastasia parted her long hair in the middle and had it neatly pulled back. She was wearing loose black dress pants, an unassuming turtleneck, and a light overcoat. She spoke into the microphone with the confidence of an experienced and able public speaker, her clear and ringing voice resonating around the square. "And this movement from homo sapiens to homo immortalis, Gacheva continued, is far from a mere utopian dream. It is not a dream of loners and individualists who want to live forever. No, it is an evolutionary imperative, demanded of us by nature."

The twentieth century, she explained, was all about venturing into space, an enormous achievement. But such short-lived beings as ourselves are not going to get the job done. She quoted a Soviet biologist, Vasilii Kuprevich, from the 1960s: A human who lives only a few decades cannot master space, just as a mayfly with a one-day life span can never cross the ocean. The speaker draws the obvious conclusion. To get to Mars and other galaxies we have to become immortal.

We need to transform our bodies. As the philosopher Nikolai Fedorov said, Our body will become our cause [nashe telo stanet nashim delom]. The idea of immortality is a deeply moral idea. Remember that science is our tool. Also remember that the Lord did not create death. Science should serve life, immortality, and resurrection!

This sudden mention of God made some members of the audience cringe, but the speech concluded to loud applause. A woman in high heels and skinny jeans, about Anastasia’s age, came up on stage gushing thanks: I knew if Anastasia Gacheva would honor us with her presence, we could count on something fiery and compelling. The second woman was Valerija Pride, widely known as the director of KrioRus, Russia’s first cryonics company, which keeps people frozen in a state of suspended animation in hopes of future resurrection. Valerija was one of the co-organizers of this event, called Rally for Radical Life Extension, the second annual public gathering of longevity activists under these auspices. Valerija went on to speak about the importance of getting state support for regenerative medicine and biotechnology, calling on everyone to write letters to the Duma, organize roundtables, and engage in lobbying. It is shameful, she said. Average life expectancy in Russia is only seventy years, when many of the technologies needed for longer life are already available.

Anastasia listened intently to the speech, occasionally nodding. Nikolai Fedorov (1829–1903), the Russian Orthodox philosopher whom she had mentioned in her speech, famously proposed that through science we would one day learn to resurrect the dead. There could be no worthier undertaking than furthering this task, argued the philosopher; it was the only thing capable of uniting humanity, ending wars, and achieving world peace. Fedorov called it the common cause (obshchee delo). Eccentric as it sounded, the notion turned out to be an extremely significant one in late Russian imperial and later Soviet culture, influencing a wide range of prominent figures, from Dostoyevsky to Bolshevik revolutionaries to latter-day Soviet scientists. The fight against death, Fedorov believed, would unite believers and unbelievers, the literate and the illiterate, the religious and the secular.

These two women, both of whom I later got to know quite well, could not have been more different. While Valerija is known for her militant atheism and for regularly scandalizing religious circles by promoting cryonic suspension, Anastasia is a devout Russian Orthodox Christian. Watching the two of them interact, I couldn’t help but wonder: Was Fedorov’s prediction about the common cause uniting believers and unbelievers coming true?

Since 1840, life expectancy on average has been growing globally at around three months with each passing year. If most babies born in 1900 did not live past age fifty, according to the U.S. National Institute of Aging, today life expectancy at birth in some developed countries is eighty or higher (eighty-three in Japan, the current leader) (National Institute of Aging 2012). However, as our life spans grow, so too, apparently, does the desire among some to live even longer. Still others, indeed, have decided to live forever. This long-running theme in science fiction and myth seems to have returned under a new technological guise, as the breathless futurology (Harrington, Rose, and Singh 2006) of bio- and nanotechnologies has captured the imaginations of tech billionaires and the general public alike. Can Google Solve Death? questioned the cover of a 2013 issue of Time magazine, as Google cofounder and chief executive Larry Page announced their new company, Calico, short for California Life Company, whose mission would be to extend life spans and cure the diseases of aging.² Start-ups pursuing life-expectancy and aging research seem to spring up weekly, often funded by tech entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin, and Peter Thiel. In what seems to be an explosion of coverage of these topics in recent years (Brooker 2015; Easterbrook 2014; Friend 2017; Isaacson 2015; Lytton 2015; Packer 2011), media accounts oscillate between excitement and worry, asking how such technologies will be implemented and to whom they will be available. Does immortality come with a price tag? Will these biological transformations benefit society as a whole, or is this a cult of narcissistic self-improvement (McCray 2017)? And how can one talk about endless life extension when, with environmental apocalypse looming on the horizon, humanity’s very survival is increasingly uncertain? What is often missing from both skeptical critiques and optimistic endorsements, in turn, is a deep reflection about what such biotechnological breakthroughs, which revitalize a dream that obsessed humanity for centuries, mean for the very idea of the human. What possible ontologies and epistemologies of the human are currently emerging from these developments? What kinds of politics, ethics, and metaphysics are enabled and disabled in the process? In this book, I look at these questions anthropologically by considering one national tradition where precisely such concerns have been provoking continuous and unusually heated debates since at least the second half of the nineteenth century.

