Putin's billion-dollar quest for immortality

A hot mic caught Putin telling Xi that organ transplants could bring immortality. It's not just talk, and it's not new either: Russian leaders have spent nearly a century chasing eternal life, with some genuinely bizarre results. Follow If You're Listening on the ABC Listen app https://radio.abc.net.au/help/apps. Check out our series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDTPrMoGHssAfgMMS3L5LpLNFMNp1U_Nq

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  Hi, it's Sam Hawley from ABC News Daily, the podcast that brings you one big story affecting your world each weekday in just 15 minutes.

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  This podcast was produced on the lands of the Uabakal and Gadigal people.

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  For more than a year now, the supervising producer of this show, Cara Jensen-McKinnon, has been kind of obsessed with this particular hot mic moment.

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  A rare, unscripted moment between President Xi Jinping and Russia's President Vladimir Putin has been caught on camera, revealing a conversation about immortality and organ transplantation.

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  These are two men who have effectively managed to make themselves president for life of their respective countries, but they're also both in their 70s.

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  In the past, people have rarely lived longer than 70 years, but today they say that at 70, you are still a child.

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  Mr. Putin replies.

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  Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and even achieve immortality.

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  Now, ask any normal 70-year-old if they feel like a child and see what they say. Ask any doctor if they have a patient who is having their organs continuously transplanted, or if people are close to achieving immortality. Now, look, Vladimir Putin isn't a regular septuagenarian. He often does things that seem pretty impressive for a guy who was born in the early 1950s. Just a few years ago, he was flipping members of the Russian judo team onto the mats in between diplomatic discussions with Turkey and Iran. He also rides horses and he plays ice hockey.

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  He's apparently good at scoring goals every time he plays. But then again, I don't think many people are keen to body check the president of Russia into the glass, but maybe they shouldn't worry. He can apparently just get his organs transplanted and live forever. The thing is, in Russia, the idea of extending your lifespan through cutting-edge modern science is taken very seriously indeed.

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  Russia is pouring billions, and we're talking billions, into a massive anti-aging project.

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  It involves peptides, harvesting the organs of mini pigs and cryogenic chambers. Some describe it as the Kremlin's biggest scientific priority. Putin says it will save the lives of 175,000 people by 2030. The strangest thing is, though, this quest for eternal life isn't new. Russian leaders have a long history of trying to live forever. Many believe it's their destiny to colonize the universe, and serious efforts have been made to preserve the bodies of Russian leaders in the hopes of reanimating them in the future.

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  The trouble is, while the president of Russia is talking about living to 150, the life expectancy of other Russian men is actually going down, not up. And the crazy thing is, they already know how to fix the problem without the organs of mini pigs, because they've done it before. I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.

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  The period right after the fall of the Soviet Union was an extraordinary time to visit Moscow's Red Square.

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  Within earshot of the Kremlin, Moscow's most famous landmark was celebrating a religious freedom unknown here for 70 years.

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  The colourful onion domes of St Basil's Cathedral echoed with religious music for the first time in living memory.

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  Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, able to hold the first services in St Basil's since the Bolsheviks turned it into a museum. It wasn't long before Christmas services were being held there.

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  Christmas here is now a public holiday. Muscovites have been dancing around Red Square.

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  By stones throw away from the cathedral, there was a slightly awkward problem that nobody was quite sure how to deal with: a comparatively small, squat red pyramid.

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  For decades, the Marble Mausoleum on Red Square was Soviet communism's holiest shrine. The body of its founder, Vladimir Initchnenin, has lain and stayed here since 1924.

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  Vladimir Lenin's tomb.

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  Beginning with Stalin, every Soviet leader has stood atop Lenin's tomb, reviewing parades that mark each communist holiday.

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  Generations of Soviet citizens and tourists lined up to enter the darkened interior for a brief, eerie glimpse of the embalmed corpse.

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  In the early 90s, with communism overthrown, it seemed very strange to have the father of the Soviet Union lying in state in the square where people were having Christmas parties.

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  Lenin's role in history is, like almost everything else here now, up for debate. Once he was seen almost as a saint, now people are separating the man from the myth.

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  But here's the thing: there's something extraordinary about Lenin's tomb. That body in the glass case, it's really him. It's not a Madame Tussauds-style wax replica of Lenin that tourists can take photos with. It is literally the real body, skin, bones and all, of a guy who died in 1924. It's not decomposed, it's not rotting, and it looks as good as any body that you might have seen at an open casket funeral, except it's been like that for 100 years. So how did they actually do this? Well, let's go back to how Lenin died in the first place.

