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Russia, it had been delayed too long because of Lenin's "tacit bloc"
with the "empiriomonist." It turned out to be a deployment of heavy
.artillery to a part of the battlefield that had largely been vacated.
It
is significant that Lenin failed to follow it up, as he had his other
large works, with a series of special articles in the press. When Bog–
danov answered it in a brief defense (the eighty-page pamphlet,
Vera
i
nauka-"Faith
and Science"- Moscow, 1910), Lenin did not
even trouble to make a rejoinder.
As
Lenin had shrewdly suspected, Lunacharsky did but Bogda–
nov did not return to his camp after the tactical and philosophical
controversies had blown over. During the war Bogdanov was an
internationalist. After the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, in which
he took no part, he attempted to serve the new society by founding
and guiding the Proletcult movement. Driven out of this field by
the guardians of "orthodoxy," he returned to the medical laboratory
and became the founder and director of the Moscow Institute for
Blood Transfusion. In 1928 he died as a consequence .of a blood
transfusion experiment, which, because of
his
uncertainty as to the
outcome, he performed upon his own person.
Lenin's book against him, though it created no stir when it
was first published, did acquire considerable importance in the his–
tory of contemporary thought after Lenin came to power, and more
particularly, after Lenin's death. Then it was published in huge edi–
tions, translated into many tongues, studied and cited by zealous dis–
ciples all over the world. In Russia it was made a basic text in the
training of all intellectuals and party theoreticians.
As
Lenin had
used Engels, so now thet Leninists used Lenin: as a sword to slay the
lurking dragon of "fideism"; as a "quotational shock treatment and
chain reaction" to link up and overwhelm
all
opposition, dissent, or
independent speculation; as a thread to guide the faithful through
the labyrinth of modern science and philosophy. Since Lenin's death
it has been used as a reagent to test new doctrines in such diverse
fields as relativity, psychoanalysis, genetics, electronics, theoretical
mathematics. Its exegesis of the philosophical insights of Engels and
Marx stands today as a coarsening screen between official Russian
Marxist thought and the more flexible, receptive, penetratj.ng think–
ing of the founders of Marxism. On this exegesis by Lenin has been
superimposed an exegesis of the exegesis by Stalin.
3
Thus do commen-
3. '
Dialectical and Historical Materialism,
by Joseph Stalin. First published
as Chapter IV of Stalin's
Short History of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union
and then reprinted as a separate work.
