In 1908 a Russian revolutionary wrote a novel about Mars.
On his Mars the socialists have found the way to build a perfect society. They exchange blood. Old citizens and young ones, back and forth, so that the vigor of the young keeps circulating through the old. Blood is not just treatment. It makes you an eternal part of the collective.
The man who wrote that was Alexander Bogdanov. Physician, philosopher, science fiction writer, and for a time one of the most important Bolsheviks alive, Lenin’s second in command and a confidant. Then he and Lenin fell out, and Lenin crushed him in the book Materialism and Empiriocriticism.
I did not meet Bogdanov the way you might, as a curiosity on some list of history’s stranger deaths. I met him in the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union course. We called the textbook The Brick, it was that thick. We had to write synopses of Materialism and Empiriocriticism, and that is how I learned about the man.
A deviationist. The heretic Lenin had to correct. But what stuck in my memory was the respectable Bogdanov, the scientist. After being tossed aside by Lenin, he quit politics and built the world’s first institute for blood transfusion, in Moscow. The Soviet blood service that grew out of it was well ahead of the world going into the war. He died running an experiment on himself, one more name on the long list of biologists who gave their lives for science. I gave him the quiet respect you give a man who built something real out of conviction. The crank arrived later, when I read on my own and learned how exactly he had died.
I also learned the part the course had left out. We knew about the “expropriations” all right, and we knew Kamo, who led the raid on Erivansky Square in Tiflis in June 1907 and afterwards feigned madness for years to cheat the gallows. He came to us as an adventure story, a daring man taking money back from the class that had taken it first. Nobody dwelt on the bombs, or on the forty bystanders dead and the fifty wounded.
What we were not told was who sent him. Bogdanov sat on the finance group of the Bolshevik Centre, with Lenin and Krasin, a body hidden not only from the tsar’s police but from most of the Party, and it was that group that ordered the raids.
One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and I was eighteen and on the side that had already decided which word to use.
So the man who would later open his veins for the benefit of all mankind had decided, twenty years earlier, that particular people standing in a particular square were just change to be spent for the cause.
I would not have thought about him again, except that a hundred years later another man also put a needle in his vein.
Bryan Johnson sold a company for enough money to buy anything and decided to spend it on not dying. Two hundred pills and compounds a day. A hundred biomarkers on a schedule. Everything published, the blood panels, the scans, even the failures. He funds his aging father’s treatments and says every extra day the old man gets is precious. As a scientist I get it. It’s cool!
At one point Johnson did the thing. He and his teenage son and his father ran a blood exchange across three generations, the boy’s plasma into him, his own into his father. He ran it as a trial, measured for a benefit, found none, and stopped. Framed that way it is a clean protocol. Described any other way it is youth flowing down the generations through the blood.
That he wants to live forever is not strange. Everyone wants that quietly, and some people write books about it. Blood is the strange part. A modern longevity program has a whole spread in front of it. Most of the menu is molecular. Senolytics, rapamycin, caloric restriction, stem cells, gene editing, epigenetic reprogramming. Still, the most instrumented longevity program on earth, run by a man who trusts nothing he cannot chart, went past all of it to a young man’s blood. The exact image a Bolshevik had published in a novel in 1908.
Blood has always been sacralized. We are blood relatives, we swear our oaths in it, the culture loaded kinship and sacrifice and inheritance into it long before medicine knew what the fluid was for. It is in your blood! Young blood!
Rapamycin is a pill you swallow and trust. A transfusion is a thing you experience. The evidence did not put blood at the front of the queue. Our culture did, a long time ago.
None of which makes the pursuit foolish. I think it is noble. Wanting to defeat death is not vanity and it is not decadence. It is close to the most human thing there is. I realized my own mortality at the age of six, when my uncle passed away. I remember being horrified for several days, but then I came up with the idea that by the time my time is up, science will find a way! So ironic.
So I count myself among the ones who want it to work, but the blood thing still unsettles me.
Before the transfusions, before the institute, Bogdanov spent a decade writing Tektology, a universal science of organization, for living cells, machines and societies alike, all of it systems seeking equilibrium. It anticipated Wiener’s cybernetics by decades. The novel came first, the theory second, the needle last, each one an application of the one before. To him individual death was a category error, a holdover of the old idea that a man is a separate thing. Lenin had excommunicated him for exactly this, for holding that reality is something the collective organizes rather than something fixed. Come to think of it, this sounds very postmodern!
