Bogdanov and His Work

Alexander Bogdanov was a co-founder, with Lenin, of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party in 1904. After 1905, Bogdanov criticized Lenin's adaption of Bolshevism to the requirements of Duma politics and his authoritarian style of leadership. Expelled from the Bolshevik fraction in 1909, he at first formed the Forward faction of the RSDRP and then turned increasingly to scholarly and publicistic work. In 1910 he published Faith and Science, replying to Lenin's Materialism and Empiriocritcism, which had been written to discredit him. His ideas on the sociology of culture led to the founding of the Proletkult in 1917 and during the 1920s these ideas were taken up, adapted and often distorted in the course of the 'Cultural Revolution'. Bogdanov's textbooks in sociology and economics were widely used during the 1920s. Seeking to liberate Marxism from the shackles of Hegelianism, he developed a theory of 'organizational science' ('Tektology') which influenced early economic planning through the work of Groman and Bazarov. As a systems thinker, Bogdanov is now viewed as a precursor of Ludwig von Berthalanffy and Norbert Wiener. Arrested by the GPU in 1923, for alleged political opposition, Bogdanov withdrew even further from public life and returned to medicine, his original calling. In 1926 he founded the first Russian Institute of Blood Transfusion, presiding over pioneering work in this sphere until 1928 when he died. During the Stalin years, Bogdanov's works were judged to be heretical and were not republished. It was not until 1989 that his 'Universal Organizational Science' was republished, though his contribution to systems thinking had been recognized by Russian and East European systems thinkers as early as the 1960s. In the West. the importance of Bogdanov as a 'cultural Marxist', as an influence upon Gramsci, and as a pioneer in systems thinking, is increasingly being acknowledged. This bibliography of Bogdanov's works takes advantage of the opening of the Party and State archives and provides references to the principal relevant archives in Europe and the United States. Its publication is a landmark in the history of Bolshevism and in the history of Russian social thought.