Philosophy Unchained E-Book

• Herausgeber: ibidem
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 542

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

The East European nations’ common past in the Soviet Union connects them in terms of both their political histories and the evolution of their philosophical thought. The USSR’s dissolution created new opportunities, domestic and international, in science, politics, and business. De-Sovietization meant for philosophy that it lost its former significance as a political-ideological tool of the authorities, and its previous role in society. Philosophers of the former Soviet bloc now found themselves able to communicate with colleagues around the world. This volume’s chapters analyze the renewal of the philosophical enterprise over the last thirty to forty years, in Belarus, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan. Among its authors are Yevgeniy Abdullaev, Viktoras Bakhmetjevas, Alexandru Cosmescu, Maija Kule, Denys Kiryukhin, Giorgi Khuroshvili, Mikhail Maiatsky, Tatyana Shchittsova, and Mikhail Minakov. This book is a long-needed assessment of the transformations of philosophy after the fall of the Soviet Union, when a wide range of possibilities opened up for philosophical thinking." —Daniela Steila, University of Turin This book offers an excellent handle with which to grasp the inherent difficulty of reconciling states, civil societies, and academic knowledge in fraught national settings." —Diana Pinto, Historian Nothing can help us more incisively than this book to grasp how thinking, though imperceptible and immaterial, can be put and kept in chains or can suddenly break free from chains." —Alessandro Ferrara, University of Rome Tor Vergata The book offers new and original cartography of the post-Soviet intellectual space and its development." —Nikolaj Plotnikov, Ruhr-University Bochum But what happened to philosophy in Soviet hands when the Soviet Union faded away? The answer is in this volume." —Ivan Krastev, Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia The book is a must-read not only for those who are interested in a deep understanding of post-Soviet philosophy, its history, and its place in the world but also for those who want to truly explore the inner side of post-Soviet being and consciousness." —Julie Reshe, University College Cork and University College Dublin It is this overview of the new critical potentials in the post-Communist East that makes the book an obligatory reading for all who care about our common destiny." —Slavoj Žižek, University of London/University of Ljubljana

Leseprobe

ibidem Press, Stuttgart

Contents

Foreword Soviet and Post-Soviet Philosophy Continuities, Complexities, Unshacklings, and Zombifications

Editor’s Introduction Philosophy Unchained Introductory Notes on the Post-Soviet Philosophical Condition

1 Soviet Union The Soviet Philosophical Condition Adventures of Philosophy in the Soviet Union

2 Belarus Philosophy as a Realistic Utopia A Personal View on the Emancipation of Philosophy in Post-Soviet Belarus

3 Georgia Philosophy in Independent Georgia

4 Latvia Philosophical Developments in the Context of Western Thought

5 Lithuania Philosophy in Lithuania after 1989

6 Moldova Constructing a Philosophical Voice Discursive Positions in Moldovan Philosophical Journals

7 Russia Contemporary Philosophy in Russia (1991–2022)

8 Ukraine The Philosophical Process in Post-Soviet Ukraine

9 Uzbekistan Philosophy in Post-Soviet Uzbekistan

The Contributors

ForewordSoviet and Post-Soviet Philosophy Continuities, Complexities, Unshacklings, and Zombifications

Christopher R. Donohue

Soviet philosophy frequently carried with it a note of apology. I. Luppol observed in the third edition of his widely known “Lenin and Philosophy” that Lenin was “not the author of many philosophical treatises” as he was not an “armchair academic who forever and exclusively buried himself in books, finding his own little world in them” (Luppol 1930: 12). This was because for Luppol (discussed by Mikhail Minakov in this volume), Lenin was “not a theoretician for the sake of theory”(Luppol: ibid.). At the same time, as was equally well-known, Marx had a high claim for philosophy. Marx wrote in the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction that not only did philosophy become concrete in the proletariat, but also that philosophy itself was the spiritual weapon of the proletariat. Philosophy, rather highly and abstractly, is part and whole, end and beginning.

Likewise, as Hannah Arendt underscored in her brilliant, though sadly unfinished analyses of Marx and Marxism, that both were revolutionary and immensely important. She wrote that the real break of Marx was in his denial of the tradition, which ranked thinking higher than action—a position that stretched back to Plato. As Arendt noted, thinkers prior to Marx had firmly committed to the idea that the only function of politics was to “make possible” and “safeguard” the life of contemplation, which viewed the withdrawal from the world as the summum bonum (Arendt 2009: 76). Philosophy, though of dire importance to Marxist and Soviet thought, was at the same time undernourished due to the emphasis on politics, and on action more broadly, its own praxis.

At the same time, Marxist, Soviet and now post-Soviet philosophy has continually suffered from the assumption that philosophy (and arts and letters more generally) in Russia and in Eastern Europe, were the consequence of an overwrought interpretation of “Western” ideas such as the Enlightenment philosophies of man and of the state, of Romanticism, of varieties of socialism and communism. And because of the so-called “Russian character” and uneven and haphazard modes of institutional, intellectual, and social development in Russia and Eastern Europe, these ideas caused irresolvable conflicts with the Old Regime. Martin Malia epitomized a generation of work in Russian and European intellectual history by underscoring the great receptivity of Russians in Herzen and Tolstoy’s eras to Western European ideas—whether to Spinoza, Diderot, Babeuf, Proudhon, Hegel, the natural and biological sciences, Darwinian theory, and Mendelian genetics. Such receptivity, due to the fragility of state and social institutions, led to radicalism, accelerationism, and finally, cataclysm (Todes 1989; Vucinich 1963; Malia 1995: 65).

Soviet and now post-Soviet philosophy in Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Baltic States, was then a constant series of negotiations with Marx and Marxist theory, revealing significant breaks because of revolutions and the violent strictures of Stalinist totalitarian rule. As importantly, the end of the Communist system in Russia, Eastern Europe, and the Baltic States was indeed another break and signified both an unshackling of philosophy from Soviet strictures as well as an embrace of a specific strand of the liberal tradition, spanning from John Stewart Mill, Mary Wollstonecraft to Walter Bagehot to Isaiah Berlin, Karl Popper and Friedrich von Hayek. Nevertheless, one sees in many writings and political reconfigurations today, some essential continuities.

The role of Marxism and Soviet philosophy, then, both during and after Communist governance, reveals itself to be both self and other. Authors working in Russia under the Soviet system in biology and genetics, and against both European and American justifications of eugenics and of scientific racism, such as the anthropologist M. Volockoj (1893–1944), reveal a complex series of negotiations and adjustments to the Soviet philosophical condition. Volockoj’s own complex alignment of eugenics with the Marxist orthodoxy illustrated various elements of “mimicry” of “good philosophy,” strenuous efforts to introduce ideas which worked against many of the fundamental tenants of Marxist practice (such as a reduction of man to the genetic and to the biological), and an intensive jousting with its subject matter. Volockoj underscored in his The System of Eugenics as a Biosocial Discipline that not enough was known in genetics to “eliminate the root causes of hereditary diseases” through eugenic measures (Volockoj 1928: 18). On the other hand, he also argued that eugenic measures, such as “sterilization, prohibition of marriage, (and) segregation” were among the only methods possible for the “protection the interests of offspring” (Volockoj 1928: 19). Much the same rhetoric was used many years earlier by one of the main proponents of the Czech eugenic movement Jaroslav Kříženecký “Youth Protection and Eugenics” (Ochrana mládeže a eugenika), published in 1916.

