AN APPOINTMENT IN MOSCOW
In November 2021, while Europe braced itself for another COVID-hit winter, I traveled to Moscow, Russia. The city had recently endured a week-long lockdown, intended to lower the number of infected. Masks were enforced on public transit, there were regular signs and posters reminding citizens to get vaccinated, and testing centers were dotted all over the city. And for good reason: deaths had recently topped 1,000 per day, amid disappointing vaccine uptake and the now common conspiracy theories circulating the rest of the world.
I was in Russia to report on the country’s warring cryonics factions, but I was also keen to find out more about the prophet so revered back at the Church of Perpetual Life in Florida, where my reporting for this book had begun. On a bitterly cold and snowy evening, I hurried into a Metro station in the middle of the city, just a few minute’s walk from the Kremlin. I was greeted by a police officer with a metal detector wand, waiting to check my backpack for weapons, and to also ensure I was wearing a mask. I felt, suddenly, like I had fallen into a dystopian science fiction novel.
Over the past two years, like everyone else, I’d been bombarded by reminders of the fragility of both humanity and our planet. That evening, the news was dominated by another failed climate conference, anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown protests across Europe, and there was another, potentially more transmissible, variant of COVID-19 just around the corner. Given the cruelty and suffering we impose on our fellow humans, animals, and the earth, it’s hard to make the case that we deserve to live longer.
Perhaps it was the cold, the pandemic, or just the location, but the brutality of nature’s indifference to human survival weighed on my mind as I made my way an hour from the city center to the Konkovo district, in search of some hope for a better future, no matter how far-fetched it may be.
When I got off the metro, I walked through a small mall and into a residential area, hoping my now internet-less Google Maps was taking me in roughly the right direction. After about 15 minutes of speed walking through the darkened streets, I arrived at a high-rise residential building with a neon sign outside. Here, on the ground floor, was the N. Fedorov Museum-Library, which was founded in 1993. It was far removed from the grandiose buildings lining the streets of the city center, many of them paying tribute to some of the country’s greatest philosophers.
As I walked through the glass doors into the mercifully warm building lobby, I was greeted with a wide smile by Anna Gorskaja, who works at the library and had kindly invited me to visit. She welcomed me in, offered me a hot drink and asked me to sit down. Sadly, Gorskaja told me, the Fedorov exhibits were in temporary storage, while the Fedorovians found a more suitable display.
There was a painting of Fedorov himself in the corner of the room, created just a few years after he died. The artist, a friend of the philosopher, couldn’t remember what his hands looked like, so he depicted them hidden away in the sleeves of his coat, Gorskaja told me.
After a short wait, she introduced me to Anastasia Gacheva, the head of the library and to whom Fedorov and his works have always been a family endeavor. Her mother, Svetlana Semenova, was credited with reintroducing his work to the world, and wrote several books about Russian cosmism, the branch of philosophy which grew from Fedorov’s thinking. Gacheva’s mother first started studying the philosopher in 1972, during the Brezhnev era, when her daughter was just five years old. “From my childhood I have organically absorbed Fedorov’s ideas, which is why I feel happy, because they give me optimism of being, which is very important for a child, for a teenager who is always searching, always doubting, always asking why they exist,” she said.
Gacheva, Gorskaja and all of Fedorov’s followers are immortalists. But there are distinct differences between their interpretation of immortalism and that practiced across the United States, particularly since Silicon Valley started showering its billions upon the industry. As unthinkable as Fedorov’s philosophy might be, there’s a message at its core that invokes a great sense of hope and empathy, something hinted at in the beliefs of the American immortalists, but seems to be seeping away at an alarming rate as big busines takes control. The Church of Perpetual Life elevated Fedorov to a prophet, many of its followers believed him to be a great man, but did they really understand him?
