ANYA BERNSTEIN
Harvard University
The many paths to immortality in post-Soviet Russia
A B S T R A C T
Through practices such as cryonics and plans tobuild robotic bodies for future “consciousnesstransfer,” the Russian transhumanist movement has engendered competing practices of immortality as well as ontological debates over the immortal body and person. Drawing on an ethnography of these practices and plans, I explore controversies around religion and secularism within the movement as well as the conflict between transhumanists and the Russian Orthodox Church. I argue that the core issues in debates over the role of religion vis-`a-vis immortality derive from diverse assumptions being made about “the human,” which—from prerevolutionary esoteric futurist movements through the Soviet secularist project and into the present day—has been and remains a profoundly plastic project. [body, immortality, religion, death, transhumanism, cryonics, postsocialism, Russia].
Moscow-based Science for Life Extension Foundation. He was pointing at a long line of worshippers across the river from his stylish office in the former Red October chocolate factory, who were waiting to get into the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, one of the largest Orthodox churches in the world. “But what do you expect? They have a 2,000-year-old brand, billions of loyal consumers, efficient sales offices, connections in the government. Hey, people! Why don’t you come to us instead?” Turning to me, he summarized,
All they have is good marketing. There is no guarantee of quality, and you won’t be able to drop the service if something goes wrong. Our competitors have been caught red-handed—many times—scamming their customers. But here we are honest and don’t make things up. The earth rotates around the sun, there is nothing after death, living is good and dying is bad. Just think, maybe you would like to just stay alive, rather than justify death with these religious fantasies?
The addressees of Batin’s tirade were pilgrims—women with their heads covered, men holding children in arms, the sick and disabled faithful— who, on July 19, 2013, spent nearly seven hours standing in line to venerate the cross of St. Andrew the Apostle, a relic brought from the Greek city of Patras to the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in celebration of the 1,025th anniversary of the baptism of Russia. The cathedral, demolished by Joseph Stalin in the 1930s then rebuilt in the 1990s, had made news as the setting of the infamous “punk prayer” unleashed in 2012 by the feminist collective Pussy Riot beseeching the Mother of God to oust then prime minister Vladimir Putin from power. The two-year prison sentences the women received for their efforts were controversial in the extreme, making secularism among the most hotly debated subjects in Russia. In the aftermath of the Pussy Riot trial, there have been roundtables, TV shows, special issues of popular magazines, and endless private debates in cramped Russian kitchens devoted to considering the place of religion in public life and whether Russia is (or should be) a secular or a religious state. Among liberal commentators, both domestic and abroad, it has become customary to
consider contemporary Russia a state in which secularism is in decline. It is to these debates that Batin, along with fel- low members of a loose movement of people calling them- selves “transhumanists,” aspire to contribute.
Transhumanism is the name of an international intellectual and cultural movement that aims to transform human nature by developing the tools to accomplish a “radical upgrade” of the human being. In Russia the movement is represented by diverse groups focused on promoting life extension and ultimately achieving immortality through such technologies as cryonics (freezing dead bodies in liquid nitrogen in hopes of a future revival) and “mind uploading” or “mind transfer,” the hypothetical possibility of separating the mind from the biological brain and “copying” it to “nonbiological platforms.” They are also active politically, lobbying the government for better funding of scientific research on aging and life extension. Anthropol- ogists have generally viewed transhumanism (cryonics, in particular) as a uniquely U.S. preoccupation, casting cryonics as a form of capitalist investment in the future (Romain 2010) that produces a shift in temporalities best understood in terms of a secular eschatology (Farman 2012). Yet, in Russia, such secular eschatologies have a much longer history, going back to 19th-century technoutopias. Nikolai Fedorov (1828–1903), considered the founder of the intellectual tradition that later became known as Russian Cosmism, called for the technological resurrection of the dead (as well as for the colonization of space to accommodate this new population, genetic engineering, the creation of prosthetic organs, and control over nature), anticipating many themes later advanced by such diverse turn-of-the-century intellectuals as the rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, biochemist and geologist Vladimir Vernadsky, physician and revolutionary Alexander Bogdanov, futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and many others. The human body must be deliberately redesigned to stop the “extreme anatomical and physiological disharmony” resulting in “wearing out of organs and tissues,” wrote the revolutionary Marxist Leon Trotsky in 1924 (2005:207). “Mortals of all countries, unite!” demanded a 1914 manifesto by Fedorov’s followers (Gorskii and Brikhnichev 1914:8; see also Rosen- thal 1997:27). This constellation of revolutionary, scientific, and religious imaginaries eventually led to the preservation of the body of Vladimir Lenin (among others), which some believed had as its ultimate goal his future reanimation.[2]
From the embalmed body of Lenin to the 41 bodies frozen since the founding of the first cryonics company in postsocialist Russia in 2006,3 issues bearing on the cor- poreal as such have been central to sometimes overlap- ping discussions of secularism and immortality. Since most transhumanists believe in the inevitability of physical im- mortality, as opposed to the immortality of the soul fore- seen in some religions, a key debate in Russian trans- humanist circles revolves around what constitutes an
immortal body and how exactly it is to be achieved. While some believe that immortality will be gained exclusively by means of cutting-edge secular science, others creatively blend science with transcendental technologies of the body drawn from various religions. Indeed, many wonder just how “secular” the immortal body can be, as accepting this modern vision presupposes a considerable leap of faith, not unlike that demanded by the religious traditions many transhumanists oppose. Here I suggest that the signifi- cance of the debate about immortality launched by tran- shumanists reaches beyond techno-utopian imaginaries, as it exhibits many of the same tensions inhering in what is conventionally understood as the contest between “the re- ligious” and “the secular” that have so animated public life in Russia since the Soviet collapse.
