Optimists, not Madmen
Boris Groys - Russian Cosmism
The New Criterion, February 1, 2019
Monument to the Conquerors of Space, Moscow, March 1993 © Andrew Stuttaford
If nothing else, the Bolshevik Revolution was seen as an absolute break with the past. That is how it was planned, how it was hymned (“We’ll burn up Raphael for our Tomorrow’s sake,” wrote Vladimir Kirillov; he was shot twenty years later), and how many of its opponents understood it. With the exception of those realists who regarded it as a reversion to barbarism, Red October was perceived as something essentially modern, or, even, to some, as rather more than modern, a pathway, to borrow a pre-revolutionary phrase from Trotsky, towards a “radiant future.”
The imagining of that radiant future owed more to ancient fantasies than a Lenin or Trotsky would ever admit, even probably to themselves. But burrow through their verbiage, eliminate the preoccupations of time and place—czars and capital and imperialism— and it becomes obvious that the Bolsheviks, or at least their truest believers, were merely the latest generation of millennialist fanatics to bother our planet, even if they wanted to build rather more of Heaven here on earth (or “earths”—I’ll get to that) than their predecessors. “We are kindling a new eternity,” declaimed the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky shortly after the revolution—and a decade or so before his suicide.
Read the words that follow Trotsky’s reference to “a radiant future” and the breadth of his vision is impossible to miss: “Man, strong and beautiful, will become master of the drifting stream of his history and will direct it towards the boundless horizons of beauty, joy and happiness.” Trotsky returned to this mirage just over twenty years later in some passages in Literature and Revolution (1924). The communist Heaven on earth was to be Promethean, with man moving “rivers and mountains.” Man himself would be its greatest project. “The most complicated methods of artificial selection and psychophysical training” would be used to “create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.”
Trotsky clearly anticipated that his superman would be able to live a (very) long time, but he doesn’t seem to have expected him to be immortal. Compared with what the Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov (1829–1903) had in mind, Trotsky’s was a narrow, crabbed, shirker’s Prometheanism. Fedorov dreamed bigger dreams. He insisted that humanity’s (compulsory) “common task” should be not the postponement of death but its defeat, a demanding enough objective even without Fedorov’s typically maximalist twist. Immortality was not enough. All the dead must also be brought back to life. In a rare nod to practicality, Fedorov admitted that completing the common task would take a very long while. In the meantime, however, it would provide mankind with a great unifying purpose (under the direction, conveniently, of a Russian autocrat). It would also push our species into space, as we searched for the particles necessary to restore long-perished ancestors, many of whom would have to be re-engineered (in ways infinitely more extensive than anything envisaged by Trotsky) so that they could survive on some distant planet: all those Lazaruses, you see, would be too numerous for earth (by this time transformed into a spaceship, “a great electric boat”) to host.
An eccentric’s eccentric (slept on a trunk, vegetarian, librarian, odd views about sex, mistaken for a beggar in the street, impressed Tolstoy), Fedorov wrote reams and attracted a few devotees but published very little during his lifetime. Nevertheless, he became known as the father of “cosmism,” an ill-defined mishmash of beliefs, convictions, and delusions, not all of which he would have shared. Cosmism, or ideas that could be squeezed into that obligingly elastic pigeonhole, drew growing attention before the revolution, and considerably more in the decade of utopian hysteria that followed it, including, in every probability, from Trotsky. In his introduction to Russian Cosmism, a collection of writings by some of the better-known (in Russia at least; over here, well . . . ) cosmists published last year, the New York University professor Boris Groys observes how many cosmists took Trotsky’s side during his duel with Stalin.
