Bogdanov combined his Marxist convictions, his revolutionary experiences of 1905, and his facility for technological projection in his fantasy of life on Mars in the early twentieth century. Failed revolutions and even enforced isolation, as in a counterrevolutionary prison cell, have often produced free flights of fantasy. Nicholas Chernyshevsky wrote the famous Utopian “Dream of Vera Pavlovna” in What is to Be Done? while languishing in the Peter Paul Fortress. The terrorist Nicholas Kibalchich designed a flying machine in 1881 while awaiting his execution (a crater on the Moon now bears his name). Nicholas Morozov, a long-time inhabitant of the Schlüsselburg Fortress prison, wrote in 1910 a light-hearted account of a voyage to the moon describing the joy of flight experienced by himself and his fellow astronauts—all former political convicts. The revolutionary euphoria that had seized so many thinkers and writers in the years 1905–07 and had produced so many apocalyptic visions and assorted dreams of an imminent New Jerusalem also permeated the spirit of Bogdanov and endowed his social vision with a sense of immediacy and hope. A rank-and-file Bolshevik of the period recalled that he and his comrades read Bogdanov’s novel with enormous enthusiasm and saw it as a sign of renewed and triumphant revolutionary upheaval. What they overlooked at the time, as he later admitted, was the novel’s principal theme: the organization of society in the socialist future. Yet the high drama of the work lies precisely in the wonderfully contrived juxtaposition of a unified, harmonious, serene, and rational life on Mars with the chaotic, barbarous, and self-destructive struggles of the peoples and social classes of twentieth-century Earth.
The vegetation on Bogdanov’s Mars (as on Wells’s) is red, and the hero calls it socialist vegetation. This is one of the few playful devices in the novel. For the most part Red Star is a straightforward science fiction utopia. Leonid, the protagonist, is a Bolshevik at the time of the 1905 Revolution caught up in political work and a dying romance. A mysterious comrade from the south of Russia reveals himself as a Martian, explains his mission on Earth, and invites Leonid to Mars. The episodes of the Revolution and the voyages are the frame of the story; at its center is the description of Martian society. The irony, an almost invariable feature of science fiction utopias, is particularly sharp in the contrast between a Russia devoured by “problems” and a Mars where such problems have long since vanished.
In Russia, for example, three major problems that beset society and state were the peasant question, the national question, and the labor question. But on Mars there were no peasants. Farming had been industrialized, and rustic life—which Marx had called idiotic—no longer existed. Nor were there any nationalities. Mars, with a population smaller than Earth’s, had an ethnically homogeneous race with a single language (another Utopian dream, by the way, made popular in Russia at that time by the Esperantists). Workers or laborers existed, of course: but since everyone was a worker who produced according to capacity and consumed according to desire, there was no “labor question” as such. Bogdanov also addressed on Mars the vexing question of the opposition and contradiction between city and countryside—a big problem of Russian social history up to Stalinist times. Unlike More, Campanella, and Morelli, Bogdanov does not aspire to destroy the countryside. Unlike Rousseau, Ruskin, and Morris, he does not aspire to destroy the city. He creates a whole new kind of arrangement that is neither country nor city, though retaining elements of both.
On Bogdanov’s Mars there is no state and no politics, although there are clothes made of synthetic material, three-dimensional movies, and a death ray. People are quartered in various kinds of urban and semiurban planned settlements, such as the Great City of Machines or the Children’s Colony. Voluntary labor alternates with leisure and culture, and the drama of life is provided by the never-ending struggle with the natural environment—not with other people. The climax of the story occurs when someone tries to alter this Martian scenario.
The systematization of the productive process is the main focus of the hero’s interest. Factories are operated by electrical power and fully automated. “Moving equilibrium” is maintained by data retrieval machinery in all enterprises. Data on stockpiles and inventories, production rates, and labor needs according to specialty are channeled into a Central Institute of Statistics, which collates and computes the information and sends it where it is needed. Since consumption is unlimited, all work is voluntary and unpaid. Short workdays and the rotation of jobs reduce the menace of alienation and psychic enslavement to the machine. Bogdanov, though he certainly revered machines, feared and hated the system of capitalist production that made human beings appendages to machinery. He thus not only fought against the so-called Taylor System of industrial labor but also against the Bolshevik “Tayloriste”—particularly Alexei Gastev, the greatest proponent of man-the-machine mentality. Planning, productivity, labor discipline, and recruitment—all problems of developed industry outlined in the novel—became issues of heated debate among Soviet planners of the 1920s and 1930s. No wonder that Bogdanov’s novel was sometimes invoked at the dawn of the First Five-Year Plan by economic chieftains and planners.