At the same time, Volockoj also complained, hewing closer to the Marxist orthodoxy, that ideas about positive eugenics (or efforts to increase the population of the so-called “fit,” as opposed to methods such as sterilization which eliminated the so-called “unfit”) were much like the complaints of Tolstoy and Pushkin about the “mass of mediocrity” (Volockoj 1928: 21). More ‘orthodox’ for the ideological times was Volockoj’s insistence that any system of eugenics needs to account for the “the role of the evolution of socio-economic relations” (Volockoj 1928: 16). Although the biological features of the organism may be immutable, according to Volockoj, as capitalism gave way to “higher social forms” and to communism, this would change the very nature of values and of social competition. The “fangs” (klykí) which were so useful in the formerly capitalist world will be nothing but a “shameful ballast” in the new communist system, where there will be an inversion of not only capitalist values but the very social structure itself (Volockoj 1928: 30).

Another illustrative text, a Russian translation of the genetic epidemiologist James Neel’s Human Heredity with an introduction by the geneticist S. N. Ardashnikov in 1958 saw the return of a kind of scientific and ideological pluralism to the Soviet philosophical condition after Stalin. Ardashnikov underscored that the book was the “best of its kind” as it relates to human genetics and questions relating to human heredity, as well as the connections between genetics and environment. Nevertheless, he cautioned the reader as to Neel’s extensive discussions of eugenics. Ardashnikov detailed how Neel’s even moderate support of some forms of eugenics was “incompatible with our ideas.” Such eugenic ideas, Ardashnikov’s noted, supported “racism” and “colonial wars.” Ardashnikov was, importantly, correct on this. For Ardashnikov, as well, Neel’s own support of eugenics, furthermore, was illustrative for the Russian reader of the support of so-called “progressive” “Western” scientists of eugenics. Ardashnikov gave then the readers his support of the latest research in genetics, the environment, and their connection to disease, along with a categorical rejection (rightly!) of eugenics as racist, colonialist, and disturbingly accepted by many geneticists in the “West” (Neel 1958: 5–6).

And as I argue in my in-preparation work on genetics, politics, and the use of various Marxisms as a philosophical substratum in eastern Europe after World War II, the consequences of the Marxist orthodoxies were enormous and generational. Without the “Marxist humanism” of Tito’s Yugoslavia and the Praxis school we would not have the singularly Spenglerian reactionary Marxism of Serbian philosopher Mihailo Marković, whose 1964 Man and Technics (Čovek i tehnika) contains the roots of Marković’s virulent biological ethnonationalism, beginning in the 1980s. Nor today, without the memories and weaponized legacy of that regime, would there be the figure of Tomislav Sunić of the “New European Right” spreading conspiratorial and genocidal theories concerning how “multicultural and multiracial states…lead to civil wars” or how the communistic “new class” caused a “negative sociobiological selection” which directly led the breakup of the state of Yugoslavia (“Kresimir” 2018).

Nor would there be, without Marxism and the Soviet philosophical condition, the work of family sociologist Walenty Majdański bemoaning the “marriages” of “bourgeoisie” and of “workers” as “childless” and “comfortable-consumable.”

Writing in 1947 with the imprimatur of the Catholic Church in Poland in The Family Against the Coming Epoch, Majdański vociferously inveighed against what he called “rationalizing children” as well as the “rationalization of children” (Majdański 1947: 5) By this he meant a kind of an “insane” “autonomy” where “marriages may not have enough children for a nation to exist.” Nations, further, with not enough children, according to Majdański, will die out, most likely from attacks from external enemies (Majdański 1947:8) Majdański, calling for “new moral forces,” (ibid.: 6) stridently inveighed against “autonomy” without “healthy morality.” Otherwise, he continued, without morality the increase in autonomy would lead to “anarchy.” Such a state was already occurring, he argued, in Europe and in the United States (ibid.: 7)

For him, a true “revolutionary” and “citizen” was an individual who led a life which is “knowingly faithful to nature” and a “healthy married life.” Any other “revolutionaries” or “citizens” for Majdański were dying out like the “bison” of the American West, or “parasites.” For him, the most important “struggle” for the Polish nation was that for the “healthy family life” which was the “basis for the existences of classes and nations.” For Majdański finally there was no future either for the proletariat (or by extension for the Communist form of government). For him, the modern-day “workers”, the modern-day proletariat were very much unlike the old Roman variety, of a “poor man with many children.” Rather it “can be said that the proletarians are dying out today as the aristocracy once did” (ibid: 10).

Majdański’s writings have a startling contemporaneity to them. Though working under and very much against the Marxist orthodoxy and in Communist Poland, one could very easily imagine the exact same arguments made by Viktor Orban in Hungary today. Particularly striking is Majdański’s juxtaposition of Poland with “Europe” and “America”, his themes of internal and external enemies besetting the nation, and his call for “new moral forces.” For Majdański, both Europe and America had “autonomy” without “values” and as such were in “anarchy.” His was a critique both of liberty and of individualism outside of traditional moralism. His biological othering of his opponents as “bison” and as “dying out and extinct” (ibid:11) both declining in number and at the same time decimating the body politic “consciously dying”“diametrically different, ” from “a completely different world” (ibid: 11), not only brings to mind the virulent Nazi German eliminationist antisemitism of the 1930s and 1940s, but also closely parallels the biological othering of political and other opponents by Orban, Sunić and other leaders of the new European right. The demodernization of American political discourse, which began with Donald Trump’s rise to political prominence in 2016, may well have reached a new and dangerous stage with a significant section of the Republican party becoming an extension of Orbanism in mid-2022 (see most recently: Borger & Garamvolgyi 2020)

As important, the continued study of Soviet philosophy and its post-Soviet legacies is newly necessary because of the essential parallels between reactionary thought under Communism and the reactionary populism has which emerged from after its dissolution. Tomislav Sunić draws frequent parallels between what he calls “Homo sovieticus” and the post-Soviet “Homo americanus.” Sunić, as part of his Social Darwinist identitarianism, argues that while it appears that both ideologies, epistemologies, ways of being were fundamentally opposed, especially after the fall of the Soviet Union, similarities between the two have begun to emerge. According to Sunić, both American and Soviet variants were “anchored to the same egalitarian foundations.” Like his Soviet counterpart, the American version became “a global kind” whose morals, ideals and values circulated far beyond the territorial borders of America or of the Soviet Union. Last, Sunić contends that America’s egalitarianism and openness to “the ever-increasing demands of non-European newcomers” will eventually lead to a leveling of society and a kind of “proto-communism” (Sunic 2019). Much like Orban and Vladimir Putin now, Sunić underscored that post-Communist Eastern Europe should promote values that were antithetical to the “West” because the denizens of Eastern Europe were characterologically different from their “Western” European counterparts. Sunić spat that, “Liberal global illusions of ‘equal rights’ trigger today great neurosis among the youth of Eastern Europe” (Sunic 1997).

