Alexander Bogdanov

Alexander Bogdanov was born into a rural teacher's family in Russia, the second of six children. He attended the Gymnasium at Tula and was admitted to the Natural Science Department of Moscow University, where he joined the Union Council of Regional Societies, and he was arrested and exiled to Tula because of it. Bogdanov was a key figure in the early history of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (later the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), and he co-founded the Bolsheviks in 1903; as a rival of Lenin, however, he was expelled from the Bolsheviks in 1909. He served as an army doctor in World War I, and became a vocal public opponent of the Lenin after the Revolution in 1917. Both Bogdanov's fiction and his political writings imply that he expected the coming revolution against capitalism to lead to a technocratic society. He developed an early form of systems theory. His 1908 novel Red Star, about a utopia set on Mars, made predictions about future scientific and social developments and dealt with themes of feminist equality and workers' rights. After years of giving himself blood transfusions in an attempt to maintain eternal youth, Bogdanov contracted malaria and tuberculosis, and died at the age of 54.