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Let's go to Mars

Bogdanov puts a communist utopia on Mars

Lenin's rival inside the Bolshevik party wrote a Mars that is already communist, running out of raw material, and debating whether to take Earth and remove the humans.

A two-panel police photograph of a bearded man in a dark coat, shown face-on and in profile, with a name written in Russian beneath.
Bogdanov in a Tsarist police file under his real name, Malinovsky, a year or two before he wrote the novel. · Image: State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF)

In 1908 a St Petersburg publisher brought out Krasnaya Zvezda — Red Star — by Alexander Bogdanov, physician, philosopher and co-founder of the Bolshevik faction alongside Lenin five years earlier. A Russian revolutionary named Leonid is approached by a stranger called Menni, who turns out to be a Martian, and flown to Mars in a ship running on the decay of radioactive matter. Most of the book describes an economy. Mars has no money and no private property; production is matched to need by continuously updated statistical tables, children are raised communally, and Martians keep themselves vigorous by transfusing blood between old and young. Netti, the doctor who explains all this, Leonid takes for a man for most of the book.

The planet underneath is Lowell's. Bogdanov accepted the canal network as fact and made it infrastructure, the visible plumbing of a society that had beaten scarcity. His 1913 prequel, Engineer Menni, is a novel about digging them.

Mars is also running short of raw material. At a closed conference a Martian named Sterni sets out the arithmetic: Earth is the only planet fit for mass settlement, terrestrial humans are too violent to assimilate, and the rational course is to remove them. Leonid murders him.

Bogdanov was expelled from the Bolsheviks in 1909, the year Lenin published Materialism and Empirio-criticism against him, and spent the revolution running Proletkult rather than the state. He built a transfusion institute in Moscow and experimented on himself; in 1928 an exchange with a student carrying malaria and tuberculosis killed him. Historians still argue about whether he knew.

Red Star was reissued in 1918 and 1922 and read as the first Soviet science fiction, though it predates the revolution by nine years. Alexei Tolstoy's Aelita, filmed by Yakov Protazanov and premiered in Moscow in September 1924, put constructivist Martians in front of packed cinemas while critics called it ideologically improper. Tolstoy's Mars inverts Bogdanov's politics, and the trip turns out to be a daydream.