Whose Brain Is This Again? The Tragicomedy Of Russia’s First Cryonics Company

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

It’s the 7th of September, 2021, and outside an otherwise inconspicuous small warehouse in Moscow, a bizarre scene is unfolding. A group of around a dozen people approach the warehouse and, using a welding tool, cut their way into the building. Under the direction of a woman, who appears to be the authority figure, they use a crane to load a huge cylindrical tank onto the back of a truck via an opening in the wall. A thick white fog pours from the roof of the tank and beings to creep across the grass. All this occurs in broad daylight, and is filmed and posted to Telegram:

Over the course of 15 hours, three giant cylinders are loaded onto the truck. It then begins to make its way in the direction of Tver Oblast, North of Moscow, but it doesn’t get far. Police stop the truck in the Moscow region and apprehend the woman. Her name: Valeriya Udalova. The contents of the tanks: human bodies, cooled to around -196°C using liquid nitrogen. The owner of the tanks: KrioRus, a cryonics company in the business of preserving dead humans in the hope that future technology will be able to revive them some day. But why would anyone want to steal a bunch of frozen corpses? Stranger still, Udalova claims to be the CEO of KrioRus. What on Earth led her to break into her own company’s facility?

Cheating Death

KrioRus was founded in 2005 by a group of nine people led by Valeriya Udalova and her ‘husband’ (the two were never officially married) Danila Medvedev. They had one goal in mind: get themselves, their relatives and anyone else who would pay for their service cryopreserved after death, in the hope that they could one day be bought back to life.

When biological tissue is cooled to sufficiently low temperatures, the chemical reactions responsible for decomposition stop progressing. While ice crystals will obliterate the microscopic structures of biological tissue in normal freezing, this can be prevented using chemicals called cryoprotectants. Just as it has become possible to sometimes resuscitate people from cardiac arrest, it might one day be possible to repair damage that is currently considered fatal and irreversible. In other words, today’s corpse could be tomorrow’s patient.

The likelihood that medical technology will ever be sufficiently advanced to revive a cryopreserved person is unknown. On the other hand, the probability of being revived without the aid of cryopreservation is zero, so why not take the chance? This is the core argument behind human cryopreservation initiatives. KrioRus had its first cryonic storage facility up and running by 2006, and a second one in 2012. People of many different nationalities were preserved, some electing to have their whole bodies stored (a service costing around $35,000), while others elected to store only their heads for a little under half that price. KrioRus even stored pets.

A Frosty Relationship

In 2009, Medvedev stepped down as CEO, with Udalova taking his place. He remained involved in the company, becoming chairman of the board of directors and a deputy CEO for strategic development. However, over time, these co-founders had a falling out. Let’s not stoop to the level of romantic gossip, but suffice it to say that Udalova and Medvedev no longer considered themselves ‘husband and wife’ by 2017, and this coincided with the deterioration of their business relationship.

In late October of 2019, KrioRus founders expressed dissatisfaction with Udalova’s role in the company. According to Medvedev, shareholders were concerned that more money had not been invested into the improvement of their cryonics technology. There is also an ongoing legal challenge alleging that Udalova forged signatures in 2018 in order to extend her term as CEO by 3 years. So, around a month later, shareholders voted to remove her as CEO and appoint former vice-director Andrey Shvedko. That’s when things started to get… messy.

The Split

Some of the details of what happened next come from the people involved presenting their own, possibly biased version of events. Between the time at which shareholders expressed dissatisfaction with Udalova, but before they voted to oust her, Udalova had registered a new company called KriuRus, which she later renamed to be the same as the original company. She then transferred some client contracts to the new company without consulting anyone and moved some of the cryopreserved brains to an under-construction storage facility in Tver oblast.

This is according to Medvedev and his team’s website, KrioRus.com, not to be confused with KrioRus.ru, which is Udalova’s team’s website. As far as Udalova was concerned, this was simply the company moving its property from one of its locations to another. When shareholders voted to remove Udalova from her position, she did not acknowledge the legitimacy of this decision. According to her, the would-be CEO Andrey Shvedko had only accepted the role under the condition that Udalova was OK with stepping down, and had been misled to believe that she was. Upon learning of this deception, Shvedko had withdrawn his candidacy, meaning that Udalova was still CEO (the only sources for this claim appear to be from Udalova and her associates).

