The bloody affair of the revolution

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130 years ago, on August 22, 1873, Russian scientist Alexander Malinovsky, better known as Bogdanov, was born. In Soviet times, this surname was inclined mainly in connection with Vladimir Lenin’s struggle against idealism, “god-building” and other deviations from the general line. Actually, Alexander Bogdanov’s whole life consisted of deviations: revolutionary, political prisoner, Proletkult theorist, member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, then their ideological opponent. He is a psychiatrist, science fiction writer, philosopher, economist, and finally, the organizer of the world's first Institute of Blood Transfusion. And also the founder of modern management, the theory of which he outlined 90 years ago.

A stranger among his own
Alexander Alexandrovich Malinovsky, who later took the pseudonym Bogdanov, was born in the city of Sokolka, Grodno province, in the family of a physics teacher. Having graduated from a classical gymnasium with a gold medal (where, according to his recollections, “the maliciously stupid authorities taught me through experience to fear and hate those in power and deny authority”), he entered the physics and mathematics department of Moscow University. From where he was expelled due to his arrest and deportation to Tula - like many at that time, the student successfully combined his studies with the “school of revolution”, joining the People’s Will “Union Council of Compatriots”. In exile, Bogdanov came to the conclusion that he was quite mature to teach others - he independently translated Marx’s “Capital”, taught classes in workers’ circles and wrote, based on the materials of these lessons, “A Short Course in Economic Science” (1897), which was published until 1917 over 10 years ago. publications One of the first reviewers to highly appreciate the book (“a remarkable phenomenon in our economic literature”) was then still an ordinary party publicist Vladimir Ulyanov.

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In the long-term game, started by Bogdanov and Lenin back in Capri, no one won...

Nevertheless, upon returning from exile, Bogdanov decided to continue his own education and entered the medical faculty of Kharkov University. The year of graduation was marked for him by two more important events: he wrote his first philosophical book, “Basic Elements of a Historical View of Nature,” and was arrested for the second time. By that time, Bogdanov had become a convinced Social Democrat.
Then began the life of a professional revolutionary. He settled in Vologda, where, having a psychiatric practice, he concurrently edited Pravda, but not the newspaper - it did not exist yet - but the Marxist magazine of the same name. After the split of the RSDLP in 1903, Alexander Bogdanov joined the Bolsheviks and later even became a member of the Central Committee of their party, and during the revolution of 1905, together with Leonid Krasin, he headed a combat technical group that provided the rebels with weapons. After the defeat of the revolution, a new arrest followed, and at the end of 1907 Bogdanov emigrated to Switzerland.
Around the same years, his ideological skirmish began with that same benevolent reviewer, now the leader of the Bolsheviks, who took the pseudonym Lenin. Their disputes did not subside until October 1917, and the embers of polemics smoldered even after, when only very brave people or very naive people could afford to object to the new government. While still underground, Bogdanov led a group of “otzovists” who opposed the presence of Bolsheviks in legal organizations and demanded the recall of socialist deputies from the Duma. That is, at that time he was to the left of Lenin himself!
Bogdanov, together with Lunacharsky, Gorky and other left-wing intellectuals, advocated for the creation of a special “proletarian religion” and expressed many other utopian ideas that irritated the famous pragmatist Lenin (the leader called such wise men “God-seekers” and “God-builders”). On top of that, Bogdanov shared the views of not only Marx, but also the Austrian physicist and idealist philosopher Ernst Mach, which in the eyes of the author of the book “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism” was tantamount to a crime.

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In essence, it turned out to be a draw: the scientist was expelled from the Central Committee and the party, but remained free and in science

However, by that time, Alexander Bogdanov’s claims to the Bolsheviks were not limited to the framework of abstract philosophy. The scientist was busy building a unified picture of the world and did not see a place for violence and class struggle in his harmonious scheme. According to Bogdanov, the revolution could and should have happened only when the necessary conditions were created for this, first of all, when a “new man” appeared with a consciousness imbued with the spirit of collectivism. As you know, the leader of the Bolsheviks considered this a pure utopia (and he was right in his own way) and proposed the exact opposite: first get involved in the revolution, and then we’ll see.
On that path, Bogdanov and the Bolsheviks parted ways. In 1909, he became involved in revolutionary education, creating on the island of Capri, together with Gorky and Lunacharsky, the “Higher Social Democratic School” to train worker propagandists and study issues of proletarian culture. Two years later, the proponent of the anti-Marxist line was removed from the Central Committee, and then completely expelled from the party, after which he withdrew from politics, taking up science.

