Left Bolshevism and Proletarian Culture
The intellectual foundations for the Proletkult movement were laid in the years after the failure of the Revolution of 1905. The defeat of the revolutionary forces marked a severe crisis for the Russian socialist movement and for the Bolsheviks in particular. When the government disbanded the Second Duma in 1907 and the police began to restrict the activities of political parties and legalized worker groups, Social Democrats had to decide whether to participate in parliamen-
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tary elections or to continue the revolutionary struggle through underground agitation. This dilemma split the Bolshevik faction in two. Lenin argued that it made no sense to eschew legal channels because a new revolutionary upsurge lay far off in the future. He was opposed by a group known as the "left Bolsheviks," led by Aleksandr Bogdanov, who believed that the revolution would soon continue and that the Bolsheviks should not be lulled into quiescent parliamentarianism.
The left Bolsheviks, who included Bogdanov, Anatolii Lunacharskii, Maxim Gorky, and Pavel Lebedev-Polianskii, challenged Lenin's claims to leadership and his vision of party politics. They attacked him on three different fronts: political strategy, party organization, and, most fundamentally, socialist theory.[3] Lenin's authoritarian methods of party organization received special criticism. Because the ranks of intellectual leaders had been depleted through arrests, disaffection, and exile, the left Bolsheviks feared that workers in Russia had been left without guidance. They argued that the Bolsheviks needed to encourage more collective and inclusive organizational tactics and to devote more resources to the training of worker-leaders who could assume positions of power.
Most important, the left Bolsheviks were deeply committed to a reinterpretation of Marxist theory that would give ideology and culture a more creative and central role. Opposed to the rigid materialism of Lenin and Plekhanov, they believed that the ideological superstructure was more than a reflection of society's economic base. Lunacharskii had long been fasci-
[3] There is a large and growing literature on left Bolshevism. For the most recent works see John Biggart, "'Anti-Leninist Bolshevism': The Forward Group of the RSDRP," Canadian Slavonic Papers , vol. 23, no. 2 (1981), pp. 134–53; Robert C. Williams, "Collective Immortality: The Syndicalist Origins of Proletarian Culture, 1905–1910," Slavic Review , vol. 39, no. 3 (1980), pp. 389–402; idem, The Other Bolsheviks (Bloomington, 1985); and Avraham Yassour, "Lenin and Bogdanov: Protagonists in the 'Bolshevik Center,'" Studies in Soviet Thought , vol. 22 (1981), pp. 1–32.
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nated by the power of art to inspire political action. Both he and Gorky were convinced that socialism could convey the force of a "human religion" and inspire individuals to look beyond themselves to a higher good, one that encompassed the fate of all humanity. Taken together, their ideas came to be known as "god-building" (bogostroitel'stvo ).[4] At the same time, Bogdanov was engaged in a massive project to integrate the process of cognition into Marxism in order to develop a more sophisticated understanding of ideology.
From 1907 to 1911 the leftists were serious contenders for control of the Bolshevik center. Initially, their activist political tactics were very appealing to the rank and file.[5] They spread their ideas about ideology and society in socialist journals; Bogdanov even published a popular science fiction novel, Red Star , which depicted the results of a successful socialist revolution on Mars.[6] Bogdanov also reached out to a scholarly socialist audience. In his book Empiriomonism , made famous by Lenin's violent objections to it, he employed the ideas of contemporary Western European thinkers such as Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius.[7] In Bogdanov's view the socialist polity of the future would demand a new awareness of the relationship between the individual and society and would require a different approach to ethics, science, human values, and art.
[4] Jutta Scherrer," 'Ein gelber und ein blauer Teufel': Zur Entstehung der Begriffe 'bogostroitel'stvo' und 'bogoiskatel'stvo,'" Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte , vol. 25 (1978), pp. 322–23; A. V. Lunacharskii, Velikii perevorot (Petrograd, 1919), pp. 14–22; and idem, "Ateisti," in Ocherki po filosofii marksizma (St. Petersburg, 1908), pp. 107–61.