Red Harvest

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Come join me on Wednesday 14 March at 7.30pm, and discover what Russia’s famines have revealed about the living world.

This is the third in a series of lectures I’m giving at Pushkin House, the Russian cultural centre in London. It is part of a large work in progress: a history of science under Stalin’s rule. The book is due out in 2014 from Faber and Faber. 

After the civil war, the Bolsheviks turned to the revolutionary science of genetics for help in securing the Soviet food supply. The young Soviet Union became a world leader in genetics and shared its knowledge with Germany. Then Stalin’s impatience and suspicion destroyed the field and virtually wiped out Russian agriculture. Stalin was right to be suspicious: genetics had promised the world a future of health and longevity, but by the 1940s it was delivering death camps and human vivisection. Genetic advances have made possible our world of plenty – but why did the human cost have to be so high?

Pushkin House, 5a Bloomsbury Square, London WC1A 2TA. Tickets  are £7, conc. £5 (Friends of Pushkin House, students and OAPs). The box office is on 44 (0)20 7269 9770, but you can always take a chance and pay on the night.

What Soviet science did for us

Untitled

I’m preparing a series of talks for Pushkin House in London, to tie in with a long project on science under Joseph Stalin. While we’re finalising the programme, these notes will give you an idea what to expect.

Russia’s Other Culture: science and technology in 20th century.

 

Early in the twentieth century, a few marginal scientists bound themselves to a bankrupt government to create a world superpower. Russia’s political elites embraced science, patronised it, fetishized it, and even tried to impersonate it. Many Soviet scientists led a charmed life. Others were ruined by their closeness to power. Four illustrated talks reveal how this stormy marriage between science and state has shaped the modern world.

 

1. The Men Who Fell to Earth: How Russia’s pilots, parachutists and pioneers won the space race.
November 2011.

 

In the 1950s and 1960s Sergei Korolev and the Soviet space programme laid a path to the stars. Now Russia is our only lifeline to the technologies and machines we have put in orbit. Simon Ings is joined by Doug Millard, Senior Curator of ICT & Space Technology at London’s Science Museum, to trace Russia’s centuries-old obsession with flight. This was the nation that erected skydiving towers in its playgrounds, built planes so large and so strange, the rest of the world thought they were fakes, and outdid Germany and the US in its cinematic portrayal of space. The nation’s soaring imagination continues to astonish the world.

 

The talk coincides with 50th anniversary of pioneering space travel by Yuri Gagarin

 

2. Prospectors: Why Russia sits on plenty and never gets rich
January 2012

 

The old boast ran that Russia governed an empire with more surface area than the visible moon. Still, 40 per cent of it lay under permafrost, and no Romanov before Alexander II so much as set foot in Siberia. Defying nature, the Bolsheviks forcibly industrialized the region, built factories and cities, and operated industries in some of the most forbidding places on the planet. Beginning with the construction of the Transsiberian railway, and ending with the planting of the Russian flag on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, this is a story of visionaries and idealists, traitors, despots, and the occasional fool.

 

The talk will form part of a week of activity marking the fifth anniversary of Pushkin House’s establishment in Bloomsbury.

 

3. Red Harvest: What Russia’s famines taught us about the living world.    
March 2012

 

After the civil war, the Bolsheviks turned to the revolutionary science of genetics for help in securing the Soviet food supply. The young Soviet Union became a world leader in genetics and shared its knowledge with Germany. Then Stalin’s impatience and suspicion destroyed the field and virtually wiped out Russian agriculture. Stalin was right to be suspicious: genetics had promised the world a future of health and longevity, but by the 1940s it was delivering death camps and human vivisection. Genetic advances have made possible our world of plenty – but why did the human cost have to be so high?

 

4. “General Healthification”: Russia’s unsung sciences of the mind.
May 2012

 

The way we teach and care for our children owes much to a handful of largely forgotten Russian pioneers. Years after their deaths, the psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein, the psychologist Lev Vygotsky and the pioneering neuroscientist Alexander Luria have an unseen influence over our everyday thinking. In our factories and offices, too, Soviet psychology plays a role, fitting us to our tasks, ensuring our safety and our health. Our assumptions about health care and the role of the state all owe a huge debt to the Soviet example. But these ideas have a deeper history. Many of them originated in America. The last lecture in this series celebrates the fertile yet largely forgotten intellectual love affair between America and the young Soviet Union.

