Those who read Prigozhin’s biography are often surprised that this sort of man could have formed a mercenary organization strong enough to challenge its own government. He began his career as a brazen petty thief in Russia’s chaotic 1990s and then became a penal colony zek. Between his release and his oligarch days, he did a stint as a hotdog salesman. He made his real fortune by staking bets on commercial properties, like grocery stores and casinos. It was at a restaurant he owned in St. Petersburg that he first met Vladimir Putin, who at the time was hosting U.S. President George Bush.

During the early 2010s, the Russian government began experimenting with private-public partnerships in military affairs. Prigozhin, who was already providing rations for the army, founded Wagner Group in 2013. The private military company mainly saw action in Libya, Syria, and several African countries, where it fought ISIS and orchestrated coups. After the war in Ukraine began, Wagner debuted with an effective offensive near Popasna. In preparation for the siege of Bakhmut, Prigozhin personally flew to prisons across Russia, assembling an assault force of 50,000 prisoners to spearhead the assault. Eventually, longstanding disputes with senior officials in the Russian army and dissatisfaction over how the war was being run in Moscow reached a boiling point. Prigozhin embarked on a “March for Justice” to Moscow to capture its military leadership and seek an audience with Putin. Its failure would eventually culminate in his death.

Prigozhin was the only type of person who could have founded an organization as unconventional as Wagner, which grew to be far more than a mercenary company at its peak. For a moment, it was an alternative cultural institution that operated a complex media empire, and it was even poised to supersede Russia’s army in influence. But throughout that time, it relied on the Russian state to provision its resources even as it grew increasingly autonomous from the state.

The same systemic chaos that made Prigozhin’s unconventional career possible also made Wagner itself possible. The Russian state’s inability to provide resources and coordination opened a window for him to carve out a fiefdom that could surpass the capacities of the state itself in its domain. These conditions are at an advanced stage in Russia, but they are not peculiar to it. “Wagnerization” may lie in the West’s future as well.

The Power Vertical

In the first year of the war, at the height of the media buzz about Prigozhin recruiting from penal colonies, I called up an old friend living in a part of Russia that sends a lot of men to the front. He had around a dozen friends and acquaintances who were in the army. While a few had been mobilized, the rest were volunteers who “would have fought for free.” It’s a common enough type in his circles.

He mentioned that some of them were considering leaving the army to join Wagner. When asked why, my friend said that the equipment, training, and provisions were better than those of the army itself, which is notoriously bad at meeting its own logistical standards. The Russian army felt like a big machine that could take in coherent instructions and competent personnel, and then spit out a complete mess. Wagner’s informal and personal structure meant problems could be addressed directly in real-time by Prigozhin’s lieutenants or by the man himself. Wagner paid better, and unlike the army, it always paid on time.

It makes sense that a private military company like Wagner would rise to prominence in a place like Russia. Emerging from the chaos of the 1990s, the country’s new elite was mostly comprised of entrepreneurs willing to get their hands dirty to acquire economic resources and political power. Mercenary companies exist in the West, too, but are usually the projects of ex-soldiers. Prigozhin founded Wagner with no military experience.

In retrospect, the lack of military background was probably an asset for his success. Career military men are often unused to building power in the civilian world, which limits their imagination when it comes to what else a semi-autonomous military company can do. Erik Prince, the most famous mercenary founder in recent U.S. history, ended his own military career early after deciding that his talents could be better used outside the U.S. Navy SEALs.

Prigozhin relied on his business sense, which led him to leverage his resources and political clout to form many other useful projects beneath the Wagner umbrella. After the beginning of the war, this enabled him to found the Wagner Center, a “start-up incubator” in St. Petersburg that provides free rent to founders and researchers aiming to benefit the state’s defense industry in some capacity. The campus is also a cultural center that hosts art exhibitions and Twitch streamers. Since the crackdown, its future is now uncertain.

Once it acquired a multipurpose headquarters, Wagner ceased to be only a mercenary outfit and started becoming a parapolitical organization. Across the developed world, these often take the form of dissident movements; European equivalents include the Italian neo-fascist group CasaPound, with its twenty-year squatting operation in the heart of Rome, and the gyms and bookstores of Azov Battalion, Wagner’s closest Ukrainian analog. While these organizations are capable of creating high cohesion by attracting people from radical political circles, military backgrounds, and subcultures to their ranks, that’s exactly what causes them to fail electorally when they morph into parliamentary parties.

By sourcing his weaponry from the Kremlin while maintaining his own separate recruiting pipeline from the Russian army, Prigozhin grew increasingly autonomous from the state even as he remained subsidized by it. This is the essence of Wagnerization: using the power of state patronage to feed and legitimize your own corporate body until it can exist independently from it.

The Wagner Center took the mercenary company out of the PMC domain and made it the armed wing of an NGO. This is because it situated Wagner in the cultural sphere as it expanded its media operations. People became familiar with Prigozhin’s pugnacious Telegram voice messages that criticized the anemic Russian war effort, Wagner’s feature-length movies, and a temple for fallen soldiers replete with relics taken from the PMC’s time in Syria as if it was the Knights Templar. This is why people in Rostov were cheering them on in the aftermath of their “March for Justice.” Being useful to the government is what provided a group like Wagner its autonomy, and that autonomy eventually made it popular—and dangerous.

While any mercenary company can be used to create plausible deniability when securing oil wells or mines in distant places, the discreet nature of these groups is precisely what makes them prone to expanding into activities beyond their initial purpose—a trait they share with intelligence agencies and criminal enterprises. They may even interface with each other; in Libya, Wagner at one point was in talks with its U.S. counterpart Blackwater to procure weapons.

Wagner has been neutralized in Russia for now. But Putin and his allies will need to rely on alternative mobilization measures akin to Wagner to continue the war. The complexity of mobilization and industrial war, the overlap in rights and responsibilities between many bureaucratic fiefdoms within the state, and Russia’s entrenched corruption make that necessary. The Russian oil and gas magnate Gazprom Neft, for example, has formed its own security wing, and photos have circulated of its members volunteering in Ukraine. Similar groups have been formed by Roscosmos, Russia’s space agency. Wagner was just the bleeding edge of the Kremlin’s increasing reliance on such organizations. As the mandate of state-adjacent corporations increases to fulfill increasingly complex tasks, the form they take on will make it increasingly fraught for the state to police them.

Wagner arose in the profoundly deactivated, inert political environment of Putin’s Russia. These are the conditions under which independent actors gain leverage over a state whose institutions are hollowed out and atrophied. But the outsourcing of state capacity to semi-autonomous organizations is just an advanced version of a dynamic that is beginning to occur in the West, too.

Wagnerization, Not Balkanization

The failure of domestic institutions is becoming more noticeable in the U.S, too. Even if state capacity in coordinating services seems to have declined since the 1970s, the funding of infrastructure projects, schools, policing, and military technology has kept increasing. Over 50 percent of all American taxes fund welfare and healthcare programs that massively underdeliver relative to the amount of resources put in. Much of the U.S. economy originates from some kind of dole or another.

Administrative and regulatory costs prevent timely, cost-effective success, and it is not likely this situation can be fixed through anything short of a “refounding moment” similar in scope to the New Deal. But this would require a high degree of political capital that no single faction in the U.S. possesses. Much like in Russia, the ruling political cliques of the United States formed decades ago.

Meanwhile, the actual power of the state to police social dissent has never been greater, and it is common for social policies that originate in the state to percolate into the corporate sphere through carrot-and-stick measures or “nudging.” The political violence that was common in the 1970s or even the 1950s is basically unheard of today, even if domestic terror threats are commonly invoked as a national security priority. The power of the state to protect its own interests remains unchanged; it is merely the services it provides that have declined.

In the U.S., private-sector responses already occur. Expanded projects like executive health programs that bypass the regular healthcare system or community-wide private security are not logistically hard. It isn’t unimaginable that someday, entire structures outside the U.S. government will emerge to provision more complex needs like education, mass healthcare, and even defense. At this larger scale, private bureaucracies and contractors can become increasingly autonomous and vertically integrated while maintaining a working relationship with the powers that be.

In high-functioning societies, enterprising people are able to do their work within established institutions. But as the vast material flows of state power stall up and become lethargic, state institutions tend to balkanize into many fiefdoms ripe for innovative parapolitical strategy. While an “American Prigozhin” may be out of the question for now, the key question for the U.S. is who is capable of redirecting these flows.

There are two vectors of proto-Wagnerization that currently exist in the U.S. political landscape: an aspiring entrepreneurial elite and a sprawling network of government agencies that enforce the rule of law.

After the end of the Cold War, the technological innovation that traditionally occurred in government-supported labs shifted toward private industry. In the U.S., the most recent advances in fields sensitive to national security, like artificial intelligence and spaceflight, have come from startups. This means that the founders behind these projects maintain some degree of leverage over the state, and sometimes not in a small way.

The story of Elon Musk’s deployment of Starlink to Ukraine is a recent example. Musk’s satellite network provided Ukraine’s military with secure communications, making its war effort possible. But the billionaire still has the final say on whether Starlink is used at all, and because the U.S. government has no matching capabilities of its own, at times it will have to cooperate with the foreign policy of Elon Musk. This came into play recently when Musk denied service to a Ukrainian attack on Crimea that would have relied on Starlink for its success.

The personality traits underlying the actions of founders like Musk are usually quite similar: disenchantment with the state paired with their own ambitious ideological vision. Insofar as greed motivates such people, it is to burn cash for a greater project. Sometimes their interests and those of the state will converge for a limited window of time. In that case, private individuals or organizations can serve as vehicles to launder state interests, or at least the interests of factions within it.

In 2019, the Trump administration announced a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria, alarming State Department circles intent on warding off Russian and Iranian influence in the region. In order to circumvent Trump’s order, they sought to grant wildcat American miners access to Syrian oil fields, as their business activity would justify the presence of U.S. troops. U.S. foreign policy became a battleground for several opposed power centers within the U.S. government. Although the miners were ultimately unsuccessful, this was largely due to a change in administration back in Washington.

The U.S. government’s ability to coordinate domestic messaging and policy during crisis moments is also running into problems. In 2020, when a collection of cities announced that they would not cooperate with the federal government in enforcing immigration laws, the Trump administration responded by deploying a heavily-armed border response team, BORTAC, to enforce crackdowns in sanctuary cities.

More politically-charged mobilizations were to follow. Later that year, during the Black Lives Matter protests and the siege of a federal courthouse in Portland, members of BORTAC were given the clear to round up suspected rioters without identifying themselves, before handing them off to overwhelmed local police. While the mayor of the city described it as an “unconstitutional occupation,” as a show of force deploying a Border Patrol unit in Oregon didn’t matter—there was an emergency that needed to be taken care of.