Following the example of many other socialists, Bogdanov wrote a utopia. The author of the story, Lenin, was dissatisfied with Bogdanov’s performance

Alexander Bogdanov returned to Russia in 1913, and when the First World War began, he went to the front as a regimental doctor. He did not accept Lenin’s slogan about turning the imperialist war into a civil war, seeing in the latter the danger of “wasting the best forces of the people,” and he generally found the idea of world revolution illusory. Bogdanov warmly welcomed the February Revolution, because he believed that it “can and should end in a democratic republic,” but he reacted negatively to the October Revolution. In 1918, when the Cheka was already in full swing, Bogdanov was not afraid to describe the transfer of power into the hands of the proletariat as a political adventure leading to the long-term dominance of the new, communist oligarchy. Plus, he was an opponent of the policy of war communism, although he himself first used this term in one of his works in 1917.
It’s amazing how, with such views, Alexander Bogdanov was able to survive and even remain free: in those years they were imprisoned for less. However, he did not enter into open conflict with his former comrades; there were other “saving” circumstances, which will be discussed below.
Be that as it may, Bogdanov not only survived, but even managed to advance on the cultural and scientific fronts. Having started teaching economics at Moscow University (by the way, on Lenin’s personal recommendation), he simultaneously set about creating a proletarian culture, free from the layers of the past. True, the “red Hamlet,” as Bogdanov’s contemporaries called him, even in the role of one of the ideologists of Proletkult, was distinguished by a duality of judgment unusual for that time, he experienced doubts and asked himself questions to which he often did not find an answer. The same cannot be said about the majority of his followers, who did not suffer from intellectual slackness and resolutely called for “throwing Pushkin off the ship of modernity.” And the fact that Bogdanov classified the issue of cultural construction as a philosophical one - as one of the links in the “universal organizational science” he created (more on this below) - then, it seems, no one understood.

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The Bolshevik elite followed the research of the Institute of Blood Transfusion located in Igumnov’s house with deep personal interest.

Marx's teaching on Mars
Even before the revolution, the violent creative energy of Alexander Bogdanov found an unexpected outlet. In 1908, he published the novel Red Star, one of Russia's first Marxist literary utopias, and in 1913, its sequel, Manny the Engineer.
Bogdanov did not reinvent the wheel. He throws the contemporary hero to Mars, where he introduces him and readers to the wonders of the local civilization, which is significantly ahead of the earthly one. The Martians wanted to share their best practices with humanity and, for this purpose, sent agents to Earth to look for a worthy contactee. The choice of the Martians, who arrived in Russia just at the beginning of the 1905 revolution, fell on the socialist Leonid, an individualist and owner who had almost become obsolete. He had to see with his own eyes the achievements of the Martians and, returning home, tell his comrades in the struggle about everything. The author, of course, did not suspect that the time was not far when the victorious Bolsheviks would do much the same thing - they would invite carefully selected Western intellectuals like Wells, Feuchtwanger and Andre Gide to Soviet Russia in order to turn them into agents of influence who would tell their countries about the great victories of the most advanced system.

Photo: ILYA PITALEV

Martian socialism appears as an exhibition of technological progress. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Bogdanov talks about digital machines serving production, about an interplanetary ship with a nuclear engine, the industrial use of radioactive elements, artificial protein, television, cinema (not only sound, but also stereoscopic), typewriters capable of working under dictation, synthetic fibers, etc. Of course, some of the modern terms mentioned here were unknown to the author, but the essence of what they mean is conveyed with amazing accuracy.
However, upon becoming acquainted with the Martian social structure, life and customs, the reader, a contemporary of Bogdanov, should have had a doubt: is this utopia so ideal? It can be assumed that with descriptions of free love (on Mars there is no institution of marriage and women are equal to men in everything, so Bogdanov can be considered a prophet of the gender revolution), the author simply added fuel to the fire of the debate that was then raging in Russian society. These scenes, by the way, were carefully cut out in the first Soviet re-release in 1979 after a half-century break. The novel was published by the Young Guard, and the Komsomol publishing house’s concern for the moral purity of the younger generation can be understood. It’s more difficult with other fragments that reflect Bogdanov’s internal conflict. This is a dispute between a social utopian and a scientist who impartially records where and when utopia has gone astray and taken a wrong turn.

Fedorov, Mach, Taylor (from top to bottom) - three sources of Bogdanov’s philosophical views. It is not surprising that already in the 30s and 40s his works ended up in a special storage facility

