Count on Russian thinkers to formulate imaginative theories that no sensible person could believe. Proud of their distinctive style of doing philosophy, social theory, mathematics, and even hard science, Russians repeatedly breach the bounds of common sense. Sometimes they make important discoveries, but they more often produce sheer nonsense, closer to science fiction than to science.
Russia has given the world its greatest novels, but no one admires its economy. And as Michel Eltchaninoff observes in his recent book, Lenin Walked on the Moon: The Mad History of Russian Cosmism, it offers visionary schemes, not practical improvements.1 There is no Russian Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs. When was the last time you bought something made in Russia? When it comes to technology, Russia is weak, except for weapons and, at one time, space travel.
When I was growing up, people laughed at Russian claims to have invented almost everything. Only recently did I discover from the authoritative historian Loren Graham that there is something to these claims: believe it or not, Russians “did transmit radio waves before Guglielmo Marconi . . . they did pioneer in the development of transistors and diodes; they did publish the principles of lasers a generation before any others did,” and much more. What they did not do was bring these inventions to market or make them generally usable.
As Walter Isaacson observed in his biography of Steve Jobs, “In the annals of innovation new ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as important.” Russians are bad at execution not only because great thinkers regard it as beneath them but also because the Russian social environment ensures that ideas are left on paper. For ideas to have a practical effect, society needs to value innovation, foster investment, secure property rights, and reward inventors. Politics and bureaucracy must not suffocate the new. Perhaps one reason Israel has been so amazingly successful technologically is that its many Russians work with people adept at turning ideas into practice in favorable circumstances.
Russians are bad at execution.
It is not as if Russians are unaware of all this. Russian literary classics frequently describe dreamers or revolutionaries who disdain practical work. Very rarely do they offer sympathetic portraits of businessmen. The eponymous hero of Ivan Goncharov’s brilliant comic novel Oblomov (1859) spends all his time daydreaming—it takes him over a hundred delightful pages to get out of bed—and could not be more unlike his practical boyhood friend Stolz, who succeeds in almost everything except changing Oblomov’s ways. As his name indicates, Stolz is not ethnically Russian. Doing things, it seems, is German. In Eugene Vodolazkin’s recent novel The Aviator (2015), the hero, suffering from a disease his doctors cannot cure, travels to a German clinic. “Expect no miracles from our clinic,” the doctor immediately tells him.
“That’s so there are no misapprehensions. We will do all we can.”
I felt that I was smiling broadly, showing my teeth:
“But it’s miracles I came for . . .”
“Miracles, that’s in Russia,” said [Dr.] Meier, his gaze growing sad. “There you live by the laws of the miracle, but we attempt to live in conformity with reality. It’s unclear, however, which is better.”
“When God wishes, nature’s order is overcome,” I said, expressing my main hope, but the interpreter could not translate that.
As the economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron pointed out, Russians pride themselves on relying not on methodical planning, as Germans do, but on avos’, a term with no English equivalent. It means, roughly, sheer luck, a happy chance, a windfall, something desirable one has no right to expect, utter perhapsness. Early in the nineteenth century, Pushkin referred to “our Russian avos’,” and from his time on Russians have regarded the kind of thinking it suggests as a distinctive national characteristic, responsible for both their greatest successes and most significant failures. Chekhov saw it as a fundamental flaw, a form of laziness bound to lead to unnecessary suffering. Solzhenitsyn’s novels about the events leading to the Bolshevik takeover depict Russia’s real heroes not as revolutionists who disdain everything bourgeois and practical but as engineers who actually build things. In August 1914, General Martos knows that Russians must overcome their characteristic way of thinking if they are to defeat the Germans. He “could not tolerate Russian sloppiness, the Russian inclination to ‘wait and see,’ to ‘sleep on it,’ and leave God to make the decisions.”