On the surface, a federal agency deployed to enforce a mandate or protect a federal building seems in legal order. But on the ground, each incident like this reveals cracks in the coherence and unitary authority of the U.S. government itself. Because these actions are almost always in the context of politically polarized emergencies, they cause fissures between different branches of government at the very moments when unified messaging and operations are most important. When these breaks in discipline occur with no serious repercussions, it becomes more likely that they will continue in the future.

If this dynamic continues to intensify, it will create a patchwork of organizations—and of powerful individuals within them—nakedly pursuing their own political strategies and ambitions. These are the conditions that could bring about American Wagnerization. In this scenario, political patronage and power relations between the strongest patrons become more important and openly acknowledged than the legal technicalities of the state. In the case of Wagner, the relationship with Putin and his allies mattered far more than formal Russian law, under which private military companies were actually illegal.

In such a landscape, the battles between different factions grow to resemble a turf war, not a civic process, and the strict distinction between state and non-state organizations disappears. The motivations and interests of the power brokers begin to matter far more than the vehicles through which they are expressed, and they operate with no reference to the collective public or state interests that were previously invoked to justify political action. This is a semi-feudal dynamic, where power is more naked and more personal than a strong modern state could ever tolerate.

Wagnerized institutions are capable of mobilizing men on the streets, brainwashing or bribing their way into covert political power, and administering their own territory according to their own rules. The optimal strategy in these conditions is one of political arbitrage: finding unusual solutions to common problems, even if it means breaking taboos about the public-private distinction. Any wealth such groups amass is a byproduct of their political power.

A certain degree of Wagnerization may even be a more healthy outcome for the American political fabric than further stagnation. Prigozhin’s “March For Justice” isn’t a desirable end state, but it is far from the only possibility. Political fiefdoms can also arise in periods when a state undergoes aggressive institutional renewal. The FDR years, for example, saw Vannevar Bush carve out bureaucratic strongholds like the Office of Scientific Research and Development to great effect, giving him the ability to run initiatives like the Manhattan Project.

At this stage, Wagnerization remains an early hypothesis about the political future, not an established fact. But it is a far more likely scenario than the reinvigoration of America’s vanished civic body, a second civil war, a “national divorce,” or territorial balkanization. The U.S. may be polarized and organizationally dysfunctional, but the ruling regime is still extremely powerful and has no realistic competitors or usurpers. In such an environment, the most useful political strategy is to carve out spaces of power and control rather than pursuing formal separatism, large-scale conflict, or attempting reform of the entire structure. This spurs the process of Wagnerization.

Those who control powerful institutions and the loyalty of large numbers of people in chaotic times will be well-poised to impose their own political narratives and ideologies, something Prigozhin began to do through his media work. Wagnerization is made up of a thousand miniature refoundings of the civic order. However, as the Prigozhin example shows, start-up governance will be uniquely vulnerable to its own leadership. Like actual startups, the fate of any political faction is determined by the carrying force of the leader’s boldness, disagreeability, and overconfidence. The right gambles can result in huge gains, while the wrong one can bring complete destruction.

It was never completed due to the beginning of the Second World War and its steel was salvaged for the war effort instead. But at the time, the demolition of the cathedral was only one instance of how the overturning of an old order was transforming Moscow’s cityscape.

It’s said that in the Moscow of 1935, it was impossible to find a contemporary map of the city. Ducking your head into a bookstore or bus station, you could find maps up to 1924. But every year since then so many new streets had been added, so many streets renamed, and so many old buildings destroyed and replaced, that there was no point in producing a new one. There was only a map of what the city was to look like in the year 1945 when the “General Reconstruction Plan” would finally be complete. Until then, Moscow was undergoing a frenetic metamorphosis of its urban fabric. As Trotsky had put it, “The revolution has cut time in half.” Other Bolsheviks like Yakov Sverdlov often spoke of the revolution as ushering in a “life in which people are fused into a single whole not only physically, but also spiritually.”

All this was merely the architectural complement of Russia’s radical transformation. A larger revolution in ideas around human nature had been underway for decades before the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution and had been fully unleashed by its arrival. This early Soviet period that transformed Moscow also spawned some of the first attempts at applied transhumanism.

Every few months throughout the 1930s, newspaper headlines announced that the secrets of immortality had been revealed and the creation of an elixir of life was imminent. One prominent Bolshevik, a certain Alexander Bogdanov, championed blood transfusions from the young as a source of eternal youth, so an entire commission was set up for the express purpose of supplying the Bolshevik old guard with new blood. The Soviet Academy of Sciences, meanwhile, authorized an expedition to West Africa that would investigate the feasibility of human-ape hybridization, “in the interests of science and the propagation of a natural-historical worldview among the masses.”

The state promoted news of electrification and workers blasting through coal-mining records, and downplayed the errant hungry years that regrettably but naturally accompanied the construction of heaven on Earth. So it was easy for a suggestible observer to believe that, in the Soviet Union, the natural limitations of man were being surpassed everywhere one looked, and that as man gained mastery over the natural elements, the cosmic domain itself was about to open up to revolutionary progress.

Fans of the rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky created the Society for the Study of Interplanetary Communications in 1924, capitalizing on a recent space craze—between 1923 and 1932, more than two dozen monographs on spaceflight were published in the USSR, versus just two in the U.S. over the same period. Meanwhile, the authors of the “Biocosmist Manifesto” called for not just the privilege but the “right to exist (immortality, resurrection, rejuvenation) and the freedom to move in cosmic space.” To some, after the revolution everything and anything seemed possible.

But one of the most important thinkers whose work had catalyzed this craze, Nikolai Fyodorivich Fyodorov, had died in 1903, long before its beginning. Although his philosophical work informed many of these scientific projects, he was not a communist, nor a socialist. Those seeking out Fyodorov met a demure, devout librarian in Moscow’s Rumyantsev library, just a ten-minute walk from the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. According to visiting admirers like Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Vladimir Solovyov, he behaved like a saint. Fyodorov eschewed his aristocratic background to live as a celibate ascetic and was so humble that he published none of his works while he was alive, despite his word-of-mouth fame.

But very little of Fyodorov’s philosophy resembled traditional Christianity. His thought came to form the core of something that was later called “Cosmism,” a catch-all term to define a period in which spiritually-infused materialist thinkers grappled with how they could reconcile technological progress with human destiny. Because of his powerful influence on the intellectual life of his time, modern ecology, aeronautics, and systems theory all owe something to Fyodorov.

Today, standing on the precipice of a prophesied revolution in materials science, artificial intelligence, and biotechnology, we too are living in a Cosmist moment. Such technologies often come along with apparently visionary ideologies attached. But their utopian promises either fizzle out or get appropriated by the more powerful and established ideological structures they exist within. In this sense, the current ideologies that advocate a revolution in human nature through technological acceleration run the scripts of early Soviet ghostware, imprinted with Cosmist thought. Likewise, they are on track to share the same fate as Fyodorov and the cathedral he worked nearby.

The technologies of the future do not always pan out the way we would like or imagine them to. The cultural momentum and even material possibility they generate are reappropriated by those with both vision and power.

Remember the Ancestors

Fyodorov’s work comes down to us mainly in the form of the Philosophy of the Common Task, a posthumous collection of manuscripts he rarely shared outside his private correspondence. With its subject matter ranging from the demilitarization of the Earth to the colonization of the solar system, human asexual reproduction, and physical resurrection, he was self-conscious of coming off like a crank and felt his work would be more useful to readers of the future than the present. Even though it led him to refrain from public life, he was a farsighted observer of the here and now.

Born in 1829, Fyodorov lived through the entirety of the electric nineteenth century. Railroads, telephone wires, lightbulbs, and steel-beamed bridges sprang up all around him. As the technical achievements of modernity reached greater and greater heights, the question of what it all meant for the destiny of mankind came to the fore. Mankind’s tools were increasing their destructive and salvific power simultaneously, leaving the human being himself to the wayside.

Fyodorov noted, though, that centuries ago Copernicus had already discerned that Earth was not the center of the universe. The librarian believed, in fact, that the rest of the universe—down to its most elementary particles—was vitally alive, but also that man was uniquely situated as the most developed, self-reflective form of life. That gave human beings the ability to feel great grief over the suffering of both human and non-human lifeforms, and over the severing of man’s connection with the land. Fyodorov was also concerned with the fading of historical memory—even the stories and experiences of our ancestors slipped through our fingers like sand.

Although that same self-reflective nature caused man great suffering, it equipped him to alleviate it and even to elevate the elementary particles of the universe themselves to a higher state of consciousness. This entailed the uplifting of all non-sentient life to his own level, the transcendence of his own current limited state, and a rejection of nature as such: “[A]s soon as the pride in the exploits of the fathers is replaced by grief over their death, we will begin to perceive the Earth as a graveyard and nature as a death-bearing force.”

Liberating this graveyard would require the literal raising of the dead. For Fyodorov, “Our task is to make nature, the forces of nature, into an instrument of universal resuscitation and to become a union of immortal beings.” Achieving this would entail studying the remains of the dead and their escaped particulate matter in outer space, which would also have to be retrieved in order to reconstitute the whole organism.

Only when all men come to participate in knowledge will pure science…cease to be indifferent to this distorted attitude of the conscious being to the uncon­scious force. Then applied science will be aimed at transform­ing instruments of destruction into means of regulating the blind death-bearing force.

His philosophy assigned what is literally a common task, a total mobilization of society that would execute on a theo-scientific vision. It required the demilitarization of the world’s armies, but not their disbandment. Instead, the scale of mobilization of modern militaries could be usefully redirected to weather regulation, terraforming, and massive industrial projects. Just like the way the Soviets would later adopt labor mobilization and militaristic terminology like “shock workers” for the purposes of achieving five-year plans, Fyodorov described the common task in terms of galactic Lebensraum:

[The] conquest of the Path to Space is an absolute imperative, imposed on us as a duty in preparation for the Resurrection. We must take possession of new regions of Space because there is not enough space on Earth to allow the co-existence of all the resurrected generations.

The mastery over nature as an imperative for human liberation and the call for “a radical technical revolution bound up with a moral one” appealed to many Bolsheviks. In a commemoration for what would have been Fyodorov’s 100th birthday, the famous Bolshevik writer Maxim Gorky declared that “freedom without power over nature—that’s the same as freeing peasants without land.” But others found the concepts suspect. Trotsky perceptively concluded that:

Cosmism seems, or may seem, extremely bold, vigorous, revolutionary, and proletarian. But in reality, Cosmism contains the suggestion of very nearly deserting the complex and difficult problems…on Earth so as to escape into the interstellar spheres. In this way Cosmism turns out quite suddenly to be akin to mysticism…[and may] lead some to the most subtle of matters, namely the Holy Ghost.

And lead to the Holy Ghost it did. Although Fyodorov was devout, he saw Christianity as “not simply a doctrine of redemption, but the very task of redemption.” To him, “General resurrection, immanent resuscitation carried out with all the heart, thought and actions—that is, by all the power and abilities—of all the sons of man, is the implementation of the precept of Christ, Son of God and also Son of Man.” Cosmism did not derive its utopian visions from the possibilities of new technology, but began with a vision—immortality and the resurrection of the dead—and asked what technology would be necessary for this common task.