Equality and collectivism are the social values held in highest esteem by Martians. Even on the voyage out, the captain’s role as commander is deemphasized and he is ranked along with the rest of the crew as a specialist. Rules and regulations are minimal and are based upon science, not on philosophical or religious moral values. Coercive, authoritarian, categorical “norms” were as repugnant to the author as they had been to Nietzsche, whom Bogdanov had once admired. Equality expressed itself on Mars in many ways: the absence of gender in names, unisex clothing, and the businesslike intercourse among people, free of superfluous greetings and empty politeness—reminiscent of the Russian nihilists of the 1860s. There are people of superior talent on Mars, but they are afforded no special prizes or recognition in life or after death. The monuments on Mars are erected to commemorate historic events, as products of collective wills, and not to heroes. After the Russian Revolution of 1917, a kindred surge toward anonymity, egalitarianism, collective creativity, and iconoclasm burst forth for some time before it was repudiated by the authorities, who soon began to set up live heroes, stone statues, and cultic idols of the Revolution. Bogdanov’s ultimate gesture of fraternal solidarity on Mars was the “comradely exchange of life” in which mutual blood transfusions were employed to prolong life.
Bogdanov clung to his vision of collective creativity after the Revolution of 1917. In a reply to Gastev written in 1919, he said that in proletarian cooperation, comradely recognition of competence would replace authority and force in the workplace and that leadership roles would be rotated according to the task and the talent:
The proletarian collective is distinguished and defined by a special organizational bond, known as comradely cooperation. This is a kind of cooperation in which the roles of organizing and fulfilling are not divided but are combined among the general mass of workers, so that there is no authority by force or unreasoning subordination but a common will which decides, and a participation of each in the fulfillment of the common task.*
From his central premises about collectivism, anti-individualism, and a wide arena for personal choice, Bogdanov’s depiction of other features of Martian life flow neatly and consistently. The scenes in the Children’s Colony, where upbringing is collective, in the hospital, where suicide rooms are available, and in the Museum of Art, where the themes of facing death and the dignity of labor are celebrated—all these are extensions of Bogdanov’s social philosophy. They also reflect debates then current among the intelligentsia about childrearing, family, and education, about suicide, which ran rampant after the collapse of the revolution of 1905, and about the meaning and function of art.
But the recurrent discussion of sex and love requires more than a passing comment. Debate on the “sexual question” reached a crescendo in Russia at the very moment when Red Star was published. Love, marriage, divorce, birth control, abortion, prostitution, and sexualit
y were hotly discussed in the media, especially in the years between Leo Tolstoy’s Kreutzer Sonata (1889) and Michael Artsybashev’s Sanin (1908). Outraged society took issue particularly with sexual “decadence” as illustrated in Sanin; and the many nuances between “comradely union,” free love, and promiscuity were canvassed endlessly in the press and in popular brochures. The accompanying wave of suicides in 1907 and 1908 led cultural critics of the time to link sensualism and suicide as forms of self-destruction and escapism born of the recently failed revolution and the upsurge of repression. Among socialists in Russia the debate on sex was especially painful and ambivalent because socialism generally inscribed high moral behavior as well as personal liberation on its banner. In 1908 a socialist woman physician, A. P. Omelchenko, linked Red Star and Sanin in a book attacking free love and upholding the family.
How did Bogdanov treat the sexual issue under communism? Leonid in fact does resemble Sanin, the vulgar amoralist of Artsybashev’s creation. Both are in love with life and sneer at the notion of moral duty. But there the similarity ends. Sanin is a wild libertine and seducer who scorns all values and all causes. Leonid, on the other hand, finds personal expression in the proletarian cause and, though he believes that polygamy is more life-enriching than monogamy, he does not practice it until he arrives on Mars. There his shallow Nietzscheanism undergoes a series of shocks. Leonid’s advanced and conventionally radical ideas on sex seem old-fashoned indeed on a planet where the words “liaison,” “affair,” “romance,” and “marriage” have the same meaning. Bogdanov, like his contemporary and fellow Marxist Alexandra Kollontai—who shared many of Bogdanov’s ideas on collectivism and antiauthoritarianism—was groping experimentally toward a reasonable and yet warmhearted solution to the question that has plagued so many dreamers and social reformers throughout the ages: how to reconcile personal freedom with the need for long-time loyalties, commitments, and emotional stability. Dr. Omelchenko, gently chiding her fellow socialist, Bogdanov, proclaimed that the family, not free love, would be the social base of the new socialist order because it did not violate the spirit of collective life and labor but rather enhanced it. Not surprisingly, a recent Soviet edition of Bogdanov’s novel saw fit to omit Leonid’s ruminations on marriage and sex.
After the survey of society, mandatory in almost all utopias, Leonid is permitted to enter into an emerging drama, one that threatens to pit planet against planet, man against man. Bogdanov extricates his hero and returns him to the explosive urban battlefields and barricades of Moscow as the Revolution of 1905 nears its climax.
The circumstances under which Engineer Menni was written in 1912 were very different from those of 1907. Bogdanov’s dream of an imminent upsurge of the proletarian offensive in Russia was ill-founded. By 1908 the reaction was in full swing and tsarist authorities were in full command of the situation. Many members of the intelligentsia and of educated society at large fell into a mood of postrevolutionary despondency and withdrawal. Mysticism, the occult, and even what was then considered pornography came into vogue. Social daydreamers now sought salvation in personal liberation and predictions of a revolution of the spirit. Some former revolutionary thinkers turned to religion—and even to conservatism and nationalism. Those who clung to revolutionary political tactics and programs were either banished to the fringes of the Russian state or forced into emigration. Bogdanov was among the latter. The expatriate world of Russian revolutionaries—Geneva, London, Paris, Stuttgart, Capri—was a world of disappointed men and women who lashed one another with bitter recriminations and ideological squabbles. One of these differences of opinion was the break between Bogdanov and Lenin.