In his work on secularism, Talal Asad starts from the assumption that “the secular” itself—a variety of practices, concepts, and sensibilities formed over time—precedes the political doctrine calling for the separation of church and state. The secular, Asad says, is such a part of modern life that it has become something like the water we swim in: hard to grasp directly. He proposes studying secular- ism through its “shadows,” those practices and discourses that indirectly challenge secular imaginaries, such as no- tions of myth and “passionate” agency and attitudes toward pain (Asad 2003). If, in Formations of the Secular, Asad ex- amined embodied practices running against the grain of secular rationalism, recently he has taken up the connec- tion between secularism and the body more directly, in response to Charles Hirschkind, who provocatively asks whether there is such a thing as a “secular body.” Indeed, while the religious body has become the subject of a volu- minous academic literature, defining what exactly a secular body might be has proven elusive for transhumanists and anthropologists alike. Asad (2011) and Hirschkind (2011) speculate about whether distinct sensibilities, affects, and embodied dispositions might distinguish the secular body and whether answering this question might have relevance for secularism as a political system. Continuing this line of inquiry, but focusing on the contradictions within “the secular,” Abou Farman (2013) demonstrates how cryopre- served bodies in the United States are produced through the secular institutions of law and medicine yet are often in conflict with them. Most U.S. transhumanists agree that secularism is a prerequisite of scientific progress. They are, in Farman’s expression, “scientifically oriented secularists.” In post-Soviet Russia, by contrast, secularism has become a subject of heated debate within the transhumanist commu- nity, just as it has in broader publics.
In this article, I consider competing practices of immortality amidst robust contemporary debates over fun- damental understandings of bodies and persons in Russia today. In this context, struggles over secularism and reli- gious life hinge now, as they long have, on defining “the human.” As the briefest of historical surveys show, from prerevolutionary Russian esoteric futurist movements through the Soviet emancipatory secularist project and into the present day, “the human” has been and remains a profoundly plastic project. Contemporary Russian tran- shumanists thus draw on deep conceptual programs born out of both revolution and socialism as well as more recent postsocialist transformations. Using transhumanist per- spectives as a microcosm for the larger Russian debates, I examine the attitudes, concepts, and sensibilities under- lying emergent notions of the human, showing how shifts in the meaning of that construct are crucial for people’s understandings of the distinction between the religious and the secular.
Transhumanists do not always agree about what con- stitutes us as human beings, with views on the mind–body problem ranging from idealism to materialism and from monism to dualism. What they do share is a deep belief in “active evolution,” wherein being human is to be in a state of permanent nonteleological transition and to be able to shape and direct one’s own evolution.4 Perhaps not surprisingly, opposition to this view has come from Russian Orthodox circles. As the Soviet secular utopia has been progressively dismantled since the 1980s, the Russian Orthodox Church has entered the public arena with its own vision of utopian collectivity and related biopolitical agenda. Increasingly finding its mission in resisting what it sees as the importation from the West of alien notions of the human, the church has taken on what it calls the “challenge of transhumanism” (vyzov transgumanizma), actively opposing transhumanist ideas and practices for the same reasons it opposes homosexuality, abortion, and euthanasia—as practices that interfere with the sovereignty of God by tampering with life itself and by encouraging ideas of human redesign and self-mastery.
