Putin Seeks to Extend Not Just His Time in Office but His Time on Earth, Mirzayanov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, July 13 – Like most aging dictators, Vladimir Putin wants not only to extend his time in office but also to lengthen his life as such and has increasingly focused on the possibilities that religion, the occult and even scientific research may give him, according to Vil Mirzayanov.

            Mirzayanov, a former Soviet chemist who now heads the Tatarstan government in exile, says that there have been rumors about this for more than a decade; but until recently, they were dismissed as mere speculation or the result of the fevered imagination of commentators (facebook.com/vil.mirzayanov/posts/10223488569586558).

            Now, however, as Putin has gotten older, he has behaved in ways that give substance to these reports and make it important that observers understand what he is doing and why because of what it says about the mindset of  the Kremlin leader and what he may do in the future, the scholar continues.

            Those who have been in power too long or who have become too old often experience an intense fear of death as well as the conviction that they are something out of the ordinary and should be exempt from the normal aches and pains of aging or even of death itself, Mirzayanov continues. 

            Some dictators consider themselves “almost ‘a god,’” and they are encouraged in that by the servile people around them.  “Some build enormous shrines and pyramids, some create new religions, some turn to magic and witchcraft, and some to science. Putin has been moving in all three of these directions simultaneously.”

            The shrine he oversaw for the defense ministry clearly was a pagan shrine to himself, and until Russians objected, he was even going to put himself up at the center of a central mosaic. At the same time, the chekist-atheist has spent increasing time inn Orthodox churches and monasteries, hoping for “eternal life via this line.”

            According to Mirzayanov, “magic and witchcraft are the most concealed part of Putin’s efforts to make himself immortal,” and his fear of the Sakha shaman Aleksandr Gabyshev shows how much importance he devotes to such things.  And reports of those in the know say that “the Kremlin is now bubbling with astrologists, fortune tellers and witches.”

            The scholar says that Sergey Shoygu, the defense minister who is a Buryat by ethnicity and a shaman by calling, encourages Putin in this.

            But in addition, Putin “isn’t forgetting about science.” He has organized an enormous research effort on genetic engineering, put his daughter in charge, and forced Russian companies to invest astronomical sums so that research can go forward in the hopes of a breakthrough on the extension of life expectancy, his own in the first instance.

            And not only has the Kremlin leader compared this project to the Soviet effort to build nuclear weapons but he has displayed remarkable interest in plans to use genetic engineering to treat a Russian actress ill with brain cancer, at a time when one might have expected him to focus on the pandemic.

            When aging dictators fall into this pattern of thinking about their own mortality and how to avoid it, they may become even more erratic and unpredictable than they were earlier. At the very least, they evaluate what they should do by an entirely different metric than do young people at the helm who do not think at each step that it might be their last.