Reading Anya Bernstein's The Future of Immortality in the midst of a pandemic that is claiming casualties across the globe, I was filled at least briefly with hope and optimism: should humanity successfully manage this viral outbreak, contemporary Russian scientists and thinkers have some visionary plans for preserving and extending healthy human life. Bernstein spent one and a half years in Moscow, during which time she interviewed an array of scholars, clergy, entrepreneurs, and futurist-enthusiasts; and she attended a host of workshops and lectures at universities, libraries, and even one on a flotilla in order to research contemporary Russia's salvific, commercial, and biopolitical agendas driving research on radical life extension and immortality. While the extent of her investigative activity itself is impressive, her analysis of complex transhumanist, posthumanist, and Orthodox Christian ideas is the work of an incisive scholar. Bernstein seeks answers to such far-reaching questions as, “What possible ontologies and epistemologies of the human are currently emerging from these [techo-scientific] developments?” and “What kinds of politics, ethics, and metaphysics are enabled and disabled in the process?” (4). From anabiosis and cryogenically-frozen corpses to disembodied consciousness and collective subjectivities, the topics illuminated in The Future of Immortality challenge our understandings of what it means to be alive and what it means to be human, and who or what should dictate those definitions.

Any discussion of immortality in Russia must engage with the ideas of Nikolai Fedorov, whose two disciples (V. A. Kozhevnikov and N. P. Peterson) gathered, amended, and published his writings and lectures under the title of Filosofiia obshchego dela (volume I in 1906 and volume II in 1913). Bernstein acknowledges Fedorov's central importance in her introduction, and Chapter 1 offers a rich account of his proposal to resurrect all deceased human ancestors. She emphasizes that Fedorov was a staunch materialist who imagined that the particles of the decomposed corpse could be reassembled, like a machine, and he viewed this reassembly as the sole ethical pursuit of science. Bernstein sees Fedorov's focus on the physical body as a precursor to contemporary actions undertaken by transhumanists to enhance their bodies (transhumanists, broadly speaking, believe in humanity's right and obligation to improve their imperfect and limited bodies using all available technologies). Indeed, Fedorov advocated for a kind of active evolution, in which humanity plays a key role in forging itself into an energetically self-sufficient species that could be untethered from planet earth. When Bernstein suggests in the introduction “that Russian immortalism is not to be dismissed as mere speculative philosophy but regarded, instead, as an attempt to bring the future into the present by advocating and exemplifying certain modes of being and acting in the world” (10), she directly echoes Fedorov, albeit without pointing to him. He wrote, “…only when the scholarly community transitions from knowledge to action and progress transitions from knowledge only of what is to knowledge of what should be” can resurrection be achieved.Footnote ¹ Furthermore, Fedorov insisted that “resurrection is not only the future, but also the present.”Footnote ² One of Bernstein's central arguments, therefore, is distilled from Fedorov's own teachings, with the difference that her definition of immortalism includes a range of life-extending and restoring practices, not only resurrection.

Fedorov viewed death as one example of nature's blind forces at work (climatological and natural disasters are others). In her discussion of Fedorov's attitude toward these blind forces, Bernstein asserts that Fedorov saw nature “as something in need of active improvements and transformation” (63). While Fedorov did advocate for the “regulation of nature,” which to him meant transforming the so-called blind (ungoverned, unconscious) forces of nature into conscious ones through the tools of human reason, his approach was not one of incremental improvements. He intended the regulation of the climate, for example, to be totalizing: he imagined a system of atmospheric magnets that would distribute precipitation equitably across the planet. Thus, to say as Bernstein does that Fedorov saw nature as needing improvements is to diminish his radicalism.

Bernstein includes as examples of transhumanist practices cryogenic preservation and efforts to transfer or download one's consciousness into a substrate more durable than our carbon-based bodies. She chronicles her time spent with two enterprises, the Moscow-based KrioRus (the first organization devoted to cryogenic preservation in Eurasia) and the Avatar Project (a techno-scientific endeavor to build alternative, non-biological vessels for human consciousness), and examines how the Russian Orthodox Church relates to these experimental undertakings. While one can find other accounts of transhumanism and posthumanism in Russia, Bernstein lays out a much-needed assessment of how Orthodox Christian religious beliefs are in conflict with secular scientific projects.Footnote ³ Given the growing influence of the Church in Russia under Vladimir Putin, Bernstein's inclusion of Orthodox viewpoints is especially valuable. Chapter 2 touches on theological attitudes toward materialism and vice versa, as well as presenting different views on the naturalness of death (the Church sees death as natural whereas other programs and credos do not).