Is it any wonder, then, that Russians have been inclined to utopianism, mysticism, and pseudoscience? In tsarist times, intellectuals commonly imagined revolution in millenarian terms, as a transformation not just of society but also of the universe. When the anticipated revolution happened, many presumed that this political upheaval would instantaneously change everything else. Wealth would be abundant within days. Suffering would instantly become a thing of the past. And, before long, mortality itself would be overcome, just as the Book of Revelation promised, only without divine intervention. These atheists anticipated that strictly scientific laws, as outlined in Marxist–Leninist philosophy, would accomplish everything that mystics had foretold.
Leon Trotsky was, by the standards of the day, one of the more down-to-earth thinkers
Science is traditionally understood as skeptical inquiry, in which ideas are tested experimentally against reality, which may not confirm them; when they prove mistaken, they are changed and tested anew. It isn’t enough for them to seem persuasive, let alone highly desirable. Since Francis Bacon, scientists have presumed that nature operates by efficient causes rather than providential goals. But in Russia, science is often viewed—even by scientists themselves—as a kind of mystical insight or magic. According to Soviet philosophy, matter itself contains a dynamic guaranteed to lead eventually to Communism. Leon Trotsky was, by the standards of the day, one of the more down-to-earth thinkers, but even he presumed that the coming revolution would transform both the natural world and human nature.
These transformations would happen, Trotsky argued, because human effort would no longer be exerted “spontaneously” and at the whims of the market. No longer would people be subject to economic forces; they would be the masters thereof. In a planned economy, everything happens according to human will, so progress would be immeasurably faster. That reasoning applied not just to the economy, since in the society Bolsheviks were creating literally everything would be planned.
“Communist life will not be formed blindly, like coral islands, but will be built consciously,” Trotsky memorably explained. “The shell of life will hardly have time to form before it will burst open again under the pressure of new technical and cultural inventions and achievements.” Nature will be shaped according to human desires:
Through the machine, man in Socialist society will command nature in its entirety, with its grouse and sturgeons. He will point out places for mountains and for passes. He will change the course of rivers, and he will lay down rules for the oceans.
Is it any wonder that the ussr became an environmental disaster?
People will also redesign themselves, Trotsky continued. They will bring the unconscious and semiconscious processes of the body, like breathing, circulation of the blood, digestion, and reproduction, under conscious control:
The human race will not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings, and capital, in order later to submit humbly before the dark laws of heredity and natural selection!
Socialist man will master his own feelings and learn “to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby create a higher social biological type or, if you will a superman.” In short,
man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser, and subtler. . . . The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.
According to Bolshevik philosophy, these predictions are not mere hopes but are entailed by science itself, especially the science of sciences, Marxism–Leninism. In Western Europe, socialism settled down into social-democratic parties of the center Left. In Russia, it became a mystical communion with the materialist divine, a pseudoscientific realization of Biblical promises.
The philosophy now called cosmism, which was born a century and a half ago, infused its spirit into Marxism–Leninism and now competes with Eurasianism and other ideologies to replace it. Unlike most Russian visionary schemes, it has actually influenced prominent Americans, particularly the “transhumanists” of Silicon Valley. Eltchaninoff points to the role that Russians like Sergey Brin (the cofounder of Google) and Robert Ettinger (the inventor of cryogenics) played in developing New Age thinking and its technological successors. He cites an impressive list of people, including Elon Musk, Michael Murphy (the founder of Esalen), Max More (the author of such essays as “The Philosophy of Transhumanism”), and many more who have been inspired by one or another of the key cosmist thinkers: Nikolai Fyodorov, Vladimir Vernadsky, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Alexander Chizhevsky, Vasily Kuprevich, and Danila Medvedev.
It all began with Fyodorov (1829–1903), the supremely weird librarian of the Rumyantsev Museum (now the Russian State Library). As did so many inspiring Russian thinkers, Fyodorov attracted hagiographers who all but canonized him. He was said to know the location and contents of every volume in the library, so that if a reader requested a book on some topic, he would receive a few more he had not known about. Fyodorov, we are told, lived a totally ascetic life; owning and eating almost nothing, he slept on a packing crate. Contemptuous of bodily discomfort, he refused to wear an overcoat even during the coldest days of the Russian winter and yet was never ill. When he was at last persuaded to don one on a particularly frigid day, he caught cold and died!—in a hospital for the indigent, of course.
