Like Vladimir Putin, Joseph Stalin was interested in immortality (‘To them, ageing is a technical problem that can, and will, be fixed’: how the rich and powerful plan to live for ever, 28 September). In 1939 he read Prolonging Life, a pamphlet promising a lifespan of 150 years, by Aleksandr Bogomolets, a haematologist famous for his rapid-healing serums and blood transfusion methods.
Bogomolets promised to prolong life with cytotoxic proteins, herbs and transfusions of young blood. Stalin made him a Hero of Socialist Labour and gave him generous research funding, but was dismayed when he died aged 64 in 1946 (this was hardly Bogomolets’s fault – as a boy in Tsarist times, he visited his mother, a revolutionary serving a sentence of hard labour in a Siberian prison, and caught tuberculosis).
Donald Rayfield
Emeritus professor, Queen Mary University of London
