Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov (born
Alyaksandr Malinouski, ) ' onMouseout='HidePop("74712")' href="http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Hrodna">Hrodna
Hrodna or Grodno , is a city in Belarus. It is located on the Neman River , close to the borders of Poland and Lithuania . It has 325,164 inhabitants...
,
Russian EmpireThe Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia, and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...
(now
BelarusBelarus is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered by Russia to the north and east, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the north. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel , Mahilyow and Vitebsk...
) –7 April, 1928,
MoscowMoscow is the capital and the largest city of Russia. It is also the largest metropolitan area in Europe, and ranks among the largest urban areas in the world. Moscow is a major political, economic, cultural, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the world, a...
)
was a
RussiaRussia , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia . It is a semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n
physicianA physician — also known as medical practitioner, doctor of medicine, medical doctor, or simply doctor — practices the ancient profession of medicine, which is concerned with maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease or injury...
, philosopher,
economistAn economist is an expert in the social science of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy...
,
science fictionScience fiction is a genre of fiction. It differs from fantasy in that, within the context of the story, its imaginary elements are largely possible within scientifically-established or scientifically-postulated laws of nature...
writer, and
revolutionaryA revolutionary is a person who either actively participates in, or advocates revolution. Also, when used as an adjective, the term revolutionary refers to something that has a major, sudden impact on society or on some aspect of human endeavour...
of
BelarusianBelarusians are an East Slavic ethnic group who populate the majority of the Republic of Belarus. Introduced to the world as a new state in the early 1990s, the Republic of Belarus brought with it the notion of a re-emerging Belarusian ethnicity, drawn upon the lines of the Belarusian language...
ethnicity whose scientific interests ranged from the universal
systems theorySystems theory is an interdisciplinary theory about the nature of complex systems in nature, society, and science, and is a framework by which one can investigate and/or describe any group of objects that work together to produce some result. This could be a single organism, any organization or...
to the possibility of human
rejuvenationRejuvenation can refer to:*Rejuvenation , reversing the aging process*Rejuvenation , when the base level that a river is flowing down to is lowered*Rejuvenation , a 1974 funk album by The Meters...
through
blood transfusionBlood transfusion is the process of transferring blood or blood-based products from one person into the circulatory system of another. Blood transfusions can be life-saving in some situations, such as massive blood loss due to trauma, or can be used to replace blood lost during surgery...
.
Life
Bogdanov was born on in
HrodnaHrodna or Grodno , is a city in Belarus. It is located on the Neman River , close to the borders of Poland and Lithuania . It has 325,164 inhabitants...
, a city in the
Russian EmpireThe Russian Empire was a state that existed from 1721 until the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was the successor to the Tsardom of Russia, and the predecessor of the Soviet Union...
(now
BelarusBelarus is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered by Russia to the north and east, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the north. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel , Mahilyow and Vitebsk...
). Bogdanov was a man of many talents and interests. His formal training was in medicine and psychiatry. He invented an original philosophy that he called “tectology” and is now sometimes regarded as a precursor of
systems theorySystems theory is an interdisciplinary theory about the nature of complex systems in nature, society, and science, and is a framework by which one can investigate and/or describe any group of objects that work together to produce some result. This could be a single organism, any organization or...
(synergetics). He was also a Marxian economist, a theorist of culture, a popular science fiction writer, and of course a political activist. Even today most of his work is
not available in English. The only book devoted to him is Zenovia Sochor’s study of his ideas about culture.
Prior to World War I
Ethnically
BelarusBelarus is a landlocked country in Eastern Europe, bordered by Russia to the north and east, Ukraine to the south, Poland to the west, and Lithuania and Latvia to the north. Its capital is Minsk; other major cities include Brest, Grodno , Gomel , Mahilyow and Vitebsk...
ian, Alyaksandr Malinouski was born into a rural teacher's family. While working on his medical degree at Moscow University, he was arrested for joining the "
Narodnaya VolyaNarodnaya Volya was a Russian terrorist organization, best known for the successful assassination of Czar Alexander II of Russia. It created a centralized, well disguised, and most significant organization in a time of diverse liberation movements in Russia...
" group. He was exiled to
TulaTula is an industrial city in the European part of Russia, located 193 km south of Moscow, on the river Upa. Population: 481,216 ; 543,000 . Tula is the administrative center of Tula Oblast. Dialing code: +7 4872....
, then continued his medical studies at the University of
KharkivKharkiv , also spelled Kharkov is the second largest city in Ukraine.It was the first capital of Soviet Ukraine, now the administrative centre of the Kharkiv Oblast , as well as the administrative centre of the surrounding Kharkivskyi Raion within the oblast. The city is located in the northeast...