To a modern reader, this could all seem quite far-fetched. Indeed, that was also the case for many of his contemporaries. But for some, it was the stimulus for incredible works of genius—including the godfather of spaceflight, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky.

Cosmism Came First

When Yuri Gagarin became the first man to go to space, the Soviet media reported that upon reaching orbit he “saw no God up here.” But this quip actually originated from the Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev; Gagarin himself was a baptized Christian, and once publicly suggested the restoration of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior.

This sort of retconning was a common pattern throughout Soviet history. Recasting scientific discoveries and historical moments like these for didactic purposes was an important part of building and then vindicating state ideology. To the Politburo and Central Committee, the space project was seen as a useful aid in promoting atheism as part of the state ideology. In fact, the entire Soviet space program owes itself to a Cosmist.

We remember Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, born in 1857, for his theoretical work on thermal-shielded, gyroscope-steered, multistage rocket “trains,” a topic on which he first published in 1903, and for the Tsiolkovsky rocket equation, which describes the way an object can move using rocket thrust. However, his work on rocketry was only one-eighth of his total research output. He was greatly influenced by Fyodorov, who “took the place of university professors” during his childhood when he studied at the Rumyantsev library. The great bulk of Tsiolkovsky’s research was actually dedicated to two things—the design of metal dirigibles and speculative writings on the cosmic will of the universe:

Death is one of the illusions of the weak human mind. Death does not exist…The universe is constructed in such a way that not only [it] itself is immortal, but also all of its parts, in the form of living, blessed beings. There is no beginning and no end to the universe, and thus no beginning and no end to life and to bliss.

To Tsiolkovsky, the universe tended toward more complex assemblages of atoms and molecules over time. They progressively possessed a greater capacity for self-awareness, a greater capacity for suffering, and a greater capability to alleviate it. By virtue of being the most developed assemblage, mankind was tasked with “liberating” the material universe by expanding into every one of its confines and developing its interconnectivity.

It was from the Philosophy of the Common Task that Tsiolkovsky got this idea. It was also from there he would learn to speculate on the feasibility and economic viability of asteroid mining, the recapturing of particles that escaped Earth’s atmosphere, and their reimplementation into the physically resurrected dead of all human history—all of whom were slated for immortality. Colonization of other planets was, as for Fyodorov, simply a way to create a living space for them.

The immortal humanity of the future would itself be upgraded, and Cosmists prefigured many themes from later transhumanist ideology. Fyodorov was celibate his entire life and dreamt of non-sexual reproduction—in his lifetime, he would have to settle for intellectual influence. Even though Tsiolkovsky had seven children, he too had a contempt for human sexuality and determined that in the future, humanity would replicate the asexual reproductive technology supposedly used by Mary to birth Christ. In fact, the Cosmists viewed all the miracles described in the Bible as not unexplainable miracles but debuts of sophisticated, reproducible technologies now lost to time.

While most in the orbit of Cosmist thought did not subscribe to its most radical theological ideas, its esoteric yet all-encompassing vision was enough to inspire many individual scientists and artists. Scientists and engineers influenced by Cosmist thought played leading roles in Soviet research. Ivan Yefremov created a new subfield of paleontology, Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko designed satellites and rocket engines for the Soviet space program, and Leonid Krasin directed the preservation of Lenin’s body in anticipation of his revival.

In this moment of Cosmist ascendancy, it seemed like their visions of transforming human life into new forms were gaining ground across the world. The Cosmist geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky directly influenced the famous French Jesuit thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Together, they developed the concept of the noosphere, a plane of collective consciousness emerging from organic life once it begins to contemplate itself, finally culminating in a higher order of mind.

But just as the Cosmist project appeared to reach newfound heights of influence, it found itself in the process of dissolution. The most useful aspects of Cosmism were incorporated into the state ideology of the Soviet space program even as they were stripped of their original justifications.

Sergei Korolev, the designer of the Sputnik satellite, was himself a great fan of both Fyodorov and Tsiolkovsky—he even wrote an introduction to a published collection of Tsiolkovsky’s work. But the ideological inspiration he brought to the Soviet space project operated within the state-approved paradigm of Soviet science, which demanded “the propagation of a natural-historical worldview among the masses” rather than resurrection and immortality. Tsiolkovsky may have become influential in his old age but his most fundamental goals died with him. Cosmism enjoyed an ephemeral and semi-prestigious influence but no prominent exponent thereafter was motivated by its core theological and material vision.

Structurally, the problem was that Cosmism, which never amounted to more than its thinkers, had neither the mechanisms nor even the ideological commitment to its own implementation. Like Cosmism, the ideology of communism had a life that preceded its entrenchment in the Soviet state. But what made communism different was its explicit bid for political power and the creation of organizational structures like the Leninist mass party, which was tasked with achieving that goal and enforcing party discipline along the way.

This combination of globally-scoped ideology and strategic institution-building made communism a uniquely successful historical project in a way that Cosmism, as a philosophical movement, could not be. Fyodorov put off his writings for readers of the future, and there never was a “Cosmist International.” Karl Marx, on the other hand, was laying the institutional groundwork for the Communist Party at the same time as he was writing screeds in a Brussels garret in 1848.

This meant that the Cosmist project had no self-defense mechanisms against its own appropriation for Soviet political goals. It was not unique in this way: those prophets who undertake the creation of new technological and philosophical paradigms may get to enjoy fame and even paid positions for their work if they are fortunate, but they are usually not driven by material incentives. Tsiolkovsky was famously irascible and Fyodorov was reluctant to get published at all, even shying away from the salons and admiration of famous intellectuals to focus instead on his library and theorizing the retrieval of past human beings like books. This meant that much of their influence was posthumous and passed through a Soviet filter.

The bastardization of Cosmism into atheist Soviet ideology makes clear that the most successful ideological projects must have both a radical impetus and a viable route for political implementation. Ideologies that lack the latter become vulnerable to recuperation into existing power structures. The ideologies that govern history are implemented by states, not the visionaries who conceive them.

Eventually, Tsiolkovsky’s contributions to the study of dirigibles were honored and rewarded by the Soviet government, which was engaged in the “airship race” of the 1930s. Before that, he had been living off five loaves of bread a month until a representative of his hometown authored an urgent report to the Soviet Academy of Sciences advocating a pension for him. Yet the ideas that inspired this research were not propagated beyond those with an intellectual bent toward esoteric ideology. Although we live in a world with the technological capabilities envisioned by Cosmists, we do not live in a universe according to Cosmism.

Our Cosmist Moment?

The Cosmists were responding to a world that was beginning to undergo one collective experience, as communication and transportation technologies seemed on the way to connecting all advanced societies into a single noosphere. This gathering of the nations meant that the destiny of mankind could be conceptualized in collective terms. Even if the Cosmists and other Soviets of the 1920s and ‘30s over-indexed on technology’s ability to make a resurrected humanity immortal, they were looking at their material conditions and speculating on what could be achieved one or five hundred years into the future.

The Cosmist experience casts a new light on the recent nexus of technological breakthroughs. Today, the very form of the human being is challenged by the possibility of human modification on a genetic or biochemical level and the rise of artificial intelligence that surpasses human intellectual capabilities. Embryonic selection for height and intelligence is already possible, and in some corners already practiced, although explicit advocacy of these technologies remains on the fringe.

While AI is more recent, there are already rumblings of a new ideology that seeks to prioritize its full development as a cure for human ills and material stagnation, possibly replacing the human race in the process. In the minds of many speculators, these technologies travel together as a group, and their arrival necessitates the disappearance of human agency and sometimes even human life from the world.

Despite the frequent pose of being purely empirical claims, these speculations are often laundered through ideologies like transhumanism that have their own ready ideas of what the human or posthuman form should become. One relevant question, then, is what visions actually motivate current technological advances, even in hidden or non-obvious ways. Another is whether these ideologies can survive on their own merits at all, or whether they will face appropriation of their best ideas into entirely new contexts.

Paradigm breakthroughs always begin with calls to great, even fantastical endeavors—to “storm the heavens,” as Fyodorov once implored his followers to do. Even if Cosmism’s attempts at articulating a human project were kooky in certain respects, a great deal of tangible scientific progress emerged from its admirers. New, totalizing theories of human purpose are likely yet to emerge. Some will inspire their own waves of material experimentation and invention. But to the degree that they are reliant on more hegemonic patrons, they will likely share the fate of the Cosmists before them.

Formerly an elusive chief of propaganda, this was one of the most public appearances of his career, and despite his secrecy, his reputation preceded him. The lawyer began with a pointed question: “Please explain what you did to destroy the Soviet Union.”

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, accusations of betrayal followed Yakovlev for the rest of his life. Ten years later he began his memoir with a barb at his endless critics: “Yes, I am that same Yakovlev,” he wrote, assuring the reader that it was “precisely me who is the main culprit for the collapse of the Soviet Union, the KGB, the army…and everything else. In short, a man of demonic possibilities.”

The first time Alexander Yakovlev came to doubt the Soviet Union was just after it had won its Great Patriotic War against Germany in 1945. Then a 23-year-old marine senior lieutenant, Yakovlev had been injured storming a machine gun nest in the swamps of Leningrad in 1942. His home village didn’t have much in the way of a hospital, so he spent the rest of the war recovering in its regional capital Yaroslavl. One day, a year after the war was over, he heard that a train car of returning soldiers was passing through. 

He limped over to the train station to see if he could greet them. But when the train finally came to the station, it did not stop. As he soon learned, this is because these soldiers were not actually on their way home. Instead, the train contained a few of the nearly two million returning Soviet prisoners of war on their way to Siberian filtration camps—surrender had become a criminal offense during the desperate days of 1941 under Red Army Order 270. Prisoners liberated by the Western Allies were investigated for espionage. From there, many would be deported to the Far East, where they were to toil in the platinum mines of Magadan.

Yakovlev knew that he could have easily been one of them had he been captured by the enemy instead of rescued by his comrades. With an impeccable war record, an officer’s epaulets, and a recently-acquired Party card, he had great opportunities available to him instead. He studied history in Yaroslavl and was then recommended to the Communist Party’s Higher Party School in Moscow, where promising candidates were groomed for a role at the Central Committee, the Soviet Union’s executive administrative body.

He was promoted to work in the Central Committee shortly after Stalin’s death in 1953, and living in Moscow he would have observed that the deadly stampede at his funeral never made it into the news. Working at the Central Committee also gave him access to the 20th Party Congress of the Soviet Union in 1956, where Nikita Khrushchev, the new general secretary, gave his unannounced Secret Speech denouncing Stalin. Like Yakovlev, many of the personnel there were new, including more than two-thirds of the Politburo, the senior leadership drawn from the Central Committee. Because of this, the Secret Speech would remain an event that framed the rest of Yakovlev and his colleagues’ lives. The general secretary began his speech before his thousands-strong audience impersonally enough:

Comrades! The cult of the individual caused the employment of faulty principles in Party work and in economic activity. It brought about rude violation of internal Party and Soviet democracy, sterile administration, deviations of all sorts, cover-ups of shortcomings, and varnishings of reality. Our nation bore forth many flatterers and specialists in false optimism and deceit.

