Putin vs. Frankenstein

Russia and Its AI Strategy. Tsardom, episode 6

Western media often write about the new technologies at Putin’s disposal: he has troll farms, hackers, viruses, and other malicious software under his command. Rarely do they discuss how AI is being developed in Russia—and that’s a missed opportunity because it’s a fascinating topic.

Few noticed that this was precisely the focus of the most intriguing moment in Putin’s famous interview with Tucker Carlson. When the Russian president once again attempted to delve into the past, talking about the Roman Empire, the former Fox News host interrupted him with this question: “When will the empire of AI—artificial intelligence—begin?”

What’s fascinating is that no one had ever asked Putin about artificial intelligence before. We previously had no information on whether Putin even knew what AI was. Now, we do. Putin responded: “Humanity faces many threats: genetic research that could create a superhuman, a specialized human—a warrior, a scientist, an athlete.”

In other words, in Putin’s view, artificial intelligence is literally a Frankenstein created by geneticists. Undoubtedly, Putin genuinely believes that today’s scientists are crafting such an “artificial human.” Moreover, he seems to have a lot of information on the matter.

Putin's Friends and Artificial Intelligence

Putin has several close friends, and the closest among them are the Kovalchuk brothers, his longtime acquaintances from St. Petersburg in the 1990s. The younger brother, Yuri Kovalchuk, is considered the most influential oligarch in Russia; he owns nearly all of the country's media. The elder brother, Mikhail, heads the Kurchatov Institute, Russia’s largest scientific establishment involved in nuclear research.

Although Mikhail is not as close to Putin as his younger brother, Putin’s remarks about scientists creating “superhumans” clearly indicate that he too exerts significant influence over the Russian president. Mikhail Kovalchuk is a rather peculiar scientist, and he deserves a closer look.

Putin and Kovalchuk Sr

Mikhail Kovalchuk, born in 1946, is a physicist who defended his doctoral dissertation during Soviet times. However, after his old friend Vladimir Putin became president, Mikhail began to aspire to a leading role in Russian science. Putin intended for Kovalchuk to head the Russian Academy of Sciences. However, the president of the Academy is elected by secret ballot, and in 2008, the other academicians blocked Kovalchuk’s election. To this day, he has not even been elected as an academician. It turns out that many Russian scientists are principled individuals with oppositional views (fortunately for them, the voting is secret).

Nevertheless, this situation did not bode well for them—the Academy’s funding was sharply cut, and now most of the money that the Russian state spends on science bypasses the Academy.

In 2005, Mikhail Kovalchuk took over the legendary Kurchatov Institute, named after the “Soviet Oppenheimer,” Igor Kurchatov, who led the development of the Soviet atomic bomb. In recent years, Kovalchuk has transformed the Institute into a mega-corporation—meaning that the funds that once went to the Academy of Sciences are now distributed by the Kurchatov Institute.

Servile People

However, it’s not only Kovalchuk’s business acumen that’s worth discussing, but also his scientific worldview. In December 2015, he spoke before the Federation Council, the upper house of the Russian parliament. In this speech, he publicly described for the first time a dystopian vision of what Western science is truly striving toward.

“The world has always been simple: some elite has always tried to put the rest of the world at its service. First, there was slavery, then feudalism, and then capitalism,” the physicist argued. “And now it’s come to this: today, there is a real technological possibility of creating a fundamentally new subspecies of Homo sapiens—a servile human.”

Kovalchuk went on to explain how near this future is: “The characteristics of this population of servile people are very simple: limited self-awareness, and cognitively this is regulated quite easily—we already see this happening. The second aspect is controlled reproduction, and the third is cheap food, like genetically modified products. And this is all already in place. So, in fact, today there is a real technological possibility of breeding a servile subspecies of humans.”

To illustrate that this was not just a fantasy, Mikhail Kovalchuk referred to the film Dead Season and suggested that Russian senators rewatch it, saying it accurately describes the situation.

You’ve probably never heard of this film because Dead Season is a Soviet film from 1968, which Kovalchuk likely saw for the first time when he was 22. It’s a spy thriller in which CIA agents conspire with former officers of the Third Reich to create a “servile human” to harm the USSR. Soviet intelligence, of course, thwarts their plans. It’s also known that Dead Season was one of Vladimir Putin’s favorite films (he was 17 at the time), and it reportedly inspired him to pursue a career in intelligence.

The physicist Kovalchuk, however, continues to be inspired by this Cold War-era spy film to this day.

In 2020, five years after his speech in the upper house of the Russian parliament, Kovalchuk appeared in the studio of the state television channel Russia, on a program hosted by the famous propagandist Vladimir Solovyov. There, he suggested that COVID-19 might have been artificially created by Americans. He once again urged viewers to watch Dead Season, claiming that its plot had become a reality: “The creation of people. An incubator, so to speak... An artificial womb... A genetically engineered human function. The question of creating servile people is being solved through genetic, biological, and technological means.”

In the same program, Kovalchuk also claimed that Americans were simultaneously trying to reduce the world’s population (to make room for “servile people”). How? By promoting debauchery (“Playboy magazine and all that. Over 50 years, this was successfully implemented”), as well as by propagating LGBT values and the “childfree” philosophy.

The Digital Gulag

But that’s not all. Kovalchuk’s ideas continued to evolve, and in October 2020, at the “Army 2020” forum, he declared that Russia was already on the verge of war with the West—in a phase he called a “hybrid cold pre-war.” According to him, the main weapon the West uses against Russia is the Internet.

“What is the Internet? It is a ‘digital Gulag’ in essence. Unlike the Gulag, where people were forcibly sent, this ‘digital Gulag’ is one people have entered willingly, and they live there quite comfortably. If people are told that everything is written on Wikipedia and that they don’t need to study, then it’s simple: turn off the switch, the Internet disappears, and the inhabitants of the ‘digital Gulag’ will know nothing, and without GPS, they won’t even be able to find their way home,” Kovalchuk stated, once again advising forum participants to rewatch the film Dead Season.

Putin and Kovalchuk Sr.

This man is not just Russia’s most senior physicist. He is also a member of the Presidium of the Presidential Council for Science and Education, a member of the Presidential Commission on the Modernization and Technological Development of Russia's Economy, President of the All-Russian Society of Inventors and Rationalizers, Dean of the Faculty of Physics at Saint Petersburg University, and holds dozens of other prestigious positions. But most importantly, he is a friend of the president. Therefore, from time to time, you could hear almost direct quotes from Kovalchuk coming out of Vladimir Putin’s mouth.

As for the “servile human,” Putin has yet to speak on that topic. But thanks to the interview with Tucker Carlson, we now have the opportunity to see that Putin takes his friend’s conspiratorial fantasies seriously. It’s a pity, though, that he so often lectures his interlocutors on history rather than physics—it could have been far more captivating.