Stalin, who had his own more downbeat take on the future, did not approve of cosmism and would not have been convinced by post-revolutionary efforts to strip it of its mystical baggage. He thought even less of those who sympathized with Trotsky. Under the circumstances, it is unsurprising that a number of cosmists were forced into the queue for resurrection earlier than they might have hoped. Others served long terms in the Gulag. But some “scientific cosmists” (cosmism is a tree with many branches), valuable to the regime in other respects, were tolerated so long as they kept their esoteric philosophizing mainly to themselves. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935) may have been inspired by Fedorov’s visions of space travel, but he was also the father of Russian rocketry, and, despite official unease over some of his views, was supported by the Soviet state.
Other cosmists’ encounters with science were less successful. Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928), an early associate of Lenin and a revolutionary, doctor, science-fiction writer, and much more besides, recommended blood transfusions from the young to the old as a way of reversing aging. As the appearance of a “blood boy” in an episode of the television show Silicon Valley suggests, this theory is going through a revival, but it killed Bogdanov. He died after an exchange of blood with a student who had been written off by her doctors owing to malaria and tuberculosis. She, amazingly, recovered.
Interest in cosmism within Russia began to pick up again in the waning days of the Soviet Union and has gathered speed since. Anton Vaino, Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff since 2016, no less, has claimed to be the co-inventor of a “Nooscope,” a device designed as a technocratic tool to study humanity’s collective consciousness. This is a questionable proposition at many levels, but it was undoubtedly inspired by the thinking of Vladimir Vernadsky (1863–1945), some sort of cosmist, but a good enough geologist to be awarded a Stalin Prize rather than a stint in the Gulag—or worse. Cosmism’s comeback in post-Soviet Russia is part of a much broader effort to reconnect with an intellectual heritage wrecked by the long communist ascendancy. It has also helped that Fedorov’s preference for autocracy and his belief in a uniquely Russian form of manifest destiny fits into attempts to cobble together an ideological structure for a Putin regime that no longer finds Western liberalism compatible with its ambitions.
Cosmism is a slippery, protean concept. Anyone hoping that Professor Groys’s book will offer anything approaching a precise definition of what cosmism was (and is) will inevitably be disappointed. To be sure, Groys’s introduction does include some useful clues, notably the contrast between the cosmists’ view that science could fulfill the millennialist hopes of the past and the Futurist conviction that the new technologies of the twentieth century represented a chance to start again from scratch. Groys also spells out how Fedorov’s ideas were (at least notionally) rooted in materialism: to Fedorov, the soul had no existence separate from the body, let alone any prospect of outlasting it. But because, as Groys summarizes it, everything was “material, physical, everything [was] technically manipulable,” a properly organized society—a requirement that aligned some initially unsympathetic cosmists with Soviet statism and, in some cases, totalitarianism—should, in the end, be able to bring back the dead. Indeed, it had a moral obligation to do so. Why should admission to Utopia be confined to the (currently) living?
Yes, this was nuts, but it was a nuttiness not so far removed from what some in the Bolshevik hierarchy were saying (Trotsky was not alone), and it was embraced with enthusiasm by zanier elements on the revolutionary fringe. The Biocosmists-Immortalists called for “immortality, resurrection, rejuvenation . . . and the freedom to move in cosmic space.” They were “daring,” one prominent Biocosmist conceded, but “optimists, not madmen.”
After his introduction, Groys throws the reader in at the deep end, leaving him to work his own way through a well-chosen selection of writings (many only recently republished in Russian, and never translated before into English) that are both of scholarly interest and an intriguing glimpse into a certain state of mind. They can be heavy going—“Here I present only sixteen theorems of life”—but are not without their highlights, among them weather control, intra-atomic energy, a worldwide labor army, homes in the ether, the colonization of space, a spot of eugenics, “happy atoms,” and a mad sci-fi story from Bogdanov: “Margarita Anche, a blossoming woman of seven hundred and fifty . . . ” But any newbies relying solely on Groys’s introduction for their understanding of cosmism will be left somewhat bewildered. This book is better read alongside works such as George M. Young’s The Russian Cosmists (2012) and The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture (1997), edited by Fordham University’s Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal. The title of the latter is yet another much-needed reminder that Soviet history is not always what we have been led to believe.