But then Khrushchev, who had worked with Stalin in the party since the 1920s and, unlike Yakovlev’s generation, had watched the personality cult develop over time, began to rattle off countless episodes of Stalin’s arrogance and brutality. The speech turned into the toppling of an idol. He castigated the old general secretary’s behavior during the war:

…during the whole Patriotic War, he never visited any section of the front or any liberated city except for one short ride on the Mozhaisk highway during a stabilized situation at the front. To this incident were dedicated many literary works full of fantasies of all sorts and so many paintings.

He spoke of the “absurd, wild” purges of the late 1930s, where an astonishing 70 percent of the members of the Central Committee’s 1934 Congress were shot. Here, the speech’s transcript records that Khrushchev’s audience expressed “indignation in the hall” in response. Indeed, these revelations and criticisms were unthinkable—including for Khrushchev, who nervously rambled through the speech, stammering, coughing, and improvising as he went.

But whatever indignation there was in the hall, Yakovlev did not hear it. For the entirety of the speech, the entire Central Committee remained deathly quiet—either from shock or a sense of self-preservation, lest it be some strange test of loyalty—and so after the speech, Khrushchev’s assistants wrote in applause, indignation, and even laughter into the transcript. Yakovlev noted that while it was quiet enough to hear a chair creak, not one of them did: 

Everything seemed unreal…the words crossed out everything I had lived. Everything flew apart into little bits and pieces, like fragmentation shells during the war. No one looked at each other—either from the unexpectedness of what just happened, or from the confusion and fear which seemed to have then settled on the Soviet people forever.

After Khrushchev finished he waited for the usual standing ovation, but the stone-faced apparatchiks remained silent. His scribes dutifully recorded it as “tumultuous, prolonged applause.” Yakovlev wrote that as the attendants shuffled out the hall, the moment felt like “a star of great faith falling down to a wicked earth.”

The Secret Speech sparked a crisis of faith among many of the younger cadres, including Yakovlev, and initiated a broader, gradual decay in party discipline that would continue for 40 years. Compared to its mass mobilization during the Stalin era, the party’s ability to embark on great projects and reforms would begin to slowly wither away. In the mind of every would-be hardliner, the question lingered: if even the Central Committee wasn’t safe, then what could happen to me? 

Like many others, Yakovlev became sluggish at work. Feeling disillusioned, he decided to take a break from the Central Committee and began postgraduate education at the Academy of Social Sciences, where he reread Marx and Lenin in search of answers. It was then that he decided Marxism was fundamentally flawed and led to dictators like Stalin, but he still had hopes that Khrushchev’s reforms would transform the country for the better.

Despite flashpoints like the Cuban Missile Crisis, the tenure of the new premier brought some of the first American-Soviet joint initiatives since the war. In 1958, Yakovlev was one of the seventeen students selected to attend Columbia University in the first-ever Soviet-U.S. Fulbright exchange. There, he studied the reforms of the Roosevelt administration’s New Deal. He also toured the Midwest, explaining to his curious farmhouse hosts that Soviets did not, in fact, practice polygamy. Back in New York, the recent publication of the Soviet dissident novel Dr. Zhivago saw American students asking him to point out the lines that would’ve gotten it banned. Despite his anti-Stalinist outlook, he was not impressed by the book, and observing America’s wealth inequality and segregation he could not say he was impressed by the country either.

When he returned to Moscow he published a series of anti-American books with names like The Call to Slaughter: American Falsifiers of the Problems of War and Peace. These books are curious outliers in his oeuvre, and it’s hard to imagine they were written for any other reason than to stave off possible associations with Western thinking. Thirty years later, one American journalist confronted him over passages from one of these books, On the Edge of the Abyss. In response, Yakovlev gave a start. “You’ve really read that book, haven’t you,” he said. When the journalist answered in the affirmative, Yakovlev supposedly smiled and replied “Maybe I should, too.”

When Yakovlev returned from his trip abroad, the Central Committee had a position waiting for him. By 1960 he was the head of the newspaper section of the propaganda wing of the Agitation and Propaganda (or Agitprop) department. But Khrushchev’s reforms had changed much in the time he had taken a break from party duties, and Yakovlev would be thrown into a new cultural world unfathomable just a few years before. As his involvement in this sphere grew, he made decisions that would lead to him leaving the Soviet Union once more—this time with no choice.

Inclusionary Politics

With the arrival of what would be called the “Khrushchev Thaw,” the ink began to flow. Intellectuals and political dissidents, many of whom had been released from the gulags just a couple of years before, began to poke their heads in at evening parties in crowded Moscow apartments. In private settings like those, debates on the reforms of the new era could take place mostly unmolested by the secret police. From there, conversations filtered into public discourse: between 1955 and 1957, 27 new “thick journals” were launched, reviving a pre-revolutionary media form wherein intellectuals submitted their takes on literature, political theory, and current events to long-form periodicals, each with its own political persuasion. But even though these writers were allowed to push the limits of contradicting Soviet authority, they actually served as useful tools for Khrushchev’s administration.

After the death of Stalin and especially after the Secret Speech, Khrushchev inherited a hostile bureaucratic state. He now counted many enemies among various departmental heads and the Politburo’s old guard—former Stalin advisors Georgy Malenkov and Vyacheslav Molotov came close to orchestrating a coup against him in 1957. By allowing the publication of anti-Stalinist magazines, Khrushchev could let the Soviet Union’s cultural sphere strike against the Stalinists for him.

Among less ideologically-inclined communists, Stalinist cultural artifacts were still a regular problem. Yes-men and the fear of reporting mistakes made the Soviet information space very opaque, even for its senior leadership. On top of that, Khrushchev’s Politburo was conflict-averse, because no one wanted the kind of party discipline that led to denunciations, then purity spirals, then great purges—instead, the “party line” was upheld at all costs, and public debates or disagreements were basically unheard of. But having devolved from the absolutist governance model of Stalin toward a more involved collective leadership of the whole Politburo, Khrushchev and his deputies needed sources of dissent to test how his reforms in agriculture and foreign policy were being received. For this, his administration needed a controlled but insightful opposition.

Just as there was a detente within the Politburo, Stalinist-style terror as a means of controlling society was no longer an option. But political dissidents still presented a threat to the government, and they needed to be concentrated and monitored. And so it was easier to insert KGB informants into the editorial boards of state-controlled publications rather than unofficial, untraceable samizdat magazines. 

This is where Yakovlev came in. His job was to balance and discipline the editorial boards of thick journals, and to serve as a liaison between the intelligentsia and the Central Committee—all it took to cut a disruptive article was one phone call. However, not all of these publications came under his jurisdiction, because there was no central agency that controlled every publication, and censors placed in different departments brought their own ideological lens to each case. Because of this heterogeneity, there was a considerable difference in outlook between each publication.

The ideological alignments of the thick journals give us a gestalt of the post-Stalin era’s ideological landscape: Noviy Mir (New World) was liberal, literary, and internationally prestigious. It published works like Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, which struck directly at the holdout Stalinists who ran the journal Oktyabr. Meanwhile, straightlaced communist academics expounded wood-tongued theory in Kommunist. It was also where bureaucrats like Yakovlev published anonymous articles that warned specific authors to tone down their critiques. A paper run by the youth wing of the Communist Party, Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard), was one of the most curious—breaking from Soviet doctrines of historical materialism, its Russian nationalist writers promoted a “Russification of the spirit” against cultural “Americanization,” as well as a reinvigoration of the Orthodox Church.

Many of these publications were based in Moscow and were staffed by people who had ties to the elite. Some were even members of the Central Committee, and their privileged status protected them from complete suppression. This did not go unnoticed by the reading public, which consumed thick journal gossip voraciously for hints of what was going on at the top. The first free Soviet elections in 1990 saw many writers and academics from this world become parliamentarians, before getting ousted in the next election cycle by professionals who knew better how to mobilize the masses.

Yakovlev personally frequented the literary salons of the Noviy Mir types and developed a pro-Khrushchev, liberal persuasion during this time. But it was impossible for him to discipline Stalinist and conservative voices unilaterally. Even though propagandists like him made censorship decisions according to their own ideological lenses, it reflected poorly on their department—and career—if too many cases were filtering up to the Central Committee for review. And so much to Yakovlev’s chagrin, Russian nationalists like those of Molodaya Gvardiya were permitted to exist as an intellectual force. 

They skillfully played into legitimate worries of much of Soviet society and its Moscow elite. Throughout the 1960s and the stagnation period of the later decades, nationalists raised the alarm over the decline of the Russian peasantry, rising rates of alcoholism and divorce, decaying historic architecture, and the replacement of Stalinist Russification with the incoherent “new historical community” of Soviet peoples, a state-promoted cultural campaign that tried to tie all of the USSR’s highly distinct ethnicities into one common culture. Nationalist cliques won sympathy by calling attention to and organizing efforts to solve these problems.

Their increasing popularity among Soviet leadership was beginning to worry Yakovlev. As ideological divisions within this “new historical community” intensified, he mulled the best way to respond.

“Against Anti-Historicism” and Exile

Khrushchev’s increasingly erratic policy decisions put him in low standing amongst the rank and file of the Party, but the new consensus was still against a return to Stalinism. In 1964, a faction of Stalinists under the leadership of former KGB head Alexander Shelepin organized a coup, and Khrushchev was informed of his deposition while vacationing on the Black Sea. But the old guard of the Politburo was able to maneuver in an opponent of Shelepin, Leonid Brezhnev, as a replacement. Brezhnev was agreeable, predictable, and not the type to rock the boat with either radical or reactionary reforms.

On the day of the coup, Yakovlev was summoned to the Kremlin, where he noticed the usual guards had been replaced with military cadets. The party’s propaganda chief informed Yakovlev that Khrushchev’s tenure was over—and that he was offloading the task of condemning Khrushchev in the papers to him. It wasn’t a desirable assignment. If Khrushchev ever managed to beat back the coup, Yakovlev would then find himself purged. And besides, Yakovlev respected Khrushchev personally as the condemner of Stalin.

But the announcement did raise his profile. At this point Yakovlev was respected in the Politburo for his learning and prose, and just as he was tasked with helping usher Khrushchev out the door, he was assigned to welcome Brezhnev in. He wrote the new general secretary’s first speech to the Central Committee and many others afterward, spending the rest of the ‘60s between Brezhnev’s villas and hunting lodges, shooting billiards with other speechwriters. He often tried to sneak liberal catchphrases like glasnost, or transparency, into Brezhnev’s speeches, but these additions were crossed out by his colleagues every time. Close to Brezhnev in a way few others were, Yakovlev gained prestige in the thick journal world. His privileged status meant that his responsibilities in the Agitprop department increasingly carried the seal of the general secretary.