. There he became involved in revolutionary activities and published his "Brief course of economic science" in 1897. In 1899, he graduated as a medical doctor, and published his next work: "Basic elements of historic prospective on nature." Then he was arrested by the Tsar's police and spent six months in prison, then was exiled to
VologdaVologda is a city in Russia and the administrative center of Vologda Oblast. Population: 293,700 ; Vologda takes its name, of likely Finno-Ugrian origin, from the Vologda River which flows through the city....
. In his pursuit of social justice, he studied political philosophy and economics, took the pseudonym Bogdanov and joined the
BolshevikThe Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903...
faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903.
For the next 6 years Bogdanov was a major figure among the Bolsheviks, second only to
Vladimir LeninVladimir Ilyich Lenin , born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov , was the Bolshevik Leader of the 1917 October Revolution, and the first Head of State of the Soviet Union; in the course of his political career, he used the pseudonyms Lenin, V. I. Lenin, Nikolai Lenin, and N. Lenin...
in his influence. In 1904-1906, he published three volumes of the philosophic treatise
Empiriomonism, in which he tried to merge Marxism with the philosophy of
Ernst MachErnst Mach was an Austrian physicist and philosopher, remembered for his contributions to physics such as the Mach number and the study of shock waves...
,
Wilhelm OstwaldFriedrich Wilhelm Ostwald was a Baltic German chemist. He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1909 for his work on catalysis, chemical equilibria and reaction velocities...
, and
Richard AvenariusRichard Heinrich Ludwig Avenarius was a German-Swiss philosopher. He formulated the radical positivist doctrine of "empirical criticism" or empirio-criticism....
. His work later affected a number of Marxist theoreticians, including
Nikolai BukharinNikolai Ivanovich Bukharin , was a Marxist theoretician, Bolshevik revolutionary, and Soviet politician. He was a member of the Politburo and Central Committee , chairman of Communist International , and the editor in chief of Pravda , journal Bolshevik , and Izvestia , and the...
.
After the collapse of the
Russian Revolution of 1905The 1905 Russian Revolution was a wave of mass political unrest through vast areas of the Russian Empire. Some of it was directed against the government, while some was undirected. It included terrorism, worker strikes, peasant unrest, and military mutinies...
, Bogdanov led a group within the Bolsheviks ("ultimatists" and "
otzovistsThroughout the history, there were a number of political factions within the RSDLP , in addition to the major split of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.- Factions by political stand :...
" or "recallists"), who demanded a recall of Social Democratic deputies from the
State DumaThe State Duma in the Russian Federation is the lower house of the Federal Assembly of Russia , the upper house being the Federation Council of Russia. The Duma is headquartered in central Moscow, a few steps from Manege Square. Its members are referred to as deputies...
, and challenged Lenin for the leadership of the Bolshevik faction. With a majority of Bolshevik leaders either supporting Bogdanov or undecided by mid-1908 when the differences became irreconcilable, Lenin concentrated on undermining Bogdanov's reputation as a philosopher. In 1909 he published a scathing book of criticism entitled
Materialism and Empiriocriticism, assaulting Bogdanov's position and accusing him of philosophical idealism .
In June 1909, Bogdanov was defeated by Lenin at a Bolshevik mini-conference in
ParisParis is the capital of France and the country's most populous city. It is situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
organized by the editorial board of the Bolshevik magazine
ProletaryProletary was an illegal Russian Bolshevik newspaper edited by Lenin; it was published from September 3, 1906 until December 11, 1909. A total of fifty issues having appeared. Active participants in the editorial work were M. F. Vladimirsky, V. V. Vorovsky, I. F. Dubrovinsky, Anatoly Lunacharsky...
. He was expelled from the Bolshevik faction and joined his brother-in-law Anatoly Lunacharsky,
Maxim GorkyAleksey Maksimovich Peshkov , better known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian/Soviet author, a founder of the socialist realism literary method and a political activist...
and other "otzovists" on the island of
CapriCapri is an Italian island off the Sorrentine Peninsula, on the south side of the Gulf of Naples, in the Campania region of southern Italy...
, where they started a school for Russian factory workers. In 1910, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Mikhail Pokrovsky and their supporters moved the school to
BolognaBologna is the capital city of Emilia-Romagna, in the Po Valley of northern Italy...
