Nikolai Fyodorov's beliefs in a cosmic religion centered on life beyond Earth inspired some of the Soviet Union's most brilliant engineers.
On December 28, 1903, during a particularly harsh Russian winter, a poor man died of pneumonia on luggage in a rented room full of poor strangers.
Nikolai Fyodorov died in secret and remained virtually unknown in the West, but during his lifetime he was celebrated by Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky and a loyal band of followers - one of whom is credited with winning the Soviet Union's space race.
Now, just as he had predicted, Fyodorov lives an unusual afterlife.
He became an icon for transhumanists worldwide and a spiritual leader for interplanetary exploration.
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Fyodorov's poverty came more as a consequence of his religious choice than material need.
He was the illegitimate child of Prince Pavel Gagarin and spent his early childhood on the family estate, until the sudden death of his father and grandfather, Prince Ivan Gagarin.
Although his family was not related to the first cosmonaut, Anastasia Gacheva of the Fyodorov Museum-Library in Moscow says that there is "an important symbolic coincidence - between Gagarin who philosophically predicted space flight and Yuri Gagarin who became the first cosmonaut in the world".
Fyodorov lived an ascetic life - on bread, tea and water - but he lived in an exciting intellectual milieu.
As the librarian of the Rumyantsev museum opposite the Kremlin, he hosted an informal intellectual gathering, and his devotees called him the "Socrates of Moscow".
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Dostoevsky was in awe of "this great thinker... his ideas delighted me: when I read them and understand what they mean, I feel as if they are completely part of me, that they are close to my heart and can be mine".
The novelist spent hours discussing Fyodorov's theories with the philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, who considered Fyodorov a Christ-like figure, while Tolstoy described Fyodorov's worldview in a letter to a friend:
"He devised a plan for the common task of mankind, the goal of which is the bodily resurrection of all men.
First, it's not as crazy as it sounds (don't worry, I don't and never have shared his views, but I understand them enough to feel able to defend them against any other beliefs of a similar material nature).
Second, and most importantly, because of these beliefs, he leads the purest Christian life...
He is sixty years old, poor, gives everything he has, is always cheerful and meek."
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Tolstoy and Fyodorov shared similar beliefs, driven by fierce resistance to the war.
Fyodorov complained that while the poor were left at the mercy of droughts and floods, the universities had become nothing more than "yards of factories and barracks, actually serving industrialism and militarism."
Both wanted to redirect the destructive energies of war into ecological restoration.
"A civilization that exploits but does not restore can have no other result than approaching its own end," Fyodorov wrote.
Like Tolstoy, he opposed the idea that books are private property.
When his few written works were published posthumously, they were accompanied by a sticker that read: "Not for sale".
Fyodorov's philosophy arose from a defining moment in his life - the death of his father and grandfather - and the family's subsequent departure from the rural idyll.
All his intellectual efforts can be understood as an attempt to repair that rupture, to restore and restore the lost paradise.
His Philosophy of Common Task envisions a world in which each generation will resurrect its dead ancestors (we should beget fathers, he wrote, not children).
But this will soon overpopulate the world, so it is necessary to reach out into space to settle on new stars, where the resurrected can live harmoniously.
However, the further we go, the more we will have to revive ("All matter is the dust of ancestors") - so the only solution is a radical extension of life: the death of death itself.
Despite his focus on lost ancestors, Fyodorov's legacy was meant to inspire new generations.
His most brilliant protégé, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, was also defined by a traumatic childhood event.
At the age of 10, Tsiolkovsky contracted scarlet fever and became almost completely deaf: schools forbade him to enter, so he studied for three years in Rumjantseva, with Fyodor's help.
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There he became fascinated with the colonization of space, which he believed would liberate mankind and lead to the perfection of the species.
A loner by nature, Tsiolkovsky spent most of his life in a remote log cabin, where he devoted himself to "the eternal well-being of every atom".
His most important work, The Exploration of Outer Space by Means of Rocket Devices (1903), pioneered astronautical theory, proving for the first time that space flight could be powered by boosters.
He sketched designs for rockets with steering thrusters, space stations and vacuum escape chambers, and closed-cycle biological systems to provide food and oxygen for space colonies.
This will later inspire Soviet engineers.
"Mankind will not remain on Earth forever," he predicted.
"The search for light and space will lead it to penetrate the boundaries of the atmosphere, timidly at first, and then conquer the entire solar system."
Fyodorov's followers, Tsiolkovsky and Solovyeva, are associated with an intellectual movement called "Cosmism," which had a significant influence on philosophy, theology, science, and visual art, both in pre-revolutionary Russia and in the Soviet period.
Although averse to Fyodor's Orthodox Christianity, older Soviets admired his critique of consumerism—the "toys" that divert our attention and imagination—and his emphasis on collective salvation.
