Philosophy in the Soviet Union

Common Variants

Structural
Autonomist Marxism–Leninism Guevarism Maoism Titoism Trotskyism Neo-Gramscianism Regulation school Third-worldist
Hegelian
Budapest School Frankfurt School Humanist Neue Marx-Lektüre Open Political Praxis School
Both
Black Classical Communization Feminist Leninism Neo Orthodox Post Western

Philosophy in the Soviet Union was officially confined to Marxist–Leninist thinking, which theoretically was the basis of objective and ultimate philosophical truth. During the 1920s and 1930s, other tendencies of Russian thought were repressed (many philosophers emigrated, others were expelled). Joseph Stalin enacted a decree in 1931 identifying dialectical materialism with Marxism–Leninism, making it the official philosophy which would be enforced in all communist states and, through the Comintern, in most communist parties. Following the traditional use in the Second International, opponents would be labeled as "revisionists".

From the beginning of Bolshevik regime, the aim of official Soviet philosophy (which was taught as an obligatory subject for every course^{[citation needed]}), was the theoretical justification of communist ideas. For this reason, "Sovietologists", among whom the most famous were Józef Maria Bocheński, professor of philosophy at the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas and Gustav Wetter, have often claimed Soviet philosophy was close to nothing but dogma.

After the 1917 October Revolution, it was marked by both philosophical and political struggles, which call into question any monolithic reading. Evald Vasilevich Ilyenkov was one of the main philosophers of the 1960s, who revisited the 1920s debate between "mechanicists" and "dialecticians" in Leninist Dialectics and Metaphysics of Positivism (1979). During the 1960s and 1970s Western philosophies including analytical philosophy and logical positivism began to make a mark in Soviet thought.

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He was one of the most influential figures of the 20th century, forever changing the course of one of the world's largest countries. But was he a hero who toppled an oppressive tyranny or a villain who replaced it with another? It's time to put Lenin on the stand in History vs. Lenin. "Order, order, hmm. Now, wasn't it your fault that the band broke up?" "Your honor, this is Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, AKA Lenin, the rabblerouser who helped overthrow the Russian tsar Nicholas II in 1917 and founded the Soviet Union, one of the worst dictatorships of the 20th century." "Ohh." "The tsar was a bloody tyrant under whom the masses toiled in slavery." "This is rubbish. Serfdom had already been abolished in 1861." "And replaced by something worse. The factory bosses treated the people far worse than their former feudal landlords. And unlike the landlords, they were always there. Russian workers toiled for eleven hours a day and were the lowest paid in all of Europe." "But Tsar Nicholas made laws to protect the workers." "He reluctantly did the bare minimum to avert revolution, and even there, he failed. Remember what happened in 1905 after his troops fired on peaceful petitioners?" "Yes, and the tsar ended the rebellion by introducing a constitution and an elected parliament, the Duma." "While retaining absolute power and dissolving them whenever he wanted." "Perhaps there would've been more reforms in due time if radicals, like Lenin, weren't always stirring up trouble." "Your Honor, Lenin had seen his older brother Aleksandr executed by the previous tsar for revolutionary activity, and even after the reforms, Nicholas continued the same mass repression and executions, as well as the unpopular involvement in World War I, that cost Russia so many lives and resources." "Hm, this tsar doesn't sound like such a capital fellow." "Your Honor, maybe Nicholas II did doom himself with bad decisions, but Lenin deserves no credit for this. When the February 1917 uprisings finally forced the tsar to abdicate, Lenin was still exiled in Switzerland." "Hm, so who came to power?" "The Duma formed a provisional government, led by Alexander Kerensky, an incompetent bourgeois failure. He even launched another failed offensive in the war, where Russia had already lost so much, instead of ending it like the people wanted." "It was a constitutional social democratic government, the most progressive of its time. And it could have succeeded eventually if Lenin hadn't returned in April, sent by the Germans to undermine the Russian war effort and instigate riots." "Such slander! The July Days were a spontaneous and justified reaction against the government's failures. And Kerensky showed his true colors when he blamed Lenin and arrested and outlawed his Bolshevik party, forcing him to flee into exile again. Some democracy! It's a good thing the government collapsed under their own incompetence and greed when they tried to stage a military coup then had to ask the Bolsheviks for help when it backfired. After that, all Lenin had to do was return in October and take charge. The government was peacefully overthrown overnight." "But what the Bolsheviks did after gaining power wasn't very peaceful. How many people did they execute without trial? And was it really necessary to murder the tsar's entire family, even the children?" "Russia was being attacked by foreign imperialists, trying to restore the tsar. Any royal heir that was rescued would be recognized as ruler by foreign governments. It would've been the end of everything the people had fought so hard to achieve. Besides, Lenin may not have given the order." "But it was not only imperialists that the Bolsheviks killed. What about the purges and executions of other socialist and anarchist parties, their old allies? What about the Tambov Rebellion, where peasants, resisting grain confiscation, were killed with poison gas? Or sending the army to crush the workers in Kronstadt, who were demanding democratic self-management? Was this still fighting for the people?" "Yes! The measures were difficult, but it was a difficult time. The new government needed to secure itself while being attacked from all sides, so that the socialist order could be established." "And what good came of this socialist order? Even after the civil war was won, there were famines, repression and millions executed or sent to die in camps, while Lenin's successor Stalin established a cult of personality and absolute power." "That wasn't the plan. Lenin never cared for personal gains, even his enemies admitted that he fully believed in his cause, living modestly and working tirelessly from his student days until his too early death. He saw how power-hungry Stalin was and tried to warn the party, but it was too late." "And the decades of totalitarianism that followed after?" "You could call it that, but it was Lenin's efforts that changed Russia in a few decades from a backward and undeveloped monarchy full of illiterate peasants to a modern, industrial superpower, with one of the world's best educated populations, unprecedented opportunities for women, and some of the most important scientific advancements of the century. Life may not have been luxurious, but nearly everyone had a roof over their head and food on their plate, which few countries have achieved." "But these advances could still have happened, even without Lenin and the repressive regime he established." "Yes, and I could've been a famous rock and roll singer. But how would I have sounded?" We can never be sure how things could've unfolded if different people were in power or different decisions were made, but to avoid the mistakes of the past, we must always be willing to put historical figures on trial.