From 1965 on, the inclusionary politics of thick journals that created room for diverse political debate became an increasingly controversial policy within the Party. To the outrage of reformists like Yakovlev, nationalist and Stalinist intellectuals allied to put gradual pressure on Brezhnev’s clique and gradually rehabilitate Stalin. Emboldened, this informal ecosystem of nationalists known as the “Russian Party” blended support for underground nationalist groups in Soviet society and Stalinist leadership in the Politburo.

Liberal thick journals like Noviy Mir that preached reform were put under constant pressure. In 1969, an article in the conservative weekly Ogoniok (The Spark) entitled “Against What Is Noviy Mir?” accused it of being an anti-Russian and anti-Soviet publication, launching a campaign that eventually led to the sacking of its editor-in-chief.

Yakovlev decided that he had to launch a retaliatory salvo to reverse the conservative tide. His article “Against Anti-Historicism” was published under his own name on November 15th, 1972, in the weekly Literaturnaya Gazeta (The Literary Gazette). At 11,000 words, it called out nationalist authors by name, accusing them of using non-Soviet, chauvinistic historiographies for anti-Soviet ends. 

Keeping in the maximalist tradition of the Russian intelligentsia, aside from Marx and Lenin it also cites Marcuse, Freud, Toynbee, and Ortega y Gasset. But setting aside its party jargon and intellectual posturing, the subject of his critique reveals the allowances and contradictions of free speech in the Soviet press:

The party has always been intransigent toward everything that might hurt the unity of our society, including any nationalistic infections, no matter from where and from whom they might emanate. One such infection appears in reflections about the non-class “national spirit,” “national feeling,” “national folk character,” “the call of native unity,” which appear in some articles marked by an objectivist approach to the past. Their striking peculiarity is the detachment of present-day social practice from those historical changes that occurred in our country during the years that followed the Great October; the disregard or incomprehension of that decisive fact that in our country there has emerged a new historical community of people—the Soviet nation. The authors of these articles virtually avoid such words and concepts as “soviet,” “socialist,” “kolkhoz.”…It is as if there exists or can exist in our country some kind of national character outside the decisive influence of the revolution…outside the cultural and scientific-technical revolution, outside the basic social constants of time!

 

Reaction in the press was swift. An official like Yakovlev publishing such a high-profile piece in an established literary institution like Literaturnaya Gazeta was interpreted by publishing houses and editorial boards as an order to censor the mentioned writers. Those named all had their articles suppressed and their books pulled from publication. But even as writers raced to their typewriters to give their take on an apparent decapitation of the nationalists by a liberal censor, Yakovlev’s move backfired.

While he had checked in with his colleagues to see if he could get away with publishing it, Yakovlev’s article had not been cleared by the more conservative minister of culture. Factions within the Central Committee and Politburo were upset. Phone calls were made, and despite the fact that it took up a great deal of that issue of Literaturnaya Gazeta, no discussion of it was permitted to appear in the Soviet press over the following weeks.

The constant need to publicly police intellectuals—who were often high-ranking Central Committee members like Yakovlev—was becoming an embarrassment to the Party. Word got around the Politburo, and before long Brezhnev summoned Yakovlev to a one-on-one meeting. Always a people-pleaser, Brezhnev did not enjoy being associated with any kind of ideology and thought Yakovlev’s article would send the wrong message to the rest of the party: the article’s publication was too close to his upcoming speech for the 50th anniversary of the USSR, which was supposed to be drafted by Yakovlev. Their proximity would make it look like Brezhnev was endorsing reformism. Affable as ever, Brezhnev gave Yakovlev a gentle pat on the back, told him everything was going to be alright, and had him removed from his post by April 1973. Yakovlev was sent to work as an ambassador for the USSR’s embassy in Canada.

Already 50 years old, suddenly uprooting himself from the usual rhythms of life in Moscow was a shock. While his wife joined him in his exile, his children and grandchildren remained in Russia. He got along poorly with workers at the embassy in Ottawa, who had preferred his predecessor.

During this low point in his career, Yakovlev struck up a friendship with Pierre Trudeau, the Prime Minister of Canada. When the Soviet Union’s hockey team came to play Canada’s, they watched the match and took their families ice skating together. When Trudeau ran for reelection in 1974, it provided Yakovlev an inside look into how mass democracies are run.

He also observed Canada’s agriculture and economy closely—it was not as capitalist and chaotic as in the United States, and not as socialist and authoritarian as in the Soviet Union. But from all outside appearances, it looked like Yakovlev was to twiddle his thumbs in Canada for the rest of his life instead of implementing any of these practices back home. He still kept abreast of the intellectual world he left behind, where he was still considered a legend among reformers and a dark puppetmaster among conservatives. The two factions continued to tilt at one another; Yakovlev could tell that the old-school nomenklatura had lost control over the “spiritual life” of the country entirely.

The years passed. In 1983 he was visited by the minister of agriculture Mikhail Gorbachev, a promising cadre who was known to have liberal sympathies. Flying around Calgary and Niagara Falls in a turboprop plane, they gradually opened up with one another:

At first we kind of sniffed around each other and our conversations didn’t touch on serious issues. And then, verily, history plays tricks on one…we took a long walk…and, as it often happens, both of us suddenly were just kind of flooded and let go. I somehow, for some reason, threw caution to the wind and started telling him about what I considered to be utter stupidities in the area of foreign affairs, especially about those SS-20 missiles that were being stationed in Europe and a lot of other things. And he did the same thing. We were completely frank. He frankly talked about the problems in the internal situation in Russia. He was saying that under these conditions, the conditions of dictatorship and absence of freedom, the country would simply perish. So it was at that time, during our three-hour conversation, almost as if our heads were knocked together, that we poured it all out and during that three-hour conversation we actually came to agreement on all our main points.

An ocean away from Moscow, this all seemed like idle chatter. But soon events would be set in motion that saw both men make a meteoric rise in prominence.

Return, Collapse, and the Battle for Gorbachev

Brezhnev brought stability to a USSR ravaged by internal contradictions, but the last years of his life saw failure in the Afghanistan War, unchecked declines in party discipline that led to corruption, and the entrenchment of military and industrial lobby groups that prevented reform. By this point, failures in Soviet agricultural policy saw the country importing grain from the United States to sustain itself, and while the USSR was scientifically advanced, it failed to implement technological innovations outside of heavy industry or military contexts. It patched the hole of economic stagnation by increasing commodity exports, but this only enabled further complacency among the nomenklatura.

After years of poor health, Brezhnev died on November 10th, 1982 at 75. His successor, Yuri Andropov, died in 1984, and the general secretary that followed, Konstantin Chernenko, died a year after that.

General secretaries were always selected from the Politburo, but its average age had been steadily rising since Khrushchev’s time. The median age of its members was now 70, and its youngest member was Gorbachev at a spritely 54. The old guard of the Politburo realized something had to change. After some behind-the-scenes discussion, Gorbachev’s only competitor, Andrei Gromyko, agreed to be the first member of the Politburo to nominate him, and the rest soon followed.

Now in power, Gorbachev immediately signaled that the party would not be going through business as usual. Channeling his discussions with Yakovlev, he announced the policies of perestroika, which meant that economic restructuring through market liberalization would replace central planning, and glasnost, which entailed total information freedom and transparency that went beyond the controlled dissent of inclusionary politics. 

Gorbachev also initiated a purge of the party. This had also been planned by Andropov, Chernenko, and their cadres, but their deaths and the politics of succession had distracted reformers from getting anything done. Gorbachev’s appointment saw the party filled with fresh blood at the same time he excised much of its bloat. One energetic younger cadre who was appointed by Gorbachev and rose to the Politburo, Boris Yeltsin, sacked thousands of Moscow nomenklatura. “We dig further and further down,” he announced after firing around 50,000 party members and assistants, “but can never find the bottom of this cesspool.”

Like Gorbachev, most supporters of perestroika and glasnost thought that these policies were the key to building a better kind of socialism. Gorbachev himself earnestly believed in a more humane version of the Communist Party. In the early days of his administration, even powerful orthodox communist representatives who saw themselves as rivals to Gorbachev recognized the need for reform as societal decline worsened.

After Brezhnev’s death, Gorbachev arranged for Yakovlev to return home. In 1985, he was installed as the official head of the Agitprop department. Intensive discussions of the future of the country were being held at every level of society, and Yakovlev served as the direct line between the liberal humanist intelligentsia and Gorbachev himself. He drafted notes for Gorbachev with some of his ideas for reform in the political sphere. Some more speculative writings that were not adopted included a plan to split the Communist Party into a “socialist” and “national democratic” wing.

For Yakovlev, this was not some technocratic attempt at fixing the party. By this point, he was using his new authority to look into the state archives of the Stalin era. There, he found details of the Katyn massacre of Polish prisoners of war by the army he fought for as a young man, and of how Lenin’s reign could be just as brutal as Stalin’s. He was already ahead of mere reformers: he decided that the entire Marxist system had to be thrown out. He described Marxism as a “neo-religion, subject to the interests and whims of an absolutist power that has exalted dozens of times and then trampled into the mud its own gods, prophets, and apostles.”

Yakovlev got to work quickly. At the Party’s official magazine, Kommunist, the orthodox communist editor-in-chief was fired and had further publications of his work suppressed. The publication Ogoniok, whose articles had incensed Yakovlev to write “Against Anti-Historicism,” suffered the same fate. The men Yakovlev installed would serve as cheerleaders of perestroika. 

As high-level shakeups transformed the face of the party, however, the rest of the country continued its downward spiral. The slow-motion collapse in productivity throughout the 1970s and ‘80s was beginning to be felt, and acute food shortages and industrial failures were starting to occur. One harsh winter in 1985 paralyzed the train network, bringing the entire industrial economy of the country to a screeching halt. The Chernobyl nuclear incident would take place a year later.

The entrenched bureaucracy of the Soviet Union made serious gaffes in response to these crises. For example, in an attempt to curtail the growing black market economy, a new ban was instated on the broad category of “unearned income.” This often extended to privately cultivated foodstuffs, so greenhouses, gardens, and street market stalls were seized and destroyed even while the shelves of state-run grocery stores remained empty. One Literaturnaya Gazeta article, “The Criminal Tomato,” solemnly explained these actions as a decision reached by the “commission for the struggle against negative phenomena.”

One stalwart Politburo conservative and former industrial boss, Yegor Ligachev, bemoaned the collapse in party discipline and the government’s inability to mobilize the population—in the Stalin days, the party could’ve mobilized the population and sent them into the fields to help collect the harvest on time. Ligachev noted that while it was Yakovlev who was closest to Gorbachev’s ear, the propagandist had close to no experience managing a country, city, or even factory—his entire career was built on newsroom or party intrigue.

