In this episode Evgenia and I talk to Anya Bernstein about Nikolai Fyodorov, Cosmism, and Russian/Soviet anti-death utopias of the industrial age.

Me, personally, I’m very much pro-death. But these guys had other ideas. Some wanted to become self-directed gods, under the flag of the Russian Empire and the Russian Orthodox Church. Others first wanted to defeat capitalism and then move on to the next big boss: death itself!

Anya is a Professor of Anthropology at Harvard and the author of The Future of Immortality, a book about cosmism and transhumuanist movements in Russia. Check out her work.

—Yasha Levine

Want to know more? Check out previous episodes of The Russians.

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