Alexander Bogdanov - Bolshevism

Bolshevism

Bogdanov dates his support for Bolshevism from autumn of 1903. Early in 1904, Martin Lyadov was sent by the Bolsheviks in Geneva to seek out supporters in Russia. He found a sympathetic group of revolutionaries in Tver. Bogdanov was then sent by the Tver Committee to Geneva, where he was greatly impressed by Lenin's One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. Bogdanov was arrested on 3 December 1905 and held in prison until 27 May 1906. Upon release he was exiled to Bezhetsk for three years. However he obtained permission to spend his exile abroad, and joined Lenin in Kokkola, Finland. For the next six years, Bogdanov was a major figure among the early Bolsheviks, second only to Vladimir Lenin in influence. In 1904-1906, he published three volumes of the philosophic treatise Empiriomonizm (Empiriomonism), in which he tried to merge Marxism with the philosophy of Ernst Mach, Wilhelm Ostwald, and Richard Avenarius. His work later affected a number of Russian Marxist theoreticians, including Nikolai Bukharin. In 1907, he helped organize the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery with both Lenin and Leonid Krasin.

For four years after the collapse of the Russian Revolution of 1905, Bogdanov led a group within the Bolsheviks ("ultimatists" and "otzovists" or "recallists"), who demanded a recall of Social Democratic deputies from the State Duma, and he vied with Lenin for the leadership of the Bolshevik faction. By mid-1908, the factionalism with the Bolsheviks had become irreconcilable. A majority of Bolshevik leaders either supported Bogdanov or were undecided between him and Lenin. 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 Paris organized by the editorial board of the Bolshevik magazine Proletary and was expelled from the Bolsheviks.

He joined his brother-in-law Anatoly Lunacharsky, Maxim Gorky, and other Vperedists on the island of Capri, where they started a school for Russian factory workers. In 1910, Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Mikhail Pokrovsky, and their supporters moved the school to Bologna, where they continued teaching classes through 1911, while Lenin and his allies soon started a rival school outside of Paris. Bogdanov broke with the Vpered in 1911 and abandoned revolutionary activities. After six years of his political exile in Europe, Bogdanov returned to Russia in 1914, following an amnesty.

Bogdanov's innovative work on the comparative study of the economic and military power of the European nations, written in 1912-1913, was the first interdisciplinary work ever on systems analysis, which he later merged with tectology. Bogdanov discovered many of what have become the modern principles of systems theory and systems analysis, although his research remained unknown to the systems theory community until many decades after his death. His works on systems analysis were not translated in his lifetime.