Almost forty years ago, Jeffrey Herf, in his brilliant Reactionary Modernism,outlined the history of “Americanism” and its importance to the German far-right. According to Herf, “Americanism meant consumerism, mass culture, Taylorism, and liberalism.” Such a combination of hatreds animated the work of figures throughout the 20th century, from Oswald Spengler to Mihailo Marković (Herf 1984: 87). Herf notes elsewhere that Amerikanismus, for far-right intellectuals and their circles was a “plague threatening the German soul” (ibid: 41). Herf's insight about Americanism, combined with the falsification that technology in the twentieth century is so pervasive as having no subject, object or remedy, is generalizable to a significant amount of anti-liberal thought after WWII.

Identitiarian, Social Darwinian figures like Sunić and Viktor Orban approach America and Europe, its liberalizmus and globalizmus, as recurrences and reincarnations of szovjetizmus, if not the actual Soviet system itself. They do this while living in a physical, geospatial reality where the Soviet state is no more, and Marxism—outside of a few instances—is a historical ideology in Europe. Here Orban’s account of the EU “rule of law” as a Soviet return is particularly illustrative.

For far-right populists today, the Soviet past and its Marxist ideology is the actual present, where there can be proclamations from the Hungarian government about the “great replacement” of “Europeans” by “non-European migrants” along the very lines which caused Majdański to bemoan the “dying out of the proletariat” like the aristocracy of old. Reactionary ideology and reactionary politics both under Communism and after, is about numbers. Numbers of children, of “Poles”, “Hungarians” against the “suicidal policy in the Western world” (Beauchamp 2022).

Anticommunism and anti-Marxism have become, for a generation of populist strongmen and “intellectuals,” anti-Europeanism, anti-Americanism and “anti-West-ism.” Such a transformation is to be expected because anti-Communism under the regime was for many conservative dissidents anti-Europeanism and anti-Westernism. And not just in the work of Majdański, but in the writings of Mihailo Marković. In the case of the latter, there is a plausible case that even Marxist “humanism,” through its account of technological alienation and its critique of America and “the West,” was an incubator of sorts for his later ethnonationalism.

The weaponized image of Marxism and the Soviet system as “egalitarian” and “multicultural” allows contemporary populists not only in Eastern Europe, but also France and the United States, to use Soviet memory and “undead” Soviet ideology as a kind of free-floating ideological vector. It functions for them at the same time as the “true face” of America and the European Union.

The Soviet past that will not become past is thus a continual sustenance to populists in ways that are barely understood. Thus, the complexity of Soviet philosophy and its post-Soviet iterations is essential for even scholars in “Western” Europe and America. And not only its manifestations but its zombification in the hands of the global far right today. Such a zombification has begun to influence liberal democracies all over the world, but none more so than the United States.

Bibliography

Arendt, H. (2009). The Promise of Politics. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Beauchamp, Z. (2022). The European country where “replacement theory” reigns supreme.” Vox, May 19, https://www.vox.com/2022/5/19/23123050/hungary-cpac-2022-replacement-theory (accessed June 11, 2022).

Borger, J., Garamvolgyi, F. (2022). Trump shares CPAC Hungary platform with notorious racist and antisemite. The Guardian, May 21, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/21/trump-shares-cpac-hungary-platform-racist-antisemite (accessed June 11, 2022).

Herf, J. (1984) Reactionary Modernism: Technology, culture, and politics in Weimar and the Third Reich. New York: Cambridge University Press.

"Kresimir". (2018). Dr. Tomislav Sunić: Rasisti i multikulturnjaci u novoj seobi naroda (Dr. Tomislav Sunic: Racists and Multiculturalists in the New Migrations of Peoples). Kamenjar, nd, https://kamenjar.com/dr-tomislav-sunic-rasisti-i-multikulturnjaci-u-novoj-seobinaroda/?fbclid=IwAR1ihhmnGxN13ypxnaDUBrjakvkrbybQQY4f8N0SHmcLXteVmOQ3xA2fGZs (accessed June 11, 2022).

Luppol, I. K. (1930). Lenin i filosofiya: k voprosu ob otnoshenii filosofii k revolyutsii [from Rus.: Lenin and Philosophy: On the question of the relationship of philosophy to revolution]. Moscow: State Publishing House.

Majdański, H (1947) Rodzina Wobec Nadchodzącej Epoki [from Polish: The Family Against the Coming Epoch]. Bydgoszcz, Poland: The Polish Printing House Under the State Board.

Malia, M. (1995). Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia. New York: Free Press.

Sunic, T. (1997). Eastern Europe’s Suicide Pact. Chronicles, July, https://www.unz.com/print/Chronicles-1997jul-00048/ (accessed June 11, 2022).

Sunic, T. (2019). Twin Brothers: Homo Sovieticus and Homo Americanus. Arktos, May 22, https://arktos.com/2019/04/22/twin-brothers-homo-sovieticus-and-homo-americanus/ (accessed June 11, 2022).

Todes, D. P. (1989). Darwin Without Malthus: The Struggle for Existence in Russian Evolutionary Thought. New York: Oxford University Press.

Volockoj, M. V. (1928). Sistema yevgeniki kak biosotsial’noy distsipliny [from Rus.: The System of Eugenics as a Biosocial System]. Moscow: Izdaniye Gosudarstvennogo Timiryazevskogo nauchno-issledovatel’skogo instituta.

Vucinich, A. (1963). Science in Russian Culture, 1861-1917. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

William N., Schull, J. (1958). Nasledstvennost’ cheloveka. Perevod s angliyskogo i s predisloviyem S. N. Ardashnikova [from Rus.: Human Heredity. Translation from English and with a preface by S. N. Ardashnikov]. Moscow: Publishing House of Foreign Literature.

 

Editor’s Introduction Philosophy Unchained Introductory Notes on the Post-Soviet Philosophical Condition

Mikhail Minakov

Philosophy as a discipline transcends national borders, periods, and cultures. Its practitioners—philosophers—form a unique intellectual network that similarly exceeds cultures, nationalities, and temporal borders and, as a result, has given rise to a self-reflexive tradition in which all practitioners participate, addressing age-old questions in new ways and posing new questions for contemporary and future philosophers to take up.

Originating in the ancient societies, the philosophical enterprise can be found in very different cultures and epochs up to the present day. Despite the extraordinary cultural and societal-institutional diversity of the last three millennia, philosophy’s staying power seems to be connected to something essential to humanity, whether it is our capacity to acknowledge and express Being, the power to act in accordance with the principles of reason, the passion to pursue intellectual challenges, or the gift of thinking. In one way or another, philosophy has been practiced by mainstream theorists and isolated tribal groups, citizens of the polis and subjects of empires, leaders and dissidents, cosmopolitans and representatives of nations, liberals and totalitarians, professors in ivory towers and activists on the streets, the high-born and the lowly wretched. And as one recent manifestation of its vast breadth and depth, philosophy lives on in the societies that have emerged in the more than thirty years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

This volume is dedicated to the study of the fate of contemporary philosophy in the countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The unifying feature of this region—namely, its common past as administratively part of the Soviet Union—establishes a shared linkage to both political history and the history of philosophy itself.

