Immortal Putin
How the Promise of Forever Became a Russian State Enterprise
The words Vladimir Putin dropped to Xi Jinping about organ transplants being the key to immortality were not, in fact, a joke. In Russia, they’ve become the foundation for billion-dollar fortunes and glittering careers. The Kremlin boss long ago set his inner circle the task of keeping him alive forever — and the Ministry of Health now treats this as one of its most sacred missions. Officially it goes by the sober bureaucratic name “National Project: Preservation of Health.” In reality, it’s run by two people with impeccable personal connections: Mikhail Kovalchuk, head of the Kurchatov Institute and a longtime pal, and Maria Vorontsova, Putin’s elder daughter.
A brand-new national project
Putin, who turns 74 next month, has no plans to head off into dignified retirement. Quite the opposite. Since he is convinced the Russian state rests entirely on his shoulders — that only he can hold the country together, prevent collapse, and win the duel with the West — preserving his own health, longevity and, ideally, immortality, has become his overriding priority. The familiar rituals are already in place: sports sessions, endless medical check-ups, teams of doctors trailing him everywhere, running tests and monitoring every heartbeat and breath.
Moscow officials don’t even bother to hide their main goal: keeping the boss alive as long as possible. At the start of 2024, Putin grandly unveiled yet another national project — the label Russia uses for top-priority programs lavished with budget billions. This one is called “New Technologies for Preserving Health.” The Ministry of Health declared it must “save 175,000 lives” by 2030 — a number close to the human losses Russia has racked up in three years of war.
Soon afterwards, Deputy Prime Minister Tatyana Golikova announced that scientists are working on a magic pill for old age, slated to hit the market sometime between 2028 and 2030. Price tag: two trillion rubles. In June, the Health Ministry fired off urgent circulars to every medical research institute in the country, demanding proposals on “reducing the burden of cellular aging,” “preventing cognitive and sensory decline,” “correcting the immune system during aging” — and, of course, “bioprinting technologies.”
The message is clear: immortality isn’t a joke in Putin’s Russia. It’s a line item in the federal budget.
“Human Repairability”
The chief curator and tireless lobbyist for Russia’s immortality project is Mikhail Kovalchuk — longtime Putin confidant, elder brother of media tycoon Yury Kovalchuk, and head of the legendary Kurchatov Institute, once the cradle of the Soviet nuclear program. A physicist by training, Kovalchuk is better known today for his outlandish pronouncements. (I wrote about him before.) He has promised to decode the “genome of the Russian man,” warned that the United States is building a “service human” — a biobot destined to fight in the army of the future — and, for years, has insisted that technology will soon secure eternal life. “The key is not immortality as such, but a long, full life. Immortality is hard to discuss, but the repairability of man will undoubtedly increase,” he declared back in 2007.
Mikhail Kovalchuk
How much money Russia is actually pouring into the pursuit of immortality remains opaque. Early this year, Putin’s elder daughter, Maria Vorontsova, won a Russian Science Foundation grant for her project with the catch-all title “Regulation of Cellular Renewal Processes in the Human Body, the Fundamental Basis for Prolonged Maintenance of Organ and Tissue Function, Health, and Active Longevity.” The award amounted to about 30 million rubles. These days Vorontsova presents herself as a respected doctor and world-class scientist, although her reputation clearly owes more to her father than to any groundbreaking publications.
Meanwhile, in 2023 independent Russian outlets Meduza and Sistema traced how the biotech firm 3D Bioprinting Solutions changed hands. Once privately owned, it was sold off at a fraction of its real value after its founder fled the country when the war began. The buyer? A company controlled by the Kovalchuk brothers. The firm’s new managing director, Yusef Hesuani, just happens to be a former classmate and close friend of Maria Vorontsova.
Maria Vorontsova, Putin’s elder daughter
Together, Vorontsova and Mikhail Kovalchuk now co-curate the state program for developing genetic engineering — which Putin himself has compared in strategic importance to the atomic bomb.
“Fooled Us All”
Immortality has become a fashionable obsession in today’s Russian court. This summer, Putin pinned the “Hero of Labor” medal on ultranationalist writer Alexander Prokhanov — and, during the ceremony, singled out one of his musings for special praise: “Do you know what the main idea of today is for Russia? It’s curious! Immortality.”
Even people with no connection to medicine are scrambling to ride the trend. Valery Fedorov, the Kremlin’s pet sociologist and head of the state polling agency VTsIOM, recently announced a symposium called “Creating the Future” with a blog post declaring that “immortality — a theme that has fascinated mankind since antiquity — has reached the peak of its relevance today, as medicine makes more and more breakthroughs.”
Stalin, 5 months before his death
The irony, of course, is that Russia has been here before. In 1939, Soviet scientist Aleksandr Bogomolets published a pamphlet titled “Life Extension.” Drawing on expeditions across the USSR — especially to the Caucasus, famed for its “zones of longevity” — he concluded that under the right conditions humans could live to 150. Stalin was enthralled. Bogomolets was showered with honors, named Hero of Socialist Labor, awarded the Stalin Prize. The only hitch? Bogomolets himself died in 1946, at 65. According to legend, when Stalin heard the news he snapped: “The crook! Fooled us all.”
Given that much of Russia’s present-day immortality research looks less like science and more like a convenient pipeline for budget money, the story may well end the same way — with disappointment, and someone shouting “fooled us all.” Still, considering how deadly serious Putin is about stretching out his own life, the whole enterprise feels less like comedy and more like a chilling experiment being carried out on a national scale.