A physician by training, Bogdanov was one of the Old Bolsheviks, joining the Bolsheviks in 1903 but expelled in 1909 after leading the ultra-left, boycottist (or ultimatist) tendency. He maintained that the party could only work through illegal organizations (due to the suppression of political parties during this period). After 1911, he drifted from political activism to writing on philosophy, culture, and economics. Served as an Army doctor in WWI. He did not rejoin the Party, but after the October Revolution, he became an organizer and leader of Proletcult. After 1921, he left politics to work in the field of science while remaining a widely respected figure of Old Bolshevism. He died in April 1928 while experimenting with blood transfusions. Bogdanov was an early exponent of Science Fiction and close to Anatoly Lunacharsky and Maxim Gorky. See The Positive Programme of Russian Positivism, a study of his novel Red Star: The First Bolshevik Utopia (1908) During the early years of the Bolshevik faction, Bogdanov was Lenin’s closest supporter, and Lenin was at first impressed with his three-volume Empirio-Monism, published in Moscow between 1904 and 1906. Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, a polemic against Bogdanov and others, dealing with the influence of Positivism in the Bolshevik Party. Plekhanov strongly condemned this book and after Bogdanov’s ultra-left otzvotism in 1908, Lenin took time off from political work to write settle accounts with Bogdanov’s ideas on modern science and dialectics.