Red Queen or White Knight? The Ambivalences of Bogdanov

Abstract

Truth is not a simple copy of the facts, not a petty and exact representation of them: it is an instrument for gaining control over them. The author of these words would have appreciated the reasons for the current interest in his ideas. As Lenin's only serious rival for political and intellectual leadership before 1917, Bogdanov's importance in the history of the Bolshevik party has never been in dispute; nevertheless, he was consigned to obscurity until, in an attempt to respond adequately to complex developments in contemporary Soviet politics, revisionist historians like Stephen Cohen began to question the totalitarian paradigm of orthodox sovietology. Questions of alternatives are being reopened, figures like Bogdanov and Bukharin reexamined, not as a wistful backward look along avenues closed by history, but as an analysis of the implications of choices that have contemporary programmatic significance. The current Soviet involvement in this discussion gives those of us devoted to the study of history's failures a new and heady sense of being at the center of things, and imposes an unfamiliar responsibility: the question of whether such figures represented genuine alternatives is no longer academic (in the popular sense of irrelevant). On this question recent scholarship on Bogdanov is sharply divided, as illustrated by the two most recent books on the subject. Zenovia Sochor, like Jutta Scherrer in her study of Vpered's party schools,' sees the main significance of Bogdanovism in a grassroots challenge to the authoritarianism of the monolithic Leninist party, an attempt, highly relevant to current debates, to create a socialism with a human face. But Robert Williams sees a symbiotic relationship between Bogdanov's collectivism and Lenin's authoritarianism.2 Surprisingly, there has been very little discussion between these two opposing points of view. Sochor notes that Williams' study appeared too late for her to discuss, but she refers to my interpretation of the Lenin-Bogdanov dispute (radically different from