Today, Explained - Putin's plan to live forever

Episode Date: June 8, 2026

Russia has long been a cradle of modern longevity science, even before its current president started spending billions to extend his life. This episode was produced by Miles Bryan, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by David Tatasciore and Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Russian President Vladimir Putin sunbathing during a vacation in southern Siberia. Photo by Alexey NIKOLSKY / SPUTNIK / AFP via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

How healthy is Vladimir Putin? Well, you know, he always projects this kind of image of a virile sort of strong man. He likes taking his shirt off. He hasn't done it in a while now, but he used to have his picture taken shirtless and, you know, jumping in ice lakes or, you know, sort of riding horses and whatnot. No one knows. I do investigative journalism and I speak a lot to Western spooks, you know, the CIA, people like that. And they've always said there's no truth to these claims that he's somehow ill or, you know, decrepit or whatever.

But thanks to some new reporting from the Wall Street Journal, we do know that Putin is spending billions of dollars trying to extend his life, maybe even live forever. And that in Russia, there's a long and fascinating history of people fiddling with human longevity. That's coming up on today, Explain from Vox. This spring, Denham gets a soft. lighter update. Introducing Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg, a new fit that moves with you. It's everything you want denim to feel like for summer. Easy, breathable, and effortlessly cool. With a fit that creates natural movement and a wide leg that feels modern, not overwhelming. Plus, that signature, wait, for this price, moment. Old Navy's drapey denim wide leg.

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This is today. Explain. Boyan Panchevsky is the Wall Street Journal's chief European political correspondent. He recently wrote a much-linked to article about Vladimir Putin's $26 billion quest for longevity. And it begins with this accidentally overheard conversation between Putin and another world leader. So there was an interesting moment last year in September. He was visiting Beijing. and he got caught on a hot mic

while having a little walk with Xi Jinping. Their words were inaudible, but their translator, still on mic, can be heard detailing parts of their conversation. Biotechnology is continuously developing. Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and you can even achieve immortality.

Shijiping seemed to be agreeing, by the way, and he was kind of nodding and giving his own kind of take on things. and I remember the media covered that a bit tongue in cheek and it was like oh this is weird kind of they're shooting the breeze these two old autocrats you know two dictators in their 70s are Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin best friends

some have made films about it sung about it while Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have been discussing it but I actually knew he was being serious because he is quite serious about his issues and I had read previously about other stuff he's interested in that domain. So I decided to kind of look up and see what he was talking about.

And it turned out that he was actually talking about a state program. Part of what they're researching within that initiative is indeed organ replacement, exactly what he was talking about. So that $26 billion is money that is being spent on this longevity project. And one of the things that it's being spent on, as you said, organ replacement. where do the poor pigs fit in here? Tell me what happened. The mini peaks, yeah, that's a bit creepy, poor little mini-pigs. So essentially there are two ways they're looking into to achieve this organ replacement for humans.

One of them is 3D printing. It's called 3D bio-printing. I think everyone by now has heard of 3D printing. Basically, 3D printers are printing things. They can print a glass. They can print a glove. They can even print a whole house. And there are also 3D printers that print biological material, tissues, and the Russians are hoping even organs quite soon. So the idea is you print an organ in the lab

and then you kind of implanted into a human being, like say lungs or liver or even the heart perhaps. That's the aspiration. The second thing is the mini-peaks. they are genetically sort of close to humans in some ways. They're genetically modified, I think, as well, and they're growing organs in these mini-pigs, and then they're implementing them,

implanting them into human beings. It has to be said, this is already being done. I don't think people who get organ like that live long, or, you know, for various reasons, the body rejects the organs or whatever, but it is a technique that is actually quite promising. It's not a fantasy. It's something that other countries are doing as well. I mean, China notably, is doing this as well. You also wrote that Vladimir Putin loves a reverse sauna. What is this?