, where they continued teaching classes through 1911, while Lenin and his allies soon started a rival school outside of Paris. Bogdanov broke with the "otzovists" in 1911 and abandoned revolutionary activities. After six years of his political emigration in Europe, Bogdanov returned to Russia in 1914, following the
amnestyAmnesty is a legislative or executive act by which a state restores those who may have been guilty of an offense against it to the positions of innocent persons. It includes more than pardon, in as much as it obliterates all legal remembrance of the offense. The word has the same root as amnesia...
.
Bogdanov's innovative work on comparative study of economic and military power of European nations, written in 1912-1913, was the first interdisciplinary work ever on
systems analysisSystems analysis is the interdisciplinary part of science, dealing with analysis of sets of interacting entities, the systems, often prior to their automation as computer systems, and the interactions within those systems. This field is closely related to operations research...
, which he later merged with
tectonicsTectonics is a field of study within geology concerned generally with the structures within the lithosphere of the Earth and particularly with the forces and movements that have operated in a region to create these structures.Tectonics is concerned with the orogenies and tectonic development of...
. In his work Bogdanov introduced modern principles of
systems theorySystems theory is an interdisciplinary theory about the nature of complex systems in nature, society, and science, and is a framework by which one can investigate and/or describe any group of objects that work together to produce some result. This could be a single organism, any organization or...
and
systems analysisSystems analysis is the interdisciplinary part of science, dealing with analysis of sets of interacting entities, the systems, often prior to their automation as computer systems, and the interactions within those systems. This field is closely related to operations research...
. However, his works on systems analysis were not translated at the time of his life, and were not known outside Russia for many years.
After World War I
Bogdanov served in
World War IWorld War I , also known as the First World War, the Great War, and the War to End All Wars, was a global military conflict which involved most of the world's great powers, assembled in two opposing alliances: the Triple Entente and the Triple Alliance...
as a physician at a hospital and played no role in the
Russian Revolution of 1917The Russian Revolution is the collective term for the series of revolutions in Russia in 1917, which destroyed the Tsarist autocracy and led to the creation of the Soviet Union. In the first revolution of February 1917 the Czar was deposed and replaced by a Provisional government...
. After the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, Bogdanov refused multiple offers to rejoin the party and denounced the new regime as similar to
Aleksey ArakcheyevCount Alexey Andreyevich Arakcheyev or Arakcheev was a Russian general and statesman under the reign of Alexander I.As he grew up, he was Peter Ivanovich Melissino's pupil and rapidly started teaching arithmetic and geometry...
's arbitrary and despotic rule in the early 1820s. From 1913 until 1922 he was immersed in the writing of a lengthy philosophical treatise,
TectologyTectology is a term used by Alexander Bogdanov to describe a discipline that consisted of unifying all social, biological and physical sciences, by considering them as systems of relationships, and by seeking the organizational principles that underlie all systems...
: Universal Organization Science which anticipated many basic ideas of
systems analysisSystems analysis is the interdisciplinary part of science, dealing with analysis of sets of interacting entities, the systems, often prior to their automation as computer systems, and the interactions within those systems. This field is closely related to operations research...
later explored by
cyberneticsCybernetics is the interdisciplinary study of the structure of regulatory systems. Cybernetics is closely related to control theory and systems theory...
. In 1918, Bogdanov became a professor of economics at the University of Moscow and director of the newly established Socialist Academy of Social Sciences.
In 1918-1920, Bogdanov was one of the founders and the leading theoretician of the proletarian art movement
ProletkultProletkult is an portmanteau of "proletarskaya kultura" , Russian for "proletarian culture". It was a movement active in the Soviet Union from 1917 to 1925 to provide the foundations for what was intended to be a truly proletarian art devoid of bourgeois influence.In the first half of 1918...
. 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. At first Proletkult, like other radical cultural movements of the era, received financial support from the Bolshevik government, but by 1919-1920 the Bolshevik leadership grew hostile and on December 1, 1920
PravdaPravda was a leading newspaper of the Soviet Union and an official organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party between 1912 and 1991....
published a decree denouncing Proletkult as a "petit bourgeois" organization operating outside of Soviet institutions and a haven for "socially alien elements". Later in the 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 .
In the summer of 1923, Bogdanov was arrested by the Soviet secret police on suspicion of having inspired the recently discovered secret oppositionist group
Worker's Truth, interrogated and soon released .