Deeply disturbed by the “unbrotherly state of the world” characterized by human “disrelatedness,” Fyodorov traced these maladies to the separation of the “learned” from the “unlearned,” among whom he strangely counted himself. The learned pursue knowledge for its own sake while forgetting about human welfare. Instead of working together to eliminate evil, they dissipate effort into ever more fields and subfields. In short, “there is division [among people] only because there is no common task.” The learned must unite to perform that common task, which is important both in itself and for joining people to accomplish it. The task Fyodorov proposed was not just one desirable project among many, but, in his view, the only proper goal for humanity: “There can be no other obligation, no other task for a conscious being.”
That “common task” was raising the dead: humanity must set aside all other concerns and discover the technology to bring our forefathers back to life. Otherwise, Fyodorov opined, we resemble children dancing on the graves of our “fathers.” Fyodorov was an illegitimate child who bore the name not of his father but of his godfather, and so it is more than curious that he writes as if the world consisted entirely of men. He was not exactly a misogynist, because misogynists are supremely conscious that women exist. We never hear from Fyodorov about resurrecting our mothers, and when he faulted the learned for inventions that foster “the manufacturing industry” (which is “the root of disrelatedness”), he accused them of “effeminate caprice.” By the same token, he regarded childbearing as a sign of our enslavement to the laws of nature.
Like the most enthusiastic Bolsheviks, Fyodorov imagined that humanity could overcome natural laws if only they were guided by a single, conscious will. Raising the dead entails our liberation from the dictatorship of nature. Only when it takes place will people truly regard each other as “brothers” (not brothers and sisters) and eliminate war along with all other strife. In this way alone can the world overcome “stateness” (gosudarstvennost’) and achieve “fatherlandness” (otechestvennost’). Altruism, the paltry goal of today, involves helping and favoring a few people, but the common task of raising our forefathers unites all.
A religious man, Fyodorov imagined that his common task would fulfill the Gospel promise to raise the dead—only people must not wait passively for divine intervention but act themselves. “We must understand and define Orthodoxy as the universal prayer of all the living for all the dead, a prayer that then becomes action,” Fyodorov instructs.
By the same token, the millennium will be achieved only by human effort. Here Fyodorov’s views align with Lenin’s. Today’s learned patriots, Fyodorov explains, take pride in their forefathers’ achievements instead of feeling “contrition for their death”—as they should, because they have still not bothered to resurrect them. Only the unlearned already know that
as soon as the earth is seen as a cemetery and nature as a death-dealing force, just so soon will the political question be replaced by the physical question; and in this context the physical will not be separated from the astronomical, i.e. the earth will be recognized as a heavenly body and the stars will be recognized as other earths. The unification of all sciences under astronomy is the simplest, most natural, unlearned thing.
What does astronomy have to do with raising the dead? The answer, believe it or not, is that atoms of our ancestors have escaped into outer space. Before we can resurrect the dead, we must retrieve their atoms. Only then can we achieve the “patrification” (not “matrification”) of matter. Hence the “common task” is inextricably linked to space travel.
I remember the late George Kline, an expert on Russian philosophy, pointing out that it is not particular atoms that make us who we are but their organization. Atoms, after all, are replaceable and constantly change within us. A less obvious objection is that even if we could produce an exact copy of a person, how do we know that a duplicate of me would subjectively be me? If someone copied me while I was alive, would I be located somehow in two places, or would, as with twins, there be two distinct versions of me? Such questions did not trouble Fyodorov and his followers.
The need for women will disappear because men will “replace the bringing into the world of children . . . with the restoration to our fathers of the life we received from them”—from them only, because women apparently play no role in giving life.
One may also wonder at Fyodorov’s disparagement of “manufacturing” and “pure science,” as if they could never contribute knowledge useful for a project unlikely to be attained by just ordering scientists to raise the dead. He did not suspect that, just as “conscious,” “orderly” central planning is actually much less efficient than the “spontaneous,” “anarchic” market, so it is by encouraging people to exploit unforeseeable opportunities that the greatest advances are made.