In Chapters 3 and 4 (devoted to anti-aging movements and neurotechnologies, respectively), the theme of Russians and Russia as having a particular devotion to or proclivity for immortalism comes to the fore. The biotech entrepreneur Petr Fedichev, whom Bernstein interviews, postulates that Russians have a “transhumanist gene,” an idea that she rightly characterizes as “extreme reductionism and biologism” (157). Alarmingly, Fedichev's nationalist essentialism is complemented in contemporary Russia by calls for making the pursuit of Web 4.0 “an Internet of people all connected via neurointerfaces,” which is an example of what Bernstein calls a “national technological idea” (167, 168). Several neurotechnology entrepreneurs told Bernstein that their NeuroNet project “might just be the next ‘megaproject’ Russia is looking for, able to replicate the success of the Soviet space program” and thereby restore the country's diminished prestige (168).

These invocations of genetic proclivities and national ideas brought me back to the book's introduction, where Bernstein contends that Russia has an especially long tradition of immortalism. She states that she is not mounting an “overtly culturalist argument,” but rather she believes that “particular historical contingencies have resulted in the Russian futurist scene being one of the world's most active contemporary immortalist communities” (5). Bernstein has in mind three main categories of historical contingencies. First, disparate thinkers and scientists in Russia from the nineteenth century onward demonstrated a consistent interest in “the theme of technologically enabled human immortality” (4); second, the Soviet techno-scientific agenda bolstered support for creating an ideologically and physiologically New Soviet Man; and third, post-Soviet state efforts to find a new source of national pride and glory to shore up patriotic sentiment have led to fantasies of neurotechnological dominance. These contingencies, especially the first one regarding the longstanding interest of the Russian state and its citizens in life extension and immortality, do not actually transcend culturalism. Bernstein's argument relies on the cultural specificity engendered by Russian intellectual and political history which is necessary to show what makes Russian immortalism distinct from that of Silicon Valley biotech companies, for example. Her moderate culturalist approach avoids the pitfalls of essentialism and determinism; rather, it opens up lines of inquiry related to intellectual history and helps us appreciate the points of convergence and divergence between past and present.

In terms of answering her big questions about the political and ethical implications of these various immortalist and futurist projects, Bernstein acknowledges that at stake are “competing biopolitical projects of remaking life and death” (214). In contrast to the egalitarian, emancipatory ethos undergirding the contemporary Fedorov Movement, the federal government's financial support of research into neurotechnologies invites possibilities for state surveillance and control that live up to Foucault's greatest fears. Despite the chillingly dystopic opportunities invited by potential government involvement in regulating life and death, especially in a country like Russia that has a strong authoritarian legacy, Bernstein concludes quite optimistically that the Fedorovian ethical stratum is what distinguishes Russian immortalism: “…it is in the importance placed on redeeming the past [injustices of death] while building a different future that Russian immortalism distinguishes itself from its Silicon Valley counterpart” (229).

As an anthropologist, Bernstein works at an intersection of scholarly disciplines, which requires that she engage with fields as diverse as biology, history, literature, religion, and sociology. Although this breadth occasionally leads to questionable turns of phrase like “biogerontological imaginaries” (144) and mistranslating “buria i natisk” as “storm and onslaught” rather than Sturm und Drang (83), overall Bernstein demonstrates an admirable ability to synthesize a range of complex topics into a compelling and enjoyable narrative. Her study emphasizes futurity, in part because humans are still quite far away from figuring out how to become immortal. Bernstein might have also considered the ways that immortalist projects, including Fedorov's, were aimed at overcoming time, thereby eradicating the very possibility of the future. Nonetheless, this book will delight specialists and amateurs alike: scholars will marvel at Bernstein's extensive research and footnotes, lay readers will revel in her storytelling, and both will be grateful to her for bringing to light the fascinating range of attitudes and practices comprising contemporary Russian immortalism.