“What of it, let them die!” – Sergei Oldenburg in Moscow

Baby steps towards an anecdotal history of Russian science…

Pomogi

Sergei Fyodorovich Oldenburg, secretary, Academy of Sciences (1863– 1934)

On 13 July 1921, Maxim Gorky appealed to the world for help; less than three months later later, Frank Golder, a native of Odessa with a PhD from Harvard University, found himself steeped in the horrors of the great Russian famine.

Golder had come from Washington to survey the extent of the catastrophe for Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration. His reports painted a terrible and complex picture. Russian agriculture had been virtually wiped out by a world war, a revolution, a civil war and then, in 1921, a drought. A government scheme to redistribute food had further alienated Russia’s traditionally suspicious peasant class; many buried and even burned their crops, sooner than hand them over to the Red Army. A survey team member wrote: “There were abandoned homes in the communes by the score, the roofs and wooden parts taken off for fuel, and the walls of mud and straw falling into decay. Everywhere we found emaciated starving children, with stomachs distended from eating melon rinds, cabbage leaves and anything that could be found, things which filled the stomach but did not nourish…”

Arriving in Penza, south-east of Moscow, Golder found the town stricken with cholera and typhus. There were next to no medicines. An 800- bed hospital there had only two thermometers, and the administrator’s best assistant, “thoroughly discouraged”, had committed suicide the day before.

In Moscow, things were better, but even among the reasonably well provided-for members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 21 had died from disease and malnutrition.

Golder got the impression that Sergei Oldenburg, the Permanent Secretary of the Academy, would soon be joining them. “It is so pitiful and so heart breaking that it completely upsets me,” Golder wrote, recalling his visit for his friend and patron Ephraim D. Adams. “I wish you could meet him for he is one of the most scholarly, cultured and kindly men that I have ever met.” Oldenburg, nearly 60 by then, was bedridden. He was barely able to reach the scraps of toast on his table, let alone chew them. He had spent the past four years trying to support his own family, the orphan children of his brother, his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren, all on about nine million roubles – or five US dollars – a month. The children had bread every day: for the rest of the family, it was a weekly treat.

Sergei Oldenburg was one of the privileged ones: highly-educated, patrician, a personal acquaintance of Vladimir Lenin, and engaged in work vital to the state. Along with other scholars, he had even been recieving a dole, although, as he wrote, “it needed the limitless authority of Lenin and the enormous popularity of Gorky to carry off the issuing of an ‘academic ration’. For this exceptional ration was created before the eyes of the hungry masses who had set themselves the task of destroying all privileges and hierarchies.”

Class resentment, exacerbated by the emergency, was indeed fierce: Frank Golder recalls how one professor called upon the representative of the Crimean government – a young female Communist – to point out that professors in the Crimea were dying of hunger. “What of it?” she had replied. “Let them die!”

Since the October Revolution, Sergei Oldenburg had worked “like a giant” trying to keep up the Academy, trying to find the Academicians something to eat, trying to keep on good terms with the Bolsheviks while striving not to alienate the anti-Bolsheviks. Oldenburg, a world-renowned Orientalist, grandson of a Full General in the Imperial Russian Army, and with a modest amount of blue blood running through his veins, was a liberal nationalist; never a communist. In 1905 he had served in the Russian Provisional Government as Minister of Education. Unlike his political colleagues, however, he had chosen to remain in Russia following the Bolshevik takeover. When Golder, seated at Oldenburg’s bedside in Moscow, talked strenuously about American state recognition, and the good American investment capital might do to save the country, Oldenburg’s mixture of national pride, and his precoccuption with the redemptive powers of suffering, marked him as a leftover of a bygone age:

“Our salvation can not come from without but must come from within and we, as a government and to some extent as a nation have not yet confessed and repented our sins… Let us recover slowly, let us suffer some more the cruel pangs of hunger because it is the only way to get well and strong… All the suffering, all the misery we have endured and are enduring is teaching us Russians to think clearly and that is a great step in the line of progress.”

