Alexander bogdanov biography

Alexander Bogdanov was one of the most versatile and creative thinkers of Russia in the revolutionary era. Besides being a political activist, he was a prolific writer on philosophy, economics, education, and culture, whose works included a science-fiction novel about a socialist civilization on the planet Mars.

Due to his conflict with Vladimir Lenin, however, he was almost entirely written out of the historical record. When Bogdanov was mentioned in Soviet times, it was exclusively from the Leninist viewpoint. Only recently has Bogdanov’s life and works become the subject of academic study. Bogdanov deserves to be remembered as one of the most intriguing figures from the Russian socialist movement in a tumultuous time.

“Bogdanov” was the pseudonym of Alexander Alexandrovich Malinovsky, who was born in the village of Sokółka, in the province of Grodno on August 22, 1873. His childhood and youth were spent in Tula, a town near Moscow, where his father was a school inspector. In 1892, Bogdanov entered Moscow University to study the natural sciences, specializing in biology, but two years later he was expelled for his presence at a student demonstration and banished to his home town of Tula.

Being an industrial center, Tula was home to a large number of workers, some of whom had organized study groups. Bogdanov was invited by one of the workers to teach a class on economics. It was from this class on economics that Bogdanov’s first publication emerged — his A Short Course of Economic Science, published in 1894.

The Short Course is in effect an exposition of Karl Marx’s economic ideas, though this is not stated explicitly in the book. The approach is historical, beginning with the collectivism of primitive society and progressing through slave society and feudalism to the capitalist era. In subsequent editions of his book, Bogdanov added refinements that were inspired b

It has been thirty years since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yet today, despite the efforts of its many gravediggers and eulogists, the short twentieth century has never felt more open, contingent and ambiguously alive. From the uneasy centenary of the Russian Revolution in 2017, to the epistemological dynamite of 2020-2021, there is clearly something to October that resists enshrinement as dead heritage – that exceeds the ability of state projects or conservative scholarship to domesticate it into a usable past. There has never been, in recent memory, a more interesting time to study revolutionary history – a time to reconsider fixed narratives, to crack open the potentialities of past socio-political rebellion, to recompose new histories of the Soviet experiment.

This is the context for several recent initiatives in the study of Russian Marxism. Particular attention should be paid to the Historical Materialism Book Series, where a group of scholars have begun to reevaluate the life and work of Alexander Bogdanov: a curious leftist polymath, science fiction author, medical adventurer and party ‘heretic’ of the Russian Revolution. Possessing one of the most original Bolshevik voices, Bogdanov has unfortunately been long neglected in histories of the period by both supporters and Cold War opponents alike.

Brill has recently released a new biography of Bogdanov as well as the first English translation of his most foundational philosophical work. Taken together, these two texts represent an ideal occasion for a reconsideration of this curious leftist. To meet with Bogdanov is to meet with the Russian Revolution in all its contingency, openness and risk – to encounter an unorthodox perspective on Bolshevism alongside an unorthodox Bolshevik; to begin the lab

It was early in April in 1928 when the word went out in Moscow that Alexander Bogdanov had died. He was a controversial figure, an old Bolshevik who had left that party long before the 1917 revolution and never returned. All the same, he had had Lenin's respect as a scientist (as long as he stayed out of politics). More recently, he also had the support of the new party strong man, Stalin. Bogdanov opposed the growing despotism of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", under which slogan Communist autocracy was being developed. But he was respected as a tireless propagandist for the socialist cause, an enthusiastic teacher of the proletariat, and a writer of arcane science and philosophy. Bogdanov was held in such respect that Communist bigwigs spoke glowingly at the funeral, praising his intellect, courage, and dedication to science and humanity. They did not fail to point out that he had split with his one-time friend, Lenin, and had succumbed to ideological "errors". Indeed, he had powerful enemies in the early Soviet state. Bogdanov was a physician, economist, philosopher, natural scientist, writer of utopian science fiction, poet, teacher, politician (unsuccesful), lifelong revolutionary, forerunner of what we now call cybernetics and organizational science, and founder of the world's first institution devoted entirely to the field of blood transfusion. You could call him a Renaissance man. Although he clearly fitted the category of the late-nineteenth-century Russian intellectual revolutionary, Bogdanov differed from most of them in being no dilettante. More than just a theorist, he was an active scientist and physician. As a teacher, he firmly believed that education and indoctrination could alter people's ways of thinking and behaving, and that humanity could be perfected under socialism. Like many revolutionaries, Bogdanov tried to keep ahead of the Tsar's police by using a variety of pseudonyms, am