Johnson put his on paper too, as a creed. Don’t Die, stated as first principle, a movement with numbered rules, and the two hundred compounds grow out of it. Underneath it sits something not far from Bogdanov’s, wearing this century’s most confident idea instead of the last one’s. The body is a mechanism, it can be tuned without limit, and death stops being a boundary and becomes a defect. Neither man is a scientist who wandered into a belief. Each is a believer who conjured a science.
From some point of view they are opposites, one a revolutionary, the other a billionaire. One wanted to dissolve the individual into the collective. The other means to preserve one individual, himself, forever. But in method Bogdanov was closer to Johnson than to any utopist, a systems thinker measuring toward equilibrium decades before the instruments existed. So was the country he helped found. Lenin praised Taylor’s stopwatch as one of the great scientific achievements. The factories copied Ford’s assembly line bolt for bolt. A leading Soviet theorist wrote an essay called Marx and Ford, arguing the two belonged together. Dialectical materialism and total measurement were never enemies. The Soviet Union ran on both, the red banner overhead and the time-and-motion study on the floor. Gosplan, Gosstat, Glushkov’s OGAS are the monuments to this.
Johnson is Bogdanov’s descendant. Believe long enough that the body is a machine with one broken part, and you reach for the oldest repair anyone knows.
This should trouble Johnson more than it ever troubled Bogdanov, because his whole creed is built on measuring everything. He measured the result of the transfusion, found nothing, and stopped.
But for all his devotion to measurement, he was not immune to the oldest intuition in medicine, that life itself resides in the blood.
Bogdanov did not stop. His death is usually told as an accident.
He transfused himself eleven times successfully. Each time he read the result off his own body, and each time it was good. His eyesight sharpened. His hair stopped falling out. He felt years younger, and a fellow revolutionary wrote that he looked it, a decade lifted clean off him.
The missed marker was most likely the rhesus factor. Rhesus was not discovered until 1940, twelve years after he died. He was not careless with a known test. He was working where the relevant fact had no name yet, and where the danger rises precisely with the number and the volume of transfusions.
The twelfth transfusion was from a student who carried malaria and tuberculosis. They shared a blood group, and nearly a liter passed between them. Three hours later Bogdanov’s body turned on the new blood. He died fifteen days after, on the seventh of April, 1928, aged fifty-three. The student recovered, finished his studies, got over the tuberculosis, and lived a long life as a meteorologist.
The blood was compatible by every measure he had, and foreign along one nobody knew about for another twelve years. He thought he was safe but he was steadily accumulating risk.
The surgeons already knew that blood was a tissue that can go wrong. He viewed it as a fluid that unites. On his Mars blood invigorates, it does not attack, and the collective body does not turn on itself because in the collective there is no self to turn. There was no place for antibodies. The needle was meant to prove that a man dissolves into the group. It proved that a man is a single body that can refuse.
I grew up inside the largest version of it ever attempted. Not a protocol, an actual country. It began from an aspiration that was noble, that human nature can be improved, that suffering and inequality and even, in Bogdanov’s corner of the dream, death itself were bugs, not features of being alive. Weld that hope to a system claiming to explain the entire motion of history and you do not get stupidity. You get serious and competent and sincere people doing insane things.
And it turned inhumane almost at once. Not slowly, and not by some later corruption of the idea. A project to perfect the human being ran on the premise that the individual one standing in front of you is provisional, a rounding error against the perfect arrangement to come later, and once a man is provisional there is nothing he cannot be spent on. That premise was in place on Erivansky Square in 1907, twenty years before anyone had power to abuse. My grandfather was spent in 1937.
Turns out, Bogdanov did not invent the dream he died for. A generation before him, a devout librarian named Nikolai Fyodorov taught that the common task of humanity, its purpose on earth, was to defeat death and bring back everyone who had ever died. Since the resurrected would need somewhere to stand, we would have to colonize the planets to house them (hello, Elon!). One of the young men who sat with him in the library was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who went off and worked out the rocket equation Russia would later ride into orbit. The Soviet space program has a Christian mystic’s resurrection dream in its family tree. Bogdanov was the branch that went to blood instead of rockets. They had a name for themselves, the Cosmists.
Fyodorov wanted to raise everyone, the poorest and most forgotten first, and there was something holy in the sheer size of it. A hundred years on, stripped of the universality, it is a rich man measuring a single body, his own. The ambition shrank from all of humanity to one customer. The refusal to accept death remained the same size.
I want what Johnson wants. I would take the working version tomorrow, and so would you, and we would be right to.
The wish to live is the good part. The danger is the program that arrives with it, and the way a program picks the answer before anyone measures anything. In both centuries it picked blood.