Born Alexander Malinovsky, was a Russian and later Soviet physician, philosopher, science fiction writer, and Bolshevik revolutionary. He was a polymath who pioneered blood transfusion,[1] as well as general systems theory,[2] and made important contributions to cybernetics.[3]
He was a key figure in the early history of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, originally established 1898, and of its Bolshevik faction. In 1904–1906, he published three volumes of the philosophic treatise Empiriomonizm (Empiriomonism), in which he tried to merge Marxism with the philosophy of Ernst Mach, Wilhelm Ostwald, and Richard Avenarius. His work later affected a number of Russian Marxist theoreticians, including Nikolai Bukharin and Dov Ber Borochov.[4][5]
Bogdanov co-founded the Bolsheviks in 1903, when they split with the Menshevik faction. He was a rival within the Bolsheviks to Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924), Lenin concentrated on undermining Bogdanov's reputation as a philosopher. In 1909 he published a scathing book of criticism entitled Materialism and Empiriocriticism, assaulting Bogdanov's position and accusing him of philosophical idealism.[6] In June 1909, Bogdanov was defeated by Lenin at a Bolshevik mini-conference in Paris organized by the editorial board of the Bolshevik magazine Proletary and was expelled from the Bolsheviks. He subsequently established his own …