At the end of Red Star, Bogdanov makes fleeting reference to the Old Man of the Mountain, an invaluable, hardheaded, but somewhat conservative and inflexible revolutionary leader. Bogdanov was clearly referring to his comrade Lenin. The two men fell out over philosophical and tactical questions. The philosophical controversy had begun to emerge years earlier when Bogdanov embraced the epistemological theories of Ernst Mach, the Austrian scientist who denied the existence of a material world independent of the observer. To Mach the world was only organized perception and nothing more. Bogdanov’s acceptance of “empiriomonism,” as this latest version of a very ancient idea was called, evoked an assault from George Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, who wounded Bogdanov to the quick by addressing him in print as “Gospodin” (mister) instead of as “comrade.” Lenin kept his own hostility to Machism muted for some time, until, in 1908, he could no longer contain it and wrote the famous massive polemic Materialism and Empiriocriticism. This was after the appearance of Red Star Lenin mentioned the novel only once, briefly and obliquely, in an ironic comment about Lowell’s Mars and Its Canah.
The philosophical duel merged with the political fight, of more recent duration. This latter was based upon Bogdanov’s insistence on the possibility of mounting a new armed uprising in 1907 and 1908. Because of this he diverted party funds into revolutionary partisan operations and vigorously opposed Bolshevik participation in the new parliament. The break which ensued was, in the last analysis, caused by a fundamental difference between an increasingly rigid and ideologically authoritarian Lenin and a Bogdanov whose encyclopedic knowledge of the sciences and whose personal proclivities toward revolutionary action could not be reconciled to the views of a self-appointed and self-righteous leader. Bogdanov recalled years later in his autobiography that the barracks and prisonlike atmosphere of his school had taught him as a schoolboy “to fear and to hate those who coerce and to flaunt authority.”
Bogdanov spent the years 1908–1914 in Western Europe. He and his associates retreated to Italy, to the island of Capri, where Gorky had been living since 1906, and founded a party school for workers. Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, Gorky, Bazarov, and Skvortsov-Stepanov, now estranged from Lenin’s party, taught there, as did non-Bolsheviks Trotsky, Pokrovsky, and Menzhinsky. All of these men would hold important posts in Soviet life after the revolution, at least for a while. Bogdanov continued to develop his system of tectology; Gorky and Lunacharsky engaged in what was called “god-building”—the attempt to forge a religion out of socialism. And all of them tried to create the basis for a new proletarian culture. By the time of the composition of Engineer Menni in 1912, most of Bogdanov’s friends had drifted back into the Bolshevik party. Bogdanov abandoned active political work in 1911 and devoted his time exclusively to the organizational science and proletarian culture. Menni was one of the fruits of this decision.
Engineer Menni combines the then-current speculation about the natural history of Mars with a plausible story of canal construction and class struggle. It is a historical novel about economic development, political change, and revolutionary labor movements on Mars in the seventeenth century—anticipating the events of Bogdanov’s time by three hundred years. The structure of the history is straightforward Marxism, schematic in places but cleverly contrived. By placing the class struggle in “nowhere” (utopia), Bogdanov universalizes the Marxist scheme of history, suggesting that something like it would happen “everywhere.” To dramatize the process, Bogdanov provides fictitious characters who represent various aspirations of struggling forces in the painful process of Martian modernization. These are not brilliant portraits, but they are far from being simple pasteboard figures speaking political platitudes. Menni, the chief protagonist, is a sympathetic person, upright and decent, but one who happens to be on the wrong side of the barricades in the fight between progress and conservatism. In his rigid logic and rugged individualism, he resembles in many ways the Nietzschean and Darwinian characters in some of Ayn Rand’s novels (her formative years were spent in revolutionary Russia). Bogdanov’s technological premise was taken from Schiaparelli and Lowell. The latter’s theory of man-made canals for irrigation was long opposed even in his time and was definitely disproved in the 1960s and 1970s by the Mariner and Viking missions. Mars and Marx,* the red planet and the red philosopher, are thus
combined to provide the historical explanation of the communist society described in Red Star.
Engineer Menni is a novel about socialists and labor leaders, capitalist villains and blind aristocrats—but it is especially a novel about engineers, a profession that has played an enormously important role in Russian and Soviet development in the last ninety years and is only recently being studied by serious scholars. Despite Bogdanov’s desire to play down the hero and the individual of great talent, technological heroes dominate this book: Menni, the engineer of genius, master of planning and efficiency, and his son Netti, who, like Bogdanov himself, devotes his later life to an encyclopedic study of work and an all-embracing science of organization. It was precisely this celebration of technocratic power, of the technical intelligentsia, and of self-correcting systems and moving equilibria based on science, and the corresponding downplaying of proletarian energy, party authority, and class struggle, that caused orthodox Bolsheviks to look askance at the author—a man who lived before his time.
Red Star Page 2