It was at Yakovlev’s advice that Gorbachev allowed the media space to consume much of his attention. He received and visited many representatives from the West, spoke at the United Nations, and received a Nobel Prize in 1990 for his opening of the country and unilaterally withdrawing troops from Europe, while crime, drug use, and worker absenteeism skyrocketed at home. Back in Moscow, whenever Ligachev was present for Politburo meetings to discuss how exactly economic reforms were to take place, the room seemed to ice over.

 Yakovlev and Gorbachev himself often met with editors and writers, encouraging them to leave no stone unturned when it came to revealing party corruption. But such a sudden reversal of the censorship techniques of the past amounted to a printed revolution. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, carefully monitored speech norms prevented the media from challenging Soviet authority. But as Yakovlev’s men in outlets like The Moscow News, Ogoniok, and even Pravda unleashed a deluge of new information that revealed the myths of the Soviet state, the artificiality of its civic identity, and the extent of corruption among its upper cadres, they were unwittingly emboldening the two factions that would successively overthrow Gorbachev: the communist hardliners and liberal nationalists.

In March 1988, an article entitled “I Cannot Forsake My Principles” appeared in the conservative Sovetskaya Rossiya. It was written by a chemistry teacher named Nina Andreyeva. Her article characterized the reforms as a slandering of Soviet history that was creating confusion among the youth, and its popularity tapped into a widespread discomfort with perestroika. There was a growing realization among traditional communists that the ostensibly communist government was no longer treating the party as if it was on the right side of history. If that was going to be the case, what was the point of the Soviet Union, and what was going to happen to it?

At the time of the article’s publication, Gorbachev and Yakovlev were so alarmed by its popularity that Yakovlev flew back from a trip to Mongolia to address it. Considering that Gorbachev had also been out of town when it was published, they considered it to be a move by “reactionary forces.” For two days, the entire Politburo was convened to discuss the article, and those who had tentatively supported its points were whipped into denouncing it. Ligachev, who was incorrectly suspected of arranging for its publication, was publicly humiliated and demoted. Instead of putting energy into other matters, Gorbachev and Yakovlev co-authored an article condemning the Nina Andreyeva piece.

The Cultural Department which both Ligachev and Yakovlev worked for was abolished and reformed with a steady-state loyalist at its helm. Ligachev was booted into obscurity as the minister of agriculture, and Yakovlev was made head of the foreign affairs commission. 

The whole episode revealed serious gaps in the reformers’ understanding of the freedom of expression. Georgy Shakhnazarov, one of Gorbachev’s senior aides characterized Andreyeva’s criticism as “unheard-of insolence—as if some miserable provincial priest had rebelled against the Pope and cardinals by accusing them of blasphemy.” Far from being a blossoming of free, constructive speech, glasnost was conceptualized and implemented as a weapon against the Soviet bureaucracy. For Yakovlev, who spent his entire career reading between the lines of published media to see what its ideological intent was, perhaps it could not have been otherwise.

The consequences, however, were beginning to escape Yakovlev’s control. Nationalist separatism in the Baltic and Transcaucasian republics was turning violent. Economic growth was declining year after year. Rumors around a KGB coup began to swirl. “Perestroika,” he realized, “became independent from its initiators.” But at that point, he didn’t care much about what this meant for the fate of the Soviet Union: “around 1988 it became clear to me…that a society built on violence and fear cannot be reformed.” 

In a sense, he was right. Falling into a common pattern, perestroika and glasnost had been a “revolution from the top.” Most of the political and media heavy lifting was not coming from the Soviet people but from established actors and institutions—be it Yakovlev’s publication of archival research through his sockpuppets in legacy media, or conservative elites organizing a coup against Gorbachev in 1991 and Yeltsin 1993. In one meeting of the Politburo in 1988, Yakovlev noted that less than 15 percent of the population generally approved of economic and political reforms—half the support of 1986. 

As economic and social conditions continued to deteriorate, Yakovlev’s relationship with Gorbachev began to sour as well. By 1988 Yakovlev was starting to get sidelined by Gorbachev, who worried his close association with the propaganda chief was destroying the consensus he needed to build with conservatives. In private, Yakovlev incessantly made the case for the dismantling of the “criminal” Communist Party and opposed any compromise with conservative factions in the government. One Politburo member (who happened to owe his career to Yakovlev) explained Gorbachev’s possible rationale in his diary:

[Yakovlev] has the same issue with Gorbachev’s ingratitude. He has not received a single “Thank you” in their five years of working together, not even for what Yakovlev initiated. Sure, he has a friendly relationship and trust (and sometimes a pretense of trust). But not a hint of recognition or reward. Most likely, Gorbachev does not want to identify himself with Yakovlev in front of the [Politburo] or [Central Committee] (where they hate Yakovlev), or society. By identifying himself with Yakovlev he would be disassociating himself from Ligachev once and for all. He is keeping A.N. “for himself,” for when he needs some advice, or to assign him to write something.

But Gorbachev’s attempts to placate conservatives would ultimately fail anyway. On August 19th, 1991, hardline communists affiliated with the military and KGB launched a coup, detaining Gorbachev at his Black Sea vacation home like they had with Khrushchev. But the plot was poorly planned and executed, and the leaders who did not commit suicide in its aftermath were apprehended and imprisoned. While it destroyed the conservatives as a viable political force, it empowered Boris Yeltsin, who had recently been agitating against Gorbachev and was popular among the people. The coup plotters had been holed up in the White House, a Moscow administrative building, and when a crowd of thousands of protestors surrounded it Yeltsin was seen giving anti-Soviet speeches atop an army tank.

With his power now restored, Gorbachev still insisted on the correctness of the “socialist choice” and the possibility of communist “renewal.” But a few days after the coup on August 23rd, at a meeting of the Russian parliament, Yeltsin humiliated Gorbachev by forcing him to read aloud a transcript from the first day of the coup. It demonstrated that all but two of the leaders of the plot were ministers Gorbachev had personally nominated to their positions. 

It was all over. The Central Committee was dissolved that same day, and Gorbachev resigned the day after. Yakovlev was not present—while he claimed to be on the “kill list” of the coup plotters, he had resigned from the Politburo in 1990, and from the Communist Party two days before the events of August 19.

Too late to change the outcome of the Soviet collapse—widespread banditism in the 1990s, a sharp drop in lifespan, and wars in the former Central Asian republics, Caucasus, and Ukraine—Yakovlev would realize that far from being a paradigm shift, perestroika fell into a pattern of state-enforced revolution upon an unwilling population:

Perestroika from the very beginning…was an attempt to execute all the reforms from above, and it was done in the hopes that people would follow the enlightened rulers. All the attempts at reform in Russian history were of similar nature, and probably this is why all of them have resulted in no absolute success.

Perestroika was explicitly conceptualized as a “reformation” of socialism, and as such many of its supporters self-identified as humanists. But humanism alone cannot unify a political entity made of hundreds of peoples, each with its own cultural distinctness and political calculus. Yakovlev and Gorbachev could intellectually oppose separatist nationalism in the Baltics, Caucasus, and Central Asia all they like—when push came to shove, they both believed it was better to cede those territories to regional elites rather than risk violence in trying to preserve them. But regardless of its ideological failings, much blood had been spilled to create and then cohere the Soviet Union as a political entity. If its borders had been preserved, perhaps the internecine revanchist wars we see today could have been prevented.

On a tactical level, Yakovlev understood the halls of power. Balancing political dissidents and takeovers of competing media outlets had taught him that. But on the level of political science, he could not extend the concept of political necessity to social relations or even international politics. Yakovlev believed in “common sense” and “real atheism” over both “nationalistic infections” and “Bolshevik neo-religion,” but common sense is not a useful or visionary tool for reshaping reality—oftentimes, the only lasting solutions to hard problems of social organization are unintuitive, and they might even involve irrational belief in the sovereign, the state, or the divine.

Nationalism, geopolitics, and economic planning were all things Yakovlev found to be remnants of the “primitive thinking of the Cold War era.” Primitive as they may be, they are facts of the world order, not propositions, and it seems that today we are missing the diplomacy and compromising spirit of that period of history. Perhaps it was only a system as secluded as the postwar Soviet Union that could incubate a class of leaders like Yakovlev, who was naïve enough to believe that attaining world peace was as simple as dismantling their own political foundation. In doing so, such a class created the conditions to see itself abolished. No wonder, then, that there are few men like Yakovlev to be found in the Kremlin today.

This interview appears in print in PALLADIUM 08: Scientific Authority. To receive your copy of Palladium’s quarterly print edition, subscribe here.

After earning his PhD in physics in 1991 at the age most earn their bachelor’s degree, Stephen Hsu went to work on the Superconducting Super Collider for Harvard. After teaching theoretical physics at Yale and the University of Oregon, he served as the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies at
Michigan State University from 2012 until the summer of 2020.

Hsu became interested in genomics a little over 10 years ago when he learned that the cost of genome sequencing was following a Moore’s Law curve—it was getting cheaper at an exponential rate. He realized that if we stayed on that curve there would eventually be millions of genomes available as data to solve the ultimate problem in biology: given the DNA of an individual, can we predict his characteristics?

Bringing his background in theoretical physics to the necessary AI and machine learning models, in 2017 Hsu and his research group published a paper that used genomic predictors to successfully determine an individual’s height within one inch. Hsu’s research group then used that same method to predict the likelihood of diseases like diabetes, asthma, hypothyroidism, and various sorts of cancers.

This, as well as his experience as a tech founder, taught him that technological inflection points are moments of great opportunity—but also moments of great debate. Hsu sat down with Palladium to talk about the role that politics, rigorous thinking, and uncertainty play in science.

Steve, lately we’ve been thinking about the interaction of politics and science. You’ve mentioned that a colleague of yours once sought funding for better climate models, but it had to be done without implying that current models had any problems. How does politics sometimes constrain the scientific process?

This individual is one of the most highly decorated, well-known climate simulators in the world. To give you his history, he did a PhD in general relativity in the UK and then decided he wanted to do something else, because he realized that even though general relativity was interesting, he didn’t feel like he was going to have a lot of impact on society. So he got involved in meteorology and climate modeling and became one of the most well known climate modelers in the world in terms of prizes and commendations. He’s been a co-author on all the IPCC reports going back multiple decades. So he’s a very well-known guy. But he was one of the authors of a paper in which he made the point that climate models are still far from perfect.

To do a really good job, you need to have a small basic cell size, which captures the size of the features being modeled inside the simulation. The best size is actually scaled down quite a bit because of all kinds of nonlinear phenomena: turbulence, convection, transport of heat, moisture, and everything that goes into the making of weather and climate.

And so he made this point that we’re nowhere near actually being able to properly simulate the physics of these very important features. It turns out that the transport of water vapor, which is related to the formation of clouds, is important. And it turns out high clouds reflect sunlight, and have the opposite sign effect on climate change compared to low clouds, which trap infrared radiation. So whether moisture in the atmosphere or additional carbon in the atmosphere causes more high cloud formation versus more low cloud formation is incredibly important, and it carries the whole day in these models.