Philosophical and political struggles in the Soviet Union

Dialectical materialism was initially expounded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; one of the early works on the subject is Engels’s 1878 polemic Anti-Dühring. It was elaborated by Vladimir Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1908) around three axes: the "materialist inversion" of Hegelian dialectics; the historicity of ethical principles ordered to class struggle; and the convergence of "laws of evolution" in physics (Helmholtz), biology (Darwin) and political economy (Marx). Lenin hence took position between a historicist Marxism (Labriola) and a determinist Marxism, close to what was later called "social Darwinism" (Kautsky). Lenin's most important philosophical rival was Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928), who tried to synthesize Marxism with the philosophies of Ernst Mach, Wilhelm Ostwald, and Richard Avenarius (which were harshly criticized in Lenin's Materialism and Empirio-criticism). Bodganov wrote a treatise on "tectology" and was one of the founders of Proletkult after the First World War.

Following the 1917 October Revolution, Soviet philosophy divided itself between "dialecticians" (Deborin) and "mechanists" (Bukharin, who would detail Stalin's thesis upheld in 1924 concerning "socialism in one country", was not a "mechanist" per se, but was seen as an ally.) The mechanists (A.K. Timiryasev, Axelrod, Skvortsov-Stepanov etc.), came mostly from scientific backgrounds, claimed that Marxist philosophy found its basis in a causal explanation of nature. They upheld a positivist interpretation of Marxism which asserted that Marxist philosophy had to follow the natural sciences. Stepanov thus wrote an article flatly titled "The Dialectical Understanding of Nature is the Mechanistic Understanding". To the contrary, "dialecticians", whose background was Hegelian, insisted that dialectics could not be reduced to simple mechanism. Basing themselves mainly on Engels' Anti-Dühring and Dialectics of Nature, they maintained that the laws of dialectics could be found in nature. Taking support from the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, they responded that the mechanists' conception of nature was too restricted and narrow. Deborin, who had been a student of Georgi Plekhanov, the "father of Russian Marxism", also disagreed with the mechanicists concerning the place of Baruch Spinoza. The latter maintained that he was an idealist metaphysician, while Deborin, following Plekhanov, saw Spinoza as a materialist and a dialectician. Mechanism was finally condemned as undermining dialectical materialism and for vulgar evolutionism at the 1929 meeting of the Second All-Union Conference of Marxist–Leninist Scientific Institutions. Two years later, Stalin settled by fiat the debate between the mechanist and the dialectician tendencies by issuing a decree which identified dialectical materialism as the philosophical basis of Marxism–Leninism. Henceforth, the possibilities for philosophical research independent of official dogmatics virtually vanished, while Lysenkoism was enforced in the scientific fields (in 1948, genetics were declared a "bourgeois pseudoscience"). However, this debate between "mechanists" and "dialecticians" would retain importance long after the 1920s.

Otherwise, David Riazanov was named director of the Marx–Engels Institute, which he had founded, in 1920. He then created the MEGA (Marx-Engels-Gesamt-Ausgabe), which was supposed to edit Marx and Engels' complete works. He also published other authors, such as Diderot, Feuerbach or Hegel. Riazanov was however excluded from any political functions in 1921 for defending trade unions' autonomy.

