The Russian Philosophy That Could Rethink the Conservative Tech Debate

For many thinkers on the American postliberal right, transhumanism represents the philosophical endpoint of liberalism: a world where human beings engineer themselves without limits. Yet if conservatives reject this future, they still face an unresolved problem—what kind of technological future should they imagine instead, and could the answer come from an unexpected place: Russian cosmism?

For thinkers such as Patrick Deneen or Adrian Vermeule, the promise of radically enhancing human beings through biotechnology or AI reflects what they see as liberalism’s deepest error: an anthropology that promises emancipation from all limits (including biological ones) and treats the human body as raw material for self-creation. In this reading, transhumanism is the philosophical culmination of liberal individualism.

Yet rejecting transhumanism does not necessarily mean rejecting technology itself. Many postliberal thinkers instead imagine a political reordering in which technological power would be subordinated to moral and political authority rather than left to market forces or technocratic elites. From this perspective, advanced technologies could even become part of a broader “civilizational competition” framework—tools that help the United States prevail economically and strategically, particularly against China.

Different conservative responses have thus emerged. Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option” imagines partial withdrawal from technoculture: small, intentional communities preserving traditional practices within an increasingly technocratic society. Ross Douthat adopts a more ambivalent position, suggesting that certain forms of technological innovation could remain compatible with a Christian anthropology, provided they serve human flourishing rather than the indefinite redesign of the species. Deneen even defended the idea that MAGA and Big Tech (then embodied by Elon Musk’s DOGE) would avoid tensions and work as a natural coalition against the same enemy.

So, if conservatives reject transhumanism as a liberal attempt to transcend human limits (whatever their broader takes on tech are), what alternative vision of technology do they offer? One unexpected answer comes from Russia.

Long before Silicon Valley began speaking about digital immortality, Russian thinkers were developing their own radically ambitious vision of humanity’s future. Known as Russian cosmism, this intellectual movement emerged in the late nineteenth century at the intersection of Orthodox theology, scientific progress, and utopian speculation. Two excellent studies in English on classic cosmism are Russian Cosmists by George M. Young and Lenin walked on the Moon by Michel Eltchaninoff.

Its founding figure, the eccentric philosopher Nikolai Fedorov (1829-1903), proposed what he called the “Common Task” of humanity: the collective resurrection of all past generations through scientific means. For Fedorov, conquering death was not an act of individual self-enhancement but a moral obligation. Humanity owed its existence to its ancestors; the duty of future generations was therefore to use science to bring them back to life.

And this was not a metaphor: Fedorov literally imagined laboratories devoted to resurrecting the dead. Resurrection, in this framework, was not a private technological achievement but a collective project rooted in solidarity and universal brotherhood.

Unlike many philosophical futurisms, cosmism did not remain abstract. In the Soviet period, some of cosmism’s most radical ideas—defeating death, transforming the human body, and expanding into space—found echoes in scientific experiments and state-supported projects.

As Anya Bernstein’s important study The Future of Immortality shows, early Soviet authorities took the struggle against death seriously, both in its utopian and material dimensions. Aleksandr Bogdanov’s blood-transfusion experiments in the 1920s aimed at a form of egalitarian “physiological collectivism,” in which society might literally share health and longevity. In the same broader Soviet attempt to suspend mortality, Lenin’s corpse became the most famous object of preservation. After his death in 1924, embalmers removed major organs and developed a long-term scientific maintenance regime that turned Lenin’s body into a political artifact symbolizing the regime’s ambition to master decay itself.

Fedorov’s ideas were also taken up by a generation of scientists who blended Cosmist speculation with scientific progress. The rocket pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857–1935) imagined space exploration as the next stage of human evolution, with humanity eventually transforming into energy-based forms capable of inhabiting the cosmos. Biochemist Vladimir Vernadsky (1863–1945) developed the concept of the “noosphere,” a stage of planetary development in which human intelligence becomes a geological force transforming the biosphere. Soviet biophysicist Alexander Chizhevsky (1897–1964) explored the influence of solar activity on biological life and human history, developing theories linking solar cycles to social and historical dynamics.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, cosmism experienced a revival. It attracted renewed interest among Russian intellectuals and state-adjacent circles as a possible bridge between technological modernity and civilizational identity. Nationalist writers such as Alexander Prokhanov promoted cosmism as part of Russia’s universal historical mission, while philosophers such as Alexander Subetto and scholars like Svetlana Semenova and Anastasia Gacheva worked to institutionalize the Cosmist tradition, often framing it in dialogue, and sometimes in competition, with American transhumanism.

Contemporary techno-futurist circles have continued to draw on these ideas. At the “Forum 2050” conference held in Moscow in June 2025, panels explicitly linked Russian cosmism to the future race to Mars, presenting space expansion as both a technological challenge and a civilizational mission. The media entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov launched the “Russia 2045” movement, which proposes transferring human consciousness into artificial bodies. Meanwhile, Russian innovation programs have supported initiatives such as Neuro.Net, a national project exploring brain-network technologies, as well as KrioRus, a cryonics company dedicated to preserving bodies or brains in hopes of future revival.

These developments point to something larger: cosmism is no longer merely an intellectual curiosity from Russian history but a way of imagining technological futures. Although often perceived as a distinctly Russian tradition, and occasionally invoked by state-sponsored intellectual circles, it cannot be reduced to Kremlin ideology. It offers something rare in today’s debates: a vision of technology that is both radically ambitious and grounded in a conservative understanding of humanity, one that could resonate far beyond Russia, including within American conservative debates about the future of technology.

Indeed, unlike contemporary transhumanism, which dreams of individual technological transcendence, Cosmism frames technological progress as a collective human destiny. Instead of private immortality for technological elites, it envisions the resurrection of all humanity. Instead of replacing biological life with machines, it imagines technology assisting the development of life itself. Instead of libertarian markets governing innovation, it imagines technological development guided by communal ethics and state responsibility.

Cosmism, therefore, poses an intriguing challenge to conservative debates about technology. For postliberal critics of transhumanism, the problem has never been technology itself but the individualistic philosophy that guides it. Cosmism sketches a radically different possibility: technological ambition embedded within a collective moral framework.

In a world polarized between Silicon Valley utopianism and conservative techno-skepticism, cosmism may offer an unexpected synthesis. At the very least, cosmism forces conservatives to confront a question they have largely avoided: not just what technological futures they fear, but what technological future they actually want.