Red Star
Page 1
RED STAR
Soviet History, Politics, Society, and Thought
James Michael Holquist and
Alexander Rabinowitch,
general editors
ADVISORY BOARD
Katerina Clark
Stephen F. Cohen
Murray Feshbach
Loren Graham
Gail W. Lapidus
Moshe Lewin
Sidney Monas
S. Frederick Starr
RED STAR
The First Bolshevik Utopia
Alexander Bogdanov
Red Star
Engineer Menni
A Martian Stranded on Earth
EDITED BY
Loren R. Graham and Richard Stites
TRANSLATED BY
Charles Rougle
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
BLOOMINGTON AND INDIANAPOLIS
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Bogdanov, A. (Aleksandr), 1873–1928.
Red star.
(Soviet history, politics, society, and thought)
Contents: Red star—Engineer Menni—Martian stranded on Earth.
1. Bogdanov, A. (Aleksandr), 1873–1928—Translations, English. I. Graham, Loren R. II. Stites, Richard. III. Rougle, Charles, 1946– IV. Title. V. Series.
PG3467.M29A27 1984 897.1’33 83-48637
ISBN 978-0-253-17350-8
ISBN 978-0-253-20317-5 (pbk.)
5 6 7 8 9 12 11 10 09 08 07
CONTENTS
Preface
Fantasy and Revolution: Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Bolshevik Science Fiction / Richard Stites
RED STAR: A Utopia
ENGINEER MENNI: A NOVEL OF FANTASY
A MARTIAN STRANDED ON EARTH: A Poem
Bogdanov’s Inner Message / Loren R. Graham
Selected Bibliography
Preface
The first edition of Red Star appeared in St. Petersburg in 1908. It was reissued in Petrograd and in Moscow in 1918, and again in Moscow in 1922. A stage version was produced by Proletcult theater in 1920. In 1928, after Bogdanov’s death, it was published as a supplement to Around the World. It was not again reissued in the Soviet Union for almost fifty years, until 1979, when it was anthologized in a slightly expurgated version in the collection The Eternal Sun: Russian Social Utopia and Science Fiction. It appeared in a German translation in 1923, and this was reprinted in 1972. An Esperanto edition came out in Leipzig in 1929, celebrating, no doubt, the Esperantists’ admiration of unilingual utopias. The first English translation recently appeared in Pre-Revolutionary Russian Science Fiction: An Anthology (1982), edited by Leland Fetzer. There were at least six editions of Engineer Menni between 1913 and 1923, and it was reissued also by Around the World in 1929. The present translations are of the original 1908 and 1913 editions. Chronologically, Engineer Menni comes first as a historical novel about the social revolution on Mars long before Leonid’s voyage of 1905–06. We have placed Red Star first, however, because it was written first and because this order makes for better reading. As a writer, Bogdanov was no master of style, and so we have given preference to clarity over literalness of translation, without omitting or violating anything essential. For the Martian place names, we have used the standard classical terminology still employed by astronomers (and used by Bogdanov in Russian translation). The illustrations for Red Star are taken from the 1923 Moscow edition.
The editors and translator wish to thank the following people for reading and commenting on our work: in Philadelphia, Mark Adams; in New York, Abraham Ascher and Kenneth Jensen; in Leeds, Moira Donald; in Washington, D.C., Murray Feshbach; in Helsinki, Ben Hell-man, Eugene Holman, Pekka Pesonen, and Ilmari Susiluoto; in Turku, Kurt Johansson; in Berkeley, Louise McReynolds; in Freiburg, Thomas Markowsky; in Montreal, Darko Suvin. Charles Rougle and Richard Stites thank each other for what Bogdanov would have called our “comradely exchange of labor” in Helsinki in the summer of 1982. Loren Graham and Richard Stites thank each other for joining together our once independent projects. We all thank Janet Rabinowitch of Indiana University Press for her stubborn faith in our work.
