Bogdanovâs Autobiography
This autobiographical sketch was written by Bogdanov in 1924 in response to a request from the Lenin Institute sent out to a multitude of people who had been a part of the revolutionary movement in Russia. The autobiographies became part of a multi-volume project.15 However, I have used the version reprinted in Neizvestnyi Bogdanov [The Unknown Bogdanov],16 since it comes from Bogdanovâs original manuscript, which is held in the Rossiiskii Tsentr Khraneniia i Izucheniia Dokumentov Noveishei Istorii (RTsKhIDNI) [The Russian Centre for the Preservation and Study of Documents in Contemporary History]. (Bogdanovâs arrest by the GPU in 1923 was not mentioned in the published version.)
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Bogdanov (Malinovskii), Alexander Alexandrovich, the second of six children, was born on 10Â August 1873,17 the son of a village schoolteacher. My father quickly rose to the position of teacher-inspector in a city higher school, and because of this I had access to the library of the school for six or seven years and later also to its small physics laboratory. I was awarded a scholarship to study at the Tula Gymnasium18 and lived in its dormitory, which was very much like a military barracks or prison. The malicious and narrow-minded authorities there taught me to fear and hate the powerful and to repudiate all authorities.
Having graduated with a gold medal,19 I enrolled in Moscow University as a natural scientist. In December 1894, I was arrested for membership in the Union Council of Zemliachestva20 and was exiled to Tula. I was drawn into work as a propagandist in workersâ study circles by I.I. Saveliev, a worker in an armaments factory, and soon afterwards V. Bazarov and I. Stepanov21 began to participate. In 1896, in the course of this work, I moved from the outlook of the âPeopleâs Willâ22 to Social Democracy. I gathered my lectures for those study circles into Kratkii kurs ekonomicheskoi nauki [A Short Course of Economic Science],23 which came out â maimed by the censors â at the end of 1897. (It was warmly reviewed by Lenin.)
Beginning in autumn 1895, I spent part of my time in Kharâkov, studying in the Medical Institute of Kharâkov University. I was involved in Social-Democratic, intelligentsia circles there, the leader of which was Cherevanin,24 but I broke with them over the question of morality, to which they attributed independent significance.25 In 1898, striving to answer the broad needs of our workers for an overall worldview, I wrote my first philosophical work, Osnovnye elementy istoricheskogo vzgliada na prirodu [Basic Elements of an Historical View of Nature].26 I graduated from the University of Kharâkov in the fall of 1899 and was subsequently arrested for propaganda.27
After six months in prison in Moscow, I was exiled to Kaluga, and then from there for three years in Vologda. I studied and wrote a great deal. In 1902, I organised and edited a collection of articles against the idealists, Ocherki realisticheskogo mirovozzreniia [Outlines of a Realist Worldview].28 I served for a year and a half as a physician in a psychiatric hospital. At the end of 1903 I began to edit a Marxist journal, Pravda [Truth], which was published in Moscow.
In the autumn of 1903, I took the side of the Bolsheviks, and, my exile having come to an end, I shortly thereafter (in the spring of 1904) travelled to Switzerland where I connected with Lenin. At the âMeeting of the Twenty-Twoâ,29 I was elected to the Bureau of Committees of the Majority (BKB), the first Bolshevik Centre. It was around that time that I was first declared a heretic from Marxism by the Menshevik journal Iskra [The Spark]. (An article by Ortodoks30 in issue no. 70 accused me of philosophical idealism.)
In the autumn I returned to Russia and, starting in December 1904, I worked in St. Petersburg in the BKB and the Petersburg Committee. I wrote the tactical leaflets of the BKB regarding armed uprising and the summoning of a Party Congress, and I wrote the majority of the other leaflets of the BKB. In the autumn of 1905 I reported on the question of an armed uprising at the Party Congress in London â the Third (Bolshevik) Congress â and on the question of party organisation as well. I was also elected to the first Bolshevik Central Committee, I worked in Petrograd and served on the editorial board of the Bolshevik journal, Novaia zhiznâ [New Life], and I was the representative of the Central Committee on the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workersâ Deputies, where I was arrested on 2 December 1905.31
In May I was freed on bail, and I was sent by the Bolsheviks to be a member of the now Menshevik-dominated Central Committee. I was exiled abroad, but I returned illegally32 and lived in Kuokkala, Finland33 with Lenin, working on the editorial boards of Bolshevik journals and also with the Duma fractions of the First, Second, and Third Dumas.34 In regard to the question of elections to the Third Duma, I was a âboycotterâ,35 but after a Party Conference decided against the boycott, I contributed to the electoral campaign to the Third Duma in Vpered [Forward], the underground workersâ newspaper that I edited.
At the end of 1907 I was sent abroad by my comrades in a troika (with Lenin and Innokentii) to edit the Bolshevik organ Proletarii. In the fall of 1909 I, along with L.B. Krasin, was removed from the Bolshevik Centre for being a Left-Bolshevik, and in January 1910, when the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks merged, I was removed from the Central Committee of the Party as well. In the autumn of 1909, I participated in organising the First Party School for Workers on the Isle of Capri, and in the fall of 1910 the Second Party School in Bologna. In December 1909 I reported on behalf of the platform of the âGroup of Bolsheviksâ, which soon after adopted the name âthe Literary Group âVperedââ¯â. Their platform â âThe Present Moment and the Tasks of the Partyâ â formulated the slogan of Proletarian Culture for the first time.