Shareholders were not happy. After attempting to solve the dispute via negotiation, they initiated legal action in 2020, but ran into a slight problem, namely a global pandemic, which significantly delayed legal proceedings. In 2021, Udalova also began the process of suing her former partner for ownership of the website domain and for monetary compensation.

KrioRus’ assets and clients (read cryopreserved body parts) were now split across multiple sites, possibly in inadequate storage conditions (a post on Medvedev’s site claims that the facility in Tver was not temperature-controlled and that the roads leading to it were too snowy to deliver the liquid nitrogen necessary to keep the bodies cool). Furthermore, the legal dispute was likely to drag on for many years. With the fate of KrioRus uncertain, Medvedev and two associates founded a new cryonics company called Open Cryonics in June 2021.

Perhaps fearing that she was going to lose control of the company, Udalova decided that there was only one thing to do: secure control of the rest of the capsules that rightfully belonged to what was, as far as she was concerned, her company.

The Heist

This finally brings us to the infamous ‘kidnapping’. According to Udalova, the September the 7th operation was the culmination of 3 months of planning. A welding machine was used to break into the storage facility in Moscow (some sources say they cut a hole in the wall, though the video appears to show that the doors are open). Using a crane, they then dumped some of the precious liquid nitrogen from the cryopreservation capsules and loaded 3 onto the getaway truck.

As we know, they were stopped on the road by police and the capsules were returned to the facility. A van carrying a cryopreserved brain was also stopped. This brain was unfortunately separated from any documentation indicating who it belonged to, leading to a sentence uttered by Medvedev that is now legendary in cryopreservation circles:

We’re currently attempting to ascertain whose brain this is.

Not exactly something a client signed up to be cryopreserved in the future would be thrilled to hear. Worse yet, it is quite likely that the cryopreserved bodies were damaged as a result of the capsules spending a lengthy period of time without liquid nitrogen cooling, making this a very embarrassing situation indeed. However, things did not end there – according to a post on Medvedev’s KrioRus website, a number of the cryopreserved brains that had previously been relocated to Tver oblast back in 2019 were ‘rescued’ by the new Open Cryonics. Then, in late November of 2021, Udalova returned to the Moscow facility and retrieved the same 3 capsules she originally tried to take in September, this time successfully relocating them to Tver oblast. Several sources say that she did this after police ruled that she was in fact the legitimate director, though I had trouble confirming that claim.

KrioRus Today

In spite of everything, Udalova’s KrioRus is still in business and accepting new clients today. The legal cases involving the company are still ongoing, and Udalova remains the CEO. Medvedev’s rival company, Open Cryonics, cryopreserved its first client in early 2022 and is still operational. I was unable to confirm the whereabouts of the brains ‘rescued’ by Open Cryonics in 2019.

We did not even mention some of the wilder the accusations that were made, including that Udalova sent ‘Chechen bandits’ to Medvedev’s apartment. Perhaps it would be better to end on a more positive note, so to that end, here is a more optimistic take from Medvedev himself, posted in the Open Cryonics Telegram chat:

“It seems to me that this whole story also has a positive side. At the very least, we get an interesting answer to the objection “who will need these cryopatients in the future?” If even now, when, in the opinion of ordinary people, this is just a bunch of frozen bodies; there are those who are ready to fight for cryopatients. Thus, over time, as the reality and the likelihood of revival gradually grows, I think, and the value of cryopatients will also grow.”

For a list of cryonics institutions with less controversial records, check out are article covering the companies hoping to revive the dead. If you’re interested in the history of cryonics, how it works and why it might not be quite as crazy as it sounds, we also have you covered.

• A Tour Of The Companies Seeking To Revive The Dead
• Cryonics: A Brief History Of Reviving The Dead
• The Quest To Revive The Dead: Where Has Cryonics Succeeded
• Cryopreservation, Where Are You? Why Calls To Cure Death Still Fall On Dead Ears