In no way are these microphysics of cloud formation being modeled right now. And anybody who knows anything knows this. And the people who really understand physics and do climate modeling know this.

So he wrote a paper saying that governments are going to spend billions, maybe trillions of dollars on policy changes or geothermal engineering. If you’re trying to fix the climate change problem, can you at least spend a billion dollars on the supercomputers that we would need to really do a more definitive job forecasting climate change?

And so that paper he wrote was controversial because people in the community maybe knew he was right, but they didn’t want him talking about this. But as a scientist, I fully support what he’s trying to do. It’s intellectually honest. He’s asking for resources to be spent where they really will make a difference, not in some completely speculative area where we’re not quite sure what the consequences will be. This is clearly going to improve climate modeling and is clearly necessary to do accurate climate modeling. But the anecdote gives you a sense of how fraught science is when there are large scale social consequences. There are polarized interest groups interacting with science.

Why was that controversial? Was it just because of the amount of money involved? Or, as you mentioned earlier, was it that it raised questions for the accuracy of the current consensus? How do these scientific questions take on political implications, even among people that are relatively aligned?

It was controversial because, in a way, he was airing some well known dirty laundry that all the experts knew about. But many of them would say it’s better to hide laundry for the greater good, because a bad guy—somebody who’s very anti-CO2 emissions reduction— could seize on this guy’s article and say “Look, the leading guy in your field says that you can’t actually do the simulations he wants, and yet you’re trying to shove some very precise policy goal down my throat. This guy’s revealing those numbers have literally no basis.” That would be an extreme version of the counter-utilization of my colleague’s work.

Now, I had long conversations with him. He said, “Well, I’m pretty damn sure the models are kind of directionally right.” And, you know, I’m not an expert in climate science, but I am an expert in evaluating the uncertainty of mathematical models and simulation models—so I asked him well, Professor X, why are you confident that you’re directionally right?

He couldn’t really give me a very good answer, at least by the standards of most rational physicists. He sort of just said, “Well, look, I’ve worked with this, I’ve worked in this field a long time and have a feel for it. I’m pretty sure we are getting it right, even though it maybe can’t be rigorously justified.” And so he wasn’t able to take that part of his experience and knowledge and transfer it to me so that I had an equally high confidence level.

Usually, what I hear from people who are a bit more rationalist, skeptical, and rigorous is that yeah—maybe these models are not right. Maybe, because of the high cloud versus low cloud thing, they’re even directionally wrong. But what are the odds of that? Maybe there’s a 20 percent chance they’re wrong and an 80 percent chance they’re right. And we need to insure against the tail risk that we’ll have uncontrolled runaway heating of the Earth’s environment.

And so to me, the highest level of discussion is more in terms of probability distributions—I believe this with a certain confidence level, I should insure against that tail risk. It’s worth spending a trillion dollars a year in the global economy to insure against that tail risk.

I think that’s a defensible argument that people can make. But that’s obviously way too sophisticated for governments that couldn’t even figure out how to do cost-benefit analysis in the face of COVID-19. You can’t just can’t engage in that highest level of discussion if it’s a contested political landscape.

This comes back to the idea that a scientific field can have dirty laundry. How does it even get into that state? You seem to be saying it’s because the potential for misinterpretation in some of these fields is such that the field has to stop having public nuance because of its high social impact. That’s not even politics coming into the science, it’s just that the impact of the science necessitates this change in how the science gets done internally.

It’s usually the case that when you’re doing frontier science, where really not everything is understood, there’s a tremendous amount of uncertainty. You have measurements but the experimentalist might have made a mistake, or there might have been an error in the data processing of the NASA satellite, or whatever. Everything is uncertain: Joe’s mathematical theorem will prove some results, or he might have made a subtle mistake. You need a lot of eyes on it to decide. Is this right? Do we trust this information enough to incorporate it into our model of nature at high confidence? Or is it still one of these things we’re not quite sure about?

So among the real experts trying to grapple with uncertainty, there’s always dirty laundry in the sense that when scientists come out in public, they want to project absolute confidence so they can convince the senator to do what they want, or the billionaire to make the donation. They can’t express uncertainty because if they do, the billionaire has other things to do with his money. “Oh, well, if you’re unsure about climate, I guess I can just build homeless shelters! My economist friend tells me there’s a great ROI on homeless shelters, they’re awesome.”

So the incentives are not quite right. The incentives in the academy are to find truth, and that’s a messy business. It’s got to be messy, people have to be able to clash. You cannot point a finger at the guy clashing with you and say, “Oh, you think the systematic error in my model is twice as big as I said it was. So you must be a climate denier!”

In my lifetime, the way science is conducted has changed radically, because now it’s accepted—particularly by younger scientists—that we are allowed to make ad hominem attacks on people based on what could be their entirely sincere scientific belief. That was not acceptable 20 or 30 years ago. If you walked into a department, even if it had something to do with the environment or human genetics or something like that, people were allowed to have their contrary opinion as long as the arguments they made were rational and supported by data. There was not a sense that you’re allowed to impute bad moral character to somebody based on some analytical argument that they’re making. It was not socially acceptable to do that. Now people are in danger of losing their jobs.

So how do you think that happened?

I don’t want to make a comment about deep history because science itself is really not that old. I mean, how long could you really say that we had a well-functioning kind of scientific infrastructure?

But certainly the change has happened during my professional lifetime. When I started as an assistant professor, the whole atmosphere on campus was different than it is now. And like every complex phenomenon, it’s multifactorial. I could list a bunch of factors that I think contributed, and one of them is that scientists are under a lot of pressure to get money to fund their labs and pay their graduate students. If you sense that NSF or NIH have a view on something, it’s best not to fight city hall. It’s like fighting the Fed—you’re going to lose. So that enforces a certain kind of conformism.

When I started in science, most hard sciences and even the “softer” social sciences, maybe even biology and psychology, were predominantly male. And the whole cultural setting was quite different. Males are much more comfortable with confrontation. Like you and I could have a huge argument and then go out for a beer later. Right? And we could be great colleagues, even though we disagree on some really fundamental issues in our discipline.

Now, this is just my observation, but as the sex composition in these fields started changing, a lot of women found themselves uncomfortable with what could be considered a toxic environment, one where you and I could really go at it.

For example, if I was giving a seminar and you just started confronting me and it got really heated. A lot of women would just be turned off by that. They might even say “I was interested in physics, but those guys are a bunch of jerks. I couldn’t pursue a physics career—I’m glad I’m in data science now.” So we’re really talking about a cultural change that happened with a change of gender makeup in the departments.

I think there’s a male idea that you can be a part of the honorable opposition. You can hold a view that is totally against what you’re supposed to think, but you’re backing it up with real data and real rational arguments. When I entered science, so as long as that was the case, opposition was okay.

But when your department has a different cultural value—collegiality, gentleness, and nurturing behavior— certain kinds of arguments that used to even happen in front of the students are now just not supposed to happen. And when it comes to scientific issues—less so climate modeling but more like nature versus nurture, for example—the argument is often advanced that you’re harming students by showing them scientific theories or evidence that is harmful to their self image. And therefore you just shouldn’t do it. It’s beyond the pale. You could be fired for harming your students.

So safety is above everything, including the truth. It’s been a gradual change, and I have to admit I’m a little blindsided by it. I didn’t realize it had happened to the extent that it happened until a few years ago. And I think you’ll see a very strong gradient where younger academics are much more prone to conformism or being uncomfortable with intellectual confrontation, much more so than the older faculty.

This change in sex composition is downstream of other cultural changes. How do you think those changes have affected the relationship between science and the rest of society?

Now, those changes in culture are not all bad. Having more collegiality might make some subset of people comfortable enough to help to participate in a particular area of science. And therefore we enlarge the pool of human capital that we can draw on.

One can debate very strongly which of these stories you believe in, but there have been times when I thought, “Oh, these guys are really toxic, it would be kind of good if they calm down and we could be just a little more polite to each other when having a discussion.”

So I see the value of that as well. As far as how science relates to the outside world, here’s the problem: for some people, when science agrees with their cherished political belief, they say “Hey, you know what? This is the Vulcan Science Academy, man. These guys know what they’re doing. They debated it, they looked at all the evidence, that’s a peer-reviewed paper, my friend—it was reviewed by peers. They’re real scientists.” When they like the results, they’re going to say that.

When they don’t like it, they say, “Oh, come on, those guys know they have to come to that conclusion or they’re going to lose their NIH grant. These scientists are paid a lot of money now and they’re just feathering their own nests, man. They don’t care about the truth. And by the way, papers in this field don’t replicate. Apparently, if you do a study where you look back at the most prominent papers over the last 10 years, and you check to see whether subsequent papers which were better powered, had better technology, and more sample size actually replicated, the replication rate was like 50 percent. So, you can throw half the papers that are published in top journals in the trash.”

We can have a very polarized discussion about what is the real role of science in informing day-to-day political debate.

One place where you might see this play out is in the actual university administration departments. You worked for a time as a vice president of a university—

[Laughs] Right. Eight years.

So was the collegial discipline very different there compared to among researchers?

Well, administrators are a different group. The top level administrators at universities are usually drawn from the faculty, or from faculty at other universities. After being a top level administrator at a Big 10 university, and meeting provosts and presidents at the other top universities, I have a pretty good feel for this particular collection of people.

You can imagine what it is that makes someone who’s already a tenured professor in biochemistry decide they want to take on this huge amount of responsibility and maybe even shut down their own research program. They are very, very careerist people. And that is a huge problem, because incentives are heavily misaligned.

The incentive for me as a senior administrator is not to make waves and keep everything kind of calm. Calm down the crazy professor who’s doing stuff, assuage the students that are protesting, make the donors happy, make the board of trustees happy. I found that the people who were in the role so they could advance their career, versus those trying to advance the interests of the institution, were very different. There were times when I felt like I had to do something very dangerous for me career-wise, but it was absolutely essential for the mission of the university. I had to do that repeatedly.

And I told the president who hired me, “I don’t know how long I’m going to last in this job, because I’m going to do the right thing. If I do the right thing and I’m bounced out, that’s fine. I don’t care.” But most people are not like that.

In economics, there’s something called the principal-agent problem. Let’s say you hire a CEO to manage your company. Unless his compensation is completely determined by some long-dated stock options or something, his interests are not aligned with the long-term growth for your company. He can have a great quarter by shipping all your manufacturing off to China, have a great few quarters, and get a huge bonus. Even if, on a long timescale, it’s really bad for your bottom line.

So there’s a principal-agent problem here. Anytime you give centralized power to somebody, you have to be sure that their incentives—or their personal integrity—are aligned with what you want them to promote at the institution. And generally, it’s not well done in the universities right now.

It’s not like it used to be that, “Oh, if Joe or Jane is going to become university president, you can bet that their highest value is higher education and truth, that’s the American way.” It was probably never true. But they don’t claw back your compensation as a president of the university if it later turns out that you really screwed something up. You know, they don’t really even do that with CEOs.