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  Symptoms of hardening cerebral arteries and the effects of an assassination attempt had begun to tell on Lenin by the end of 1921. On May 6, 1922, he suffered his first stroke.

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  It was clear to most of his inner circle that Lenin was dying, but some of the leading Bolsheviks didn't think that his death needed to be permanent. One of those Bolsheviks was Leonid Krasin, whose official duties were all to do with foreign affairs and trade, but in his spare time, he was heavily interested in longevity. He was a fan of the science fiction writer Alexander Bogdanov, whose book Red Star was about a future communist society on Mars, where older people extended their lifespan by exchanging blood with younger people. Krasin was so keen on this idea that he actually tried it out in real life. He

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  and Bogdanov exchanged blood with each other, and Krasin exchanged blood with his daughters in an effort to cure his anemia and live longer. He referred to himself as a real vampire.

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  We'll get back to how it all turned out for those vampire guys later, but Krasin was committed to this cause. He later said at the funeral of one of his Soviet comrades that the time would soon come when technology would allow scientists to reanimate the dead. And then...

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  Lenin died on the 21st of January, 1924. He was a political leader of a type never before seen by the world.

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  The Bolsheviks didn't really have a plan for what to do with Lenin's body, and autopsy was carried out where the pathologist cut the major arteries, something that you apparently don't do if you're planning to preserve the body long term. He also sawed open the skull and removed the brain, where it was sent off to be studied. At Moscow's Brain Institute, they sliced his brain into 30,000 pieces, all carefully analyzed, catalogued and stored. They thought that if they sliced the brain up like mortadella, they could study each slice to figure out what made Lenin so brilliant. As for his body, it was temporarily embalmed and then put on display.

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  A scholar, a propagandist and an organizer of the masses. It was these masses who lined up in Red Square to pay tribute to communism's first effective leader.

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  The freezing cold January weather initially prevented the body from rotting, but by February, they realized they needed some kind of plan for what to do next. Of course, they could just bury the body in the walls of the Kremlin, like they did with all the other leaders of the revolution, but Krasin wanted to preserve it long term, and he thought that he knew how to do it.

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  He had a glass case built for the body, and ordered refrigeration equipment be imported from Germany, which would blow cold air into the case through a duct system. Before they tried freezing Lenin's body properly, Krassen ordered that experiments be undertaken on other corpses first. Now, needless to say, the refrigeration experiments went badly. Just pop an uncovered raw sausage in your fridge for a few days and you'll see why. All of the bodies started getting wrinkly and splotchy. By early March, Krassen and his colleagues were in a panic. Lenin's body had started to decompose. They started throwing around ideas.

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  Maybe they could fill the glass case all the way up to the top with embalming fluid. Maybe they could suck the air out and replace it with pure nitrogen. Eventually, a team of scientists was hired to develop a method of keeping the body intact for as long as possible.

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  Keeping the leader's mortal remains in a fit state to be viewed has been no easy task.

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  A giant lab was dug underneath Red Square, with Lenin's mausoleum built on top.

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  Below the crypt, a team of doctors, researchers and technicians keeps 24-hour watch on the famous corpse, checking humidity, temperature and elasticity. For a long time, the lab's work was a big mystery. The greatest mystery has surrounded the embalming fluid, long decreed to be a state secret.

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  But we now know that the process involves periodically dipping the body into three different bathfuls of goo. Bath one is formaldehyde, which kills bacteria. Bath two is alcohol, which restores skin colour. And bath three is glycerol, which softens the skin and combats dehydration. It was a meeting of faiths, the Soviet faith in science and in the vision of one man. These gooologists initially refused to say how long that this would work for, but it kind of just kept working.

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  The complex beneath the tomb, housing computers that keep the temperature steady at 60 degrees, and an exercise room used by the ceremonial guards.

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  Apart from a period in World War II when he was moved to Siberia to hide him from the advancing Germans, Lenin's brain has been in a filing cabinet on 30,000 numbered glass slides, and his body has remained in the glass case in the mausoleum, viewed by millions of visitors.

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  You'll find long queues for Lenin's mausoleum. Sometimes the crowds stretch all the way round the Kremlin. By the 1980s, seeing the body had become a rather odd tradition. Marriage Moscow-style is usually followed by a quick trip to Lenin's tomb. Every Saturday, hundreds of newlyweds hurry past the policeman up the cobbled slope to pay their respects to the leader of the Bolshevik revolution.