Yeah, he does. He does a cryo chamber. He loves a cryo chamber. That's what they call him. A cryo chamber is basically a room like a sauna. But the difference is the opposite of a sauna because it's extremely cool. I think it's minus under 70 Fahrenheit, if I'm not mistaken. Oh. It's ridiculously good for inflammation, ridiculously good for any aches or pains. And my legs started to tinkle and I'm like, okay, this is a little bit what hypothermia. It feels like. What he does there, he kind of strips naked and walks in and stands there for a few minutes in that sort of horrible cold. I discussed this with the former chancellor of Austria, a guy called Sebastian Quartz, who visited Putin in the Kremlin.

and then during the conversation Putin just kind of brought up this thing and then talked about it for quite a while and Kurds who at the time was a young man he was just over 30 years old I think he was the world's youngest leader even and then he was listening to this and he told me later that was weird

you know I didn't expect him to start to start talking I don't understand why he mentioned that he was kind of you know we were here to talk politics and things and then suddenly he talked he started talking about health and longevity and how you should use this reverse sauna. They're looking into how to slow down or even stop the actual aging process

within the human cells. They're looking into peptides. Again, something very familiar. I think RFK Jr. is very big on peptides. I mean, I'm a big fan of peptides. I've used them myself. Putin had one longevity guru who was a geriatric,

doctor. He was a very esteemed sort of professor of medicine. And that guy had been looking into peptides for many decades, even since back in the Soviet days. So he was a peptide pioneer. And he was asked in an interview,

you know, what about, you know, what is your research? How does it relate to Putin? And he said the idea is to preserve, to prolong the life of a leader who is so important to us that if he were to die, our country would be thrown into a crisis.

So that's how he saw his mission. And he also said that people are actually programmed to live 120 years old. And he quoted the Bible as his source for that, the Old Testament. Sarah's lifetime, the span of Sarah's life, came to 127 years. The Book of Genesis. Aaron was 123 years old when he died on Mount Hore. The Book of Numbers, Chapter 3. Moses was 120 years old when he died.

His eyes were undimmed and his vigor unabated. The book of Deuteronomy, chapter 34, verse 7. So it was kind of interesting for a well-credentialed scientist, a professor even, to quote the Bible as a source of medical knowledge. But the thing is, he then died when he turned 77. So he didn't reach the age that he prescribed himself and that he, I guess, He was hoping Putin might reach. So then Putin had to find another longevity guru after the early demise of that guy.

And then now he's got a guy who's much more focused on the mini-pigs and the 3D printing. I was genuinely impressed to learn that Vladimir Putin's daughter is involved in this. She is a legit scientist, yeah? She is a doctor, yeah. Her name is Maria Voronsova. She is an endocrinologist. She looks into glands and the sort of endocrine system of the human body. And she has received quite a substantial grant of money from one of these state programs

to work on research related to longevity. So Putin has recruited his own family members. He's recruited scientists. He really trusts. to work on this issue. So it's very close to home for him. That really shows that it's something very, very important to him as a leader of a state. And as an autocratic leader, you know, it's not a real democracy, Russia. It's pretty much a military dictatorship nowadays. You know, he can commandeer the resources of state the way he likes it. And obviously,

he's decided this is a subject that merits a lot of research and a lot of funding and the input from people he really trust, including his own daughter. your point, Vladimir Putin is not the first Russian autocrat slash dictator to want to try to live forever, is he? Not at all. I was surprised to learn while researching my article that actually Russia is kind of the cradle of modern longevity science. Going back to Joseph Stalin, the dictator of the Soviet Union, he had a longevity guru himself. And that longevity guru organized what seems to be the world's first longevity conference back in the day. I think it was at the end of the 20s or the early 30s.

It happened in Kiev in today's Ukraine. Then it was the Soviet Union. And that guy also claimed in his studies and his medical work that people will be living up to 140 years of age. And that guy too unfortunately died age 65. So it seems to be a trend among these longevity gurus that they don't really reach the biblical age, you know. And I didn't include this in my article

because I couldn't really find hard evidence for it, but there are some anecdotal sort of stories about Stalin being very angry about his longevity. You didn't like the sound of that. Bad look. All right, so Vladimir Putin is spending a lot of money, a lot of Russian money on this project. It may work.

it likely will not work. But let's say it does work. Let's say there are some real advances here that come out of this project, scientific advances. Is Putin going to share? Will he share with Russia? Will he share it with the world?

If Vladimir Putin were to find the source of eternal youth, I mean, obviously he'll be hogging it for himself first and for the members of his family or the elite. But eventually these things trickled down, you know. It's worth remembering that Putin is extremely concerned about the demographics of his country and the demographics were awful to begin with. Life expectancy for a Russian male is 68 years.

It's very, very low for an industrial nation. And so that's terrible. And on top of that, there is this extremely lethal war that he started and he's waging against Ukraine and it's not going well for him or for anyone. There's a bit of a macabre irony that he's now trying to prolong the lifespan of a nation that he's dragged into this incredibly damaging and deadly war and that he's trying to somehow undo something that he's done himself.

