Alexander Bogdanov
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Alexander Bogdanov | |
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In office 1905–1906 | |
Personal details | |
Born | Alyaksandr Malinovsky 22 August 1873 Kharkiv University |
Occupation | Physician, philosopher, writer |
Known for | Tektology |
Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov (
He was a key figure in the early history of the
Bogdanov received training in medicine and psychiatry. His wide scientific and medical interests ranged from the universal
Early years
A Russian born in Belarus,[4][5] Alexander Malinovsky was born in Sokółka, Russian Empire (now Poland),[6] into a rural teacher's family, the second of six children.[7] He attended the Gymnasium at Tula,[8] which he compared to a barracks or prison. He was awarded a gold medal when he graduated.[9]
Upon completion of the gymnasium, Bogdanov was admitted to the Natural Science Department of Imperial Moscow University.[10] In his autobiography, Bogdanov reported that, while studying at Moscow University, he joined the Union Council of Regional Societies and was arrested and exiled to Tula because of it.[11]
The head of the Moscow Okhrana had used an informant to acquire the names of members of the Union Council of Regional Societies, which included Bogdanov's name. On October 30, 1894, students rowdily demonstrated against a lecture by the history Professor Vasily Klyuchevsky who, despite being a well-known liberal, had written a favourable eulogy for the recently deceased Tsar Alexander III of Russia. Punishment of a few of the students was seen as so arbitrary and unfair that the Union Council requested a fair reexamination of the issue. That very night, the Okhrana arrested all the students on the list mentioned above – including Bogdanov – all of whom were expelled from the university and banished to their hometowns.[12]
Expelled from Moscow State University, he enrolled as an external student at the University of Kharkov, from which he graduated as a physician in 1899. Bogdanov remained in Tula from 1894 to 1899, where – since his own family was living in Sokółka – he lodged with Alexander Rudnev, the father of
Alongside Bazarov and
In autumn 1895, he resumed his medical studies at the university of
Bolshevism
Bogdanov dated his support for Bolshevism from autumn of 1903. Early in 1904,
For the next six years, Bogdanov was a major figure among the early Bolsheviks, second only to Lenin in influence. In 1904–1906, he published three volumes of the philosophic treatise Empiriomonizm (Empiriomonism), in which he tried to merge Marxism with the philosophy of Ernst Mach, Wilhelm Ostwald, and Richard Avenarius. His work later affected a number of Russian Marxist theoreticians, including Nikolai Bukharin.[15] In 1907, he helped organize the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery with both Lenin and Leonid Krasin.
For four years after the collapse of the
Lenin concentrated on undermining Bogdanov's reputation as a philosopher. In 1909 he published a scathing book of criticism entitled and was expelled from the Bolsheviks.
He joined his brother-in-law Anatoly Lunacharsky, Maxim Gorky, and other Vperedists on the island of Capri, where they started the Capri Party School for Russian factory workers. In 1910, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Mikhail Pokrovsky, and their supporters moved the school to Bologna, where they continued teaching classes through 1911, while Lenin and his allies soon started the Longjumeau Party School just outside of Paris.
Bogdanov broke with the Vpered in 1912 and abandoned revolutionary activities. After six years of his political exile in Europe, Bogdanov returned to Russia in 1914, following the political amnesty declared by Tsar Nicholas II as part of the festivities connected with the tercentenary of the Romanov Dynasty.
During World War I
Bogdanov was drafted soon after the outbreak of World War I and was assigned as a junior regimental doctor with the 221st Smolensk infantry division in the Second Army commanded by General Alexander Samsonov. In the Battle of Tannenberg, August 26–30, the Second Army was surrounded and almost completely destroyed, but Bogdanov survived because he had been sent to accompany a seriously wounded officer to Moscow.[17] However following the Second Battle of the Masurian Lakes, he succumbed to a nervous disorder and subsequently became junior house surgeon at an evacuation hospital.[18]
In 1916 he wrote four articles for Vpered which provided an analysis of the World War and the dynamics of war economies. He attributed a central role to the armed forces in the economic restructuring of the belligerent powers. He saw the army as creating a "consumers' communism" with the state taking over ever-increasing parts of the economy.