RED STAR
FANTASY AND REVOLUTION
Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Bolshevik Science Fiction
Richard Stites
“Blood is being shed [down there] for the sake of a better future,” says the Martian to the hero of Red Star as they are ascending to Mars. “But in order to wage the struggle we must know that future.” The blood he speaks of was the blood of workers shot down in the streets of St. Petersburg, of revolutionaries put against the wall of prison courtyards, of insurgent sailors and soldiers, of Jewish victims of pogroms in the Russian Revolution of 1905. And by “that better future” he means not the immediate outcome of the revolution but the radiant future of socialism that will dawn on earth after revolution has triumphed everywhere. In order to inspect the coming socialist order, the hero—a Bolshevik activist named Leonid—has accepted the invitation of a Martian visitor to fly with him and his crew to Mars.
In this manner Alexander Bogdanov, a major prophet of the Bolshevik movement and one of its most versatile writers and thinkers, begins his Utopian science fiction novel Red Star, first published in 1908. The red star is Mars; but it is also the dream set to paper of the kind of society that could emerge on Earth after the dual victory of the scientific-technical revolution and the social revolution. Bogdanov, a professional revolutionary, was one of those people, peculiar to revolutionary societies of our century, who moved easily back and forth between the barricade and the study table, the prison cell and the laboratory. He was a physician and a man of science; and he was the first in Russian fiction to combine a technical utopia, grounded in the latest scientific theories of the time, with the ideas of revolutionary Marxism. This was the central theme of both Red Star and his other novel, Engineer Menni.
Bogdanov’s revolutionary Martian fantasy grew out of his personal experiences as a Marxist during the Revolution of 1905, the popularity of science fiction in Russia around the turn of the century, and his still developing theory of tectology, the science of systems thinking and organization. Bogdanov was born in Tula in 1873 to an educated family, studied science and psychology in Moscow and Kharkov, and received a medical degree in 1899. By that time he had also become a Populist and then a Marxist. On the surface, Bogdanov’s path from medicine to revolution appears typical of radical Russians of that age in that so many of them—Mark Natanson, Fëdor Dan, Vera Figner, among others—had begun their love affair with “the people” by learning how to cure their physical illnesses. Unlike most of the
m, Bogdanov did not abandon science for revolution: rather, he deepened and extended his study of physiology, technology, and natural science and combined them with his own version of Marxian sociology. An early member of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Party—the matrix of Bolshevism and Menshevism—Bogdanov worked as an underground agent, fomenting agitation and disseminating propaganda among workers, students, and educated society in Moscow as well as in provincial towns far distant from the two capitals. In terms of on-the-spot experience, he was one of the best informed of the Social Democrat leaders about actual life and labor conditions in Russian cities. As a physician he was also keenly aware of the social misery of poor people in the burgeoning factory centers of industrializing Russia. His repugnance for the contemporary city reveals itself in his loving description of the Utopian factory settlements of Red Star and the dreadful working conditions in Engineer Menni. Numerous arrests and terms in exile punctuated his revolutionary career, and these experiences—often called the university education of radicals—threw him into contact with like-minded young thinkers and rebels such as Anatol Lunacharsky, future Bolshevik Commissar of Education and Culture, Fëdor Bazarov, a well-known economist, and I. I. Skvortsov-Stepanov, publicist, economist, and writer on atheism.
When the newly formed Russian Marxist party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903, Bogdanov—like the hero of Red Star—chose the more impetuous and revolutionary current of Bolshevism headed by Lenin. Bogdanov was among the original Bolsheviks (not yet a separate party), one of those “twenty-two,” with Lenin as the central figure, who fashioned in Switzerland early in 1904 a group dedicated to disciplined revolutionary action. In the stormy years of war and revolution from 1904 to 1907, Lenin and Bogdanov were close associates, with Lenin mostly in emigration and Bogdanov inside Russia organizing and directing the underground network of party cells and organizations. In 1905 the social unrest that had been brewing since the 1890s exploded in a revolution that swept over the vast expanse of the Russian land. In an unprecedented display of revolutionary energy, workers, peasants, soldiers, sailors, intellectuals, teachers, students, schoolchildren, priests, actresses, musicians, and people of every rank of society revolted; they demonstrated, shouted down their former masters, fought, struck, boycotted, burned out manor houses, and in every imaginable way disrupted society. In the midst of this ferment, Tsar Nicholas II issued a constitution and created a parliament. Then the authorities struck out with vengeful fury to punish the insurgents and restore order to the beleaguered empire. Martial law, drumhead trials and shootings, brutal punitive expeditions, and murderous repression of urban uprisings crushed the radical wing of the revolution and drowned it in blood.