Boyan Panchevsky, he's the Wall Street Journal's chief European political correspondent. Coming up, Revolution's French and Russian, Dostoevsky, a cryptic futurologist. What on earth? Support for today, explain, comes from Vanta. What's one thing in business? Vanta asks that's spreading as fast as AI. AI risks, says Vanta. Every new tool that your team signs up for, every vendor that turns on AI features, every new integration has the potential to create a risky situation for your company.

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It's easy to get started. Right now, ProtonVPN is offering our listener 70% off a two-year plan when you go to ProtonvPN.com slash explain. That's P-R-O-T-O-NvPN.com slash explained for 70% off your two-year plan. That's ProtonvPN.com slash explained. Erin Brown, editor at New Lines Magazine, in the first half of the show, we heard about Vladimir Putin's deep and profound interest in immortality. You wrote a story about how the quest for immortality in Russia does not start with Vladimir Putin. In fact, it goes back way, way, way earlier than him. Where does this all begin? Yeah, so it's not even just the quest for immortality in Russia. In fact, there's a whole movement right now that's called the transhumanism movement, right? And it's these guys. like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel and Brian Johnson and, you know, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping who are thinking about how to use technological vectors to achieve immortality.

But even though these guys come from lots of different kinds of backgrounds, they actually all have one patron saint. And it's this guy named Nikolai Fyodorov, who was an ascetic living in Russia in the 1860s. Now, the 1860s was kind of a wild time. in the Russian Empire, right? This is when the Tsar had just liberated the serfs. They were instituting local governments. There was a lot of upheavals around what the future of the Russian Empire would look like. And there were a group of students who were reading a novel that was really interested in the questions of socialism, right? It's called What is to be done? And a lot of them

were looking for examples of this kind of socialist future. One of them, a young guy named Nikolai Pavlovich Peterson actually ran into a real-life example of kind of the perfect man, the new Cincinnati when he was out teaching to country school in Nizhny Novgorod. He was this guy, Nikolai Fyodorov, who was actually the son, illegitimate son of a big princely family, and he'd fallen sort of out of his charmed lifestyle when his father died and he was kicked off his family's estate. And he had gone from city to city, town to town, teaching in little schools, and all the while he had been developing this kind of wild thesis, this wild idea of the

future that he called the common task. And it wasn't about creating utopian communes or socialism in the future. It was instead this idea that humanity could, in fact, resurrect everyone who had ever lived and achieve immortality for those who are living now, and that we could all live together both on the earth and in worlds beyond. Okay, so young man interested in socialism goes out to the country, starts teaching, has a weird and interesting colleague, and the colleague's name is Fyodorov. You said he's living like an acetic, so he's living very simply. What is this dude's deal?

Why is he so compelling to the young teacher? So he has these ideas that take the kinds of. energy and fervor that we were seeing in the French Revolution and taking them one step further, right? The French Revolution is all about, like, liberty and equality and brotherhood. And he says, we don't need liberty and equality if we have actual brotherhood, if we're actually taking care of one another. And he had this idea that at that moment, basically all of the technology of the world was being used for warfare. Anytime there was a leap forward and anything from, like, sewing to chemistry, governments were using this to find new ways to wage war.

And he said instead, what if we took, right? What if we took all of these efforts and all of this energy and turned it instead towards this task of trying to figure out how to cheat death? There is not a single invention which the military are not bent on applying to warfare. Not a single discovery which they failed to turn to military purposes. So if it were made the duty of the armies to adapt everything now used in warfare for controlling natural. forces, this duty would automatically become the common task of humanity as a whole. Nikolai Fyodorov, the philosophy of the common task. Every philosophy in the world sort of accepts death as an ineffable, and he instead was like,

I don't think I can accept that. A better knowledge of physiology and psychology should make it possible to prevent the decomposition of corpses and achieve bodily immortality. I think there has to be a way that we can overcome this. and that we can not only, like, live forever, but we can resurrect our ancestors and live with them. Now, of course, there was a problem with this, which is if you're resurrecting everyone who's ever lived, you're going to be living in, like, a sardine tin on the planet Earth. And so one of the things that the Fyodorov was thinking about was how do we get off of the planet Earth

and start populating other parts of the solar system so that everybody has enough space to live and live well. The resources of any planet, however great, are eventually limited. And consequently, an isolated world cannot maintain immortal beings. Okay, so Fyodorov is this random, if a very interesting man at a random country school. How do his ideas become ideas that everyone is aware of? Yeah, so he eventually moved to Moscow and he got a job at what's essentially the Russian State Library. And he was the worst writer. You cannot read his writings.