Given the growing political and moral influence of the Orthodox Church in Putin’s Russia, ontological questions of what constitutes the human, how the mind is connected to the body, and whether immortality is desirable gain political traction beyond the domain of speculative philos- ophy. In Russia, definitions of the human become central to the ongoing renegotiation of perceived boundaries be- tween the secular and the religious in the wake of the collapse of the world’s largest atheist state. Simultaneously, with Russian transhumanists producing novel theories of the relationship between body and person, human and time, and technology and biology, it becomes clear that the stakes are not just Russian but global, amounting to nothing less than the redefinition of the human condition.
KrioRus: Bodies in the deep freeze
“In 2005 it was nearly impossible to find articles in the me- dia on radical life extension, but now it’s quite common.
Everyone is talking about it.” So I was told by Valerija Pride, director of KrioRus, a Russian cryonics company founded in
2006.5 “Eight years ago we launched a huge PR campaign.
Our ideas were really well received on completely different levels—from the liberal media to high-level government of- ficials. Even the pro-Putin youth movement Nashi caught the bug.” KrioRus occupies a modest two-room apartment on the ground floor of an attractive building in Moscow’s historic center. The front room offers cozy office space, and in the back a loft accommodates sleeping (not, employees assured me, dead) comrades-in-arms. When I arrived, I was greeted by Zhenia, a young volunteer in his early twenties. It was my first meeting with Valerija,6 and she was run- ning late. To entertain me while I waited, Zhenia showed me items from the company’s online shop, called Tovary iz budushchego (Goods from the Future).7 Among the items he highlighted were a 3D printer, which printed little blocks and other shapes, a bottle with a built-in water purifier, and a small cardboard container, like a juice carton, containing a liquid meal replacement.
Valerija arrived, bubbling over with apologies for be- ing late. She was a thin, energetic woman in her fifties who spoke very fast. “Last month we froze four people,” she said. “Four people in one month! I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a world record. That means society is ready for this. Maybe because we’re used to grand projects—the Soviet Union, the exploration of space.8 Our scientist Tsiolkovsky said we should live for a thousand years. Already in the 1970s the famous Soviet gerontologist Lev Komarov orga- nized symposiums on artificial life extension. However,” she admonished, shaking her finger, “gerontologists have differ- ent goals than ours. They only study aging, while we are de- termined to fight it.”
I found myself pondering the famous line from Karl Marx about merely understanding the world as opposed to changing it, recognizing the very quintessence of the tran- shumanist worldview in Valerija’s self-definition. It is possible to radically transform human nature, she was saying, and the place to start is the human body:
Our bodies are incredibly imperfect. We get old, we get sick. Even if our health is great, we can’t see well at night, we can’t fly . . . To put it briefly, things are pretty dire. I’m not satisfied. I want to be able to swim under water without having to breathe. But I’m unable to do this. So I want an upgrade. Upgrade my health. Upgrade my intellect.
And transhumanists have other long-term visionary projects, beyond upgrading one’s body. They are devoted to exploring space, peopling other planets, and even “upgrading” animals to the level of rational conscious beings. Yet perhaps the greatest goal of all, shared by most transhumanists, is radical life extension and, ultimately, immortality. Death, to them, is the single greatest obstacle to transforming the human condition. They call those who consider death inevitable “deathists” (smertniki)—a term uttered with contempt. Says Mikhail Batin, “I think life is a colossal tragedy. Everything goes well—people enjoy life, study, get married, get divorced, have aspirations, build careers ... And then they start rotting alive. They suffer enormously, their vital organs fail, they become less and less intelligent, and they die in pain. And this happens over and over.” If in some worldviews, both religious and secular, death gives human life meaning, in the opinion of transhu- manists, death renders life hopelessly meaningless because it effectively annuls the continuity of human achievement. According to Batin, death should be considered a curable disease, similar to cancer.[9]
Transhumanists like Valerija and Mikhail are not willing to wait for scientists to find the time and funding to work on a cure for death. They declare cryonics—the freezing of re- cently deceased bodies in liquid nitrogen—the best choice in a bad situation. Cryonicists’ reasoning recalls Pascal’s wa- ger. If you sign a contract with us, they say, and we cryonize your body, and it doesn’t work, you die. If you don’t sign a contract with us and don’t cryonize your body, you die any- way. Choose cryonics—that is your only chance to live.
