Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia

"[A] surprisingly moving story." --The New Yorker "Bogdanov's novels reveal a great deal about their fascinating author, about his time and, ironically, ours, and about the genre of utopia as well as his contribution to it." --Slavic Review "Bogdanov's imaginative predictions for his utopia are both technological and social... Even more farsighted are [his] anxious forebodings about the limits and costs of the utopian future." --Science Fiction Studies "The contemporary reader will marvel at [Bogdanov's] foresight: nuclear fusion and propulsion, atomic weaponry and fallout, computers, blood transfusions, and (almost) unisexuality." --Choice A communist society on Mars, the Russian revolution, and class struggle on two planets is the subject of this arresting science fiction novel by Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928), one of the early organizers and prophets of the Russian Bolshevik party. The red star is Mars, but it is also the dream set to paper of the society that could emerge on earth after the dual victory of the socialist and scientific-technical revolutions. While portraying a harmonious and rational socialist society, Bogdanov sketches out the problems that will face industrialized nations, whether socialist or capitalist. Alexander Bogdanov (1873-1928) was born Aleksander Aleksandrovich Malinowski at Sokolka, in what was then Russian Poland. He was a man who turned his hand to almost everything. Trained as a physician, he was also an economist, politician, revolutionary (rival of Lenin), philosopher, science fiction author, poet, and scientist. His work on organizational science foreshadowed present developments in that field and cybernetics. In Moscow, in 1926, he founded the world’s first institute devoted entirely to blood transfusion. Two years later, ironically, he died as a result of a transfusion experiment gone wrong.