The Icon and the Axe

Bogdanov believed that the ultimate key to the future lay not in the economic relationships and class struggles that were characteristic of past history, but in the technological and ideological culture of the future that was already being created by the proletariat. Marx's fascination with dialectical struggle was an unfortunate holdover from his youthful Hegelianism. In the manner of Saint-Simon rather than Marx, Bogdanov argued that the destructive conflicts of the past would never be resolved without a positive new religion: that the unifying role once played in society by a central temple of worship and religious faith must now be played by the living temple of the proletariat and a pragmatic, socially oriented philosophy of "empiriomonism."

In a long series of studies, beginning with his Basic Elements of a Historical View of Nature in 1899, Bogdanov developed the idea that the revolutionary movement would lift man beyond the level of economics, and nature beyond all previous laws of material determinism. The key to this program of cultural regeneration within the revolutionary movement was presented in a long work published in installments throughout the decade 1913-22 under the title The Universal Organizational Science {Tectology). This new super-science of "tectology" was designed to provide a harmonious unity between the spiritual culture and the physical experience of the "working collective," in whose interest all science and activity were to be organized and all past culture reworked.59

Bogdanov felt that the creation of a new proletarian culture should precede the political annexation of power by the Bolsheviks. His concept of God-building through tectology was designed-like Sorel's concurrent call for a new heroic myth-to kindle enthusiasm and assure the revolutionary movement of success not only in gaining power but also in transforming society. Like Sorel, Bogdanov was enthusiastic over the initial Bolshevik annexation of power; and he rushed into print with a series of writings designed to spell out the God-building possibilities of the new society: the second part of his Tectology (1917) and two Utopian novels, Red Star (1918) and Engineer Menni (1919). Though originally published in 1908, Red Star produced its greatest impact when it appeared in the second, 1918 edition.60 Its image of an earth dweller suddenly transported to another planet which was in a feverish ecstasy of socialist construction seemed to many the image of a new socialist society into which Russia might suddenly leap. The novel was reprinted several times; and Bogdanov's organization for the creation of Proletarian Culture (JProletkuli) enjoyed nationwide

popularity throughout the period of Civil War and "war communism"- publishing about twenty journals throughout Russia during those difficult days.

Late in 1920 Lenin forced the subordination of the hitherto freewheeling Proletkult to the Commissariat for Education. Bogdanov's organization was censured for its claim to have brought about "immediate socialism" in the cultural sphere, a proletarian culture totally emancipated from the bourgeois past. Bogdanov, for his part, in a suppressed pamphlet of 1919, had already expressed the fear that the new rulers were merely a parasitic class of managerial organizers.61 Proletkult was soon abolished altogether; he and his followers, the so-called Workers' Truth group, denounced; and his prestige undercut by the time Tectology was completed in 1922. Bogdanov spent his last days in the relatively obscure but appropriately visionary post of director of an institute for "the Struggle for Vital Capacity" (Zhiznesposobnost'). He died in 1928, apparently from a dangerous experiment involving transfusions of his own blood-a front-line casualty, as it were, in his undaunted efforts to take harmony and immortality away from imaginary gods and put them into the real life of men. The most extreme Prometheanism of the age was found in the so-called Cosmist movement, an offshoot of the God-building movement that flourished in St. Petersburg during the Civil War years of 1918-21. The Cosmists and the closely related Blacksmith {Kuznitsa) group of Moscow poets spoke with a kind of frenzied hyperbole about the imminent transformation of the entire cosmos. Under the leadership of Alexis Kuz'min, who took the appropriate pen name Extreme (Kraisky) and entitled his first fantastic book of poems The Smiles of the Sun,62 the Cosmists burst forth with expletives: "We shall arrange the stars in rows and put reins on the moon" and "We shall erect upon the canals of Mars the palace of World Freedom."63