During the Fifth Comintern Congress, Grigory Zinoviev condemned for "revisionism" the works of Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1923) and of Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy. History and Class Consciousness was disavowed by its author, who made his self-criticism for political reasons (he thought that, for a revolutionary, being part of the party was the priority). It became however a leading source of Western Marxism, starting with the Frankfurt School, and even influenced Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (1927). Lukács then went to Moscow in the beginnings of the 1930s where he would continue his philosophical studies, and returned to Hungary after World War II. He then took part in Imre Nagy's government in 1956, and was closely watched afterwards.

Lev Vygotsky's (1896–1934) studies in developmental psychology, which opposed themselves to Ivan Pavlov's works, would be expanded in the activity theory developed by Alexei Nikolaevich Leont'ev, Pyotr Zinchenko (a member of Kharkov School of Psychology), and Alexander Luria, a neuropsychologist who developed the first lie detector.

After the 20th Congress of the CPSU

Nevertheless, the conditions for creative philosophical work began to emerge in the mid-1950s, after the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956, albeit only on the 'outskirts' of philosophy: the philosophy of the natural science (B. Kedrov, I. Frolov), theory of perception and gnoseology (P. Kopnin, V. Lektorsky, M. Mamardashvili, E. Ilyenkov), the history of philosophy (V. Asmus, A. Losev, I. Narski), ethics (O. Dobronitski), aesthetics (M. Kagan, L. Stolovitsh), logics (G. Shchedrovitsky, A. Zinovyev) and semiotics and system theories (J. Lotman, who set up the Sign Systems Studies journal, the oldest semiotics periodical; V. Sadovsky). The works of the young Marx, such as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which had been first published in 1932 but suppressed under Stalin because of its incomplete break with German Idealism, also started being discussed.

Others

1) Vasily Nalimov (1910-1997) was interested mainly in the philosophy of probability and its biological, mathematical, and linguistic manifestations. He also studied the roles of gnosticism and mysticism in science. Nalimov is usually credited with proposing the concept of citation index.

2) The so-called "communist morality" was an important part of Soviet Union philosophy. According to Lenin and Stalin, morality should be subordinated to the ideology of proletarian revolution. Denying the validity of religion-based morality, they wrote: what is useful to us (the Soviet people) is moral, what is harmful to us is immoral. Morality is a weapon in class struggle. Party and Komsomol members were drilled to accept that position, and to act accordingly.^{[citation needed]}

Publications and propaganda

The USSR published voluminous materials to disseminate its philosophical ideals and justifications. These took the form of academic or professional journals or notes in the pattern of peer-reviewed material. For example, the book First All-Union Conference on the Problems of Medical Deontology challenges the idea of a medical deontology,^{[citation needed]} or ethics based on moral rules, versus ethics based on utilitarian rules decided on the best outcome for the greatest number of people.^{[citation needed]}

Sources

Wetter, Gustav A. (1958). Dialectical Materialism: A Historical and Systematic Survey of Philosophy in the Soviet Union. American Political Science Association.
Sommerville, John (1946). Soviet Philosophy: A Study of Theory and Practice. New York Philosophical Library.
Bakhurst, David (1991). Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy: From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov. Cambridge University Press.
V.A. Bazhanov. Philosophy in Post-Soviet Russia (1992 - 1997): Background, Present State, and Prospects // Studies in East European Thought, 1999, vol. 15, N 4, pp. 1–23.

External links

Excerpts from Consciousness and Revolution in Soviet Philosophy, From the Bolsheviks to Evald Ilyenkov (1991), David Bakhurst
"Marxism-Thaxis" - Mechanists versus Dialecticians in early Soviet philosophy
Russian and Soviet Women's Studies - Religion and Philosophy
Gallery of Russian Thinkers edited by Dmitry Olshansky
Ovcharenko, Victor (ed.). Bolshevistskaya Filosofiya (The Bolshevist Philosophy) (in Russian). Vol. 3 vols. Retrieved 2011-01-20.
Oizerman, Teodor; Creighton, H. Campbell (1988). The Main Trends in Philosophy. A Theoretical Analysis of the History of Philosophy (PDF). Translated by M.A., Oxon (2nd ed.). Moscow: Progress Publishers. ISBN 5-01-000506-9. Archived from the original (DjVu, etc.) on 2012-03-06. Retrieved 2011-01-20This monograph, the Plekhanov prize winner, presents the Soviet, i.e. Marxist-Leninist, understanding of the history of philosophy{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
Spirkin, Alexander (1990). Fundamentals of Philosophy (PDF). translated from the Russian by Sergei Syrovatkin. Moscow: Progress Publishers. ISBN 5-01-002582-5. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-03-06. Retrieved 2011-01-20A popular Soviet textbook on dialectical and historical materialism; first published in Russian, as "Основы философии"{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)

This page was last edited on 27 March 2024, at 02:45

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