In 1924, Bogdanov started his
blood transfusionBlood transfusion is the process of transferring blood or blood-based products from one person into the circulatory system of another. Blood transfusions can be life-saving in some situations, such as massive blood loss due to trauma, or can be used to replace blood lost during surgery...
experiments, apparently hoping to achieve
eternal youthThe elixir of life, from Arabic: الإكسير, also known as the elixir of immortality or Dancing Water or Persian: Aab-e-Hayaat آب حیات and sometimes equated with the philosopher's stone, is a legendary potion, or drink, that grants the drinker eternal life or eternal youth. Many practitioners of...
or at least partial
rejuvenationRejuvenation can refer to:*Rejuvenation , reversing the aging process*Rejuvenation , when the base level that a river is flowing down to is lowered*Rejuvenation , a 1974 funk album by The Meters...
. Lenin's sister Maria Ulianova was among many who volunteered to take part in Bogdanov's experiments. After undergoing 11 blood transfusions, he remarked with satisfaction on the improvement of his eyesight, suspension of balding, and other positive symptoms. The fellow revolutionary
Leonid KrasinLeonid Borisovich Krasin was a Russian and Soviet Bolshevik politician and diplomat.-Biography:Krasin joined the Social Democratic Labor Party during the 1890s...
wrote to his wife that "Bogdanov seems to have become 7, no, 10 years younger after the operation". In 1925-1926, Bogdanov founded the Institute for Haemotology and Blood Transfusions, which was later named after him.
In 1928 Bogdanov lost his life as a result of one of the experiments, when the blood of a student suffering from
malariaMalaria is a vector-borne infectious disease caused by a eukaryotic protist of the genus Plasmodium. It is widespread in tropical and subtropical regions, including parts of the Americas, Asia, and Africa. Each year, there are approximately 350–500 million cases of malaria, killing between one and...
and
tuberculosisTuberculosis is a common and often deadly infectious disease caused by mycobacteria...
was given to him in a transfusion. Some scholars (e.g.
Loren GrahamLoren R. Graham is a noted historian of science who is considered to be the leading scholar on Russian science outside that country...
) have speculated that his death may have been a suicide, because Bogdanov wrote a highly nervous political letter shortly before his last experiment, while others attribute it to blood type incompatibility, which was poorly understood at the time .
Fiction
In 1908 Bogdanov published the novel
Red StarRed Star is Alexander Bogdanov's 1908 science fiction novel about a communist utopia on Mars. Set in early Russia during the Revolution of 1905 and on socialist Mars, the novel tells the story of Leonid, a scientist-revolutionary who travels to Mars to learn and experience their socialist system...
, a
utopiaUtopia is a name for an ideal community or society, that is taken from Of the Best State of a Republic, and of the New Island Utopia, a book written in 1516 by Sir Thomas More describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean, possessing a seemingly perfect socio-politico-legal system...
set on
MarsMars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after Mars, the Roman god of war. It is also referred to as the "Red Planet" because of its reddish appearance, due to iron oxide prevalent on its surface....
, in which he made some almost prophetic predictions about future scientific and social developments. His utopia also touched on
feministThe term Feminism can be used to describe an academic discourse, or to describe a political, cultural or economic movement aimed at establishing more rights and legal protection for women...
themes that would become more common later in the development of utopian science fiction, e.g. the two sexes becoming virtually identical in the future or women escaping "domestic slavery" (one reason for the physical changes) and being free to pursue relationships with the same freedom as men, without any extra stigma.
Other notable differences between the utopia of
Red Star and present-day society include workers having total control over their working hours, as well as more subtle differences in social behavior such as conversations being patiently "set at the level of the person with whom they were speaking and with understanding for his personality although it might very much differ from their own". The novel also gave a detailed description of blood transfusion in the Martian society.
Red Star was one of the inspirations for
Red Mars, an award-winning science fiction novel by
Kim Stanley RobinsonKim Stanley Robinson is an American science fiction writer known for his award-winning Mars trilogy. His work delves into ecological and sociological themes regularly, and many of his novels appear to be the direct result of his own scientific fascinations, such as the fifteen years of research...
. Bogdanov is the surname of the character Arkady, who is also a fictional descendant of Alexander Bogdanov.
Tectology
Bogdanov's original proposition -
Tectology - consisted of unifying all social, biological and physical sciences, by considering them as systems of relationships, and by seeking the organizational principles that underly all systems. His work "Tectology: Universal Organization Science", finished by the early 1920s, anticipated many of the ideas that were popularized later by
Norbert WienerNorbert Wiener was an American pure and applied mathematician.A famous child prodigy, Wiener went on to become a pioneer in the study of stochastic and noise processes, contributing work relevant to electronic engineering, electronic communication, and control systems.Wiener is the founder of...
in
Cybernetics and
Ludwig von BertalanffyKarl Ludwig von Bertalanffy was an Austrian-born biologist known as one of the founders of general systems theory...
in the
General Systems Theory. There are suggestions that both Wiener and von Bertalanffy might have read the German translation of "Tectology" which was published in 1928. In Russia, Lenin (and later Stalin) considered Bogdanov's natural philosophy an ideological threat to the dialectic materialism and put tectology to sleep. The rediscovery of Bogdanov's tectology occurred only in the 1970s.
