Panacea Sovietica

Gravidan, a Soviet hormonal drug, becomes a tool of power. The project explores the body as a biopolitical resource, where attempts to outwit nature mirror the desire to prolong authority.

In the late 1920s, in one of the experimental laboratories of the young Soviet Republic, a hormonal drug called Gravidan was developed from the urine of pregnant women by physician Alexei Zamkov. It was used to treat a wide range of conditions — from mental and cardiovascular disorders to infections. The drug proved especially effective in addressing sexual dysfunction, which quickly made it highly popular among the Soviet elite.

By the 1960s, Gravidan was declared ineffective and gradually fell into obscurity. However, in the 21st century, within a new historical context, research quietly resumed amid renewed interest in prolonging life. Production initially served the domestic elite, later expanding to allied autocrats and “indispensable” leaders worldwide. Access to the drug became a tool of loyalty and dependence, while the country’s geopolitical influence grew alongside its distribution, forming what came to be known as Gravidan Diplomacy.

The project follows Gravidan as a residue of Soviet biopolitical imagination — a technology that was never fully stabilized, yet never entirely disappeared. It persists as a fragmented set of practices in which the body becomes both archive and laboratory. Within this logic, political longevity is pursued through biochemical maintenance, while reproductive female bodies are instrumentalised as adaptive systems for extraction, regeneration, and continuity. These operations are not a unified program but recurring attempts to negotiate the limits of ageing, authority, and biological decay.