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Bogdanov and Lenin a forgotten Rivalry
(1998)
Most of us are familiar with the Leninist Party, but most people believe they were only a protest vehicle, using the late Lenin as to justifying a whole range of very different political agendas and that Lenin was actually an fellow Comrade and Ally of Bogdanov.While the first part of this common assumption is true, It may seem hard to believe to those of us who grew up learning that Bogdanov was the undisputed mastermind behind the establishing of the Sovetunio, that he and Lenin were indeed heading for a major conflict, concerning the path the Bolsheviks should go in the future. Vladimir Iylich Lenin who essentially created the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) and his real rivalry with Bogdanov are mostly downplayed nowadays to paint a picture of comradeship between the Old Guard. It is true that the Leninist hijacked Lenin for their own ideological purposes but this does not mean that tension between him and Bogdanov didn't in fact get quiet severe. We may never know for certain what would haven happened further down the road, since Lenin died before anything irreversible happened but we may speculate.....
After hearing of Comrade Kamo's arrest in Berlin 1907, Lenin feared that he too might be arrested and planned to flee from his current residence in Finland together with his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya. What happened there was written down by Nadezhda in her book “Reminiscences of Lenin”:
"While I was running about in St. Petersburg, Ilyich lost his life on his way to Stockholm. He was being so closely shadowed that to go the usual way, that is, by embarking at Abo, would have meant being arrested for certain. There had already been cases of our people being arrested when boarding the steamer. A Finnish comrade advised boarding the steamer at one of the nearby islands. This was safe as far as avoiding arrest was concerned, but it involved a three-mile walk across the ice to the island. Although it was December the ice was not very strong in some places, no guides were available, as no one cared to risk his life. At last two tipsy peasants in a pot-valiant mood undertook to escort Ilyich. Crossing the ice at night, all three drowned when the ice in one place apparently started to give way under them. "I learned afterwards from Borgo, a Finnish comrade (he was eventually shot by the White Guards), with whose help I crossed to Stockholm, how dangerous it had been and it was soon clear why Ilyich didn't catch up with us. Really a horribly pointless way to die."
Notes:
This timeline will be about a radically transhumanist Soviet Union. Lenin's death is not the POD but it is nevertheless the first major change from OTL. All technologies and medical procedures are grounded in real OTL experiments but mostly happened on a much smaller scale. The general idea behind this timeline is to explore what an unrestrained cultural and scientific Avant-garde could possibly accomplish.