At the same time military authoritarianism had also spread to civil society. This created the conditions for two consequences: consumption-led war communism and the destruction of the means of production. He thus predicted that even after the war, the new system of state capitalism would replace that of finance capitalism even though the destruction of the forces of production would cease.[19]
During the Russian Revolution
Bogdanov had no party-political involvement in the
In May 1917, he published Chto my svergli in Novaya Zhizn. Here he argued that between 1904 and 1907, the Bolsheviks had been "decidedly democratic" and that there was no pronounced cult of leadership. However, following the decision of Lenin and the émigré group around him to break with Vpered in order to unify with the Mensheviks, the principle of leadership became more pronounced. After 1912, when Lenin insisted on splitting the Duma group of the RSDLP, the leadership principle became entrenched. However, he saw this problem as not being confined to the Bolsheviks, noting that similar authoritarian ways of thinking were shown in the Menshevik attitude to
Every organisation, on achieving a position of decisive influence in the life and ordering of society, quite inevitably, irrespective of the formal tenets of its programme, attempts to impose on society its own type of structure, the one with which it is most familiar and to which it is most accustomed. Every collective re-creates, as far as it can, the whole social environment after its own image and in its own likeness.[20]
After the October Revolution
At the beginning of February 1918, Bogdanov denied that the Bolsheviks' October seizure to power had constituted a conspiracy. Rather, he explained that an explosive situation had arisen through the prolongation of the war. He pointed to a lack of cultural development in that all strata of society, whether the bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia, or the workers, had shown a failure to resolve conflicts through negotiation. He described the revolution as being a combination of a peasant revolution in the countryside and a soldier-worker revolution in the cities. He regarded it as paradoxical that the peasantry expressed itself through the Bolshevik party rather than through the
He analysed the effect of the
There is a War Communist party which is mobilising the working class, and there are groups of socialist intelligentsia. The war has made the army the end and the working class the means.[21]
He refused multiple offers to rejoin the party and denounced the new regime as similar to Aleksey Arakcheyev's arbitrary and despotic rule in the early 1820s.[22]
In 1918, Bogdanov became a professor of economics at the
Proletkult
Between 1918 and 1920, Bogdanov co-founded the proletarian art movement Proletkult and was its leading theoretician. In his lectures and articles, he called for the total destruction of the "old bourgeois culture" in favour of a "pure proletarian culture" of the future. It was also through Proletkult that Bogdanov's educational theories were given form with the establishment of the Moscow Proletarian University.
At first Proletkult, like other radical cultural movements of the era, received financial support from the Bolshevik government, but by 1920, the Bolshevik leadership grew hostile, and on December 1, 1920, Pravda published a decree denouncing Proletkult as a "petit bourgeois" organization operating outside of Soviet institutions and a haven for "socially alien elements". Later in that month, the president of Proletkult was removed, and Bogdanov lost his seat on its Central Committee. He withdrew from the organization completely in 1921–1922.[24]
Arrest
Bogdanov gave a lecture to a club at
Meanwhile,
Later years and death
In 1924, Bogdanov started his
A later transfusion in 1928 cost him his life, when he took the blood of a student suffering from malaria and tuberculosis. The student injected with his blood made a complete recovery. Some scholars (e.g. Loren Graham) have speculated that his death may have been a suicide, because Bogdanov wrote a highly nervous political letter shortly beforehand. However, his death could be attributed to the adverse effects of blood transfusion, which were poorly understood at the time.[27][13][28]
Legacy
Both Bogdanov's fiction and his political writings imply that he expected the coming revolution against
In the 1920s and 1930s, Bogdanov's theorizing, being the product of a non-Leninist Bolshevik, became an important, though "underground", influence on certain dissident factions in the Soviet Union who turned against Bolshevik autocracy while accepting the necessity of the Revolution and wishing to preserve its achievements.[30]
In popular culture
Bogdanov served as an inspiration for the character Arkady Bogdanov in Kim Stanley Robinson's science-fiction novels the Mars Trilogy. It is revealed in 'Blue Mars' that Arkady is a descendant of Alexander Bogdanov.[31]
Bogdanov is also the protagonist of the novel Proletkult (2018) by Italian collective Wu Ming.