Fedorov saw immortality as the “common task” that would unite humanity. He didn’t believe in eternal life for the few, and he didn’t think money had a role to play in its development. His ambitions were much broader and heavily impacted by his Christian faith. As we learned earlier in the book, he said the goal of the planet should be also to resurrect everyone that ever lived and “regulate” nature. That claim seems utterly ridiculous on a practical level, but by making this his ultimate goal, he ensured that everything done in the pursuit of that mission served to unify the whole of humanity. He wanted to bring the world together to create technologies that would make humanity the master of nature and become a God-like figure itself. “Fedorov was in general a very harsh critic of capitalism, because it was, first of all, exhausting to nature, to the earth, and to people. But most importantly, he argued why universality is necessary - for him, man is a being who is necessary to nature, who is necessary to the world. He had a formula that nature in the individual becomes aware of itself and rules itself. That is, man is a part of nature,” Gacheva explained.
Gacheva described Fedorov’s mission in a way most articles rarely articulate. His quest to end death wasn’t just about saving humanity; he wanted to take command of nature, to end death for all species and living things, and to end the food chain so all animals could live like plants, taking the energy from the universal source of the sun. “One cannot attain immortality if everything in nature is mortal,” Gacheva said. “In Russian cosmism there was this intuition that nature itself, that living beings want to overcome this law of devouring, fighting. In the Christian picture of the world, the future kingdom will have no death and no enmity. Conventionally speaking, there the wolf and the hare will be friends - one will not eat the other. As the prophet Isaiah says - a doe lies next to a wolf, predators graze peacefully there, they do not eat their own kind. This is the brotherhood of creatures, the brotherhood of all created things.”
Many transhumanists talk of Fedorov as the one of the founding fathers of the movement, but Gacheva believes they still have a lot to learn from him. “It’s good that they consider him one of them, because if they do, it’s a chance for transhumanism to expand its spiritual and creative base a little bit. Transhumanism as it has developed is in many ways the child of this digital, commercial and industrial civilization.”
Gacheva’s mother Semenova was skeptical of cryonics. She believed in the resurrection of every person in history, even if it was from a single piece of DNA, as Fedorov taught. Cryonics is more of a “secular project,” Gacheva said. If the practice were to be proven possible, it would only serve to resurrect those who had been frozen, which would go against Fedorov’s teaching of universal immortality. But the concept still has some merit to Gacheva. “To compare: once mankind invented a stone axe, it was the first stick. The killing stick. Then there was a stone axe for work. If a stone axe branched out [to all the] technology we have, cryonics is the stone axe in this future story of resurrection and victory over death. It’s the first tool we’re trying out. There’s probably not much we can do [with it]. There will be some new ones.”
Inevitably, our conversation turned to the pandemic. Gacheva believes Fedorov would not have been impressed by the global approach to the spread of COVID-19. She said the restrictions were defensive tactics, while Fedorov preached offensive measures to take control of nature, not just halting death, but natural disasters like earthquakes, hurricanes, and pandemics too. “This pandemic, it shows us that we are not up to the challenges that nature gives us. We should be united by this threat, but it is driving us apart. At first, humanity was a little united in the face of a common threat, and then came the rivalry of pharmaceutical companies for vaccines, for something else. People have realized that it is very convenient to manipulate humanity, to divide it, split it up, fractionalize it and so on,” Gacheva said.
When I left the museum, I found myself deeply impressed by the optimism and positivity of the Fedorov way of thinking. I wasn’t ready to sign up as a follower, but I felt a little better about the pursuit of immortality regardless. Given the choice between Fedorov’s spiritual, all-encompassing version of eternity and a two-tiered world where technology’s elite lived on forever, I’d take the old dead Russian philosopher’s viewpoint every time.
And despite being thousands of miles away, the Fedorov library and museum reminded me of my trip to the Church of Perpetual Life in Florida, and not just because of the Russian prophet revered in each institution. Both buildings were located in unassuming residential neighborhoods, ill-fitted to the bold and brash causes chased by each institution. Inside, they were a haven for ideas most would find too ambitious or extreme to even ponder, and their followers were, among other things, fueled by a great sense of hope.
But were their efforts misplaced? Back in the biting cold, I put on my mask and scurried into the warmth of the Moscow metro, and pondered my odyssey through the world of immortalism. I’d met all types of believers across many groups. Their quest for immortality would continue, no matter the price. But for me, it was time to move forward—and avoid looking back to see if death was peering over my shoulder.