A MARTIAN STRANDED ON EARTH A MARTIAN STRANDED ON EaRTH ALEXANDER BOGDANOV, BLOOD TRANSFUSIONS, AND PROLEtaRIAN SCIENCE Nikolai Krementsov THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO AND LONDON Nikolai kremeNtsov is associate professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. He has contributed to several scholarly journals and edited volumes, and his previous books include Stalinist Science, The Cure, and International Science. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2011 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2011. Printed in the United States of America 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11â 1 2 3 4 5 isBN-13: 978-0-226-45412-2 (cloth) isBN-10: 0-226-45412-6 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Krementsov, N. L. A Martian stranded on Earth : Alexander Bogdanov, blood transfusions, and proletarian science / Nikolai Krementsov. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isBN-13: 978-0-226-45412-2 (cloth : alk. paper) isBN-10: 0-226-45412-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Bogdanov, A. (Aleksandr), 1873–1928. 2. Biology—Soviet Union—History. 3. Blood—Transfusion. 4. Science—Soviet Union—History. I. Title. QH305.2S63K74 2011â570.947'0904—dc22â2010039373 ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). To my friends We are born to make a fairy tale into reality. Pavel German and Iulii Khait, “Ever higher” (circa 1924) Whatever the judgment of our elementally dramatic epoch by the future historian will be—and, undoubtedly, his assessment will differ profoundly from a contemporary one—in any case, he will note and recognize the unprecedented audacity in the formulation of problems as one of the best manifestations of this epoch’s cultural process. Alexander Bogdanov, Struggle for Viability (1927) Contents List of Illustrations ix Note on Translation and Transliteration xi Genealogy and Acknowledgments xiii REVOLUTIONS 1 The Big Science of Visionary Biology 1 TRANSFUSIONS 2 Ideas, People, and Places 15 VOYAGERS 3 To Mars and Back 33 EARTHLY REALITIES 4 The Health of the Ruling Elite 55 STRUGGLES FOR VIABILITY 5 Proletarian Science in Action 73 BLOOD AND SOCIALISM 6 The Death of a Hero 93 LESSONS AND LEGACIES 7 A Martian on Earth 113 List of Abbreviations 129 Notes 131 References 147 Index 169 Illustrations 2.1 Vladimir Shamov, circa 1909 · 21 2.2 Russia’s first transfusiologists, circa 1921 · 27 3.1 Lenin and Bogdanov, circa 1908 · 41 3.2 Bogdanov’s 1910 program · 49 4.1 Lenin’s doctors, circa 1923 · 63 4.2 The Igumnov mansion (Institute of Blood Transfusion) · 69 5.1 A cartoon on rejuvenation à la Voronoff, 1927 · 81 5.2 A blood transfusion at Bogdanov’s institute, circa 1928 · 91 6.1 Bogdanov’s funeral, April 1928 · 100–101 6.2 A propaganda poster for blood donations, 1941 · 111 Note on Translation and Transliteration Although some of the original Russian sources I cite are available in English, all the translations in the book are my own. Throughout the book, I use the Library of Congress’s transliteration system, except for the commonly adopted spellings of well-known names—for example, “Trotsky” and “Metchnikoff” instead of “Trotskii” and “Mechnikov.” Genealogy and Acknowledgments Until about a year ago, I had never thought that I would write a book about Alexander Alexandrovich Malinovskii-Bogdanov, even though I had known of him for nearly forty years. I first encountered his name in 1973, when, as a freshman at Rostov-on-Don University’s Biology School, I took the obligatory course “The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” In the fat gray textbook of nearly eight hundred pages, Bogdanov’s name was mentioned twice. The first time was in the list of participants in the Third Party Congress held in 1905 in London. The second time Bogdanov appeared in a chapter entitled “V. I. Lenin’s Defense and Development of Marxist Philosophy” as one of several “bourgeois intelligenty,” who “had attacked the fundamental principles of Marxist philosophy” in the aftermath of the first Russian revolution of 1905–6 (Ponomarev 1973, 74, 122). The next year, taking another obligatory course on dialectical materialism, I had to read Materialism and Empiriocriticism, Lenin’s “foundational” treatise on the subject. In the process, I learned that it had been written specifi- cally to undermine Bogdanov’s “reactionary philosophy.” Bogdanov’s name—accompanied by “appropriate” epithets—figured on practically every other page of Lenin’s four-hundred-page-long work. Bogdanov’s own treatise on “empiriomonism,” which Lenin had been lambasting throughout the text, however, was not on the course’s reading list, and I could not even glimpse its actual contents from partial quotations scattered within Lenin’s “critique.” Nor could I guess that Bogdanov had written a similarly acerbic response to Lenin’s