In Russian, in translation, it is turgid, it is dry. So long as participation and knowledge does not embrace everyone, pure science will remain indifferent to struggle and depredation. But he became essentially kind of the Socrates of Moscow. And he had a little group of acolytes who would listen to his ideas and then translate them to other people either orally or write them down. And in fact, Peterson, his acolyte, wrote down a bunch of his ideas. and sent them to none other than Fyodor Dostoevsky, who really latched on to them and became obsessed with them. In fact, you can really see some of these ideas in the Brothers Kermazov. So one of the great questions of the Brothers Karamazov is, you know, who does not desire the death of his father?

And all throughout this, you see Fyodorov's ideas kind of percolating up and bubbling into it. So he was really influential among the kind of literary set. He also met and had kind of a frosty, a little bit of a prickly relationship with Liev Tolstoy as well. Tolstoy greatly admired Fyodorov, but was not about to buy into his ascetic lifestyle. Even when he was pretending to kind of go back to the land as a peasant surf, he still wore silk undershirts. So he was not about to get on Fyodorov's terrain. of sleeping on a trunk with newspapers as a blanket. Okay, there is something looming on the horizon here, which is, of course, the Russian Revolution and then the Soviet era. This is a massive change in Russian society, right? And I can imagine when power changes hands, when there's this big upheaval,

this guy's ideas vanish into nothingness. And yet, I suspect something different happened? Yeah, not entirely. So his ideas were building, But obviously with the entrance of the Soviet era, there were a lot of revolutionary ideas and there were a small group of kind of an offshoot, sort of second and third generation of Fyodor of Acolytes, who, you know, really grabbed onto the language of the time and declared, you know, death as ugly and inadmissible and these sorts of things. But under Stalin, a lot of the great thinkers of the Russian Empire were sent to labor camps or killed. And that included a lot of the early cosmos. But what was interesting is that some of his acolytes had been the initial kind of people who had thought about what it might look like to travel into space.

So even as early as 1903, he had kind of an acolyte who was drawing rocket boosters and airlocks. And eventually his ideas came back, kind of roaring back in the 60s as the Soviet Union entered the space race. And so he is considered sort of the grandfather of these ideas that push people to consider, like, could we get to the cosmos? And he is slowly being like re-venerated in Russia because of this. Okay. So because that is persisting into this century, the standard bears today are tech leaders. Yes, exactly, right? I mean, I think it's quite easy to see why somebody like Elon Musk loves a guy who's kind of the,

the offbeat thinker, the person who was, you know, thinking beyond his time and also thinking about putting people on other planets, since that is a huge part of what Elon Musk wants to do. But the real difference between Fyodorov and the likes of, you know, Peter Thiel and Brian Johnson and Elon Musk is that he was really concerned with this quest for immortality extending to everyone. He said, not for oneself and not for others, but with everyone and for everyone, right, that we couldn't actually achieve immortality if we left anyone behind. And I think a lot of the critics nowadays of the transhumanist movement, right,

this idea that at one point we will use technologies of vector to achieve immortality, is that it's largely serving a techno-elite class and that the morality that Fyodorov was so concerned with has fallen by the wayside, right? Elon Musk wants to be immortal for himself, so that he can extend his power indefinitely. And perhaps he would extend that immortality to others. But is that so that they can achieve some kind of a higher cosmic purpose? Or is it so that they can work in an Amazon warehouse or, you know, on a terraformed Mars space camp for longer?

So I think in a way, a lot of Fyodorov's warnings have gone unheeded. He also said that a civilization that exploits but does not restore. cannot have any other result than the approach of its own end. And I feel like in a way he's kind of a Cassandra out there saying like, hey, we can do this, but we have to do it together and we have to do it for the right reasons. And I don't know if that managed to get translated into the 21st century. Aaron Brown is an editor at New Lines Magazine. Miles Bryant-Burin produced today.

Amina El Sadi edited and pitched a weird one. Gabriel Dunantov checks the facts, and Patrick Boyden, David Tatashore, engineered. I'm Noelle King. It's today explained.