Bogdanov, like thousands of other revolutionaries, was seized with the spirit of insurgence, heroism, and hope. He saw what superior military technology could do against insufficiently armed and organized revolutionary forces. And yet the revolutionary élan generated by the recent events was so highly developed that even in the summer of 1907, when the tide was visibly and rapidly ebbing, Bogdanov was still hoping for a resumption of action that would turn the tide again. This led him to a tactical quarrel with Lenin, who was convinced that the revolution was over. And it led Bogdanov to write Red Star—a novel of revolutionary optimism set in a far-distant utopia.
The spectacle of fire and devastation in the 1905 revolution formed the backdrop for Bogdanov’s story. The revolution is the scene of the opening and the closing chapters, and it also underlies the fantasy world of Mars. The voyage itself and the accompanying technological explanations, though striking in predictive detail, were not wholly original. “Mars, gleaming red and hateful,” had been the object of fascination to astronomers since antiquity. But the man most responsible for generating public speculation about life on Mars for almost a century was Giovanni Schiaparelli, whose observations in the late 1870s and early 1880s from a Milan observatory led him to use the word canali to indicate the straight lines he detected on the surface of the planet. The word, normally meaning channels or natural waterways, was quickly mistranslated as “canals,” suggesting massive engineering projects, a huge labor force, and advanced minds (it had recently taken ten years to dig a hundred miles of the Suez Canal). The specter of human life on Mars was fleshed out by the American astronomer Percival Lowell, who claimed to have identified four hundred canals by 1900. His Mars and Its Canals (1906), with its depiction of a complex network of man-made waterways, great engineers, and a struggle against a dying environment, may have been a direct inspiration for Bogdanov.
The first novel to capitalize on Schiaparelli’s “canals” was Percy Gregg’s Across the Zodiac, which appeared in London in 1880, complete with “apergy”—an antigravity substance—huge canals, an engineer hero, advanced humans, and orange vegetation with red foliage, all discovered by human astronauts. More ambitious and plausible was Kurd Lasswitz’s Auf zwei Planeten (1897), which brought large-eyed Martians to Earth. In an elaborate plot, Martians and Earthmen, Martian militarists and pacifists, are locked in friction. The issues are finally resolved in favor of democracy and peace. (A generation of German scientists was raised on this novel, although it was banned by the Nazis in the 1930s for its exaltation of internationalism and antimilitarism.) In 1897–98 also appeared the much more famous War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells, a writer who enjoyed enormous popularity in Russia at the time. Bogdanov in 1908 may have drawn from all of these, updating them with the latest speculation in science and technology, including the writings of the Russian rocketry pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. What Bogdanov added was a communist utopia on Mars.
But there was also a rich native tradition of Utopian science fiction to draw from. From about 1890 to the eve of the Revolution of 1917, at least twenty Russian tales of Utopian societies, fantastic voyages, and interstellar space travel appeared. Some of these were blatant copies of the numerous Western science fiction novels that were widely circulated and serialized in translation in the same period. Others drew on native Russian Utopian dreams of the nineteenth century, such as Vladimir Odoevsky’s The Year 4338 (1840), Nicholas Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done? (1863), and Vladimir Taneev’s The Communist State of the Future (1879). Still others were antisocialist tracts written in the form of “warnings” of the danger of Utopian collectivism, materialism, and a dehumanizing high technology—predecessors of the famous anticommunist dystopias of the mid-twentieth century: Eugene Zamyatin’s We (1920), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1931), and George Orwell’s 1984 (1948). In addition to these, scientific and popular science journals of the period were full of stories and speculations about rocketry, space travel, alien life, and new forms of energy and fuel. There is hardly anything in the technology of Leonid’s voyage to Mars that did not appear either in scientific writings or in the science fiction of the period before 1907.