The creation of the Soviet Union, its power structures, and its human—as well as intellectual—condition was suppressing freedom and reason alike. The dissolution of the Soviet Union was accompanied not only by the collapse of the structures of totalitarian society but also by a formal, intentional process of de-Sovietization, including the reform and the restructuring of the security services, the abandonment of the command economy, and the dilution of the ideological monopoly of Soviet communism. At the same time, this process liberated opportunities, domestic and international, in science, politics, and business. For philosophers as well, de-Sovietization entailed a process of ambiguous, though radical change: philosophy quickly lost its former significance as a political-ideological tool and, commensurately, sustained a loss of interest on the part of the authorities and society. On the other hand, it gained a long-awaited unshackling from ideological strictures, and philosophers of the former Soviet bloc now found themselves able to communicate with philosophical groups around the world. The chapters in this volume analyze the renewal of the philosophical enterprise on a different tack over the last thirty to forty years and where it has led, in Belarus, Georgia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.

Despite its immaterial nature, thinking can be in chains. Thoughts can indeed be handcuffed, and minds can surely become captive due to many different reasons: laziness of reason, denial of reality, choice of illusion, adherence to ideology, devotion to religious dogma, or subjugation to power. Human culture and nature are full of ways to turn truth into tools of either subjugation, or emancipation. The cases of Soviet and post-Soviet philosophies represent both trends as the studies on this volume demonstrate. Still, the research in this book provides our readers with the information and analysis to decide for themselves whether there was continuity between Soviet and contemporary philosophy, and whether philosophy was influencing the emancipation of societies in the Eastern Europe and Central Asia, whether local philosophical thought was becoming part of the global intellectual landscape, and whether a particular post-Soviet philosophical condition has emerged.

The writing of this book was conceived in 2020, but we are publishing it in a time of war, after the unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by the Russian Federation. The intellectual background of this tragedy’s preparation can be found in the chapters on Russian and Ukrainian philosophical development, but not only. In recent thirty years, the unchained philosophy was supportive of both: of the leap into the abyss of unknown or of the longing for being a brick in the pyramid of predefined truth, of meaningful freedom or of destructive violence. And our book is an attempt to reflect on the interconnection between philosophical and political choices made in the past three decades.

 

1 Soviet UnionThe Soviet Philosophical ConditionAdventures of Philosophy in the Soviet Union1

Mikhail Minakov

The philosophical landscape of Eastern Europe is quite rich and diverse today, with arguably far more philosophical schools and doctrines being developed in and around intellectual centers both there and in Northern Eurasia than before 1989–91. The last thirty years have seen explosive growth in philosophical departments, faculties, centers, societies, associations, and publications in the regions’ countries (Bazhanov 1999; Godoń, Jucevičienė & Kodelja 2004; Guseinov & Lektorsky 2009; Tevzadze 2010; Menzhulin 2011; Minakov 2011; Bachmetjevas 2022; Grigorishin 2022; Kūle 2022; Menzhulin 2022). This diversity of post-Soviet philosophical life was—at least until recently—supported by the spread of ideological pluralism, an increase in academic freedom, social emancipation, and the marketization of education.

Yet this multitude of philosophical organizations and publications has not changed the impression among Western philosophers that “the (post-Communist) East” no longer generates new ideas, or that the generation of “new ideas” are the consequence of “Western influences.”2 Philosophers of the East seem to have been adapting to—and learning how to think and work in—the new conditions, which can be described in terms of the absence of repression by authorities, the destruction of ideological monopolies, reduced public interest in philosophical ideas, sporadic bursts of popularity for some popular thinkers, and the hegemony of Western theories and Far Eastern teachings among the general public.

This contemporary situation has a tragic and gripping prehistory. In the 20th century, philosophy survived two major caesuras in the East of Europe. The fall of the Russian Empire and the rise of the Soviet Union in 1917–1922, moved philosophy from one of many intellectual practices on the margins of the struggle for power and truth, right into the center of that struggle. Simultaneously, the heightened significance of philosophy made it a subject of control and separation from global intellectual dynamics. Hence, the Soviet philosophical condition constituted an unusual situation for a life of the mind—at least in modern times. This condition was established and developed through several periods until its grand finale in the caesura of 1989–91. Thus, between the 1917–22 and the 1989–91 caesuras, at least three generations of philosophers studied, worked, and laid the ground for the intellectual institutions and practices that can still be seen in the contemporary intellectual landscape of Eastern Europe and Northern Eurasia.3

In this chapter, I offer a retrospective study of the Soviet philosophical condition, demonstrating its features up until the caesura of 1989–91. In the first part, I offer a definition of Soviet philosophy as a specific philosophical condition. In the second part, I offer a periodization and a brief overview of the development of the Soviet philosophical condition. Finally, I identify major tendencies that may have survived the caesura of 1989–91 and that are still visible in diverse post-Soviet philosophies.

1 Soviet Philosophy as a Condition

1.1 Soviet philosophy as a contested concept

If we approach the phenomenon of Soviet philosophy directly—upfront, so to speak—the transformation of this phenomenon into a problematic concept is inevitable. Such a problematization has been constantly manifest since the 1950s, when the first studies of this phenomenon were published in the West.

Initially, the debate of scholars studying the Soviet “system” and culture was focused on the relation between Soviet totalitarianism and modernity. Hannah Arendt, the philosopher who laid the foundation for totalitarianism studies, attempted to understand the specificity of the human condition in a totalitarian society in the terms of a “radical break” with modernity’s emancipation and of the subjection of personal experience to the totalitarian collective mind (Arendt 1986, 1989). Despite agreeing with Arendt’s general understanding of totalitarianism, Merle Fainsod defined the Soviet system in terms of “enlightened totalitarianism,” with official Soviet philosophy serving as a tool for total control over scientific and social thought and, paradoxically, continuing the long Enlightenment trends of the rationalization of the world and the emancipation of the human (Fainsod 1965: 9–10; see also a later Kotkin’s argument at: Kotkin 1997: 7).

Those scholars who were interested in Soviet philosophy as part of the wider “Soviet system” went deeper into this contradiction. For example, Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski described the role of philosophy as that of an instrument subjecting human reason to the authorities’ interests and totalitarian ideology. For them, Soviet philosophy was inseparable from Marxist ideology, and it was a source of rupture between logical reasoning and everyday experience—the trauma that reproduced a totalitarian syndrome “through education” (Friedrich 1957: 67). And yet, Friedrich recognized that Soviet philosophy was “a modern phenomenon” connected to the emancipatory rationalist practices of modernity, albeit a perverse one (Friedrich 1964: 13).

This direction in studies of Soviet philosophy continued with Adam Ulam and Bertram Wolfe in the 1960s–80s and then with Sheila Fitzpatrick and Terry Martin in the early 21st century. For them, Soviet philosophy was one of Soviet Modernity’s ambiguous intellectual practices that reproduced the dialectical unity of subjection and emancipation, loyalty and rationality, revolution and tradition, the captive mind and human reason in the constant fight for autonomy (Ulam 1963; Wolfe 1969; Martin 2000; Fitzpatrick 2000, 2007, 2018). In this line of study, Soviet philosophy was mainly seen either as a non-philosophical practice (part of political censorship and ideological brainwashing) or as one of the philosophical schools of a wider Marxist thought. The latter assessment is evident, for example, in works by Józef Bocheński and Gustav Wetter, who challenged the philosophical concepts of Soviet Marxism. They looked at the philosophical processes in the Soviet Union through the lens of anti-Marxism and assessed the quality of Soviet philosophy as “extremely primitive” (Bocheński 1950: 2; see also Wetter 1958; Bocheński 1973).