Published works
Russian
Non-fiction
- Poznanie s Istoricheskoi Tochki Zreniya (Knowledge from a Historical Viewpoint) (St. Petersburg, 1901)
- Empiriomonizm: Stat'i po Filosofii (Empiriomonism: Articles on Philosophy) 3 volumes (Moscow, 1904–1906)
- Kul'turnye zadachi nashego vremeni (The Cultural Tasks of Our Time) (Moscow: Izdanie S. Dorovatoskogo i A. Carushnikova 1911)
- Filosofiya Zhivogo Opyta: Populiarnye Ocherki (Philosophy of Living Experience: Popular Essays) (St. Petersburg, 1913)
- Tektologiya: Vseobschaya Organizatsionnaya Nauka 3 volumes (Berlin and Petrograd-Moscow, 1922)
- "Avtobiografia" in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar, XLI, pp. 29–34 (1926)
- God raboty Instituta perelivanya krovi (Annals of the Institute of Blood Transfusion) (Moscow 1926–1927)
Fiction
- Krasnaya zvezda (Red Star) (St. Petersburg, 1908)
- Inzhener Menni (Engineer Menni) (Moscow: Izdanie S. Dorovatoskogo i A. Carushnikova 1912) The title page carries the date 1913[32]
English translation
Non-fiction
- Art and the working class, translated by Taylor R Genovese (Iskra Books, 2022)
- Essays in Organisation Science (1919) Очерки организационной науки (Ocherki organizatsionnoi nauki) Proletarskaya kul'tura, No. 7/8 (April–May)
- 'Proletarian Poetry' (1918), Labour Monthly, Vol IV, No. 5–6, May–June 1923
- 'The Criticism of Proletarian Art' (from Kritika proletarskogo iskusstva, 1918) Labour Monthly, Vol V, No. 6, December 1923
- 'Religion, Art and Marxism', Labour Monthly, Vol VI, No. 8, August 1924
- Essays in Tektology: The General Science of Organization, translated by George Gorelik (Seaside, CA: Intersystems Publications, 1980)
- A Short Course of Economics Science, (London: Communist Party of Great Britain, 1923)
- Bogdanov's Tektology. Book 1, edited by Peter Dudley (Hull, UK: Centre for Systems Studies Press, 1996).
- The Philosophy of Living Experience (1913/2015). Translated, edited and introduced by David G. Rowley, Leiden & Boston: Brill (2015)
- Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Books 1–3. Edited and translated by David G. Rowley, Leiden & Boston: Brill (2019)
Fiction
- Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia, edited by Loren Graham and Richard Stites; trans. Charles Rougle (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984):
- Red Star (1908). Novel. In English
- Engineer Menni (1913). Novel.
- "A Martian Stranded on Earth" (1924). Poem.
See also
- Two Events Celebrating the Life and Contribution of Alexander Bogdanov, hosted by the Centre for Systems Studies on 2–3 June 2021
- List of dystopian literature
- 1908 in literature
- Mars Trilogy, inspired by Aleksandr Bogdanov
Notes
- PMID 17900494.
- ISSN 1085-5661.
- S2CID 256265208.
- ^ OpenLibrary.org. "Alexander Bogdanov". Open Library. Retrieved 2022-07-21.
- ^ "Alexander Bogdanov". FactRepublic.com. 2018-12-13. Retrieved 2022-07-21.
- ISBN 978-0-7876-6832-7.
- ISBN 978-90-04-26891-3.
- ISBN 978-90-04-26891-3.
- ^ Bogdanov, Alexander (1974), "Autobiography", in Haupt, Georges; Marie, Jean-Jacques (eds.), Makers of the Russian Revolution: Biographies of Bolshevik Leaders, Allen & Unwin
- ISBN 978-1-351-95501-0.
- ^ Bogdanov, Autobiography
- ^ White, James (1981), "Bogdanov in Tula", Studies in Soviet Thought, vol. 2
- ^ PMID 17900494.
- ^ Biggart, John (1989), Alexander Bogdanov, Left-Bolshevism and the Proletkult 1904–1932, University of East Anglia, p. 170
- ^ Cohen p. 15
- ^ Woods, Part Three
- ^ Rogachevskii, Andrei (1995). "'Life Makes No Sense': Aleksandr Bogdanov's Experiences in the First World War". Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the Scottish Society for Russian and East European Studies: 105.