In the autumn of 1911, when the group âVperedâ began to move from cultural-propagandistic work to émigré-style politics, I left the group and left politics as well. From then on, until the Revolution of 1917, I only wrote propagandistic articles in Pravda and other workersâ organs. I returned to Russia in 1913, and in 1914 was sent to the front as a doctor. The Revolution of 1917 found me in Moscow, and it was there that I began to write political-propagandistic articles. In one of them, in January 1918, I made a diagnosis of War Communism, and I subsequently switched over entirely to cultural and scientific work â in the Proletkult, the Proletarian University, etc. In the fall of 1921 I ceased my work on proletarian culture,36 and I devoted myself entirely to science. But even though I decisively left politics alone, it did not completely leave me alone, as shown by my arrest in September to October 1923.37
Since 1918 I have been a member of the Communist (formerly Socialist) Academy.
[Editorâs Postscript]
Bogdanov devoted the last years of his life to the science of blood transfusion, and he became the Director of The Institute of Haematology and Blood Transfusion. He died in 1928 as a result of a transfusion experiment in which he himself was one of the subjects.38
Nevskii 1931.
Bordiugov 1995.
Russia at that time still used the Julian calendar. According to the Gregorian calendar, to which Russia converted in 1918, it was 22Â August.
Gimnaziia was the term for university-preparatory high schools in imperial Russia. The government charged fees to attend, in order to restrict university attendance to the wealthy, but scholarships were available for particularly bright young men. (Women could not attend.)
The equivalent of an honours diploma.
Zemliachestva were student self-help organisations whose purpose was to help students from the provinces to cope with life in large metropolitan universities.
V.A. Bazarov (Rudnev) (1874â1939) and I.I. Stepanov (Skvortsov) (1870â1928).
The original Narodnaia Volia [The Peopleâs Will] had been created in 1879 by populists who were disillusioned by the failure of a widespread peasant revolution against the autocracy to occur. They decided that the only alternative was to use terror to force reform from above, and it was the executive committee of this party that assassinated Tsar Alexander II in 1881. The party was suppressed by the police in the aftermath of the assassination, but the name was adopted by various local populist groups in the 1880s and â90s to indicate their concern for the peasantry and their hatred of the tsarist regime.
Bogdanov 1897.
F.A. Cherevanin (1869â1938) went on to become a Menshevik.
i.e. they treated moral values as absolute and not relative.
Bogdanov 1898.
The official charge was disseminating âsocial propaganda among workersâ (Biggart 1998, p. 462).
Ocherki realisticheskogo mirovozzreniia (Bogdanov 1904c) was specifically a reaction to Problems of Idealism (Poole 2003), published in 1902 by the Moscow Psychological Society. Problems of Idealism, which was a landmark in Russian culture, signifying the blossoming of the âNew Religious Consciousnessâ of the Russian intelligentsia. It was especially galling to Russian Revolutionary Social Democrats, since the leading Russian Marxist revisionists â including P. Struve, N. Berdiaev, S. Bulgakov, and S. Frank â were contributors.
This was the meeting, 30Â Julyâ1Â August 1904, which formally created the Bolshevik fraction of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP).
Liubovâ Akselrod (1868â1946) was a close associate of G.V. Plekhanov, second to him in prestige as a philosopher in the Menshevik fraction.
This was the beginning of the suppression of the 1905 Russian Revolution.
This may not be accurate. It appears that the Minister of Internal Affairs actually granted him permission to travel abroad (Biggart 1998, p. 467). Perhaps the illegality was his return to Finland and not to Russia.
Although Finland was part of the Russian Empire, it was a âGrand Duchyâ with a high degree of legal autonomy and resentment of interference by Russia. Russian revolutionaries in Finland were safe from arrest.
The Duma was the legislative body provided for in the constitution promulgated by Tsar Nicholas II in 1905.
After the First and Second Dumas were dissolved by the Tsar because they were too radical, Prime Minister Peter Stolypin changed the voting laws (in violation of the constitution) to increase the representation of the wealthy. In protest, the âboycottersâ called for a boycott of elections to the Third Duma.
Lenin had been an enemy of Bogdanov ever since his expulsion from the Bolshevik Centre. He was alarmed at the great success of the Proletarian Culture movement, and in 1920 he forced Bogdanov out of his leadership position in the Proletkult and encouraged a campaign of vilifying him as a Marxist âhereticâ.
Bogdanov was arrested by the GPU (State Political Directorate) on 8 September 1923 on trumped up charges of having links with anarcho-syndicalists and collaboration with émigrés and foreign intelligence agencies. However, Bogdanov was able to convince Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the GPU, that he was innocent, and he was released on 13 October (Biggart 1998, pp. 379â83).
See Krementsov 2011 and White 2018.