Oldenburg was certainly a clear thinker: a scholar of Buddhism who welcomed and enjoyed the company of the growing number of Academicians who were natural scientists. The Academy itself was old, founded in 1724 by Peter the Great. It had always been a more reliable friend to the State than the universities, and had enjoyed a privileged position, as a sort of expert arm of the Russian civil service. Oldenburg knew how to convey the Academy’s value to those now in power. He emphasised the practical benefits working with the Academy. His close friend Vladimir Vernadsky had established the Academy’s Commission for the Study of Natural Productive Forces (KEPS) – a key asset in negotiations with the government. Oldenburg asked for money and independence; in return, he could help the State develop greater self-sufficiency in raw materials and manufactures, and even help Lenin with his over-ambitious plan for the rapid electrification of Russia.
It was never an easy compromise, but Lenin, for his part, understood how important the Academy was to the Russia’s survival. (When, in 1922, a Proletkult bigwig wrote a Pravda article hostile to the Academy, Lenin, unimpressed, scrawled in the margin: “And what percentage of [his] loyal proliterians know how to build locomotives?”) So Sergei Oldenburg survived the famine, the flood that inundated his apartment in 1924, and even the attentions of “that black cloud from Moscow”, the astronomer Vartan Ter-Oganezov, an ideologue whose ambitions to remake science in the image of Bolshevism earn him a chapter later in this account. In this chapter, we will see how Oldenburg, with astonishing political dexterity, shaped the future of the world’s largest scientific institution: a sprawling organisation that fed and clothed almost all the people whose lives and and careers are described in this book.

From the beginning, Russian scientists had reservations about communist ideology. Until the “Great Break” and Cultural Revolution of 1929 there was not one member of the Academy of Sciences who was also a member of the Communist Party. But few Academicians could resist the allure of Sergei Oldenburg’s vision of the the Academy’s future: a scientistic programme of modernisation that offered many influential positions to the scientists and engineers willing to work with the communist government. The new Academy grew vast, comprising hundreds of research institutes spread across the USSR. Its central control structure appealed to Lenin’s notorious successor Joseph Stalin. But it appealed just as much to Academicians of Oldenburg’s stripe and generation: men who, in Tsarist times. had argued for nothing else.
Class resentment, wielded as a weapon by Joseph Stalin, eventually destroyed the arrangements Oldenburg spent so many years maintaining. Oldenburg was dismissed from his post during the “Great Break” of 1929. His legacy lived on, nonetheless: a collosal working institution, often troubled, often compromised, but recognised the world over as a pillar of world science.

“What of it, let them die!” – Sergei Oldenburg in Moscow

Baby steps towards an anecdotal history of Russian science…

Pomogi

Sergei Fyodorovich Oldenburg, secretary, Academy of Sciences (1863– 1934)

On 13 July 1921, Maxim Gorky appealed to the world for help; less than three months later later, Frank Golder, a native of Odessa with a PhD from Harvard University, found himself steeped in the horrors of the great Russian famine.

Golder had come from Washington to survey the extent of the catastrophe for Herbert Hoover’s American Relief Administration. His reports painted a terrible and complex picture. Russian agriculture had been virtually wiped out by a world war, a revolution, a civil war and then, in 1921, a drought. A government scheme to redistribute food had further alienated Russia’s traditionally suspicious peasant class; many buried and even burned their crops, sooner than hand them over to the Red Army. A survey team member wrote: “There were abandoned homes in the communes by the score, the roofs and wooden parts taken off for fuel, and the walls of mud and straw falling into decay. Everywhere we found emaciated starving children, with stomachs distended from eating melon rinds, cabbage leaves and anything that could be found, things which filled the stomach but did not nourish…”

Arriving in Penza, south-east of Moscow, Golder found the town stricken with cholera and typhus. There were next to no medicines. An 800- bed hospital there had only two thermometers, and the administrator’s best assistant, “thoroughly discouraged”, had committed suicide the day before.

In Moscow, things were better, but even among the reasonably well provided-for members of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 21 had died from disease and malnutrition.

Golder got the impression that Sergei Oldenburg, the Permanent Secretary of the Academy, would soon be joining them. “It is so pitiful and so heart breaking that it completely upsets me,” Golder wrote, recalling his visit for his friend and patron Ephraim D. Adams. “I wish you could meet him for he is one of the most scholarly, cultured and kindly men that I have ever met.” Oldenburg, nearly 60 by then, was bedridden. He was barely able to reach the scraps of toast on his table, let alone chew them. He had spent the past four years trying to support his own family, the orphan children of his brother, his daughter-in-law and his grandchildren, all on about nine million roubles – or five US dollars – a month. The children had bread every day: for the rest of the family, it was a weekly treat.

