https://theconversation.

com/russian-cosmism-a-national-mythology-against-transhumanism-152780

Russian Cosmism: a national

mythology against transhumanism
Published: January 11, 2021 6.30pm GMT
Author

1. Juliette Faure
Doctorante en science politique, Sciences Po

Disclosure statement

Juliette Faure does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit
from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Ilya Glazunov’s painting Eternal Russia (Glazunov Museum, Moscow) expresses ideas dear to contemporary
propagators of cosmism, notably the alliance of Soviet modernity and the traditional values of the Russian
empire. 
Wikipédia
Cosmism, a complex intellectual movement that blends Orthodox theology with
scientific forecasting, emerged almost 150 years ago and is once again on the rise in
Russia. Part of the country’s elite holds Cosmism as a distinctively Russian response to
the supposedly dominant transhumanism in the West. What is Cosmism, and how is it
spreading in Russia today?

Léonid Pasternak, Portrait of Nikolaï Fiodorov. Wikimedia

At the end of the 19th century, the Russian thinker Nikolai Fyodorov (1829-1903)
defended a deeply moral and Christian philosophy of science. He imagined that
humanity could employ technological progress to achieve universal salvation. According
to him, scientific advances could be used to resuscitate ancestors, achieve immortality,
transform human nature toward its deification, and finally, conquer and regulate the
cosmos.

After Fyodorov, renowned Russian scientists – such as the forerunner of cosmonautics

Constantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) or the founder of geochemistry Vladimir
Vernadsky (1863-1945) – built up on his futuristic and spiritual vision of technical
progress.

In the 1970s, a group of Soviet intellectuals became passionate about the esoteric theses
of these authors and brought them together under the name of “Russian Cosmism”. In
contrast with the official communist ideology, Cosmism was a heterodox theory. It
nevertheless aroused the interest of academics as well as high-ranking members of the
political and military establishment.

One of these was Lieutenant-General Alexey Savin, the director of the secret unit
10003 in charge of research on the military use of paranormal phenomena from 1989 to
2003. Inspired by his reading of Vernadsky, he developed the principles of a science of
the extraterrestrial world called “noocosmology”. Likewise, in 1994, Vladimir Rubanov,
deputy secretary of the Russian Security Council and former director of the KGB’s
analytical department, proposed to use Cosmism as the basis of “Russia’s national
identity.”
The Izborsky Club: Cosmism as Russian national ideology
Today, Cosmism still serves as a source of inspiration for ideologues in search of a
national idea for post-Soviet Russia. The legacy of Cosmist thought is particularly
claimed by a conservative think tank close to power, the Izborsky Club, which was
created in 2012.

This group brings together about 50 academics, journalists, politicians, entrepreneurs,

clerics and ex-military around an imperialist and anti-Western agenda. Supported in part
by funding provided by the presidential administration, the Izborsky Club aims to define
an ideology for the Russian state. In this regard, members of the Club consider science
as an ideological battlefield, within which Russia must oppose its own “technocratic
mythology” to the Western model of development. The latter is roughly associated with
transhumanism, a concept behind which members of the Izborsky Club rank both
explicit advocates of transhumanism such as Elon Musk and any worldview that
derogates from their vision of traditional society such as feminism, globalization or
sustainable development.

While some Western transhumanist thinkers identify Fyodorov as the prophet of their

quest for immortality, the Izborsky Club on the contrary claims the specifically Russian
character of Cosmism and its intimate connection with the “historical mission” of the
Russian people. The November 2020 issue of the Izborsky Club journal meant to
demonstrate the opposition between Cosmism and transhumanism.

Accordingly, transhumanism is the logical heir of evolutionary progressivism, aimed at

emancipating the individual from the constraints of human nature through their
hybridization with the machine. In contrast, Cosmism is described as an eschatological
quest for the spiritualization of humanity, guided by a literal interpretation of the biblical
promises of resurrection. If the authors of the Izborsky Club journal denounce a purely
scientist faith in the technical improvement of man, they also stand apart from a
bioconservative or ecological technophobia. Cosmism thus serves as the basis for a
syncretic ideology that they entitled “technocratic traditionalism”, and which combines
technological modernity with religious conservatism.

This ideology allows to join together the different legacies of the Russian history. In this
view, the technological and industrial power of the Soviet Union harmoniously unites
with the traditional Orthodox values of Tsarist Russia. Furthermore, the president of the
Izborsky Club, Aleksandr Prokhanov, a well-known writer and editor-in-chief of the far-
right newspaper Zavtra, coined the expression “Cosmism-Leninism” to argue that the
fundamental meaning of Lenin’s industrialist utopianism emanated from the “doctrine of
the Russian Cosmists” and extended it. The reinvention of the Cosmist heritage thus
produces a unified national narrative that responds to Vladimir Putin’s regime’s aim to
obliterate memory conflicts and [“link historical eras” in order to claim that “Russians
have a common, continuous history spanning over 1,000 years”.
In addition, the Izborsky Club promotes Cosmism as the basis of a “new global
alternative development project that Russia could express and propose”. The marriage of
modern science with political traditionalism indeed intends to offer an alternative to the
Western theories of modernization, which assume that economic development brings
about the political convergence of societies toward liberal democracy. Contrary to the
libertarianism and cosmopolitanism that they attribute to Silicon Valley, the ideologues
of the Izborsky Club advocate the Stalinist model modernization, led by an authoritarian
state and a collectivist economy.

In their view, Cosmism stands in place of the fallen ideal of Bolshevik society and
therefore allows to renew an imperialist and messianic conception of the finality of
science. The major scientific achievements promoted by the Izborsky Club (space and
submarine exploration, Arctic development, research on improving human capacities)
serve the defense of the “Russian civilization” and its “spiritual security”. Science thus
becomes the vector of realization of the “Russian dream”, which is meant to replace the
American dream with “the ideals of Russian Cosmism” and of a “spiritual science”.

A vision increasingly shared at the highest levels of power

The Izborsky Club is connected to influential power networks that allow the circulation
of its ideas. In July 2019, Aleksandr Prokhanov was invited to the Duma, the Russian
Parliament, to present his film Russia: Nation of Dream, in which he promoted his
vision of a national scientific and spiritual mythology. The Izborsky Club is also close to
key figures in the conservative elites – the monarchist oligarch Konstantin Malofeev and
Dmitry Rogozin, the director of the Roscosmos Space Agency. Finally, it has access to
the military-industrial complex. As a witness of these links, a strategic bomber carrier of
missiles, Tupolev Tu95-MC, was named after the Club, “Izborsk”, in 2014.
Beyond the Izborsky Club, references to Cosmism permeate the discourse of the highest
authorities. Valery Zorkin, President of the Constitutional Court, recently quoted a
fervent advocate of Cosmism, Arseny Gulyga (1921-1996). In his speech at the 9th St.
Petersburg International Legal Forum in 2019, he called for a broadening of the meaning
of the common destiny of the Russian people written in the Constitution to a more
general acceptance turned toward “universal salvation”.

Cosmism therefore serve as the foundation for a new Russian national mythology that
matches the two imperatives of the current regime: a technological race for power and
the definition of an alternative political model to Western modernity.