The figure who best portrayed the Promethean vision of the early God-builders was Alexander Malinovsky, a brilliant theorist who has suffered the relative oblivion of those who neither joined the emigration nor rose to high authority in the new Soviet state. Shortly after taking his first regular position as a journalistic critic in 1895 at the age of twenty-two, Malinovsky assumed a new name which remained with him and accurately conveys the image he had of his own high calling: Bogdanov, or "God-gifted." He
soon became active in the Social Democratic movement, siding immediately with the Bolsheviks after the split of 1903, and helping edit their theoretical journal New Life, where he began his friendship with Gorky.
Bogdanov believed that the ultimate key to the future lay not in the economic relationships and class struggles that were characteristic of past history, but in the technological and ideological culture of the future that was already being created by the proletariat. Marx's fascination with dialectical struggle was an unfortunate holdover from his youthful Hegelianism. In the manner of Saint-Simon rather than Marx, Bogdanov argued that the destructive conflicts of the past would never be resolved without a positive new religion: that the unifying role once played in society by a central temple of worship and religious faith must now be played by the living temple of the proletariat and a pragmatic, socially oriented philosophy of "empiriomonism."
In a long series of studies, beginning with his Basic Elements of a Historical View of Nature in 1899, Bogdanov developed the idea that the revolutionary movement would lift man beyond the level of economics, and nature beyond all previous laws of material determinism. The key to this program of cultural regeneration within the revolutionary movement was presented in a long work published in installments throughout the decade 1913-22 under the title The Universal Organizational Science {Tectology). This new super-science of "tectology" was designed to provide a harmonious unity between the spiritual culture and the physical experience of the "working collective," in whose interest all science and activity were to be organized and all past culture reworked.59
Bogdanov felt that the creation of a new proletarian culture should precede the political annexation of power by the Bolsheviks. His concept of God-building through tectology was designed-like Sorel's concurrent call for a new heroic myth-to kindle enthusiasm and assure the revolutionary movement of success not only in gaining power but also in transforming society. Like Sorel, Bogdanov was enthusiastic over the initial Bolshevik annexation of power; and he rushed into print with a series of writings designed to spell out the God-building possibilities of the new society: the second part of his Tectology (1917) and two Utopian novels, Red Star (1918) and Engineer Menni (1919). Though originally published in 1908, Red Star produced its greatest impact when it appeared in the second, 1918 edition.60 Its image of an earth dweller suddenly transported to another planet which was in a feverish ecstasy of socialist construction seemed to many the image of a new socialist society into which Russia might suddenly leap. The novel was reprinted several times; and Bogdanov's organization for the creation of Proletarian Culture (JProletkuli) enjoyed nationwide
popularity throughout the period of Civil War and "war communism"- publishing about twenty journals throughout Russia during those difficult days.
Late in 1920 Lenin forced the subordination of the hitherto freewheeling Proletkult to the Commissariat for Education. Bogdanov's organization was censured for its claim to have brought about "immediate socialism" in the cultural sphere, a proletarian culture totally emancipated from the bourgeois past. Bogdanov, for his part, in a suppressed pamphlet of 1919, had already expressed the fear that the new rulers were merely a parasitic class of managerial organizers.61 Proletkult was soon abolished altogether; he and his followers, the so-called Workers' Truth group, denounced; and his prestige undercut by the time Tectology was completed in 1922. Bogdanov spent his last days in the relatively obscure but appropriately visionary post of director of an institute for "the Struggle for Vital Capacity" (Zhiznesposobnost'). He died in 1928, apparently from a dangerous experiment involving transfusions of his own blood-a front-line casualty, as it were, in his undaunted efforts to take harmony and immortality away from imaginary gods and put them into the real life of men. The most extreme Prometheanism of the age was found in the so-called Cosmist movement, an offshoot of the God-building movement that flourished in St. Petersburg during the Civil War years of 1918-21. The Cosmists and the closely related Blacksmith {Kuznitsa) group of Moscow poets spoke with a kind of frenzied hyperbole about the imminent transformation of the entire cosmos. Under the leadership of Alexis Kuz'min, who took the appropriate pen name Extreme (Kraisky) and entitled his first fantastic book of poems The Smiles of the Sun,62 the Cosmists burst forth with expletives: "We shall arrange the stars in rows and put reins on the moon" and "We shall erect upon the canals of Mars the palace of World Freedom."63
One important feature of Revolutionary Prometheanism was its attractiveness to long-submerged minority groups of the Russian Empire. At a time when a groping and desperate Tsar was increasingly relying on repression and Russification, minority peoples looked increasingly to the new worlds being opened up in the cosmopolitan culture of the silver age. Jewish painters like Marc Chagall and Lazar Lissitzky played a key role in the experimental painting of the day; and the Lithuanian painter-musician-writer, Michael Chiurlionis, anticipated much of the most revolutionary art of the day and exerted a shadowy influence over much of the Russian avant-garde. Among the Revolutionaries the role of minority people was no less conspicuous; and it seems appropriate to conclude with two of the most visionary, brilliant, and universal-minded of all Russian Revolutionaries: the
Pole, Waclaw Machajski, and the Jew, Leon Trotsky. The silencing of their voices in the course of the twenties was a measure of the retreat of the new regime from the great expectations of the earlier period.
Machajski, who wrote under the pseudonym A. Vol'sky, believed even more passionately than Bogdanov in the need for a totally new type of culture. One must move beyond the culture not only of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie but also of the newest and most insidiously oppressive social class, the intellectuals. Beginning with his Evolution of Social Democracy in 1898, the illegally published first part of his magnum opus, The Intellectual Worker, Machajski warned that articulate intellectuals will inevitably find their way to the head of the revolutionary movement and become the controlling oligarchy within any future revolutionary regime. In order to protect the interests of the inarticulate manual workers he called for a world-wide "workers' conspiracy" dedicated to gaining enough economic improvement to permit the workers to raise their level of literacy and culture. Only in this manner could the advantage that the intellectual enjoyed over the worker be neutralized, and the working class assured that a genuine proletarian culture rather than a mythic culture of the intellectuals be built after the revolutionary attainment of power.
Machajski's position resembles the revolutionary syndicalism of Sorel, with its belief in "direct action" in the economic sphere and the development prior to any bid for power of an autonomous, anti-authoritarian working class culture. His form of social analysis is also reminiscent of Pareto's theory of the "circulation of elites," Michels' "iron law of oligarchy," and Burnham's subsequent theory of a purely "managerial revolution." But unlike all these figures Machajski remained an unreconstructed optimist, confident that the workers' conspiracy could save the Revolution and develop fully the Promethean possibilities of the proletariat. Machajski's ideas, which were particularly popular in Siberia, were anathemized by the Bolshevik leadership with particular venom long before his death in I926.64