Sergei Oldenburg was one of the privileged ones: highly-educated, patrician, a personal acquaintance of Vladimir Lenin, and engaged in work vital to the state. Along with other scholars, he had even been recieving a dole, although, as he wrote, “it needed the limitless authority of Lenin and the enormous popularity of Gorky to carry off the issuing of an ‘academic ration’. For this exceptional ration was created before the eyes of the hungry masses who had set themselves the task of destroying all privileges and hierarchies.”

Class resentment, exacerbated by the emergency, was indeed fierce: Frank Golder recalls how one professor called upon the representative of the Crimean government – a young female Communist – to point out that professors in the Crimea were dying of hunger. “What of it?” she had replied. “Let them die!”

Since the October Revolution, Sergei Oldenburg had worked “like a giant” trying to keep up the Academy, trying to find the Academicians something to eat, trying to keep on good terms with the Bolsheviks while striving not to alienate the anti-Bolsheviks. Oldenburg, a world-renowned Orientalist, grandson of a Full General in the Imperial Russian Army, and with a modest amount of blue blood running through his veins, was a liberal nationalist; never a communist. In 1905 he had served in the Russian Provisional Government as Minister of Education. Unlike his political colleagues, however, he had chosen to remain in Russia following the Bolshevik takeover. When Golder, seated at Oldenburg’s bedside in Moscow, talked strenuously about American state recognition, and the good American investment capital might do to save the country, Oldenburg’s mixture of national pride, and his precoccuption with the redemptive powers of suffering, marked him as a leftover of a bygone age:

“Our salvation can not come from without but must come from within and we, as a government and to some extent as a nation have not yet confessed and repented our sins… Let us recover slowly, let us suffer some more the cruel pangs of hunger because it is the only way to get well and strong… All the suffering, all the misery we have endured and are enduring is teaching us Russians to think clearly and that is a great step in the line of progress.”

Oldenburg was certainly a clear thinker: a scholar of Buddhism who welcomed and enjoyed the company of the growing number of Academicians who were natural scientists. The Academy itself was old, founded in 1724 by Peter the Great. It had always been a more reliable friend to the State than the universities, and had enjoyed a privileged position, as a sort of expert arm of the Russian civil service. Oldenburg knew how to convey the Academy’s value to those now in power. He emphasised the practical benefits working with the Academy. His close friend Vladimir Vernadsky had established the Academy’s Commission for the Study of Natural Productive Forces (KEPS) – a key asset in negotiations with the government. Oldenburg asked for money and independence; in return, he could help the State develop greater self-sufficiency in raw materials and manufactures, and even help Lenin with his over-ambitious plan for the rapid electrification of Russia.
It was never an easy compromise, but Lenin, for his part, understood how important the Academy was to the Russia’s survival. (When, in 1922, a Proletkult bigwig wrote a Pravda article hostile to the Academy, Lenin, unimpressed, scrawled in the margin: “And what percentage of [his] loyal proliterians know how to build locomotives?”) So Sergei Oldenburg survived the famine, the flood that inundated his apartment in 1924, and even the attentions of “that black cloud from Moscow”, the astronomer Vartan Ter-Oganezov, an ideologue whose ambitions to remake science in the image of Bolshevism earn him a chapter later in this account. In this chapter, we will see how Oldenburg, with astonishing political dexterity, shaped the future of the world’s largest scientific institution: a sprawling organisation that fed and clothed almost all the people whose lives and and careers are described in this book.

From the beginning, Russian scientists had reservations about communist ideology. Until the “Great Break” and Cultural Revolution of 1929 there was not one member of the Academy of Sciences who was also a member of the Communist Party. But few Academicians could resist the allure of Sergei Oldenburg’s vision of the the Academy’s future: a scientistic programme of modernisation that offered many influential positions to the scientists and engineers willing to work with the communist government. The new Academy grew vast, comprising hundreds of research institutes spread across the USSR. Its central control structure appealed to Lenin’s notorious successor Joseph Stalin. But it appealed just as much to Academicians of Oldenburg’s stripe and generation: men who, in Tsarist times. had argued for nothing else.
Class resentment, wielded as a weapon by Joseph Stalin, eventually destroyed the arrangements Oldenburg spent so many years maintaining. Oldenburg was dismissed from his post during the “Great Break” of 1929. His legacy lived on, nonetheless: a collosal working institution, often troubled, often compromised, but recognised the world over as a pillar of world science.