Russians usually credit the mathematician and rocket designer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935) with founding (or at least inspiring) the Russian space program. “Fyodorov . . . believed that the stars didn’t exist merely to be contemplated and admired,” Tsiolkovsky wrote in praise of his predecessor, “but so that mankind could conquer them and settle among them.” What’s more, Tsiolkovsky enthused, Fyodorov “believed that the whole universe could be controlled by human will and consciousness.”
Once a cult figure for the few, Tsiolkovsky has become a national icon. When the ussr disintegrated, the Russian Cape Canaveral turned out to be in Kazakhstan, and so a replacement was built in the Russian Federation. It was named for Tsiolkovsky because, as President Putin explained,
one of the first people in our country, and indeed the world, to have pondered these questions [about humanity’s relation to the cosmos] was Tsiolkovsky—and yet we have no towns that bear his name. We are not going to build just a cosmodrome and a launch pad here, but a research center, and a whole city. I think that if . . . we call this future city Tsiolkovsky it will be only fitting.
“Cosmism,” Eltchaninoff instructs, “has come to be considered a philosophical discipline in its own right.”
Compared to Tsiolkovsky, Fyodorov almost seems, well, down to earth. Tsiolkovsky’s prose displays what Eltchaninoff aptly calls “metaphysical vertigo.” Tsiolkovsky began his article “Panpsychism, or Everything Feels” in the tone of an evangelist:
I am afraid you will leave this life with bitterness in your heart if you do not learn from me, a pure source of knowledge, that continuous joy awaits you. . . . I would want this life of yours to be a bright dream of the future, a future where happiness never ends.
The way I see it, my sermon is not even a daydream, but a strictly mathematical conclusion based on precise knowledge.
We sense ourselves thinking, Tsiolkovsky explains, but it is really each atom in the brain that thinks and feels. And not just in the brain: “in a mathematical sense,” every particle of matter feels and thinks. It’s only a question of degree. Thought does not stop with humans; to a lesser extent, dogs and rats think, and to a still lesser extent, plants. Why stop there, since the line between living and non-living matter is entirely arbitrary? “Can anyone deny that in nature we have a continuous chain of links which differ only quantitatively?” In fact, everything senses and feels. “The inorganic world cannot express itself,” Tsiolkovsky asserts, “but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t possess a primitive form of sensitivity.”
Atoms have rudimentary feeling, like that of a sleeping person. They awake into full consciousness when they become part of something complex, like a brain. Although everyone dies and their brains disintegrate, the part of them that really feels, their atoms, lives on and eventually becomes part of other brains. In the interim they sleep and do not sense time passing, and so, when they awake, even if after millions of years, life will seem to have been continuous. In that sense, we are truly immortal. Since the universe extends infinitely in time and space, we will have an infinite number of lives. Indeed, we have already had an infinite number! “What exists is a single, supreme, conscious, happy life that never ceases.” We can be sure of happiness because, Tsiolkovsky preposterously asserts, “the ethical code of the cosmos dictates that there be no suffering anywhere.”
As life extends indefinitely in time, so humanity will conquer ever more space. First, people will harness the sun’s energy, only a tiny portion of which is actually used, and so multiply human powers billions of times. People will use that energy to eliminate deserts and increase population exponentially. When they at last need more room, they will establish colonies on the asteroids and planets, then on worlds throughout the Milky Way, and then move on to other galaxies.
People will also perfect themselves. Like so many progressives of his time, Tsiolkovsky believed in eugenics. He envisaged central planners controlling mating to produce a superior species. Humanity will at first be divided into two parts, the chosen ones living together by conscious planning while the others endure spontaneously. Gradually, everyone will belong to the chosen, and then
all will be happiness; all will be contentment. And those who cannot be helped will be subsumed into nirvana, or non-being (temporarily, of course).
Perfect happiness demands that atoms not be subjected to imperfect experiences in inferior beings, “such as our monkeys, cows, wolves, deer, hares, rats, and the like,” whose existence “is of no benefit to the atom.” We must therefore
eliminate the animal world . . . . Likewise, the atom’s rare potential existence in the body of modern man encourages us to improve and eliminate all backward [human] breeds.