Another approach to the study of Soviet philosophy is illustrated by George Kline, Thomas Blakeley, Helmut Dahm,and Philip Grier, who distanced themselves from the Cold War agenda as well as from the debate between philosophical schools. Their research was done in the framework of what may be called the history of contemporary philosophy. This approach provided them with an opportunity for more nuanced and less politicized research on Soviet philosophy (Blakeley 1961, 1979; Kline 1968; Grier 1978; Dahm, Blakeley & Kline 1988). This approach was continued by James Scanlan, David Bakhurst, and Evert Van der Zweerde from the 1980s into early 2000. These scholars were highly attentive to internal cleavages, different approaches, and the diversity of intellectual practices in the areas of official, academic, and dissident philosophies and of literary-philosophical fiction in the Soviet Union (Scanlan 1985, 1987; Bakhurst 1991, 2002; Van der Zweerde 1998). Accordingly, in the works by these scholars, one can find analysis not only of orthodox Marxist-Leninist philosophy but also of atheism and religious thought, logical theories and the teachings of different dialectics, and political theories and semiotics in the Soviet period.

For both lines of Western study, Soviet philosophy was an unusual phenomenon not fitting the standards of the Western cultural canon, which constituted a problem for its definition. Soviet philosophy challenged the cultural order that assigned to philosophy its necessary place and limits.

It is worth noting that Soviet philosophy was not a subject of discussion by thinkers participating in it. However, it became an issue during and after the caesura of 1989–91. Basically, the issue stemmed from the source just mentioned: the specificity of the phenomenon challenged the cultural orders that were established after the fall of the Soviet Union and during the creation of new societies. In this context, Soviet philosophy was denied its philosophical dignity, it was declared part of the repressive political system, and it was refuted as Marxist philosophy proved its intellectual powerlessness. Also, it was deconstructed and reconstructed as an alternative philosophical practice to the Western cultural order or as an integral part of a long-term national philosophical canon—or else as the several-generations–long rupture in such a canon.

The maximalist denial of the philosophical dignity of Soviet philosophy is based on the argument that the Soviet totalitarian system did not provide the free space needed for its public function (Proleev 2003; Dmitiriev 2010; Koriakin 2019). In this connection, Sergij Proleev even called it “anti-philosophy,” a power practice in opposition to intellectual practice (Proleev 2003: 42ff). Meanwhile, Boris Yudin offered to look at Soviet philosophy as an element of the science–authority relationship in the USSR. Yudin explained the dominant loyalty of philosophers (and scholars at large) as the result of an unspoken agreement: the Party protected scientists from the proletariat in exchange for complete, unconditional loyalty (Yudin 1993: 100). Yet there was still room for philosophy to evolve, since the legitimization of Soviet authority needed arguments from both the exact sciences and materialist philosophy. Accordingly, Soviet philosophy developed in a void together with political power, ideologized education, and the sciences (ibid.: 106). It is this void that provides grounds for doubt as to whether Soviet philosophy was truly philosophy.

Many philosophers have interpreted Soviet philosophy solely as Soviet Marxism. This brand of Marxism went through several cycles of reinterpretation, from Vladimir Ulyanov-Lenin and Lev Trotsky to Joseph Stalin-Jugashvili and many later figures who combined theory with political, military, and administrative practices. Anatolij Loj, for example, argued that these reinterpretations reduced Soviet philosophy to a type of “worldview” that dogmatically subjugated human individuals, communities, or society at large to the goals of the revolution (Loj 2003: 46). Anatolij Jermolenko has also supported this argument, making a case that Soviet Marxism—and Soviet philosophy as such—has lost its connection with philosophies outside the Soviet Union; this disconnection and lack of communication led first to the cynicism of the late Soviet Marxists and then towards the complete intellectual and ideological impotence of Soviet Marxism (Jermolenko 2003: 349).

Another way to look at philosophical practices in Soviet times is to reject the normative value of the Western canon and to accept their otherness. There are scholars who look at Soviet culture as an alternative to Western modernity (e.g., Arnason 2000; Hoffmann 2003). From this point of view, the case of Soviet philosophy represents the life of philosophy in a “closed society” or a “society of power,” which is different from the life of philosophy in the Western cultural order (Kurennoi 2002; Nemtsev 2010; Minakov 2020). Even though this approach has its drawbacks,4 it opens up an opportunity to see and research what was actually going on in philosophy in the domains of ideas, problems, schools, individual biographies, and the histories of philosophical organizations between 1917 and 1991 in Eastern Europe and Northern Eurasia.

The deconstruction of philosophy’s Sovietness is also accomplished through post-Soviet nationalization. One of the key processes in post-Soviet development was nationalization, a reorientation of public reason toward reinvented nationalities and identity politics in the states that were established on the ruins of the USSR. For some time, this nationalization was based on the equation that post-Soviet meant anti-Soviet. This fundamental equation stemmed from the denial of Sovietness through the establishment of new institutions (divisions of power into branches, presidentialism, and parliamentarism), the acceptance of new values (liberty, money, anomie, and responsibility for one’s own life), and the pursuit of practices (openness to chaos and unpredictability, readiness for active participation in public life, and self-expression) that were either impossible or strictly limited in the Soviet Union. Yet people living in this flow of post-Soviet innovations still needed some orientation, and nationalization was one of the cultural (as well as social and political) processes that offered it.5

In terms of the history of philosophy, this nationalization manifested itself in a reorganization of the national philosophical canon. In some cases, like those described in the studies of 20th-century Latvian or Lithuanian philosophies by Maija Kūle and Viktoras Bachmetjevas (Kūle 2022; Bachmetjevas 2022), the post-Soviet deconstruction of Sovietness has led to the irrelevance of the Soviet philosophical legacy as such for the Latvian and/or Lithuanian philosophical communities.

However, in other cases, Georgian, Russian, Ukrainian, or other scholars, while studying the legacies of individual philosophers of the Soviet period, were inevitably brought to the construction of new contexts in which these legacies were reused for philosophical canons. In these studies, ideological conflict between Soviet and post-Soviet worldviews was usually put aside. Instead, researchers focused on the lives of thinkers and their ideas. In this way, the philosophical legacies of Valentin Asmus, Genrikh Batiščev, Vadim Ivanov, Evald Ilyenkov, Volodymyr Jurynec’, Bonifatii Kedrov, Pavel Kopnin, Mikhail Lifšyc, Aleksej Losev, Jurij Lotman, Merab Mamardašvili, and many others returned to the center of attention of contemporary philosophers.6 However, as soon as post-Soviet historians of Soviet philosophy left the biographical and empirical arena, the power of politicization returned, together with general contextual reinterpretations.

This politicization could have either apologetic inclinations (as in Tabačkovsky 2002 or Motrošilova 2012, 2018) or manifest as a hypercritical approach (as in Proleev 2003 or Dmitriev 2010), or else it evolved into a reinvention of the nation’s philosophical canon. In the latter case, Soviet philosophy was interpreted as a sort of cultural deposit that supplied post-Soviet national intellectual/philosophical historians with elements from the philosophers’ biographies and theoretical legacies that would fill the gaps in their canons. Thus, these elements were reinterpreted as parts of Kazakhstani, Lithuanian, Russian, or Ukrainian histories of national philosophy in the 20th century (Donskis 2002; Minakov 2009; Tkačuk et al. 2011; Sydykov et al. 2016; Epstein 2019; Kabelka 2019; Lektorsky & Bykova 2019). This kind of reuse of the Soviet past was both therapeutic for the national traditions and productive in terms of research in the history of philosophy.

