Alexander Bogdanov
Alexander Aleksandrovich Bogdanov (Russian: Александр Александрович Богданов; 22 August 1873 [O.S. 10 August] – 7 April 1928), born Alexander Malinovsky, was a Russian and later Soviet physician, philosopher, science fiction writer, and Bolshevik revolutionary. He was a polymath who pioneered blood transfusion, as well as general systems theory, and made important contributions to cybernetics.
He was a key figure in the early history of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (later the Communist Party of the Soviet Union), originally established 1898, and of its Bolshevik faction. 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 and Dov Ber Borochov.
Bogdanov co-founded the Bolsheviks in 1903, when they split with the Menshevik faction. He was a rival within the Bolsheviks to Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), 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 subsequently established his own faction Vpered. Following the Russian Revolutions of 1917, when the Bolsheviks came to power in the collapsing Russian Republic, he was an influential critic of the Bolshevik government and Lenin from a Marxist leftist perspective during the first decade of the subsequent Soviet Union in the 1920s.
Bogdanov received training in medicine and psychiatry. His wide scientific and medical interests ranged from the universal systems theory to the possibility of human rejuvenation through blood transfusion. He invented an original philosophy called "tectology", now regarded as a forerunner of systems theory. He was also an economist, culture theorist, science fiction writer, and political activist. Lenin depicted him as one of the "Russian Machists".
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