Bridging the Gap: Science as a Means for Unity in Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star Anonymous College

For eons before mankind, even his most fundamental iteration, nature has been. Beyond having shaped the world and birthed the human being, nature is the all-powerful mother that has controlled and molded the human existence throughout its history. Whether responding to disease or storm, or to simple topographical realities, mankind has forever been subject to nature, creating a reactionary relationship between the two whereby man must constantly adjust to the environment in which he lives. Aware of this reality, Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star accounts for nature, incorporating it as the driving force behind the socio-political structures of the Earthly and Martian societies about which he writes. Between these two civilizations, nature is the shared, maternal omnipresence that framed customs and influenced politics, resulting in a violent and capitalist Earth and a homogenous, peaceful and communist Mars. Positing Mars as the communist and scientific utopia towards which mankind should strive, Bogdanov constructs his Martian society as a role model and an “elder brother” (Bogdanov, 56) not just for his contemporary Russia, which at the time of his writing was fraught with revolutionary angst, but for the Earth entire.

To this...