1.2 The Soviet philosophical condition

Each of the above approaches has strong arguments in support of its vision of Soviet philosophy. Nonetheless, they all have one common denominator: they constantly problematize the phenomenon and contest the concept of Soviet philosophy. Taken together, they create a situation of overthinking in which the wealth of contradictory ideas and interpretations simply leaves no space for involving the Soviet philosophical legacy in the ongoing philosophical dialogue running from ancient philosophers up to today’s thinkers.7 In my opinion, to avoid this hermeneutic obstruction, Soviet philosophy should be reassessed not as a provocative phenomenon in the history of philosophy, but as a specific condition under which philosophy subsisted under challenging conditions for at least three generations of thinkers in Eastern Europe and the Baltic States

Soviet philosophy as a philosophical condition was founded not only on the contradiction between the vita contemplativa and the vita activa8 but also on the critical redefinition of the meaning and performance of contemplation/theory and activity/practice. Here, contemplation still meant a withdrawal from active public life, but the theoretical distance of the contemplator was so greatly influenced by the institutions of Soviet thought control, and by the Marxist belief that philosophy is central to the struggle for power that contemplation could have been practiced only in constant cooperation/struggle with public institutions. Simultaneously, due to the strong and lasting ideological monopoly and the absence of the public sphere (at least in the Western meaning of the term) in the socialist state, the public activity of practice was so alienated from the authentic human being and from the aims of communication in the public realm that participation in it was close to an act of existential self-destruction. As a result, the Soviet philosophical condition crucified itself on the philosophical process on the axes of its fundamental contradictions between controlled autonomous contemplation and limited public action, as well as between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa.

The harmful effects of this double self-alienation of philosophy’s life were compounded by the disrupted communication between thinkers within the Soviet Union and their colleagues from the outside world. Once part of wider philosophical networks under the Russian empire (beginning from the 18th century and intensifying from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th), individual philosophers and entire schools dropped out of the dialogue among the world’s philosophies in Soviet times. Only Soviet Marxist doctrine remained visible globally, but its philosophical status was doubtful. Within the USSR, the official philosophical “surface” was almost indistinguishable from the official ideology. Meanwhile, closed, often underground philosophical groups lived almost apart from contact with each other and their peers abroad. This was extremely harmful for the life of philosophy in the region since philosophy usually reproduces itself in open, potentially authentic, and preferably uninterrupted communication among different thinkers and schools.9

As I stated above, the Soviet philosophical condition was established as a result of the 1917–22 caesura and lasted until the next caesura in 1989–91. A caesura here means a breach in the continuity of a certain cultural ontology. The revolutionary events in the societies and lands once ruled by the Russian Empire fundamentally changed the conditions of life, practice, and thought between 1917 and 1922. Cultural, social, political, and economic lifestyles changed so much and underwent so much innovation that human beings living in the Soviet Union were in a sense rethrown into the new world. So, the change of 1917–22 was indeed a historical caesura.

Yet this caesura went even deeper than these revolutionary changes. What happened in the period of 1917–22 also had a certain ontological status. The human experience of rapid change in those times can be described as a re-Geworfenheit of Dasein. In Heidegger’s existentialist philosophy, a human being—Dasein—is seen as the existence that is always present in a certain temporal/historical situation: it is thrown (geworfen) into the world. The modus of human life is thus in-der-Welt-sein, and the human condition is fundamentally Geworfenheit into the Event-Ereignis.10 In the case of a caesura, we enter into an unusual ontological event wherein it is not human existence, but the world itself, that is “thrown,” while Dasein follows it in an act of re-Geworfenheit. A caesura of this kind is an extreme case in which continuity and communication are interrupted not by human agency, but by deeper ontological structures—by Destiny or Being (das Seyn) itself. This means that the experience of such a caesura bears witness to the co-creation of a new world and a new human being: they are recreated in Destiny’s act of rethrowing both—like dice in a game.

In the conservative ontology of Heidegger, it is close to impossible to fully express the experience of a human existence being rethrown after the rethrowing of the world. But the conceptual language of Michel Foucault can better help with understanding the ontology of such a deep caesura. In Foucault’s perspective, a caesura can be understood as the simultaneous rupture and reassembling of the ontological foundations of power, the human subject, and truth (Foucault 2005, 2007). Foucauldian intentionality opens up for us an ontological zero-point in which authentic human presence demonstrates itself as grounded in nothingness, as constructed from an event of self-founding wherein power, truth, and the human subject ground themselves by grounding each other—since there is nothing else that can ground them.

In this way, a caesura can be understood as more than a break in historical continuity.11 It is the experience of meeting the Nothing in which we can see our true, historically unconditioned selves—in total war, in mass murder, in class struggle, in famine, in proletarian dictatorship—after which the human being, power, and truth re-establish the world and time, along with new power practices, new truth regimes, and a new human condition. For Foucault, the birth of the Western contemporary human subject came in tandem with a disciplined society promoting self-control.12 Similarly, the caesura of 1917–22 gave birth to the Soviet Human, Society, and World, while the caesura of 1989–91 brought them to an end and laid the grounds for our contemporary condition.

The archipelago of the Soviet condition included philosophy as an integral part, as one of its islands. This archipelago needed and desired philosophy to maintain the integrity of its truth regimes, which philosophy did by betraying its own self-interest and self-identity, turning itself into a multilayered construction with Soviet Marxism on the surface (or the top) and many hidden philosophical layers (at the bottom). The official philosophy served the authorities well. Still, philosophy was one of the major transgressive forces that managed to smuggle in ideas from pre-Soviet times and prepare the way for the caesura of 1989–91 through “ideological diversions.” The Soviet philosophical condition was full of different events and cultural phenomena, and, as that condition, it neither had to harmonize them nor have its own identity.13

The second caesura brought the Soviet philosophical condition to a close. In the several years between 1986 and 1991, philosophy lost its “central role” for the government and for the public. During Perestroika, the modernist discourse of the future, with its interest in logic, dialectics, and universality, was “enriched” (and often replaced) by the conservative orientation towards the past, with its focus on memory, historical justice, and ethnonational particularism in the emerging public space. This emergence of a free public space preconditioned a huge demand for political and social theories, which Soviet philosophy could not offer. As a result, the market of ideas was taken over by various “brands” of foreign philosophies. The decentralization and decommunization of the USSR, along with the nationalization of public discourse in Soviet republics and smaller communities in 1988–89, destroyed the usual hierarchy of philosophical centers and groups. The fall of the East’s autarchy opened the possibility of communication with the outer world, which first boosted East–West philosophical encounters and soon led to Western philosophical hegemony in the 1990s. Finally, the dissolution of the Union and the launch of new polities initiated a new era in the life of philosophy in Eastern European and Northern Eurasian societies.