1908: The Island (work in progress)

I’m writing some biographical sketches of Soviet scientists and academicians

Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Bogdanov, philosopher (1873–1928)

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The moment he stepped off the boat, Lenin went on the offensive: “I know, Aleksey Maximovich, you’re always wanting to reconcile me with those Machists. I told you in my letter it’s pointless, so don’t even try.”

For months, the writer and political activist Aleksey Maximovich Peshkov – better known as Maxim Gorky – had been trying to bring the twin stars of the Bolshevik movement back together. Aleksandr Bogdanov was already staying with Gorky at his residence on the mediterranean island of Capri, once the favourite resort of Roman emperors. Valdimir Lenin had a standing invitation tovisit. The men had once been the closest of friends. Bogdanov had helped Lenin through his split with Trotsky, and the consequent crisis in the party, and between 1906 and 1907, while hiding out in Finland, Bogdanov, Lenin and his family had lived practically out of each others’ pockets.

But as the forces of reaction dismantled the gains of the 1905 uprising, Bogdanov and Lenin had grown further and further apart. Lenin still held out hope that the Bolshevik cause might be furthered within the Duma – the constitutional parliament established in 1905. Bogdanov thought this was a waste of time. His radical politics had been acquired during his first Tsarist exile, while delivering lectures to factory workers; he wanted the Bolsheviks to align themselves much more strongly with the old underground workers’ organisations.

 The disagreement between Lenin and Bogdanov was a crucial one for the Party, and the men’s more or less equal standing only made things worse. Bogdanov – likeable, gentle, and a little bit full of himself – was also a loose cannon, preaching revolution for its own sake, as man’s only significant form of self-assertion. And he was extraordinarily good at getting hold of money. The Bolsheviks’ sometimes terroristic “expropriations” of funds from political opponents, and from the districts that harboured them, were Bogdanov’s idea. Bogdanov held the party’s purse-strings; since 1907, Lenin had found it harder and harder to fund his own projects.

Immediate and violent action might have drawn the two men together under the banner of a common cause – but there was no action to be had. With the decision to work within the Duma, 1905’s exciting world of barricades and mutinies had to be given up, and Bogdanov bitterly resented the fact.

The Bolsheviks seemed to be getting further and further away from any real action. In typical Chekhovian style, their factional arguments grew ever more rarefied. One contemporary memoirist wrote: “When Ilyich began to quarrel with Bogdanov on the issue of empiriomonism, we threw up our hands and decided Lenin had gone slightly out of his mind.”

Bogdanov, the son of a rural teacher, was an urbane thinker. He had read his Kant. He followed the theories of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius. He admired Marx, but he did not believe that Marx should have the last word on every topic. Above all, he understood that the sciences of mind lagged painfully far behind the physical sciences. So it was important to be as honest as possible about where one’s information about the world was coming from. The Austrian physicist Ernst Mach had pointed out that, real as the world may be, we can never apprehend it directly: our knowledge of it comes through our senses. Bogdanov’s “Machism” was an attempt to apply that honest admission consistently across all bodies of knowledge—    

Bogdanov knew far more than was good for him: that afternoon in May 1908, as he vainly tried to explain his position, he stumbled over his words.

“Drop it,” Lenin snapped.

Perhaps it was Gorky who suggested a friendly chess game to clear the air. At any rate, he is there in the photograph, looking on as Lenin, seated on a balcony with his back to the Tyrrhenian Sea, steadily loses control of the game, and himself. It astonished Gorky how angry and childish he became.

Lenin believed in Marx. He believed in the natural sciences. He believed that some things had been discovered once and for all. He was no philosopher, and he imagined that Bogdanov was a dangerous relativist. Bogdanov believed in nothing and so, whether he knew it or not, he was siding with the priests and the mystics. “Somebody or other – Juarez, I think – said, ‘It is better to speak the truth than be a minister.’ Or a Machist, I would add.”

Aleksandr Bogdanov had always revered Lenin, but the differences between the men were becoming unbridgeable. Bogdanov was the more intellectually adept of the two, but he lacked Lenin’s appetite for political infighting. Bogdanov was a novelist: his science fantasy Red Star was being published that year, and he hankered for more writing time.