But what if humans are themselves an inferior breed? If the universe has quintillions of worlds, and has lasted forever, then there must be civilizations billions of years ahead of us who regard us the way we regard rats. So why do they allow us to live? Isn’t the fact that we exist proof that something is wrong with Tsiolkovsky’s logic? As we might guess, he comes up with an entirely ad hoc answer. Every now and then, it seems, advanced beings “degenerate” and so “are eliminated as a result of occasionally occurring regressions. A fresh influx is necessary,” and so Earth and a few similar planets are allowed to develop “to replenish the losses incurred by regressive breeds in the cosmos.”
In short, we can begin to appreciate the significance of our existence only if we think cosmically. Then we will recognize that life is eternal. “Can we really doubt that the cosmos generally contains only joy, satisfaction, perfection and truth”?
The pantheon of cosmists includes numerous thinkers who propounded the preposterous as indubitable. Alexander Chizhevsky (1897–1964) claimed to have established, by strict mathematical deduction of course, that solar cycles regulate history:
that the greatest revolutions, wars, and mass movements . . . constituting the turning points of history . . . have tended to coincide with epochs of heightened solar activity and reach their peak in the moment of the most intense solar activity.
Since the Bolsheviks utterly rejected anarchism, the anarchist Alexander Svyatagor (1889–1937) invented “anarcho-biocosmism,” which aimed to overturn not social but natural laws. Since this project demanded strict control of all human effort, anarchism morphed into its opposite.
According to Eltchaninoff, the embalmers of Lenin were inspired by the sort of thinking that eventually led to cryogenics (freezing of the dead until science can cure whatever killed them). The Bolshevik Alexander Bogdanov maintained that “mutual transfusion,” in which the blood of an old and young person is exchanged, would rejuvenate the former without aging the latter. This technique had the added benefit of transcending bourgeois individualism. When Bogdanov tried the process on himself, he (but not his young partner) died.
More recently, the futurologist Danila Medvedev, a founder of the Russian transhumanist movement and of the first cryogenic company outside the United States, argued that the universal immortality he promised would “create new possibilities for collaboration with the Russian Orthodox church,” which
has always had the custom of preserving the bodies and body parts of saints as relics. We’ll be able to offer them a service for preserving their saints, who will then be technically ready for resurrection.
What’s more, Medvedev continued, we will be able to unite spiritual and secular power in one person by
transplanting the head of Patriarch Kirill of Moscow onto the body of President Putin. Then we’d have a single, unified leader. And I don’t see any blasphemy.
Where but in Russia (or in Jonathan Swift’s Academy of Lagado) could such ideas flourish? Some Russian thinkers agree with the former deputy prime minister Dmitri Rogozin, who became head of the Russian space agency Roscomos, that cosmist thinking is an “intrinsic part of the Russian soul” and that it was “predetermined by the national character of the Russian people.” Others stress how closely cosmist ideas resemble those circulating at the Esalen Institute and in Silicon Valley. Can there be more convincing proof, they ask, that Russian discoveries will conquer the world?
Russian cosmists proposed a “nooscope” that could intervene in human thoughts, and today Elon Musk’s Neuralink project aims to train the brain—or, as the Neuralink website explains, the company will “create a generalized brain interface to restore autonomy to those with unmet medical needs today and unlock human potential tomorrow.” Paralysis will be a thing of the past, and, we may suppose, psychiatry as we know it will be superseded. It is also easy to see how intrusive government might create an unprecedented kind of tyranny.
“The link between cosmism and [American] transhumanism is pretty clear,” the British philosopher and sociologist Steven Fuller observed. Eltchaninoff offers numerous examples of American techno-wizards and transhumanists who were directly inspired by Russian cosmism, but even if the two movements developed independently, the similarities should make us reflect. It is never good when Americans begin to think like Russians. Who can tell what young people educated to despise Western liberal values will do when they join a technological movement reflecting the cosmist “Russian soul”? The fact that, spiritually speaking, Silicon Valley borders on Moscow does not comfort me.