If the first caesura was aimed at claiming a monopoly on truth, a project that was never fully implemented but that greatly damaged the life of philosophical thought and the quality of intellectual debate in the USSR, the second caesura did not similarly result in big projects: philosophy lost its public influence for good and for all. Some praised this loss, some mourned it, but there is no doubt that the social and academic marginalization of philosophers has caused them to pay tribute for their freedom in the coin of growing disrespect for rationality, universality, and contemplation in general.

So, what specifically in the Soviet philosophical condition has elevated philosophy so high in terms of public authority and dragged it so low in terms of contemplative depth? This is the question I will answer in the following part of this chapter.

2 Periods in the Establishment and the Demise of the Soviet Philosophical Condition

An in-depth study of the history of the Soviet philosophical condition has yet to be written. In this study, I would like just to identify the major stages of this condition’s establishment, evolution, and demise.

I propose to isolate these stages based on the specific nature of the Soviet philosophical condition, which gave political and ideological factors in intellectual development equal importance to philosophical ones, and which manifested the void just described between elevated practical significance and depressed contemplative depth. For this reason, I find the periodization of the development of Soviet philosophy offered by Vladislav Lektorskij and Marina Bykova unbalanced and too much oriented toward political processes. In particular, they offered just three periods in the development of Soviet philosophy: (1) the post-revolutionary decade, (2) the epoch of Stalin, and (3) the post-Stalin era (Lektorskij & Bykova 2019: 4–9). I agree that these three periods work well for tracing the external, political preconditions for the evolution of the Soviet science and other intellectual practices through the period from 1922 through 1986. However, the logic of this periodization misses too much detail to understand the development of philosophy as such in the Soviet period, and it does not relate to the processes in those “levels” and “circles” in which philosophy lived in the Soviet times.

I should note here that the fragmentation of Soviet philosophy into such levels and circles is not unique: the entire Soviet society and culture was compartmentalized, a quality very well analyzed in the study by Mark Lipovetsky, Maria Engström, Klavdia Smola, and others (Lipovetsky et al. 2021). In both Soviet philosophical and cultural processes, a common feature was the fragmentation of levels beneath the official surface (which was fully controlled by party and government structures) into underground groups (which could be controlled more, less, or not at all by the official structures). This vertical division was also fragmented horizontally into circles, which existed on each of those levels in different Soviet republics and intellectual centers.14

If this fragmented character of the Soviet philosophical condition is taken into account along with the balance between philosophical and political factors, five distinctive stages in the history of Soviet philosophy can be identified:

the establishment of the Marxist hegemony and degradation of philosophical diversity, 1922–35;

the spread and hegemony of ideological frenzy, 1935–55;

an ideological confusion and incipient return of philosophical pluralism, 1956–64;

the professionalization of philosophy and proliferation of ideological cynicism, 1965–85;

a decline of ideological monopoly and fuller return of philosophical pluralism, 1986–91.

2.1 The first caesura and the establishment of Marxist hegemony, 1922–35

This period starts right after the first caesura. The launch of the new philosophical condition was characterized by the search for a new type of institutionalization for philosophy and a new role for it in culture, society, and politics. This quest can be described as consisting of five interconnected tendencies:

the beginning of the division of philosophers into those regarded as correct (i.e., supportive, loyal, and publishable) and those branded as wrong (i.e., disloyal, hostile, and non-publishable);

experimentation with new ways of uniting philosophers, which would lead to the creation of ideological platforms able to work in the frameworks established by historical and dialectical materialism; de-platforming of non-Marxist philosophies;

the establishment of the hegemony of a new Marxist lingo supporting the dominance of Marxist concepts in philosophy at large;

the introduction of pre-totalitarian Soviet censorship of philosophical works and the creation of an early system of Soviet philosophical institutions; and

the final establishment of an ideological monopoly on philosophical and general education.

The Soviet cultural condition was severed from the imperial Russian one by World War I, two revolutions in 1917 (the bourgeois revolution in February and the socialist revolution in October), many national revolutions from Poland through Turkestan from 1918–22 (continuing, in some regions, until 1924), civil wars, and many foreign interventions. This caesura was driven by the worldview of a civil war that made use of nationalist or socialist classifications, but in fact fostered profound distrust and paranoia among neighbors, local communities, and ethnic and religious groups. After the Bolshevik government took control over most of the Russian imperial provinces and launched its Union project at the end of 1922, the new order—not only political, but also cultural, social, and economic—was established.

This order was to be constructed in accordance with Marxist doctrine, specifically as understood by the Bolsheviks and national communists in the Soviet republics. In their political imagination, philosophical practice was part of a wider class struggle, and philosophical ideas mattered for the construction of socialism and for the promotion of the World Socialist Revolution. Hence, the distinction between philosophers who were correct (loyal Marxists) and those who were wrong (disloyal Marxists and non-Marxists) became an important part of public life around the Soviet Union. In turning the new country into a springboard for the World Revolution, the Bolshevik central and republican governments had to ensure that Marxism-Leninism would face no internal obstacles to its global aims. Accordingly, during the 1920s, Marxist doctrine repositioned itself from being one of many philosophical platforms to functioning as a hegemonic platform. However, its movement into this central position was not as repressive as in later periods. Still, in this decade Soviet philosophy slowly began to form the philosophical practice and style that would later become its official surface.

An important event for the formation of the Soviet philosophical condition was the practice of forced emigration for social scholars and philosophers, also known as “philosophers’ trains and steamboats.” The Bolshevik government expelled Nikolaj Berdyaev (1874–1948), Semion Frank (1877–1950), Nikolaj Losskij (1870–1965), Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968), and many other non-Marxist philosophers, legal thinkers, historians, and economists from the country in 1922 (Osharov 1973; Glavackij 2002).

This governmental decision can be seen as relatively “mild,” as it stopped short of the physical destruction of intellectuals resorted to in times of civil war—or during Stalin’s rule. After 1922 there were cases of repression of “white” philosophers/social thinkers (through imprisonment or execution), but the Bolsheviks’ attention was mainly directed at the creation of organizations where loyal Marxist thinkers could work, offer theoretical and practical solutions for socialist state-building, and spread their teaching to the masses. The Socialist Academy of Social Sciences (created in 1918, but almost non-functional until 1923) was reorganized into the Communist Academy in 1924. Simultaneously, a network of Institutes of Red Professors had been developing since 1921 to meet the growing demand for loyal professors in educational institutions. In addition, both systems provided the Soviet central and republican party structures, governments, and Red Army units with personnel capable of conducting educational activities and propaganda in the Marxist spirit.

At the same time, throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s, several alternative philosophical movements were present in public space and academia alongside Marxist philosophy. Although the “philosophical steamboats” struck a decisive blow to the quality and depth of the philosophical process in the early 1920s, many non-Marxists, including Mikhail Bakhtin (1895–1975), Boris Fokht (1875–1946), Gustav Špet (1879–1937), Lev Vygotskij (1896–1934), and the young Alexej Losev (1893–1988), were able to work and publish.15 In addition, a significant number of classic philosophical texts were translated and published in the 1920s, including texts unrelated to Marxism. Only after 1929–31 did these translations increasingly focus on materialist philosophers, their predecessors, and those who could be regarded as part of that tradition. The translation of these philosophical works came to an end by the mid-1930s.