Legacy
Technocracy or socialism? Both Bogdanov's fiction and his political writings as presented by Zenovia Sochor, imply that he expected the coming revolution against capitalism to lead to a technocratic society. This was because the workers lacked the knowledge and initiative to seize control of social affairs for themselves. According to this book source, this was due to the hierarchical and authoritarian nature of the capitalist production process. Another reason presented in that source was the hierarchical and authoritarian mode of organization of the Bolshevik party as well, it was problematic for this 'take over' also, although Bogdanov considered such organization necessary and inevitable... he was a Bolshevik, and in fact Lenin did have political and intellectual rivals inside his own party. The most important of these non-Leninist Bolsheviks may have been Alexander Bogdanov.
Works
- Poznanie s Istoricheskoi Tochki Zreniya (Knowledge from a Historical Viewpoint), St. Petersburg, 1901.
- Empiriomonizm: Stat'i po Filosofii (Empiriomonism: Articles on Philosophy) in 3 volumes, Moscow, 1904-1906
- Filosofiya Zhivogo Opyta: Populiarnye Ocherki (Philosophy of Living Experience: Popular Essays), St. Petersburg, 1912
- Tektologiya: Vseobschaya Organizatsionnaya Nauka in 3 volumes, Berlin and Petrograd-Moscow, 1922.
- English translation as Essays in Tektology: The General Science of Organization, trans. George Gorelik, Seaside, CA, Intersystems Publications, 1980.
- Red star : the first Bolshevik utopia, ed. Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites ; trans. Charles Rougle, Bloomington, IN, Indiana Univ. Press, 1984.
Further reading
- John Biggart, Georgii Gloveli, Avraham Yassour. Bogdanov and his Work. A guide to the published and unpublished works of Alexander A. Bogdanov (Malinovsky) 1873-1928, Aldershot, Ashgate, 1998, ISBN 1-85972-623-2
- John Biggart, Peter Dudley, Francis King, Aldershot, Ashgate (eds.), Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia, 1998, ISBN 1-85972-678-X
- Stuart Brown. Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers, London, Routledge, 2002 (first published in 1996), ISBN 0-415-06043-5
- Peter Dudley, Bogdanov's Tektology (1st Engl transl), Centre for Systems Studies, University of Hull
The University of Hull, also known as Hull University, is an English university, founded in 1927, located in Hull , a city in the East Riding of Yorkshire. The main campus is located on Cottingham Road in the north west of the city while a smaller campus is located in nearby Scarborough...
, Hull, UK, 1996
- Peter Dudley, Simona Pustylnik. Reading The Tektology: provisional findings, postulates and research directions, Centre for Systems Studies, University of Hull, Hull, UK, 1995
- George Gorelick, Bogdanov's Tektology: Nature, Development and Influences, in: Studies in Soviet Thought (1983), Vol. 26, pp. 37-57.
- Simona Pustylnik, "Biological Ideas of Bogdanov's Tektology" presented at the Int'l Conf.: Origins of Organization Theory in Russia and the Soviet Union, University of East Anglia (Norwich), Jan. 8-11, 1995
- M. E. Soboleva. A. Bogdanov und der philosophische Diskurs in Russland zu Beginn des 20. Jahrhunderts. Zur Geschichte des russischen Positivismus. Georg Olms Verlag. Hildesheim. 2007. 278 S.
External links
- International Alexander Bogdanov Institute in Russia
- Short biography and bibliography in the Virtual Laboratory
The online project Virtual Laboratory. Essays and Resources on the Experimentalization of Life, 1830-1930, located at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, is dedicated to research in the history of the experimentalization of life...
of the Max Planck Institute for the History of ScienceThe Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin was established in March 1994. Its research is primarily devoted to a theoretically oriented history of science, principally of the natural sciences, but with methodological perspectives drawn from the cognitive sciences and from...
- Red Hamlet
- Socialist Standard April 2007 page 10. Bogdanov and Technocracy
- Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History By Loren R. Graham Published by Cambridge University Press, 1993 ISBN 0521287898 - Russian technocratic influence of engineers, subsequent deaths, trials and imprisonments.
- About tectology, John A. Mikes, prepared for ICCS [International Conference on Complex Systems, New England Complex Systems Inst. Sept.21-27,1997 Nashua NH USA)