Alexander Bogdanov was a Russian philosopher, scientist, political activist, novelist, pioneer of system theory and a physician who founded the first institute of blood transfusion in Soviet Russia. Nikolai Bukharin said of him that he was ‘without doubt one of the greatest and most original thinkers of our time’. By rights Bogdanov should occupy a prominent place in the modern history of Russia and the history of European Marxism, but because he fell foul of Lenin, the role he played in the Russian revolutionary movement and his contribution to the various spheres of knowledge in which he was involved, have been deliberately obscured.
The present study of Bogdanov sets out to reconstruct his system of thought, examining the way his ideas originated and evolved, and showing the contexts in which they developed. Although this is first and foremost an intellectual biography of Bogdanov, it does not treat Bogdanov’s ideas in isolation from his life and political involvements. Bogdanov’s political activism is the complement of his thought. It was the factor that determined that his characteristic ideas should arise and the factor that determined their character. Bogdanov himself viewed his own personality as a synthesis of the philosopher and the revolutionary, of the thinker and the activist. On several occasions in his writings he returns to the theme of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which he regarded as a work of genius. Bogdanov saw the character of Hamlet, not in terms of the conventional interpretation, as a person who hesitated to take decisive action, but as a peculiar combination of a warrior and an aesthete. For Bogdanov Hamlet was a person whose upbringing had been the art of warfare, one appropriate to the descendant of Vikings, but whose inclinations were towards culture and the arts. Clearly Bogdanov saw himself in this same light, as the incarnation in a single person of the spirit of revolution and that of philosophy. Bogdanov’s German biographer Dietrich Grille noticed this partiality for Shakespeare’s play and referred to Bogdanov as ‘the Red Hamlet’. Because it suggests the synthesis of ideas and political action that was central to Bogdanov’s character, I have used Grille’s phrase as the title of this book.
The approach I have taken in this book is historical, that is, I have traced chronologically the evolution of Bogdanov’s ideas from his first publication in 1897 to his final lecture in 1927. This method is appropriate, as it is able to reveal the connection between episodes in Bogdanov’s life to what he wrote at the given time. It is also apt because in the development of Bogdanov’s ideas there are a number of recurrent themes which appear throughout his writings and form the central core of his thinking. Some of the chapters consist mainly of expositions of Bogdanov’s ideas, as for example the chapters on ‘empiriomonism’ and ‘tectology’. Other chapters, like those on the 1905 revolution and Bogdanov’s expulsion from the Bolshevik Centre, have a fair amount of historical narrative. The two types of chapter tend to alternate, so that the exposition of Bogdanov’s thought is punctuated by passages about his life and activities.
The method adopted here can also be described as ‘multi-disciplinary’. Although Bogdanov was involved in several fields of knowledge – philosophy, natural science, medicine, economics, political theory etc. – it would be wrong to treat these various fields separately. Just as Bogdanov’s ideas show continuity over time, they also show continuity between disciplines. Central themes in Bogdanov’s thinking repeat themselves in the different disciplines which he pursued. The most obvious example of this is his use of tectology, his universal science of organisation, in economics, political science and medicine. To appreciate the range and depth of Bogdanov’s thinking requires that all its ramifications be examined. I have not written either to defend or decry Bogdanov’s ideas, but to expound them as accurately and as objectively as possible.
The main source used in the present work is the extensive corpus of Bogdanov’s writings. In doing this I have been helped enormously by the bibliography of Bogdanov’s works by John Biggart, Georgii Gloveli and Avraham Yassour, which is an essential companion for anyone doing research on Bogdanov. I have also been greatly helped by my extensive correspondence with John Biggart, who has been unstinting in his advice and provision of Bogdanov materials.
Until 1918 Russia used a different calendar from Western Europe. The dates of the Russian (Julian) calendar were twelve days behind the Western (Gregorian) in the nineteenth century and thirteen days in the twentieth. Rather than give both versions of every date, I have used the Russian calendar in those cases where the events take place in Russia, and the Western calendar where the events take place in Western Europe.
I have used a modified version of the Library of Congress system of transliteration from Russian in the Bibliography, since this will facilitate the identification of the sources used. In the body of the text, however, where there exist generally accepted forms of proper names, I have used these rather than the forms that a strict adherence to the Library of Congress system would have dictated (Berdyaev instead of Berdiaev, Lunacharsky instead of Lunacharskii, Trotsky instead of Trotskii etc.). In the text, for the sake of readability, I have omitted the soft sign in transliterated Russian terms (Proletkult instead of Proletkul’t).
My gratitude goes to Georgii Gloveli, Francis King, John Lowrie and Ian Thatcher for the help they have given me and the materials they have put at my disposal. I owe special thanks to Douglas Huestis, with whom I have corresponded on the subject of Bogdanov’s illness and death. As well as translating Bogdanov’s The Struggle for Viability, Professor Huestis had researched Bogdanov’s biography and had collected a number of documents relating to Bogdanov’s life, which he kindly made available to me. I have also profited greatly from my discussions on Bogdanov’s ideas with David Rowley.
This book would have been impossible but for the resources of the Soviet Studies section of Glasgow University Library, which has been continually enriched by the acquisitions made by the librarians in charge. I am also deeply grateful to the staff of Inter-Library Loans department for scouring the libraries of the world to obtain for me the items that were not in GUL.
JDW
2017