So did you get bounced out?

A little bit, a little bit. I was the most senior administrator who reviewed all the tenure and promotion cases. We have 50,000 students here. It’s one of the biggest universities in the United States. Each year, there are about 150 faculty who are coming up for promotion from associate professor to full professor or assistant to associate with tenure. And there are sometimes situations where you know what the system wants you to do with a particular person, but there’s a question of your personal integrity—whether you want to actually uphold the standards of the institution in those circumstances.

It’s funny, because the president who hired me actually wanted me to do that. She wanted someone who was very rigorous to control this process. But I knew I was gradually making enemies. Sometimes there’s a popular person, and maybe there’s some diversity goal or gender equality goal. So you have this person maybe who hasn’t done that well with their research, or hasn’t been well-funded with external grants, or maybe their teaching evaluations aren’t that great, but some people really want them promoted. And if you impose the regular standard and they don’t get promoted, you’ve made a lot of enemies.

So if I just thought to myself, “I’m not going to be at Michigan State 10 years from now—let them let them handle the problems if all these people who are not so good get promoted. Let them deal with it,” that would be the smart thing if I were a careerist or self-interested person. Don’t make waves, just put your finger in the wind and say: “Which way is the wind blowing? I’ll just go with that.” But I didn’t do that. Because I thought, “What’s the point of doing this job if you’re not going to do it right?” Now imagine how many congressmen are doing this, imagine how many have really deeply held principles that they’re trying to advance. Maybe it’s 10 percent? I don’t know, But it’s nowhere near 100 percent.

It’s the same in higher ed. There’s something called the College Learning Assessment. It’s a standardized test that was developed over the last 20 years. And it’s supposed to evaluate the skills that were learned by students during college. For less prestigious directional state universities this would be a very good tool, because the subset of graduates who did well on the CLA could get hired by General Motors or whatever with the same confidence as they were able to hire the kid from Harvard, University of Michigan, or anywhere else. So there was interest in building something like the CLA.

In order not to do it in a vacuum, the people who were developing it went to all these big corporations and said “Well, what are the skills that you really want out of a college graduate?” And not surprisingly, they wanted things like being able to read an article in The Economist and write a good summary. Or to look at graphs and make some inferences. Nothing ivory tower—it was all very reasonable, practical stuff. And so they commissioned this huge study by RAND. Twenty universities participated, including MIT, Michigan, some historically black colleges, some directional state universities—a huge spectrum covering all of American higher education.

They found that leaving students’ CLA score was very highly correlated to their incoming SAT score. Well, if you knew anything about psychometrics, it’s no surprise that the delta between your freshman year and your senior year on the CLA score is minimal. So what are kids buying when they go to college for four years? Are they getting skills that GM or McKinsey want, or are they just repackaging themselves?

I showed the results of this Rand CLA study to my colleagues, the senior administrators at Michigan State University, and I tried to get them to understand: “Guys, do you realize that maybe we’re not doing what we think we’re doing on this campus? You probably go out and tell alums and donors, moms and dads that we’re building skills for these kids at Michigan State, so they can be great employees of Ford Motor Company and Anderson Consulting when they get out. But the data doesn’t actually say that we do that.” I’m not talking about specialist majors like accounting or engineering, where we can see the kids are coming out with skills they didn’t enter with. I’m talking about generalist learning and “critical thinking” that schools say they teach, but the CLA says otherwise.

I have all my emails from when I was in that job, so I can tell you exactly how much intellectual curiosity and updating of priors there was among these vice presidents and higher at major Big 10 universities. Now, they could have come back and said, “Steve, I don’t believe this RAND study. My son Johnny learned a lot when he was at Illinois,” or something. They could have come back and contested the findings. Did any of them contest the findings with me? Zero.

Did any of them care about what was revealed about the business that we’re actually in, about what is actually going on our campus? One or two well-meaning VPs emailed me saying “Wow, that’s incredible. I never would have thought…” One of the women who emailed me back had a college-aged kid, and this actually impacted some decisions that were going on in her family at the time.

But there was overall very little concern about the findings, there was very little pushback even denying the findings. Those are the people running your institutions of higher education. I discussed these findings with lots of other top administrators at other universities and very few people care. They’ve got their career, they’re just doing their thing.

You’ve worked in genomics research, where you’ve blogged about interesting questions like the possibility of intelligence enhancement with things like embryo selection. How does that interact with today’s modern ideological environment and political considerations?

Well, there are people who are really trying to either kill or at least studiously ignore all of this progress in genomics. One of the consequences that I’ve talked about is the specific data that you need to, for example, build up a genomic predictor where you could take the DNA of a person and predict some aspect of that person.

My research group solved height as a phenotype. Give us the DNA of an individual with no other information other than that this person lived in a decent environment—wasn’t starved as a child or anything like that—and we can predict that person’s height with a standard error of a few centimeters. Just from the DNA. That’s a tour de force.

Then you might say, “Well, gee, I heard that in twin studies, the correlation between twins in IQ is almost as high as their correlation in height. I read it in some book in my psychology class 20 years ago before the textbooks were rewritten. Why can’t you guys predict someone’s IQ score based on their DNA alone?”

Well, according to all the mathematical modeling and simulations we’ve done, we need somewhat more training data to build the machine learning algorithms to do that. But it’s not impossible. In fact, we predicted that if you have about a million genomes and the cognitive scores of those million people, you could build a predictor with a standard error of plus or minus 10 IQ points. So you can ask, “Well, since you guys showed you could do it for height, and since there are 30, or 40, or 50, different disease conditions that we now have decent genetic predictors for, why isn’t there one for IQ?”

Well, the answer is there’s zero funding. There’s no NIH, NSF, or any agency that would take on a proposal saying, “Give me X million dollars to genotype these people, and also measure their cognitive ability or get them to report their SAT scores to me.” Zero funding for that. And some people get very, very aggressive upon learning that you’re interested in that kind of thing, and will start calling you a racist, or they’ll start attacking you. And I’m not making this up, because it actually happened to me.

What could be a more interesting question? Wow, the human brain—that’s what differentiates us from the rest of the animal species on this planet. Well, to what extent is brain development controlled by DNA? Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could actually predict individual variation in intelligence from DNA just as we can with height now? Shouldn’t that be a high priority for scientific discovery? Isn’t this important for aging, because so many people undergo cognitive decline as they age? There are many, many reasons why this subject should be studied. But there’s effectively zero funding for it.

So this brings us to a larger question, which is the relationship between science, scientific authority, political authority, ideology, power, and funding. In your view, what makes for the healthiest relationship between science and politics?

There’s something scientists at universities tell each other that I think is actually true: why do we insist that some kid who’s going to go on to be an investment banker or an NBA talent scout take some science when they’re in college?

The answer is so they can understand a little bit about how science works, and how science and technology have impacted our civilization over time. Then, when they are writing an editorial for the newspaper, or voting, or whatever, they can have at least a little bit more realistic view of science. They’ll know that okay, maybe some scientists are motivated by politics and they’re overclaiming results.

Sometimes, maybe the science isn’t quite right. But on average, it does progress mostly in the right direction, and it does develop really powerful technological tools to help society. So I think the most mature place you can end up is where the people who wield real power in society know something about science. Scientists don’t really wield power. I think a healthy society would be one where the people who have the political power have a healthy respect for and understanding of science, including how messy it can be on frontier issues. If you can’t find anybody who disagrees on either side of an issue, maybe there’s something wrong with that field of science. Maybe the people who disagree are being forced to pay such a huge penalty that they stopped saying anything. And I think that should make you less confident of the claims coming out of that sector of science.

One of the things that I teach in the tech startups that I’m involved in is that you never want the point answer without being given an uncertainty range. For example, if I ask about how many units we are going to sell next quarter, and the guy says, “My model says five million,” an additional estimate of uncertainty, together with the central point estimate, has enormous value. It’s a 2x if he says, “Well, it could be five million, but 95 percent confidence is anywhere between one and nine million.”

Then you realize—okay, so I’m not going to build that strongly into my model. I’m not going to tell our board members tomorrow that we’re definitely going to sell five million units. So that extra second thing, this point estimate and the uncertainty, is already a huge innovation over the way people normally communicate.

You guys are probably too young to remember Robert Rubin. He was Secretary of the Treasury under Clinton. Anyway, he wrote a famous memoir about his years in the White House and at Goldman, where he had been a mergers and acquisitions trader for a long time before going into government.

One of the things that shocked people who read the book was that he talked about probabilistic estimates. “Yeah, in our White House we were so much more sophisticated than those guys over on Capitol Hill, because we didn’t just say it was black and white. We would say, ‘Well, Mr. President, high conviction, it’s black. Or I think it’s white, Mr. President, but low conviction.’”

And you know, anybody who’s done mergers and acquisitions at Goldman knows yeah, you’ve got to talk that way. The word conviction is used all the time in finance: what’s your conviction? If you tell them “high conviction” and it’s wrong, they’re going to fire you.

So he brought that to the White House. And what was funny was that anybody who came from the science world would say, “Well of course if I wrote my physics lab report and I didn’t put the error estimate in there, I’d get an F.” But at the time, the book had an enormous impact. People thought he totally revolutionized strategy at the White House because he introduced the concept of conviction.

People normally associate technocracy with making the world more black and white. But it seems like in that instance, it’s actually permitting nuance.

Well, a lot of mergers and acquisitions that these Goldman guys do are event-driven. “Okay, I think this is going to happen to oil, and then we’re going to do this deal, right?” And so they always have to use this conviction variable because they can’t just throw out predictions for a year from now willy-nilly. They have to plant their flag in certain places. If they’re wrong in those high-conviction things, they’ve got to pay a price.

Do you think there’s something about politics in particular that makes certainty, authoritative statements, and commitments dominant over uncertainty and nuance? Is there some countervailing cultural or political force that makes probabilistic thinking hard to adopt?

I think if I’m working at Goldman, and you’re paying me a million bucks a year, and you’re not pinning me down and making me say what my conviction is, then if I’m wrong later I can say, “Yeah, Joe, that was low conviction. Don’t hold me to that.” If you don’t force me to give you my conviction levels, I prefer not to because you have less grounds to dismiss me when I turn out to be a loser.

So no one’s going to do it for free, they’ve got to be forced to do it. Do our voters have enough attention span that, a year or two later, they’ll remember “Hey, what did he say when he was campaigning?” Or “When the Secretary of Defense told us the Afghan government would last easily over a year, was it high conviction or low conviction when he told us that?” So of course, if I’m the SecDef, I’d rather get to say “Oh, I was getting out of the office and you know, they didn’t ask me whether it was high or low conviction on my way out.” So when it turns out that it’s only four weeks instead of a year, I won’t get in trouble because I will just say “Well, we didn’t really know.” People are going to resist meritocracy and keeping a careful score.