Cryonicists have a distinctly relativist understanding of death. Indeed, their take intersects with anthropological investigations into sociocultural constructions of death, both inside and outside biomedical regimes, but especially within them, as the medical community is constantly pressured by new technologies to revise its own definition of death (Kaufman and Morgan 2005; Lock 2001). Like anthropologists, Russian cryonicists regard the medical definition as a product of particular histories and as subject to change. They regard death not as a single event but as a three-stage process: Stage 1: The body ceases to function as a whole. This, cryonicists say, is what we normally understand as death, in the sense inherited from past medical knowledge and beliefs. During Stage 1 many organs and cells continue to work because their structures have not yet been destroyed. Stage 2: The body is partially destroyed. Stage 3: The full, irreversible physical decomposition of the body sets in. It is in this latter sense, say cryonicists, that the term dead will be understood by the medicine of the future, and this is how they claim to view death now. Once technologies have been invented that offer a “gut renovation” (kapital’nyi remont) of the body, full restoration at Stage 2 becomes a possibility. Characteristically, cryonicists do not refer to frozen people as “dead” but as “cryo-patients” (kri- opatsient). They treat them as if they were alive, waiting in suspended animation to be reawakened. In Valerija’s summary, people who dismiss cryonics by saying that frozen people are dead simply misunderstand the term: “That ar- gument is based on a long outdated understanding of death as a single event. What does it mean when we say, ‘He died’?
Does it mean the doctor signed off on the death? But who is the doctor? Is he God? The process of death is slow. What is the exact moment of death?”
Aside from KrioRus, the only other cryonics companies that boast storage facilities are in the United States, the Cryonics Institute in Michigan and Alcor in Arizona. KrioRus, Valerija proudly points out, is “the first cryonics company in Eurasia.” It offers contracts for two types of cryopreservation, one that freezes the whole body and one that preserves only the brain (neirosokhranenie, or neurop- reservation). The second option is attractive for people on a budget (it costs $10,000 as opposed to $30,000 for the whole body), but it is also considered by orthodox cryonicists to be more advanced ideologically. Since cryonicists believe that personality is located in the brain, the body becomes a secondary issue. Personality, in this view, is constituted by long-term memories recorded in the cerebral cortex, and if these memories can be preserved, it does not matter what kind of body might be attached to the brain in the future. Cryonicists acknowledge that separating the head from the body is a radical, iconoclastic step, even for fairly advanced adepts. But it also offers a certain compromise in regard to traditional burial practices.
While based on the prior agreement of the deceased, cryonics contracts tend to be fulfilled, for obvious reasons, by relatives, many of whom happen to be active in the transhumanist movement. In 2008, Valerija cryonized her mother, who died of peritonitis, and her assistant Andrei cryonized his father, who succumbed to hepatitis C. Andrei opted for brain-only preservation, because other relatives insisted on a traditional Orthodox burial. The brain went one place for cryopreservation, while the body was buried in a cemetery. To all appearances the body was whole, and the priest performing the ceremony was unaware that his client’s brain had been removed to be frozen.[10]
“We don’t really have a problem with religious people,” said Valerija. “We personally do not believe in the existence of a soul. But if patients want to throw some Orthodox icons in the cryo-chamber, we are absolutely fine with it.” People taking the opposing view are not always so even tempered. When controversy erupted over the KrioRus storage facility for cryo-patients in a village near Moscow, cryonics itself came under attack. Angry villagers—who disparaged the storage facility, located on private property, as “corpse stor- age” (trupokhranilishche)—wrote irate letters to the police, demanding that it be shut down. According to the Orthodox Christian worldview, they argued, the bodies are nothing more than corpses that have long since been abandoned by their souls—as in the popular Orthodox belief, it takes only 40 days for the soul to “fly off” (otletet’) from the body. They demanded immediate burial of the bodies stored in the cry- onics facility so near their homes, expressing fears that they would soon be invaded by zombies, animated corpses, or the soulless living dead.[11]
Orthodox villagers are not the only ones opposed to cryonics. Major criticism has also come from within the Russian transhumanist community itself. The most prominent critic, interestingly enough, is the person known to international audiences as the “face” of Russian transhu- manism: Dmitry Itskov, a former Russian media tycoon who has recently devoted his life to searching for immortality. While cryonicists have created a prototypical secular body, devoid of a soul and with consciousness confined to brain chemistry, Itskov and his transhumanist circle take a dis- tinctly more transcendental approach. They share with cry- onicists the problem of how to overcome the mortal body, but they want to preserve more than the body, something more akin to a soul. Itskov attracted a lot of publicity in the United States for organizing and funding the Global Futures 2045 congress, held in June 2013 in New York City. Among a long list of distinguished participants were scientists from fields like neuroprosthetics and molecular genetics, as well as robotics designers, futurists, and visionaries. But nonscientists also attended and included such diverse per- sonalities as U.S. scholar and Buddhist Robert Thurman, Russian yoga master Swami Vishnudevananda, Tibetan incarnate lama Phakyab Rinpoche, and Lazar Puhalo, a re- tired hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church in America.