The price for Martian socialism, where there is no place for the market and competition, was general equalization, leveling of personality and barracks order. This is not news for us, but let us remind you that the work was published in 1908, and thus the writer acted as a visionary here too. Further, on Mars, wars and politics are a thing of the past, and all conflicts are in the sphere of struggle with nature - on an overpopulated planet with rapidly dwindling resources, one cannot expect an easy life. (By the way, the idea to write a novel “about how the predators of capitalism robbed the earth, wasting all the oil, all the iron, wood, all the coal” was given to Bogdanov in Capri by none other than his regular chess partner Lenin.) True, stress in the absence of wars and political squabbles have not disappeared, but, on the contrary, bloom in full bloom. There are even special clinics on Mars for those wishing to end their lives. In short, the Martian society is seriously thinking about moving to a more habitable planet, and there are only two of them in the neighborhood - Venus and Earth.
The ending of the work is dramatic, as if the author remembered that he was writing not a philosophical treatise, but a novel. While discussing options for the colonization of our planet, one of Leonid’s new acquaintances unexpectedly proposes to destroy every single earthling - so that they don’t suffer! All the same, even if their socialism wins, it will certainly take some ugly forms in the presence of remnants such as militarism, patriotism and nationalism. Hearing this, Leonid, understandably, could not restrain himself and hit his frail Martian comrade (on Mars the gravity is less than on Earth), so much so that he gave up the ghost. It is unclear what was more in this explosion of emotions - resentment for his fellow tribesmen or jealousy (the murdered man shared their common lover with Leonid, which is a common thing on Mars). After which the contactee, who was unable to suppress his atavisms, was quietly sent back to Earth, and there the hero’s excited stories about his experiences naturally led him to the psychiatric hospital.
All these Martian passions at the beginning of the century were perceived with great interest and without a shadow of irony. But other revelations of the author, unfortunately, went almost unnoticed. For example, those contained in the second part of the dilogy, which sets out the background of the Martian utopia (we are talking about the era of the construction of the Grand Canals). It was “Engineer Manny” that Lenin sharply criticized: “The same Machism-idealism, hidden in such a way that neither the workers nor the stupid editors in Pravda understood.” It’s good that at that time such a description received from the leader did not yet mean automatic inclusion in the “enemies of the people.”

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The experience of “comradely exchange of life not only in ideological, but also physiological existence” turned into an ordinary death for Bogdanov

Organized universe
In fact, the novel was just a popular presentation of a coherent and coherent scientific concept developed by Bogdanov in the three-volume monograph “General Organizational Science” (the first two volumes were published in 1913 and 1917, the third in 1922).
Bogdanov called his science tektology, starting from the Greek root “tek”, which forms a whole bunch of words with a “creative” meaning, such as “tekton” (builder) and “tekne” (craft, profession, art). Before Bogdanov, the term “tectology” was used only by the German philosopher Ernst Haeckel, but in relation only to the laws of organization of living beings (by the way, he also coined the term “ecology”). The Russian thinker proceeded from the fact that tectology would unite all sciences known at that time, as well as all spheres of human life (biological, psychological, social, informational, etc.), considering them as systems based on common organizational principles. Thus, Bogdanov considered technology to be the “organization of things,” economics to be the “organization of people,” and ideology, which is logical, to be the “organization of ideas.”
Descending from heaven to earth, the scientist developed many practical applications, the significance of which could only be appreciated at the end of the last century. What is worth at least such a proposal from a visionary scientist: to use mathematical methods to analyze the activities of an organization - in particular, to determine the optimal measure of its decentralization! Today it is well known that any centralization and specialization over time becomes a brake that prevents the introduction of new things, and that any enterprise or team needs to be thoroughly shaken up from time to time - reoriented, but not spontaneously, but according to a carefully thought-out development strategy.
All these commonplace truths for today’s managers smacked of heresy a century ago. Only in the second half of the last century did it become clear that the basic principles of the emerging theory of systems, cybernetics, synergetics, management psychology, management (up to the newfangled reengineering) were long ago described by Bogdanov in his “General Organizational Science”.
By 1930-1940, the scientist’s works, published in scanty editions, naturally migrated to special storage facilities. However, tectology, one might say, is still lucky. After the October Revolution of 1917, Bogdanov was defended, unknowingly, by the American engineer Frederick Taylor, the author of the theory of scientific management (and this very term, translated into French as “scientific organization of labor” and into German as “rationalization”).
Taylor's ideas, as well as the results of their practical implementation by Ford and other Western industrialists in Russia, were actively discussed even before the revolution. In 1908, small-circulation publications such as the magazines "Metalist" and "Notes of the Russian Technical Society" first reported the existence of Taylor and his theory to a narrow circle of Russian readers. And the peak of popularity of Taylorism occurred in the pre-war year - 1913, when the domestic economy was very receptive to all progressive trends from the West. The American engineer became the ruler of thoughts in Russia; his theories were discussed in student classrooms, ministerial offices, even at Duma meetings. Not everyone shared Taylor's views. Among the critics who considered the domestic economy not ripe for such progressive innovations was Ulyanov (Lenin), the author of the article “The Taylor System - the Enslavement of Man by Machine.”
However, after the Bolsheviks came to power, their leader’s attitude towards Taylorism changed. Already in 1918, Lenin declared that it was impossible to build socialism without a high labor culture and no less high productivity, and they, in turn, are achievable only with in-depth study and widespread introduction of elements of Taylorism into a planned economy. Red economist-enthusiasts took the leader’s instructions as a guide to action and began the total Taylorization of Soviet industry.
Two years later, the authorities financially supported one of Bogdanov’s associates in the Plaletkult, a personnel revolutionary, a metallurgist worker and poet Alexei Gastev, nicknamed the Russian Taylor, allocating several million rubles in gold to create a central institute of labor, which Gastev headed. And Bogdanov himself, in connection with his ideological proximity to Taylorism, was not only not persecuted, but even seemed to be on horseback. In 1923, he, however, was arrested, but quickly released and no longer touched. The time of "reactionary Taylorism - the tools of enslavement of the proletariat" has not yet come, respectively, it was far from the shooting of the "enemy of the people" of Gastev and the closure of its institute.

