In 1928, the man who had once been Lenin's greatest rival died in Moscow, killed by his own experiment. He believed the secret of youth was swapping blood with the young. It had worked eleven times.

His name was Alexander Bogdanov: physician, philosopher, economist, and revolutionary. He helped found the Bolshevik movement, and for years he stood so close to the top of it that in 1908, at Gorky's villa on Capri, he was photographed calmly playing chess against Lenin. He lost the power struggle, was pushed out of the leadership, and turned his enormous brain elsewhere. That same year he published a science fiction novel, Red Star, about a communist utopia on Mars whose citizens stayed young forever by a simple, beautiful method: they shared their blood with one another, old exchanging with young, each renewing each.

Twenty years later, he decided to build it. In 1926 the Soviet state gave him the world's first Institute of Blood Transfusion, in Moscow, with Bogdanov himself as director. And he became his own chief experiment. Eleven times, he lay down beside a young volunteer, and the two of them exchanged blood, close to a litre at a time. He reported that his eyesight improved. That his balding stopped. That he felt ten years younger. Volunteers lined up to join the experiments, among them Maria Ulyanova, Lenin's own sister. The revolution, it seemed, had found its fountain of youth, and it ran on shared veins.

Then came exchange number twelve. In the spring of 1928, Bogdanov swapped blood with a twenty one year old student. Within hours, something went catastrophically wrong. His body began destroying the transfused blood, his kidneys failed, and for roughly two weeks the director of the institute lay dying inside it, calmly observing and recording his own decline like the scientist he was. He died on the 7th of April, 1928. The student who had received Bogdanov's blood in the same exchange recovered completely, and lived.

The new science of blood groups soon explained the disaster his novel had never imagined. But here is the part that outlives the irony: the institute he founded did not die with him. It survived, it grew, and it stands in Moscow to this day, as Russia's national centre of blood science. The man who dreamed of immortality through shared blood did not get it. His institute did.

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