Well before Silicon Valley’s recent obsession with immortality (Friend 2017), from the mid-nineteenth century onward, in Russia, the Soviet Union, and the Russian Federation that succeeded them, the theme of technologically enabled human immortality has been consistent across diverse intellectual circles in a way, I would contend, that we do not find elsewhere in the world at least until the 1960s. Take, for example, a 1932 doctoral dissertation by the well-known American historian Corliss Lamont, titled Issues of Immortality. While the dissertation in question included over two thousand titles in its bibliography, discussing every possible type of immortality, science-based eternal physical life was not one of them. Such an omission, claimed British Sovietologist Peter Wiles, who first quoted this example in 1965, would be impossible in a Russian context during the same period—a statement well corroborated by historical evidence (Lamont 1932; Wiles 1965a, 1965b).

In 1965, Wiles published On Physical Immortality, a substantial two-part essay devoted to the history of the idea of living forever and attempts to actually achieve it in Russia and the Soviet Union. Although he seems to have been aware that cryonics, the freezing of recently deceased bodies in liquid nitrogen in hopes of future reanimation, was being theorized and developed at the time in the United States in a way it had not been in Russia, Wiles clearly wants to maintain a kind of Russian priority on the topic.³ And other researchers tend to agree, identifying the Russian trace in the history of American cryonics (Soloviov 1995) by pointing, among other predecessors, to Russian anabiosis research being undertaken as early as the late 1800s. The idea of anabiosis—a state of suspended animation, that is, of neither life nor death—was that freezing stops all biological processes in a living organism. So captured was the public imagination by experiments on achieving the state of suspended animation in fruit flies and bats that in 1922 a group of revolutionary anarchists, artists, and poets calling themselves Biocosmists even composed a poem called Poema anabioza (Poem of anabiosis), where the freezing and thawing of humans was proposed as a way to advance the world revolution (Iaroslavskii 1922).

My point in this context is not to posit a point of origin or advance an overtly culturalist argument—that there is somehow something very Russian about technofuturism—but to show how particular historical contingencies have resulted in the Russian futurist scene being one of the world’s most active contemporary immortalist communities. To learn more about this, I installed myself in Moscow for a year and a half to pursue a number of questions posed by this development. Through a wide variety of conversations, interviews, and informal work settings, I reached out to diverse but often overlapping milieus of futurists, life-extension activists, scientists, philosophers, investors, lobbyists, and religious thinkers who constitute the complex field of Russian immortalism. My interlocutors for this book included owners of a cryonics firm and their clients, scientists in the field of biology of aging, or biogerontology, professional futurologists, grassroots neurotechnology enthusiasts, followers of the Fedorov movement, and others. All were pondering the future and the big questions.

The Limits of Time and Space

I can’t understand why governments spend so much money on useless space exploration, when we have not yet figured out how the human body works, said Andrei, a twenty-eight-year-old Russian entrepreneur. An astrophysicist by training, he had recently become passionate about the possibilities of genomics extending the biological life span. He was addressing his far-flung online audience, with participants responding in typed comments.⁴ I am not talking about ‘useful’ space research, like GPS or communication satellites, Andrei added as a disclaimer. "I am talking about deep space [dal’nii kosmos]. Why spend money on something so impractical? Look, the top science news today is how they found water on Mars. But the really breaking news—that they found a new revolutionary way of genome editing—is completely buried."⁵

Responses from the audience varied, revealing a range of opinion regarding science, religion, ethics, and humanity’s future—all frequent topics of heated public debate in contemporary Russia. One woman replied indignantly: Humanity not wanting to leave the confines of one planet is a sign of the world decline! The statement brings to mind a quote from the pioneer of Russian cosmonautics Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who is famous for the phrase: The earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever.⁶ Continuing the same line of argument, someone appealed to Soviet history, pointing out that the generation who dreamed when they were kids of growing up to be cosmonauts is still around, referencing the lasting prestige of space exploration in the post-Soviet imaginary. Others offered more practical reasons to explore deep space: the commercial mining of planets and asteroids, the possibility of unexpected scientific discoveries, the possible appearance of new industries, or ultimately the need to locate an alternative habitat due to the risk of human extinction on Earth. Still others argued that since gene editing implies human redesign, it will never be accepted because we still have people who believe in God, whereas deep space exploration doesn’t contradict religion.⁷ A few accused Andrei of being narrow-minded and ignorant of the field of space research.

