This cruel planet is my home from now on
Here begins what in the future will create physiological collectivism
The transfusions were working. “Bogdanov seems to have become seven, no, 10 years younger after the operation,” a friend – and fellow revolutionary – remarked.
Alexander Bogdanov described the benefits first-hand: he’d stopped balding and his eyesight was improving. A year after beginning his experimentation, the self-styled Russian renaissance man was all-in. Since cancer primarily occurs in the old and tuberculosis in the young, he reasoned, swapping blood between different age groups could combat these diseases.
In 1925, he founded the Institute for Haemotology and Blood Transfusions – a research hall that would later bear his name. He hired a pair of assistants who began testing his theories on a small army of rabbits and dogs. Two years later, he penned Struggle for Viability, a 160-page manifesto of sorts outlining his work.
The work blasted what he’d deemed “bourgeois” science – highly specialized research that sought to gate-keep knowledge from the general populace. “The book is written in such a way that it could be read not just by physicians,” he explained in the introduction, “but by anyone who has some knowledge of natural sciences.”
Convinced he’d unlocked something transformational, Bogdanov sought to share it with his fellow Soviets. His hopes extended beyond the apparent fountain of youth he’d found in the veins of vibrant test subjects (including Maria Ulyanova, sister of his one-time party rival, Vladimir Lenin). It was something far greater: true collectivism.
“Here begins what in the future will create physiological collectivism,” Bogdanov wrote, “which will allow the human organism to rely not only on its own forces and means in its struggle against diseases, wounds, and a general deterioration of life but also on the elements of viability developed by other human organisms.”
The sentiment was echoed in Struggle for Viability’s triumphant finale,
In our epoch, individualist culture dominates; its atmosphere is unfavorable to both our method and our viewpoint that underpin the method. Their true foundation, labor collectivism, is only beginning to come to life. When it triumphs, then those difficulties and obstacles that now stand in the way of physiological collectivism will be removed, [and] then this collectivism will blossom.
In another lifetime, some decades prior, he’d first worn his utopian visions on his sleeve as a pioneer of Russian science-fiction. Most notable among his works was 1908’s Red Star, the tale of a Bolshevik revolutionary’s travels to the lush, red fields of Mars, courtesy of a nuclear rocket with anti-gravity properties. It is here he discovers a communist utopia, populated by Martians who lead nearly identical lives.
An edition of the book, published the same year Bogdanov began his transfusion experiments, features includes his recently-penned “A Martian Stranded on Earth.” The poem, which forms an outline for a third book in the series, showcases the stark antithesis of a Martian crash landed on a neighboring planet.
The work opens bleakly,
Our ship plunged and crashed against Earth's solid face.
My comrades are all dead and gone.
There is no return from this damnable place,
This cruel planet is my home from now on.
By the poem’s end, however, its narrator is transformed. Committed to the hard work ahead, he envisions a future where Martians and mankind work together to bring communist utopias to planets across the galaxy,
Take a word of farewell when the victory is won
To my loved ones on the star of my birth
Tell them their brother is glad to have come
To this wondrous young planet called Earth!
In March 1928, Bogdanov returned to his own self-experimentation, performing a 12th transfusion with a 21-year-old student. Nearly a liter of blood was exchanged between the two men, and in a matter of hours, both fell ill. The younger man recovered. Two weeks later, Bogdanov was dead of renal and liver failure, owing to the student’s malaria and tuberculosis.
Work on A Martian Stranded on Earth was never completed.
Sources:
A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science by Nikolai Krementsov
Red Star by Alexander Bogdanov
Bogdanov and Lenin: Epistemology and Revolution https://www.jstor.org/stable/20099591