One hundred years ago, in the midst of the Russian Civil War, one group raised Fyodorov's ambitions to stratospheric levels.
Biocosmists-immortalists, announcing the separation from anarchist universals, condemned death as "logically absurd, ethically inadmissible and aesthetically ugly".
They advocated galactic liberation from statehood, called for the immediate establishment of cosmic communication and set two "fundamental" demands: freedom of movement in interplanetary space and the right to eternal life.
The author of the biocosmist manifesto from 1921, Aleksandar Sviatogor, followed Fyodorov in defining two types of death: physical decomposition and spiritual death - what he called "death in life".
Fyodorov equated this with the loss of one's distinctive personality and identity, while Sviatogor applied it to capitalism, arguing that death lies in "monstrous private property," which cannot be eliminated in the mortal world, where dying buys you a private slice of time.
Sviatogor also adopted Fyodorov's idea of turning the planet into a giant "Earthship" so that, instead of continuing as idle passengers around the sun's orbit, we become "the crew of our celestial craft."
For cosmologists, the point is not to understand nature, but to change it.
In 1922, the founder of the Petrograd chapter of biocosmists, Alexander Yaroslavsky, wrote a fourteen-page poem in praise of "anabiosis" - the cryonic suspension process used two years later to preserve Lenin's body.
When refrigeration proved unsuccessful, his body was embalmed.
During the early years of the Soviet Union, Lenin tolerated spacemen, but his successor soon restricted them.
Stalin was hostile to the religious roots of their scientific outlook, and many publicly supported his rival Trotsky.
The vast majority of cosmonauts were imprisoned or sent to labor camps (like Sviatogor, who disappeared in Siberia), and all their works were suppressed.
After Stalin's death, the Soviets turned to space again, just in time to counter American efforts to launch satellites into orbit.
Sergei Korolev, the chief designer of Sputnik 1 and Gagarin's Vostok 1 rocket, was greatly influenced by Tsiolkovsky.
After meeting with them, the young Korolev wrote: "I left his house with only one thought: to build rockets and fly in them."
From now on I have one goal in life - to reach the stars".
Korolev oversaw the design and construction of Sputnik 1 in just one month: it was launched on October 4, 1957—the same year he published The Practical Significance of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky's Proposals in Rocket Engineering.
With the fall of the Soviet Union, cosmists were once again able to establish a link between religion and science.
Harvard University professor Anja Bernstein, author of the book The Future of Immortality:
The growth of life and death in modern Russia, says that the cosmonauts of the 21st century "worship" Gagarin because of his role in the realization of Fyodorov's "prophetic" vision.
By leaving this mortal shell, we fulfill God's mission, Fyodorov wrote, and "the divine word becomes our divine action."
Over time, we become the cosmic mind of the universe itself - a concept called "noosphere", which was developed by Tsiolkovsky's contemporary - Vladimir Vernadsky.
Today, Russia is second only to the United States in introducing cryogenic procedures, says Bernstein.
However, the Russian immortal movement differs sharply from American transhumanism, whose emphasis is secular and generally more libertarian.
Some of its most extreme advocates, far from envisioning the end of capitalism, dream of extending the infinite productivity of workers.
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In contrast, in Russia, cryonicists preserved their parents and grandparents, reflecting Fyodorov's (genitive) emphasis on kinship.
Some Fyodorovites even oppose this process altogether, on the grounds that it is selective-
Fyodor's vision was one of universal salvation ("a union of immortal beings"), not a division between the richly chosen and the damned poor.
Despite this, a portrait of Fyodor sits next to one Arthur Clarke at the Church of Eternal Life in Hollywood, Florida.
Now a number of American futurist thinkers acknowledge their debt to Fyodorov.
This brave new world seeks to merge space and cyberspace.
For both immortals and transhumanists, human personality resides in a brain that can live forever if "put" into a computer, a favorite theme of science fiction writers.
Neuralink's goal is to provide a brain-machine interface that merges human consciousness and artificial intelligence - helping people "stay relevant" in a world dominated by artificial intelligence.
These schemes of the Cosmists are rife with ethical anxieties, and it seems fitting that Fyodorov was fascinated by the figure of Faust.
Cosmism even has heretics, like Alexander Bogdanov, who once wrote a short story about a thousand-year-old man who kills himself to escape the trap of eternal life.
Concealment of being robs us of the essence of being - and death, contrary to Fyodor's claim, actually brings meaning to our lives, giving us a limited window in which to act and love.
Fyodorov would argue that this criticism only reflects the failure of our imagination, "a manifestation of our infantility".
We must outgrow our own fear and grow into our destinies.
As his student Tsiolkovsky wrote: "The earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot stay in the cradle forever".
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