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  You know, you've got the ceremony, the signatures, the photos, the visit to the pickled corpse, then the reception. Standard wedding stuff. The preservation of Lenin's corpse was such a success that Joseph Stalin was preserved in the same state, in the same tomb after his death, although he was ultimately removed and buried because of, you know, the genocide and stuff. But it was clear that the goo was working. It worked to the extent that the Soviet Union even started offering these services to other dead communist leaders. Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam, Mao Zedong of China, and both Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il of North Korea are all gooed up and available for viewing, thanks to the work of the Lenin Lab.

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  Lenin's body is also still there, but the lab barely survived the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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  Hard pressed for funds, Lenin's embalmers have now found themselves an agent, an upscale funeral parlor in outer Moscow.

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  They started offering to embalm the relatives of Russian oligarchs at extraordinary prices.

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  Relatives want to say their last goodbyes to a body which looks good. If you want long-term embalming, we provide a number of other services like mobile crypts and visits of our experts to keep the body in necessary condition. Nobody can do it better than us.

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  Their gooification services weren't popular though, and the work of the lab was propped up by the remaining elements of the Russian Communist Party. By that stage, Lenin's corpse had been kept in good condition for just under 70 years. Coincidentally, 70 years was also the average life expectancy of a Russian person at the time. When the USSR fell in 1991, a Russian woman could expect to live to 74, while Russian men, on average, lived to 63. But those numbers were about to drop, and they were going to drop the lowest among men.

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  A lot of things contribute to variations in average life expectancy. The biggest one is child mortality. That's because the deaths of babies and young kids really pulls down the average projected age of a country. The Soviet Union, by and large, dealt with that problem in the 1950s. By improving childhood health outcomes, they bought an extra decade of life for the average Russian. The next big jump they saw was in the mid 80s, when Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev enacted a national campaign to decrease alcohol consumption. Average spirits consumption rapidly halved, and life expectancy for men jumped up from 61 to 64.

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  But Gorbachev's sobriety campaign collapsed in 1989, along with the Berlin Wall. Alcohol is Russia's number one public health problem,

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  claiming the lives of Russian men at an alarming rate.

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  The statistics were staggering. Alcohol consumption quadrupled in six years. And that's just the official statistics. Beer wasn't counted as alcohol at the time, and a lot of Russians were distilling their own booze at home.

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  Many Russians break the law by selling their own homemade tipple. Volodov makes his from water and sugar.

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  It's so strong, he says, that after just two shots, you're ready for fun.

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  But fun, at the time, was in short supply. There are many reasons why Russians are drinking more, not least the social and economic turmoil of the last few years. On top of that, Russians were being subjected, for the first time in their lives, to totally unregulated alcohol advertising. The most striking thing about the intensive care ward at Moscow's largest drug and alcohol hospital is the age of the patients. Even the president Boris Yeltsin was clearly struggling with an alcohol problem. His alcoholic exploits left even this nation of heavy drinkers ashamed of their president. But Russia's alcoholism in the 90s wasn't just embarrassing, it was deadly.

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  It's leading to a death rate which is much, much higher than in Western Europe.

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  If you hone in on the figures for working-age Russian men and compare those figures between 1985 and 1994, the results are staggering. Accidental deaths in fires, from falls, from drowning, and on the roads, all went up. Homicides quadrupled. Pathologists were so overwhelmed that they registered 33,000 men in that year as having died from injury of undetermined intent, because they just couldn't figure out what had happened to them. In terms of disease, alcohol poisoning, heart disease, and liver failures more than doubled.

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  Back in 1985, the death toll for working-age Russian men was 420,000. In 1994, it was 743,000. Life expectancy for men, which had peaked at around 64 in the late 80s, was now... Around 58.

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  And this is unbelievably short expectation of life. If this process would continue, that would mean a genocide of the nation.

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  A financial crisis in Russia in 1998 dragged the health crisis into the new millennium. Russia was headed very much in the wrong direction, and things needed to change fast. So in the year 2000, when a new judo-kicking, horse-riding, hockey-playing president was inaugurated, he got straight to business. It was very clear that Vladimir Putin, who did not drink at all, had a lot of work to do. And he did it. He implemented Western-style healthcare policies and rapidly trained and deployed doctors across the country. And things started turning around. The number of general practitioners in Chuvash jumped from 200 in 2003 to 475 years later.

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  He also classified beer as alcohol for the first time and cracked down on home-brew vodka.

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  The president wants a return to a state monopoly on vodka production. He says that would be safer for vodka drinkers. It's easier to control it when the state is part of its production.