Still, between 1923 and 1935, Russian translations of works by Democritus, Plato, Aristotle, Toland, La Mettrie, Diderot, Helvetius, Holbach, Kant, Priestley, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Feuerbach, and other philosophers were published; several texts were also translated into Georgian, Ukrainian, and Uzbek. This translation program significantly advanced philosophical studies and conceptual language—both Marxist and non-Marxist—in the USSR.

Marxist philosophical textbooks were also designed and published in significant print runs—on a scale much larger than in pre-revolutionary times. Unlike later-stage publications, these textbooks presented quite different interpretations of Marxism, including some closer to Lenin or Trotsky. This period predated the institution of the “magistral line of the party,” an ideological interpretation of Marxist-Leninist dogmas defined in public acts of the party that varied over time and guided philosophical work at the official surface. Because this institution had not yet been created, the first period of Soviet philosophy was the heyday of early non-dogmatic Soviet Marxism. This area has been studied only sporadically and still awaits systemic research. It was during this period that such thinkers as Valentin Asmus (1894–1975), Vladimir Brušlinskij (1900–1992), Ivan Boričevskij (1886–41), Pavel Blonskij (1884–1941), Boris Černyšev (1896–1944), Aleksandr Deborin (1881–1963), Olga Freidenberg (1890–1955), Nikolai Kareеv (1850–1931), Aleksandr Makovel’skij (1884–1969), Dmitrij Mordukhai-Boltovskij (1876–1952) and Viktor Serežnikov (1873–1944) actively worked and published their philosophical (and ideological) studies.

An example of partial openness in the emerging official Marxist philosophy is the famous discussion between “mechanists” (Liubov’ Axelrod (1868–1946), Arkadij Timiriazev (1880–1955), Sandor Varjas (1885–1939), I. Skvortsov-Stepanov (1870–1928), V. Sarabjanov (1886–1952)) and “dialecticians” (Deborin, Jan Sten (also Janis Stienis, 1899–1937), Kareev, Grigorij Bammel’ (1900–1939)) concerning the status of Marxist philosophy in relation to science and the authorities.

On the one hand, the styles of expression and argumentation in this debate portrayed the Soviet Marxism of that period as a system of views open to interpretation and debate. On the other hand, in the process, both sides—in addition to using philosophical arguments—called on the authorities to intervene and repress their opponents. These calls were attentively listened to by party leadership and security services, and by the early 1930s, philosophical debates often resulted in the expulsion of philosophers from the losing group and the increased attention of party leadership (and availability of special services) to the philosophical winners. The model in which losing the philosophical debate meant loss of one’s job and then of one’s freedom was pioneered in the 1929–30 discussion between Deborin and Vladimir Vernadsky (1863–1945) on the connection between science and materialist philosophy and further tested out in the 1930–32 discussion between “Bolshevizers” (Mark Mitin (1901–1987), Pavel Judin (1899–1968), Vasilij Ral’tsevič (1893–1957)) and followers of Deborin.

This newly minted model then led to the repression of the representatives of the failing group, which was usually presented as a “wrong direction in the interpretation” of Marxist ideas. The same model was reproduced in all educational and scientific institutions, down to the lowest level and to the most politically neutral disciplines, like genetics or linguistics. The way for totalitarian Stalinist society was being prepared not only by the Bolshevik authorities but also by many Soviet intellectuals. In the process, philosophical contemplation was becoming more and more public: philosophical thinking was already regarded as political practice, an action that could be judged either as loyal behavior supporting the proletarian revolution or as a crime against the communist cause.

Throughout this period, changes in philosophical language became increasingly evident. First, the translations of philosophical literature into Russian and other languages enriched the materialist and non-materialist lexicons. But the centralization of power that began around 1927/29 also led to (1) the mobilization of “forces on the ideological front” with strengthened internal propaganda and censorship, (2) the intensification of anti-religious “struggle” and the first wave of destruction of churches by officials and party activists, and (3) new acts against private property and in favor of big collective economic actors.

Altogether, these shifts in policy increased the use of censorship, repression, and violence against those working in philosophy, the humanities, and the social and natural sciences. Part of this censorship was carried out by means of linguistic revision. In Moscow and in the Soviet republics, official languages were reformed twice, first in the 1920s through translations and the creation of new dictionaries oriented to the revolutionary drive toward “new proletarian cultures of Soviet peoples,” and again in 1927–34 during the early Stalinist revisions aimed at the unification of the Russian and national languages. Each time, the reforms meant a rapid increase in the use of terms peculiar to Marxism. Increasingly, these terms were also used all too often not only in philosophy and scientific literature but also in the mass media and in the daily communication of propagandists. The adoption of this lingo into philosophy seriously restricted non-historicist, non-Marxist ways of speaking and thinking. Marxist jargon became almost the universal language of philosophy at most levels, from Mitin’s hegemonistic pamphlets to Losev’s pre-imprisonment idealistic works (Losev 1928; Mitin et al. 1930).

Furthermore, the education of philosophers survived radical changes in this period. Initially, the training of philosophers in the Soviet Union was canceled from 1923 to 1926. The training of Marxist theoreticians was mainly conducted in the Institutes of Red Professors. However, by 1926 the low quality of Marxist studies and the lack of educated cadres for the party posts was too evident, so the party leadership approved the reopening of a philosophy department at Moscow University (in the department of history and archaeology). The only professors there were Marxists. In 1931, philosophers and psychologists at Moscow State University withdrew to form a new, separate institution, the Moscow Institute of History, Philosophy, and Literature (MIFLI). This institution served as a model for the creation of ideological “educational-philosophical” institutions in Leningrad, Kazan, Kharkiv, Kyiv, Tbilisi, and other scientific-administrative centers of the Union.

Training in philosophy was spreading across Soviet educational institutions to achieve a dual task: (1) to develop “the theory and practice of socialism” and (2) to train workers for “socialism’s construction” (Mitin 1936: 4, 22). In addition, scholars at these philosophical centers participated in debates with their foreign colleagues from both communist and non-communist networks through publications or (much less often) in personal meetings. This initial impulse was a substantial part of the philosophical education up until the very end of the Soviet condition, and even survived in many countries.

Thus, the first period in the evolution of the Soviet philosophical condition was a time of differentiating philosophical practices into two primary categories (correct and wrong), accumulating institutional and cadre potential for the development of Marxist philosophy, and creating mechanisms for thought control in public space and in academia. Despite the constantly growing ideologization of education and philosophical work, there was still some room for non-Marxist philosophy and for a range of Marxist-Leninist positions. This was also the period in which the chasm between contemplation and practice in Soviet philosophy was effectively set up.

2.2 The stage of ideological frenzy, 1935–55

During this stage, the Soviet philosophical condition received its “classical” formulation. If the philosophical development of the 1920s and early 1930s transpired in “herbivore style,” with limited repression, the traumatic, “carnivorous” experience of the Stalin era laid down several matrices in the foundation of philosophical practices that can still be witnessed today, thirty years after the USSR’s dissolution. Among these matrices were:

official ideology was treated as the only philosophical practice;

a justification of government actions via moral codes and official histories based on a patriotic metaphysics;

a rupture between philosophical education and research through the division between universities and academic institutes;

governmental control of philosophical (and wider intellectual) studies through the actions of loyal philosophers, party activists, and security services;

strict differentiation between official and non-official philosophy, systematic repression of dissident thinking, institutionalization of isolated circles of philosophical thought avoiding any public presence, etc.