tract: it was never mentioned in any of the course readings. Needless to say, I forgot Bog- danov’s name as soon as I passed (with some difficulty) the exams: at the time, I was much more interested in neurocybernetics than in memorizing some obscure names from the history of the Communist Party or dialectical materialism. Yet, some years later, I encountered Bogdanov’s name again. In 1990, during the heyday of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika, Politizdat—a pub- lishing house run by the Communist Party’s Central Committee, which Genealogy and Acknowledgments had issued the textbook on the history of the party that I had read as a student, as well as Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriocriticism—released a volume of Bogdanov’s selected works entitled Issues of Socialism. I probably would never have noticed the book—“issues of socialism” not being high on my interest list—had it not been for a friend who X told me that, along with a series of articles, the volume included two xiv X science-fiction (SF) novels about Mars and its inhabitants, one entitled Red Star, another Engineer Menni. A longtime SF fan, I bought the book and, skipping the articles altogether, read the novels. Alas, conditioned by the classics of Western and Soviet SF, ranging from H. G. Wells, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury to Alexander Beliaev, Ivan Efremov, and Boris and Arkadii Strugatskiis, I found Bogdanov’s Martian novels dull and unimaginative by comparison. In fact, bored to tears, I could not even finish the second one and left the volume to gather dust on my bookshelf. By that time, I had lost interest in neurocybernetics and had moved on to studying the history of science—to be exact, the history of Rus- sian biological and biomedical sciences. Indeed, earlier that very year, I had defended my doctoral dissertation on the history of interactions between behavioral and evolutionary research and had begun working on my first monograph about the Soviet science system during the Stalin era. Since then—for the last twenty years—I have been writing on vari- ous aspects of the history of Russian biomedical sciences, and through these years, Bogdanov’s name has periodically lurked somewhere on the periphery of my investigations. Five years ago, I started a large project on the effects of the 1917 Bol- shevik Revolution in experimental biology and experimental medicine. I wanted to look at intellectual and institutional developments in several disciplines and research programs, from endocrinology and eugenics to biophysics and gerontology, that had flourished in Russia in the after- math of the revolution. One such discipline was to be “blood science,” for I had a deep personal interest in this particular science. According to my family’s lore, in the early 1930s, the prominent Tashkent surgeon Valentin Voino-Iasenetskii saved a little boy with a very bad case of septicemia from inevitable death by . a blood transfusion—there were no antibiotics or even sulfa drugs in those days. That little boy grew up to become my father, and I, of course, was eager to find out more about the history of blood transfusions in the Soviet Union. To my surprise, a preliminary review of the secondary literature suddenly brought Bogdanov from the periphery to the forefront of my research. I quickly learned that he had played a major role in the history of Soviet blood studies and that the Moscow Scientific-Research Institute of Genealogy and Acknowledgments Blood Transfusion still bears the name of its founder and first director, Bogdanov! I blew off the thick layer of dust from the 1990 Bogdanov volume still on my shelf and for the first time read it from cover to cover. Although some of the articles included in the volume dealt with Marxist analyses of what science is and ought to be under socialism, none of them had anything to do with “blood science.” But one of the X xv SF novels, Red Star, did mention “blood exchanges” as a means of X “rejuvenation” practiced by the inhabitants of the “Red Planet.” Marx- ism, SF, and blood research? It did not make much sense. Intrigued, I launched a full-scale hunt for Bogdanov’s materials in Russian archives, libraries, and secondhand bookstores as part of my ongoing research on the history of 1920s biomedical sciences in Russia. For four years, I collected archival documents, journal and newspa- per articles, books, and photographs; visited museums; and read the extensive secondary literature on the history of experimental biology and experimental medicine, along the way writing up various pieces of my research pertaining to specific disciplines and research directions. About fifteen months ago, I began drafting what I thought would be a fifty-page chapter on blood transfusions in a book about biomedical sciences and the Bolshevik Revolution.