The Avatar Project
Two weeks after the congress in New York, I sought out Dmitry Itskov in Moscow. “You are going to write about Rus- sian transhumanists?” he asked, in disbelief that someone would come from the United States—in his view, the Mecca of transhumanism—to study the phenomenon in Russia. Itskov’s secluded office was unreachable by public trans- portation, so he picked me up in his white BMW, with pri- vate driver, at a metro stop about 15 minutes away. When we stepped out into the courtyard of the dilapidated Moscow building where he is headquartered, Itskov elaborated on his surprise. “Well, things are very sad in this area here,” he said. “Most adepts are just too materialist to care about any- thing beyond preserving their biological bodies. Perhaps it’s a legacy of the Soviet period. This is what I’m trying to change.” We rode an old elevator upstairs, passing through a series of steel doors to arrive at his loftlike office with white brick walls and exposed piping, a strikingly contemporary mix of industrial design and Zen-like decor. The office had a railroad layout, with two female employees working in the first two open-plan rooms. A thick glass door separated It- skov’s office at the back. His desk sported a photograph of himself with the Dalai Lama, who, as has been widely re- ported, recently approved of Itskov’s quest to transfer con- sciousness into artificial bodies (Itskov 2012).
Itskov is the founder of Immortality, a corporate joint venture that has set itself the goal of creating an artificial body. In 2011 it launched Russia 2045, a sociopolitical movement designed to promote ideas of radical life ex- tension as well as to lobby the Russian government to adopt the project of building artificial bodies as a unifying “national idea.” The year 2045 is the date by which the movement’s main endeavor, the Avatar Project proper, is to be completed. The idea is to transfer the human brain and mind into a series of progressively changing and improving robotic bodies, first melding man and machine but even- tually eliminating the very need for a physical body. The first stage, to be completed by 2020, aims to create Body A, a robotic body controlled through a brain–computer interface, similar to the avatar featured in James Cameron’s popular film of that name. Itskov believes the work leading to Body A is already underway, citing research on brain implants that give disabled people control of robotic limbs or make it possible to spell words and move the cursor on the computer solely by means of thoughts (Segal 2013). The second stage, Body B, to be completed by 2025, culminates in the creation of an artificial body into which a human brain is transplanted at the end of life. Body C (or Rebrain), creates an artificial brain, into which consciousness is transferred at the end life. Body C is scheduled for 2035. The final stage, Body D, slated for completion by 2045, intriguingly suggests dispensing with the physical body altogether in favor of a so-called hologram body, a body that is entirely nonphysical and nontangible (see Figure 1). In a New York Times article on Itskov, appearing per- haps appropriately in the business section, reporter David Segal described what makes Itskov and his project stand out, even among the most visionary scientists: Most researchers do not aspire to upload our minds to cyborgs; even in this crowd, the concept is a little out there. Academics seem to regard Mr. Itskov as sincere and well-intentioned, and if he wants to play global cheerleader for fields that generally toil in obscurity, fine. Ask participants in the 2045 conference if Mr. It- skov’s dreams could ultimately be realized and you’ll hear everything from lukewarm versions of “maybe” to flat-out enthusiasm. [2013]
More than a few, as Segal notes, believe that, at a min- imum, “interest in building Itskovian avatars will give birth to and propel legions of start-ups. Some of these far-flung projects have caught the eyes of angel investors, and one day these enterprises may do for the brain and androids what Silicon Valley did for the Internet and computers” (2013). Nonetheless, it is not money that Itskov is after. As reported in the article, he has already spent $3 million of his personal funds just for the congress. “I had a midlife crisis at 25,” said Itskov as we settled into his office. He was 32 when we spoke.
I was head of a big media business. I had made a lot of money. I could either continue working, grow my