James D. White’s Red Hamlet: The Life and Ideas of Alexander Bogdanov is the first comprehensive English-language biography of Bogdanov. In it, White alternates chapters of straight biography with dense chapters that rehash Bogdanov’s philosophy and the debates surrounding it. The volume meticulously provides an inside-baseball look at the evolution of the Bolshevik organism and makes clear the degree to which Bolshevism’s path was not predetermined—it could have been different…

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