In fact, we know that Andrei the astrophysicist was likely much better versed in space research than most of his audience. He was being deliberately and thoughtfully provocative. He spoke as if he wanted to be convinced otherwise, playing devil’s advocate regarding the uselessness of space exploration. I had first met Andrei about eight months earlier at a gathering of futurists, visionaries, and entrepreneurs that took place on a flotilla of three government-funded boats meeting under the banner of the Foresight Fleet. The goal of this four-day float, consisting of only the most promising participants carefully selected by a special agency, was nothing less than to identify and develop emergent technological ideas with the potential of becoming a new postsocialist Russian megaproject on the model of the space program in the Soviet period. Andrei told me that he grew disillusioned with academic science after obtaining his graduate degree and quit physics to become the CEO of a successful bioinformatics start-up. He saw opportunities—on both the entrepreneurial and visionary planes—in new applications of genomics research to aging. Through his new interests, he met people calling themselves transhumanists, members of a loosely defined philosophical and cultural movement that aspires to transform the human condition, deliver humanity from its biological limitations, extend the life span, and even achieve actual immortality. He does not call himself transhumanist and prefers to keep his distance from controversial practices like cryonics and mind uploading (the hypothetical possibility of separating the mind from the biological brain). What captured Andrei’s interest was biogerontology, or the biology of aging, a field about which many transhumanists are also passionate, with some devoting their lives to promoting it.

Some of his readers equated the need for space exploration with the long-term goal of resettlement made necessary by the threat of human extinction on this planet. Andrei takes that risk quite seriously, insisting nonetheless that it remains the human body that needs to be figured out first. He conceded the definite possibility, even scientific certainty, that our Sun will eventually die out, and eventually the entire universe will come to an end. Yet the possibility, he quipped, that you and I will die in the next one hundred years is one hundred percent. So let’s stop dying first and then figure out how to deal with space exploration. Doesn’t that make more sense? One commenter agreed, noting that while he considers life valuable, it’s not the highest value, and that he understands why people would buy a one-way ticket to Mars.⁸ Of course, he added, in the ideal situation we would fly there with our bodies already genetically modified to reduce the need for oxygen and increase our tolerance to cosmic radiation. Then after a thoughtful pause: On the other hand, none of this guarantees indestructibility—even with a genetically modified body, you can still die in a spaceship crash. Wouldn’t it be better to find a way to transfer our minds to more durable media? Then you can make backups and be everywhere at once. Andrei, in turn, expressed his doubts, absent a great deal more knowledge about the brain, that any such backup would be possible.

Throughout 2015 I observed discussions of just these issues being replayed again and again in multiple circles and settings in Russia, both off- and online. It may seem that interest in questions of space exploration and life extension is confined to a narrow circle of science fiction fans, but in Russia these are frequent and controversial discussion topics in broad intellectual circles, which are linked to divergent interpretations of the Soviet legacy and competing visions of possible futures. As if in answer to Andrei’s question, one interlocutor burst out indignantly:

Our dreams of both space exploration and life extension have been betrayed. Betrayed in the Soviet Union, but also in the rest of the world. Humans were really changed by the development of space travel. We didn’t go into space to get our hands on new spices, like fifteenth-century colonial explorers. It’s useless and not profitable to drag home minerals from space. No. We ventured into space to find ourselves. To find our future. To find a superhuman [sverkhchelovek]. But in the 1970s the expansion of the space program stopped. By then it had been reduced to meaningless spinning around the earth with petty commercial goals. It’s depressing to think that it has been forty-two years since a human being set foot on another celestial body.⁹

Here we see two completely divergent opinions: one saying that too much airtime is being devoted to space exploration, the other lamenting that as far as space exploration is concerned, nothing is going on at all anymore, which is a betrayal of the Soviet dream. Meanwhile Andrei’s position is that the exploration of space can only be worthwhile if death is overcome, whereas for other Russian futurists, these two projects are seen as one. Space conquest for them is not a goal to be postponed for a later time—on the contrary, its urgency lies in that in itself it constitutes the way to spiritual and biological transformation.

Apart from space exploration as a constant theme, the key issues in debates about the future revolved around these questions: As we extend life spans, should we remain in our biological bodies? Or should we forgo our carbon-based substrate altogether and search for some more durable medium, such as silicon, or perhaps even something intangible and virtual? What kind of bodies are being envisioned in the evolving discursive constructions of the brain as wetware (in analogy with hardware and software)? Does the conflict between our long-standing carbon-based history and these new propositions change the status of being human? What are the ethical implications of that? What new possibilities, and what risks, are being brought out by such rapid advances in biotechnology and artificial intelligence? And, finally, what do we do with all of ourselves if we really stop dying? As far out as such debates might seem, what is shared across the divides in these often heated discussions is a deep interest in rethinking the changing status of the human, the relationship between body and mind, biology and technology, extending to the notion of life itself.

In this book I explore these interconnected and emerging technoscientific and religious futurisms in the context of contemporary Russian culture and politics. I argue that while the recent rise of such futurisms