In October, Maria Vorontsova, Putin’s elder daughter and a medical researcher, presented a new longevity laboratory at the Skolkovo business school near Moscow. Last year, Putin and China’s leader Xi Jinping were overheard in Beijing discussing whether people could live to 150.
So people ask me: does Putin really believe there is some secret way to live to 150?
And what will happen to all of us when he realizes there is no such way and that he will have to die after all? Will he take everyone with him?
First, let’s note that the laboratory whose work Putin’s daughter presented deals not so much with extending life as with the changes in the economy, in demography and in other social areas that come from people living longer. It is more about that.
That Maria Vorontsova works separately on extending life, and that money has been allocated for it — well, we have heard about that.
But the first fiddle here is more likely played by a far more tragicomic character: Mikhail Kovalchuk, who heads the Kurchatov Institute, Russia’s national nuclear research center. Kovalchuk really is a kind of cross between Ostap Bender, the con man of Soviet satirical novels, and Academician Petrik, a self-styled scientist known for pseudo-scientific inventions.
As head of the federal nuclear center, which is frightening in itself, he utters very strange words and makes very strange speeches about a world government that sits who knows where. In this sense he is an extremely benighted man, or he plays an extremely benighted man. We should not rule that out either: understanding what the country’s current leadership, and Vladimir Putin personally, wants, he acts out exactly what Putin needs.
Maria Vorontsova, by contrast, has always been fairly measured in her assessments, and she was in this speech too. She says that a human life has a set length, 85 to 90 years in favorable circumstances, and that this is the length we would like to reach. All steps beyond that are attempts, as they say, to cheat God. And so far progress in that direction is not very noticeable.
As I understand it, and from what I heard some time ago, she would not much like her dad to experiment on himself with radical life extension. These experiments don’t work very well on rats. On a human being, even one who in character resembles these wonderful animals, it could all end very quickly and very sadly. And apparently sadly for his daughter, since she speaks about it so very cautiously.
Russia’s state program does indeed provide for life expectancy to rise, to 78, and to 74 for men. I would say that so far the government and Vladimir Putin are working in exactly the opposite direction. But it is written down.
I don’t think Putin fully believes these stories about 150 years that Kovalchuk may be pushing. What we heard in his conversation with President Xi was more what is called small talk: the everyday, social part of a conversation, when people trade half jokes. It was certainly not a serious conversation.
But the situation itself is, of course, very unpleasant. The life of the world, and certainly the life of Russia, depends on what goes on in the head of one man who is no longer young, and whose age has just reached the line he wrote into the program for all of Russian society: 74 years. And today many billions, tens and even hundreds of billions of dollars are being spent on shortening the lives of all other Russians, not lengthening them. That is what he does. What can you do about it?
Will he want to take us all with him? Let’s hope he won’t be allowed to. Although, as of today, nothing constrains him.
He has obviously had cosmetic facial surgery. He does not look at all like the person Yeltsin appointed as Prime Minister after 25 years of normal ageing. Those who do not need it to my mind have an unhealthy mental and spiritual regard for themselves and an acute fear of progressive morbidity and death.
His life story explains so much. He has made nothing but enemies and rivals and false sycophantic friends. He has become corrupted by power and the ability with impunity to enrich himself with money and possessions that he cannot take with him unless he is as naive as the Pharoahs. He has ordered the killing of hundreds of thousands of people and must be paranoid about someone avenging one of them.
He has mocked God by exploiting for his own selfish ends the deep traditional piety of Russian Orthodoxy so cruelly suppressed in the USSR era. turning the Moscow Patriarchate into a Directorate of the FSB. War for its own sake as a sybaritic hedonism is a fundamental perversion of Christianity. If he has a shred of religious sincerity, which I doubt, his terror of his eschatological fate will intensify his paranoia as the normal infirmities of age eat into his comfort blanket of self-control and control over others.
Henry VIII trod the similar primrose path to perdition and ended his self-destructive blood-sodden tyrannical life as a virtually immobile huge stinking bag of guts.
Et in Arcadia Ego.
Now the true meaning of Russia’s «pivot to Africa» is starting to become clear. It seems Moscow is looking less for new markets than for the secrets of physical and political longevity.
Just look at the evidence: Cameroon’s President Paul Biya is 93 and has been in power for nearly 44 years. Equatorial Guinea’s President Teodoro Obiang is 84 and has ruled his country for 47 years. Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni is 82 and has been president for the last 40 years.
You’ve got to admit — there’s a lot to learn here.
As for the unfortunate experience of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, we’ll leave that outside the scope of our study. Let’s just treat it as a statistical outlier that doesn’t fit the broader pattern. No point letting one inconvenient data point ruin such an elegant scientific hypothesis.