Video taking off 14x its usual first day

From Lenin's brain to organ-growing pigs: Matt Bevan traces Putin's bet against death

The If You're Listening episode starts with a caught-on-mic chat between Putin and Xi Jinping and ends up in an underground Moscow lab that has kept Lenin's body for a century.

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ABC News In-depth Story of October 11, 2026Trari Newsroom

Why this story? The video opened at a pace of 275,796 views a day, 14 times a normal first day on this channel (19,274).

Putin's billion-dollar bet against death | If You're Listening

"Human organs can be continuously transplanted," Vladimir Putin tells Xi Jinping in the translated voiceover that opens Matt Bevan's new episode of If You're Listening. The longer you live, he goes on, the younger you become, and you might even achieve immortality. A microphone caught the exchange, and Bevan uses it as a door into a much older story.

The present-day part is strange enough. Bevan points to reporting, including a Wall Street Journal piece on Putin's "$26 Billion Quest for Longevity," about Russian anti-aging research. The description adds human organs grown inside genetically modified mini pigs, overseen by a scientist with a passion for scanning Egyptian mummies.

Then the episode goes back to 1924 and the death of Lenin. Bevan follows Bolshevik figures such as Leonid Krasin and the writer Aleksandr Bogdanov, who later founded an institute for blood transfusion, as they toyed with life extension and even future reanimation. Scientists sliced Lenin's brain into 30,000 pieces for study and devised a chemical bath to keep his body intact. The underground "Lenin Lab" that grew out of that work went on to embalm other communist leaders, and after the Soviet collapse it took commercial clients to stay afloat. "Nobody can do it better than us," says Lenin embalmer Giorgi Tischenko in archival footage.

The most sobering stretch is about ordinary Russians. Bevan walks through how male life expectancy collapsed in the 1990s, driven largely by alcohol, accidents and violence, and how healthcare reforms and alcohol restrictions under Putin pushed it to record highs by 2018. That sets up the question the description asks outright: how much of Russia's long chase after eternal life has been about the people, and how much about the man at the top?

It is a big start for one of the channel's long explainers, with roughly 327,000 views in its first 30 hours.

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