Vpered group

Who split, and why?

After the defeat of the 1905 revolution the Bolsheviks divided over tactics. On participation in the Duma of Stolypin's regime, Lenin held that even the legal platforms of a reactionary period had to be used. The left around Bogdanov answered that Duma participation was corroding the revolutionary party, and demanded the recall of the deputies (otzovism) or an ultimatum to them (ultimatumism). In June 1909 the enlarged editorial board of Proletary expelled Bogdanov from the faction, and with Lunacharsky, Gorky and others he formed the Vpered group at the end of that year. Bogdanov was then a Bolshevik theorist and financial steward second only to Lenin, so this was a split in the leadership itself.

What did it stand for?

Vpered was more than a tactical grouping. First there was the philosophical quarrel: Bogdanov had developed empiriomonism, an epistemology drawing on Mach, and Lenin attacked it in Materialism and Empirio-criticism as an abandonment of materialism. Second there was a cultural programme: the group argued that before taking political power the proletariat had to build its own science and art, an independent culture, and taught worker activists accordingly at the party schools on Capri (1909) and in Bologna (1910–11). The idea flowed after the revolution into the Proletkult movement, and Bogdanov's organisational theory was systematised as tektology.

What became of it?

The group did not last. Worn down by running the schools and by émigré politics, Bogdanov himself withdrew from front-line politics around 1911, and the group had effectively dissolved by 1913. When revolution came in 1917 most of its members, Lunacharsky among them, returned to the Bolsheviks and took charge of culture and education in the Soviet government. Official Soviet historiography filed Vpered away as the left deviation of otzovism, but later research has read it differently: as a strand of early Bolshevism that stressed inner-party democracy and workers' self-education, and as a rare attempt to make culture an independent task of the revolution rather than its dependent variable.