Stalin, Putin and an enduring obsession with immortality | Letter

Readers respond to an article by Aleks Krotoski about dictators and tech billionaires wanting to solve the problem' of ageing

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