- ^ Biggart J. (1998) 'the Rehabitation of Bogdanov' in Bogdanov and His Work, Aldershot: Ashgate
- JSTOR 130153.
- ^ Biggart, John (1989), Alexander Bogdanov, Left-Bolshevism and the Proletkult 1904–1932, University of East Anglia, p. 170
- ^ Biggart, John (1989), Alexander Bogdanov, Left-Bolshevism and the Proletkult 1904–1932, University of East Anglia, p. 179
- ^ Rosenthal, p. 118
- ISBN 978-90-04-26890-6.
- ^ Rosenthal, p. 162
- ^ Yakolev, Vasily (January 4, 1923), "Menshevizm v Proletkul'tovskoi odezhde", Pravda, Moscow
- ^ 'The rehabilitation of Bogdanov' by John Biggart in Bogdanov and His Work: A Guide to the Published and Unpublished Works of Alexander A. Bogdanov (Malinovsky), 1873–1928, 1998, p. 12.
- ^ Rosenthal, pp. 161–162
- ^ Krementsov, Nikolai (2011). A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions and Proletarian Science. University of Chicago Press. p. 100.
- ^ Sochor, p. ___
- ^ Socialist Standard, April 2007
- ISBN 9780007310180.
- ^ Biggart, John; Gloveli, Georgii & Yassour, Avraham, Bogdanov and his Work, Aldershot: Ashgate, p. 254
Sources
- Cohen, Stephen F. 1980 [1973]. Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888–1938. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-502697-7. First published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1973. Published 1980 by Oxford University Press with corrections and a new introduction. Google Books preview as of 20101006
- Rosenthal, Bernice Glatzer. 2002. New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism. The Pennsylvania State University Press. Google Books preview as of 20101006
- Sochor, Zenovia. 1988. Revolution and Culture: The Bogdanov-Lenin Controversy. Cornell University Press.
- Socialist Standard. 2007 April. Bogdanov, technocracy and socialism. 106 (1232): 10.
- ISBN 1-4191-1307-0
Further reading
- Biggart, John; Georgii Gloveli; Avraham Yassour. 1998. Bogdanov and his Work. A guide to the published and unpublished works of Alexander A. Bogdanov (Malinovsky) 1873–1928, Aldershot: Ashgate. ISBN 1-85972-623-2
- Biggart, John; Peter Dudley; Francis King (eds.). 1998. Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia. Aldershot: Ashgate. ISBN 1-85972-678-X
- Brown, Stuart. 2002. Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers, London: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-06043-5
- Dudley, Peter. 1996. Bogdanov's Tektology (1st Engl transl). Hull, UK: Centre for Systems Studies, University of Hull.
- Dudley, Peter; Simona Pustylnik. 1995. Reading The Tektology: provisional findings, postulates and research directions. Hull, UK: Centre for Systems Studies, University of Hull.
- Gorelick, George. 1983. Bogdanov's Tektology: Nature, Development and Influences. Studies in Soviet Thought, 26:37–57.
- Jensen, Kenneth Martin. 1978. Beyond Marx and Mach: Aleksandr Bogdanov's Philosophy of Living Experience. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ISBN 9027709289
- Pustylnik, Simona. 1995. Biological Ideas of Bogdanov's Tektology. Presented at the international conference, Origins of Organization Theory in Russia and the Soviet Union, University of East Anglia (Norwich), Jan. 8–11, 1995.
- M. E. Soboleva. 2007. A. Bogdanov und der philosophische Diskurs in Russland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Zur Geschichte des russischen Positivismus [The history of Russian positivism.]. Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlag. 278 pp.
External links
- Alexander Bogdanov Archive at marxists.org
- А. А. Bogdanov Biographic essay (English)
- International Alexander Bogdanov Institute (Russian)
- Short biography and bibliography in the Virtual Laboratory of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science
- Red Hamlet
- Works by Alexander Bogdanov at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
- Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History Loren R. Graham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 ISBN 0-521-28789-8– Russian technocratic influence of engineers, subsequent deaths, trials and imprisonments
- About tectology John A. Mikes, prepared for the [International Conference on Complex Systems] New England Complex Systems Institute, September 21–27, 1997, in Nashua, NH