Russia is a country where 40% of the population are atheists and less than 15% identify themselves as Orthodox Christian. . . Russia is also a country where 14% of the adult population states, with no qualifications, that they want to live forever, and where 40% state that they “want to live as long as possible in good health.”
I wondered where that figure for atheists came from, so I checked what sociologist Phil Zuckerman's research shows. In his paper, "Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns," (PDF), Zuckerman has a table (scroll down to p. 15) which gives for Russia a range of "24-48%" of the population as atheists. Mike's 40 percent figure falls into that ballpark.
Before the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the total number of Russian atheists would probably amount to less than 1 percent of the population. Decades of Soviet rule, which interfered with the transmission of religious beliefs to the young, have had lingering effects a generation after the collapse of the Soviet political system, even though presumably today's Russians can study and profess any religion they want without persecution. Apparently the Soviet experiment to create a secular utopia didn't completely fail. The utopia part of the experiment bombed, but the secularization part made significant progress in transforming Russian culture.
Mike also notes that Russia has its own, independent transhumanist tradition dating back to the early 20th Century, generally referred to in the West as Russian Cosmism. Russian cryonicists have apparently resumed that tradition, and Mike raises the possibility that cryonics could succeed in Russia while it founders in the U.S. because the American version has had to deal with an indifferent, if not hostile, cultural environment, especially given the level of religiosity here.
I would put it another way: Russia represents an alternative model of modernity, which despite its backwardness relative to the West, had produced visionary futurist thinkers advocating ideas well ahead of Western futurology. A century ago Russia's intellectuals argued for manned space exploration, conquering aging and death, transforming the human mind and body through scientific means, and other science-fictional proposals. Some of this thinking appears in Leon Trotsky's Literature and Revolution, though it apparently never became the emphasis of official Soviet policy, especially after Stalin exiled Trotsky, suppressed his writings and made him an enemy of the Revolution:
Man at last will begin to harmonize himself in earnest. He will make it his business to achieve beauty by giving the movement of his own limbs the utmost precision, purposefulness and economy in his work, his walk and his play. He will try to master first the semiconscious and then the subconscious processes in his own organism, such as breathing, the circulation of the blood, digestion, reproduction, and, within necessary limits, he will try to subordinate them to the control of reason and will. Even purely physiologic life will become subject to collective experiments. The human species, the coagulated Homo sapiens, will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and, in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and psycho-physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution. Man first drove the dark elements out of industry and ideology, by displacing barbarian routine by scientific technique, and religion by science. Afterwards he drove the unconscious out of politics, by overthrowing monarchy and class with democracy and rationalist parliamentarianism and then with the clear and open Soviet dictatorship. The blind elements have settled most heavily in economic relations, but man is driving them out from there also, by means of the Socialist organization of economic life. This makes it possible to reconstruct fundamentally the traditional family life. Finally, the nature of man himself is hidden in the deepest and darkest corner of the unconscious, of the elemental, of the sub-soil. Is it not self-evident that the greatest efforts of investigative thought and of creative initiative will be in that direction? The human race will not have ceased to crawl on all fours before God, kings and capital, in order later to submit humbly before the dark laws of heredity and a blind sexual selection! Emancipated man will want to attain a greater equilibrium in the work of his organs and a more proportional developing and wearing out of his tissues, in order to reduce the fear of death to a rational reaction of the organism towards danger. There can be no doubt that man’s extreme anatomical and physiological disharmony, that is, the extreme disproportion in the growth and wearing out of organs and tissues, give the life instinct the form of a pinched, morbid and hysterical fear of death, which darkens reason and which feeds the stupid and humiliating fantasies about life after death.
Man will make it his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to the heights of consciousness, to make them transparent, to extend the wires of his will into hidden recesses, and thereby to raise himself to a new plane, to create a higher social biologic type, or, if you please, a superman.
It is difficult to predict the extent of self-government which the man of the future may reach or the heights to which he may carry his technique. Social construction and psycho-physical self-education will become two aspects of one and the same process. All the arts – literature, drama, painting, music and architecture will lend this process beautiful form. More correctly, the shell in which the cultural construction and self-education of Communist man will be enclosed, will develop all the vital elements of contemporary art to the highest point. Man will become immeasurably stronger, wiser and subtler; his body will become more harmonized, his movements more rhythmic, his voice more musical. The forms of life will become dynamically dramatic. The average human type will rise to the heights of an Aristotle, a Goethe, or a Marx. And above this ridge new peaks will rise.
Wow. Heavy stuff. You could modernize the language a bit and it would sound like something from a current transhumanist blog. Given Russia's historical semi-isolation from the West, Russian culture has developed a world view substantially different from America's. If the country can resume economic and demographic growth, cryonics might have a chance there after all. The Russians' interest in cryonics also belies the effort to characterize cryonics as an odd America-centric obsession, part of something called the "Californian Ideology."
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