Bogdanov and the others went out for a walk, and Lenin unburdened himself to his hostess, Gorky’s common-law wife, Maria Andreyeva. Of Bogdanov and his set, Lenin said, more in sorrow than in anger, “They are intelligent, talented people. They have done a great deal for the Party, they could do ten times more, but they won’t go with us! They can’t. Scores and hundreds like them are broken and crippled by this criminal system.”

With hindsight, it’s clear enough that Bogdanov’s philosophy foreshadows the greatest achievements of Soviet science in the first half of the twentieth century. Marxism’s greatest intellectual challenge was to to make room for human experience, while at the same time  doing away with God. It wasn’t enough to be crudely materialist, because Mind wasn’t a thing. You couldn’t point to it the way you could point to a chair or a table. And you couldn’t make mind a special case, either, because that led straight to mysticism. Mind, therefore, had to be an “emergent property” – something that arose, not from matter itself, but from the way matter was organised. 

Bogdanov’s breakthrough was to realise that this is true of everything. Everything is as it is because it is arranged in a certain way. If you understand how something is organised, then you understand its essence. If you can describe things in terms of their organisation, then you really can talk about human minds and even whole societies in the same breath as chairs and tables, since all these things are simply more or less complex arrangements of matter. Bogdanov envisaged a science which would embrace the biological and social worlds in the way that mathematics had described classical mechanics. In the West, we call this science “systems theory”: our entire digital culture is built upon it.

It has been said that Russian philosophy has a Messianic streak a mile wide, and Bogdanov’s writings certainly lend credence to the claim. Bogdanov attempted to apply what was essentially a scientist’s philosophy over the whole of human experience. He believed that the world’s “biological-organisational” tendencies could and should be mastered to control human society on an economic, political, psychic, and even sexual level. Bogdanov’s schemes were at once grander and vaguer than Marxism itself. They were – or seemed to be – wildly impractical. No wonder, then, that come the October Revolution, and the Bolshevik takeover of the State, Lenin was prepared to tolerate his old friend’s “infantile” social experiments.

Following his visit to Capri, Vladimir Lenin had split from Bogdanov and his followers. He had attacked Bogdanov’s work in print and in person, and had him expelled from the party. Bogdanov had responded by walking away with the Bolsheviks’ monies, and using them to set up an experimental revolutionary school on Capri with his brother-in-law, Anatoly Lunacharsky. The experiment had faltered. By 1917, Bogdanov’s ambition to manufacture and manage a truly proliterian culture must have seemed a harmless dream  – harmless enough that Lenin appointed Bogdanov’s co-experimenter Lunacharsky Commissar of Education, charged with the development of Soviet culture as well as its learning. Lunacharsky, in turn, made room for his brother-in-law’s ‘Proletkult’ experiment: an attempt to bootstrap an entire proliterian culture out of little more than a heap of good intentions.

Incredibly, it succeeded. At its height, Bogdanov’s cultural movement boasted 400,000 members, published twenty journals, and had won the public allegiance of virtually every significant artist, musician and writer in Russia. Experimental art, music and theatre flourished. The Tula Proletkult music section had a symphony orchestra, a brass band, an orchestra for folk instruments, and special classes in solo and operatic singing. Even tiny arctic Archangel, perched on the coast of the White Sea, boasted a choir. Lunacharsky greeted Proletkult’s meteoric rise with bemusement; Lenin’s reaction was one of barely-disguised horror. He insisted Lunacharsky’s Commissariat take over the running of the Proletkult: the Commissariat itself was closed down soon after. Now that the Bolsheviks were in power, Bogdanov’s anarchic inclinations could no longer be indulged.

Like many an intellectual who followed him into semi-obscurity, Bogdanov responded by devoting his time to his writings, and to science. In 1924, he began to investigate scientifically a folk idea about blood that had cropped up once or twice in his science fiction: the idea that transfusions might rejuvinate the body. His studies were perfectly serious: in 1925-1926, he founded the Institute for Haemotology and Blood Transfusions, which was later named after him. But here too, and critically, Bogdanov’s ambition got the better of him: on 7 April 1928 he died following a transfusion of infected blood.

Counting synaesthetes (work in progress)

I’ve been doing some work on how we treat mental gifts, and how we count the gifted…

bw_sample_ch7.pdf
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