The industrialization of Russia in the 1890s and the accompanying growth of technology, transport, and urbanization opened up broad vistas for Utopian speculation. A whole series of European and American utopias appeared in Russian translation between 1890 and 1905: the works of August Bebel, Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, Atlanticus, and Lili Braun, with their exaltation of electricity, communal apartment living, and the technologizing of everyday life, captured the imagination of Russian socialists who were looking for the ultimate purpose of revolution to inspire themselves and their followers—a dream of a golden future where men and women could work, study, and love in total freedom, harmony, and community, liberated from the backwardness, poverty, and greed which had always tormented humanity. In this sense, utopia was seen by Bogdanov (through the eyes of his hero) as a weapon in the arsenal of revolution: a snapshot of man’s future that would dazzle the eye of the worker and inspire him more deeply than could the arid words of party programs.
Studies of reading habits in tsarist Russia have shown that the urban lower classes were far more interested in adventure tales than in polemical propaganda. Bogdanov, wh
o had close connections with workers, knew this. And socialist writers had no monopoly on futuristic fantasy. In 1895 the engineer V. N. Chikolev wrote an “electric tale” of a coming world transformed by technology, particularly electricity, that could provide everything human life needed, including musical concerts. L. B. Afanasev’s Journey to Mars (1901), on the other hand, was a warning against industrialization per se, whether capitalist or socialist. Using Martian society as a vehicle, the author related how the appearance of cities, roads, and factories turned the simple, primitive, trusting, rural Martians (read the peasants of Russia) into greedy, competitive, cannibalistic brutes and egoists—into what Afanasev called “the nervous society.” More devastating yet was N. Fëdorov’s An Evening in the Year 2217 (1906), with numbered citizens, monstrous conformity, abolition of marriage and family, sex by appointment, and a lifeless socialist urban milieu of glass and stone—a virtual prototype for Zamyatin’s We.
Bogdanov, in constructing his utopia on Mars, was not indifferent to the dangers of collectivism and high technology projected by some of the anti-utopian fantasies of the late tsarist epoch. He may well have had some of the dark warnings in mind as he set out to describe, through Leonid’s narrative, the “self-adjusting” and socially just world on Mars. Indeed, he was acutely aware of the dreadful consequences of a premature revolution in a backward society. But a deep-seated belief in the rational power of “systems” prevented him from descending into the depths of social pessimism or cosmic fear—a feeling that enveloped many thinkers after the failure of the 1905 revolution.
Bogdanov’s systems thinking, still developing when he wrote Red Star, eventually blossomed into a full-scale theory which he called “tectology.” The term, borrowed from Ernst Haeckel, denoted a study of the regulatory processes and the organization of all systems, a “general natural science.” As a physician and a political ideologist, Bogdanov was struck by the systemic analogies between living organisms and societies, between scientific and social organizations and processes. His main goal was to suggest a super-science of organization that would permit regulative mechanisms to preserve stability and prevent cataclysmic change in any of life’s major processes—including the production and distribution of goods. As a Marxist he believed this to be possible only under a system of collective labor and collectivized means of production; but he also believed that Marx had to be updated by means of contemporary scientific and organizational discoveries. The complex theory of organization that he devised and revised in the 1910s, tectology, has often been cited as an early version of cybernetics or systems thinking. Thus one of the functions of Red Star, with its highly elaborate Martian system of feedback, information control and retrieval, statistics, protocomputers, regulation, and “moving equilibrium,” was to lay out the author’s first thoughts on the theory that has won him so much attention in recent years, both in the Soviet Union and in the world at large.