Temple of science on blood
We can say that on the theoretical developments of Bogdanov, a socialist planned economy and the Soviet school of managers grew up. At the same time, the scientist all his life remained an eclectic, combining often incompatible. And even his death mixed in one pile - a scientific feat and adventure, natural science and mysticism.
Bogdanov, in principle, could spy his life final in his own “red star”. There, among other Martian wild dicks, the ritual of universal blood metabolism is described, with the help of which the Martians achieve the rejuvenation of the body with the aim of longevity (or, as they call this process of natives, "a friendly exchange of life not only in the ideological, but also physiological existence"). And it is no coincidence that the image of a vampire was placed in the “engineer of Manny”, who tempted one of the Martian eternal life, as the devilish second “I” of Ivan Karamazov at Dostoevsky was tempting.
For many years, Bogdanov was vividly interested in the “bloody” traditions and folklore of different peoples - from pagan rituals of bathing in the blood and legends of vampires to the Christian rite of the Eucharist (familiarization with the blood of Christ). In exile, he had to listen to the lectures of the famous German mystic Rudolf Steiner, and one of them “Fundamentals of Occult Medicine” made an indelible impression on the Russian Social Democrat. Steiner spoke in her about blood as a carrier of all information about the human person. And in the last years of Bogdanov’s life, like many of his contemporaries, he was fascinated by the equally extravagant ideas of the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Fedorov, who offered to resurrect all the dead in order to achieve eternal life - and not in the other world, but in our real!
At that time, many scientists, even far from mysticism, considered the bearer of hereditary information precisely blood, not genes. (The basic laws of heredity were opened in the century before last, but the term “gene” itself appeared only in 1909.) And for Bogdanov, a doctor by profession and philosopher by vocation, mutual blood transfusion was not only medical practice, albeit with a certain a mystical accent, but also a means of achieving the global unity of humanity, which in this case became one family in every sense.
The new authorities, who gave Bogdanov “Good” to create the world's first blood transfusion institution in the world (currently the Institute of Hematology and Blood Transfamation of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation) believed little of this mysticism. (Here, however, it is appropriate to recall what color the Soviet state flag was.) They proceeded from more pragmatic reasons. In the 1920s, part of the party elite thought about the eternal and was not averse to supporting the research of scientists who promised various rejuvenation options and even the achievement of immortality. First of all, of course, the party veterans. By the way, the aforementioned institute, which was opened in 1926, whose first director Bogdanov was shared the building of the former mansion of the merchant Igumnov on Bolshaya Yakimanka (then there was an embassy of France) with an equally colorful institution - the brain institution that grew out of the Labor Laboratory.
The first experiments on mutual blood transfusion aroused interest and support in the Kremlin. But on April 7, 1928, the next experiment conducted by the director of the institute on himself ended tragically. Bogdanov decided to exchange blood with a student, sick malaria and tuberculosis, and could not know that they had a different Rh factor (the latter was discovered in the United States only 12 years later). After the death of Bogdanov, his employees continued to study, having achieved success in the field of blood conservation. During the Patriotic War, a third of all blood reserves in the country was prepared at the Bogdanov Institute.
Live the scientist and the philosopher longer, he would most likely share the fate of many smarters like him. Bogdanov would recall the polemic with Ilyich, and the rejection of the October Revolution, and the “reactionary fraud”, and the suspicious extra -class tectology. The son, a major Russian biologist and philosopher philosopher Alexander Alexandrovich Malinovsky, born in 1909 in Paris (his godfather was Lunacharsky), who went in his own experience, learned what two “sales girls of imperialism”-genetics and cybernetics in 1909. After the arrests of his teachers and colleagues-geneticists and the sadly famous session of the 1948, Malinovsky was fired from work. And even in more liberal times (he died in 1996), he was repeatedly “worked out” for too strong the fascination with the theory of systems and the theory of management, the appearance of which his father predicted and which the world had long lived behind the iron curtain.
VLADIMIR GAKOV

Magazine "Kommersant Money" No. 33 dated 08.25.2003, p. 45