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  Advanced healthcare, controls on the sale of alcohol, and an improving standard of living brought back the years of life expectancy lost in the 90s. And things just kept improving. Western-style health policies had saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Women saw great improvements too, though they were already well ahead of the men. In fact, things were going so well that 2018 was the healthiest year in Russian history, with the average Russian man living to 68, up nine years since Putin had taken office. But in that time, Putin had also inexorably linked himself to the idea of Russia

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  and eradicated any credible opposition to his rule. Vladimir Putin is Russia, and yet Vladimir Putin was also 66.

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  Nearing 70, he is suddenly looking old. Face mysteriously bloated, his health a matter of open speculation.

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  He was doing everything modern medicine told him to do, but he was still aging.

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  The Putin we see today is a different man to the opaque bureaucrat I saw emerge in 1999, claiming to support free speech and democracy. And he's not the same figure who once paraded shirtless to prove his masculine strength against weak Western rivals.

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  This became extremely clear during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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  Vladimir Putin used his infamous long table for his meeting with the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

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  Terrified of getting sick, he only took meetings with people who were seated on the opposite side of a giant room or across an enormous table. If possible, he got people to quarantine for two weeks before coming to see him. He was clearly feeling his age and thought that modern medicine had nothing else to offer him. So he started looking elsewhere, announcing a massive funding boost for a scientific institute that was devoting a reasonable amount of time and effort to putting the still-closed sarcophaguses of Egyptian mummies into high-tech scanners.

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  This is Russian scientist Mikhail Kovalkchuk. He's a close ally of Vladimir Putin, and he's the head of the Kirchtov Institute. He's also fascinated by mummies and uses his institute's resources to scan them and research them. On top of his work peering into sarcophagi, he is the head of Vladimir Putin's mission to make Russians live longer.

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  Kovalkchuk is heavily influenced by the same guys that inspired the Bolsheviks to invent Lenin's corpse preservation goo. And he's convinced that aging and death are just engineering problems waiting to be solved. According to The Wall Street Journal, Putin has put him in charge of a $26 billion investment in longevity research, some of which he's spending on conventional medical research and some of which he's spending on things that are less conventional.

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  One of them is to be able to replace human organs as they age or become affected by illness. And that would kind of allow people to have a longer youth or prolong their lifespan.

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  Russia is also said to be experimenting with bioprinting human tissues and organs, as well as growing human-compatible organs inside genetically-modified mini-pigs. Is any of that going to work?

• 22:46Speaker 02

  Will it be any more effective than the blood-exchange theory pursued back in the 1920s by Leonard Crassin and Alexander Bogdanov? I mean, the bar is pretty low on that, seeing as both of those guys were dead within four years of Lenin's first goo-bath. Crassin died in London while there as the Soviet ambassador, claiming that the British blood donors just weren't up to scratch. Bogdanov, meanwhile, died after exchanging blood with a tuberculosis and malaria patient. The thing is, researching ways of prolonging life or delaying aging is objectively a good idea. It's good that people are trying to do that.

• 23:27Speaker 02

  Antibiotics, vaccines, and cardiac catheterization all seemed like science fiction until it was proven that they work, and now all of them have caused significant advances in life expectancy. The thing with Russia, though, is they're not at the stage where they need to invent 3D-printed lungs yet. See, Putin says that his longevity research will save 175,000 people by 2030, while simultaneously overseeing an invasion of Ukraine that by conservative estimates has killed at least 350,000 Russian soldiers.

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  Raising living standards and funding health and education is the most obvious way to improve life expectancy in any country. It's what they're doing in Iraq, Iran, Syria, and North Korea, all of which, incidentally, now have higher male life expectancy than Russia does. Meanwhile, Russia is spending billions of dollars trying to invent transplantable kidneys grown inside a mini-pig. But perhaps all that research is less about improving the lives of Russian citizens and more about extending the lifespan of one particular judo-kicking, horse-riding, hockey-playing Russian guy.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  This episode was written by Cara Jensen-McKinnon and me, Matt Bevan. Cara is also our supervising producer. The show is produced by Jess O'Callaghan and Adair Shepherd. We've got a great episode for you on Tuesday. You might remember that in our episode about southern Lebanon, which came out in June, I mentioned that Hezbollah had its own theme park. Well, after that episode aired, a listener named Alex wrote in to say he has actually been to that theme park, and it's even stranger than you'd imagine. That's on Tuesday. I'll catch you then.