The prehistory of post-soviet philosophies

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THE PREHISTORY OF POST-SOVIET PHILOSOPHIES

Mikhail Minakov

Kennan Institute, Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars

Abstract

philosophical marxist pluralism cynicism

Keywords: history of philosophy, Soviet philosophy, Marxism, Soviet Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Soviet dissident philosophy, contemplation, practice

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; Godon, Juceviciene & Kodelja 2004; Guseinov & Lektorsky 2009; Tevzadze 2010; Menzhulin 2011; Minakov 2011; Bachmetjevas 2022; Tishbeisky 2022; Kule 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” I discuss this issue more in Minakov 2021. See also the sources of the debate: Habermas 1990; Hosle 1992; Frank 1992; Oushakine 2000; Habermas 2018. 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 20^th 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. On the Soviet generations of philosophers, please see Sineokaja 2022 in the Collected Papers volume.

In this article, 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 21^st 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 Jozef Bochenski 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” (Bochenski 1950: 2; see also Wetter 1958; Bochenski 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, Sergii 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, These drawbacks are well pointed out by A. Dmitirev, who called the culture of Soviet philosophy a “dead water” that prevented Soviet philosophers from practicing their ideas and made their work senseless in a specific normative philosophical sense (Dmitirev 2010: 22). 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 postSoviet 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. On this, see Brubaker 2011; Kasianov 2012.

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 20^th-century Latvian or Lithuanian philosophies by Maija Kule and Viktoras Bachmetjevas (Kule 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, Genrih Batiscev, Vadim Ivanov, Evald Ilyenkov, Volodymyr Jurynets, Bonifatii Kedrov, Pavel Kopnin, Mikhail Lifshyts, Aleksei Losev, Jurij Lotman, Merab Mamardashvili, and many others returned to the center of attention of contemporary philosophers. See: Bystrytsky 2003; Yurynets 2007; Kantor 2009; Motrosylova 2009; Taho-Godi & Taho-Godi2009; ToLstyh 2009; Lektorskii 2009, 2010a; Arslanov 2010; Popovych 2010; Tkacuk 2016; Turenko 2019. 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 Tabackovsky 2002 or Motrosllova 2012, 2018) or manifest as a hypercritical approach (as in Proleev 2002 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 20^th century (Donskis 2002; Minakov 2009; Tkacuk 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. On philosophy as continued dialogue among its different elements, see Jaspers 1962; Kearney 1984; Collins 2009; Habermas 2015. 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 activa Hanna Arendt used this binary opposition to analyze the human condition and philosophy's role in dealing with the theory-practice split in Western culture. 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 18^th century and intensifying from the end of the 19^th century to the beginning of the 20^th), 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. This account is supported by various arguments of, e.g., an ontological, existential, or sociological nature. See, respectively, Heidegger 2002; Jaspers 2001; Collins 2009.

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. As in Heidegger 1989, 2015. 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 cocreation 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. As in Agamben 2004: 12 or Nancy 2000: xii. 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 reestablish 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. Foucault 2005: 17ff.; Foucault 2007: 42ff. See also the argument by Munteanu 1996: 46, 112ff. 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. Despite thousands of professionals who lived by doing philosophy in the USSR, Soviet philosophy has never had its own identity. There were no histories of Soviet philosophy in Soviet times. This is one of the arguments in favor of my interpretation of Soviet philosophy as a philosophical condition (as well as a position) rather than a tradition, event, or phenomenon. In Perestroika, there were some publications with the attempt to formulate this identity (Surovaja drama naroda 1989; Jahot 1991), but the post were done already during the second caesura and had no influence on the Soviet philosophers'' identity.

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 article.

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 Engstrom, 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. This horizontal diversity has been studied by various scholars in different post-Soviet countries; just to name a few: Jeu & Blakeley 1982; Donskis 2002; Minakov 2009a, 2009b; Sydykov et al. 2016.

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:

1) the establishment of the Marxist hegemony and degradation of philosophical diversity, 1922 - 35;

2) the spread and hegemony of ideological frenzy, 1935 - 55;

3) an ideological confusion and incipient return of philosophical pluralism, 1956 - 64;

4) the professionalization of philosophy and proliferation of ideological cynicism, 1965 - 85;

5) 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:

1) 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);

2) 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;

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

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

5) 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 (1977 - 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 nonfunctional 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 Spet (1879 - 1937), Lev Vygotskij (1896 - 1934), and the young Alexei Losev (1893 - 1988), were able to work and publish. I should also note that there was a space for intellectual practices on the boundaries of literature, critique, and philosophy that were open for new ways of thinking, philosophizing, and writing-with their own intercultural and interdisciplinary dialogue-in the cultural centers of the USSR: Moscow, Leningrad, Kharkiv, Odessa, Kyiv and Minsk. The example of such new spaces is the Soviet modernisms so well analyzed in: Babak & Dmitiriev 2021. 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 Brushlinskij (1900 - 1992), Ivan Borichevskij(1886 - 41), Pavel Blonskij (1884 - 1941), Boris Chernyshev (1896 - 1944), Aleksandr Deborin (1881 - 1963), Olga Freidenberg (1890 - 1955), Nikolai Kareev (1850 - 1931), Alaeksandr Makovel'skij (1884 - 1969), Dmitrij Mordukhai- Boltovskij (1876 - 1952) and Viktor Serezhnikov (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 (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'tsevic (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:

1) official ideology was treated as the only philosophical practice;

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

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

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

5) 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.

One of the results of the Stalinist revolution in the USSR that took place between 1927 and 1935 was an ideological frenzy-a mixture of the authorities' repressive policies, societal acceptance of the logic of the new class struggle, absolute ideological monopoly, purges in all professional communities (including those of philosophers), and the establishment of a totalitarian system that filled most public and private lacunae. This ideological frenzy engulfed the upper floors of Soviet philosophy, and only isolated thinkers, like Bakhtin or Losev, could survive by reducing the space of free philosophy to texts written not for publication or conversations with select, trusted people.

It is during this period that the unified ideological doctrine of Marxist-Leninist philosophy (the party's so-called “magistral line”), in the Stalinist interpretation, was first coined. This is when the ideological content of the official surface of Soviet philosophy was finally articulated and refined several times before the death of Joseph Stalin-Jugashvili (1879 - 1953) and the start of de-Stalinization in 1956-58.

This indoctrination was supported by the split between philosophical education and research. Separate institutions, such as the Communist Academy and various Institutes of Red Professors, were merged into the Academy of Sciences, which united research institutes subordinated to the Union and to the governments of the Soviet republics. The totalitarian rupture between centers of research that belonged to the Academy and centers of education (profession-oriented institutes and universities) deepened. The higher education system proliferated the ideologically charged materials approved by authorities for the production of “ideological workers” and loyal intelligentsia, the most faithful of whom were allowed to engage in theoretical philosophical research within the framework of the Academy.

An important factor in the development of the Soviet philosophical condition was the formation of an ideological control network in all educational and research centers. In 1936, the party's Central Committee issued a decree “On Pedological Perversions” which, upon its publication, established the system of total party control over education: it launched control over the content of education, the appointment of professors and teachers, and even the style of teaching.

Two years later, the Short Course of the Bolshevik Party's History was published. Its fourth chapter-“On Dialectical and Historical Materialism”-was written by Joseph Stalin-Jugashvili (Jstorija Vsesojuznoj... 1938). This short chapter effectively defined the official doctrine of Soviet Marxism, which survived almost unchanged in educational courses on historical and materialist dialectics up until 1991. The instructions for applying Stalinist material to philosophical and general education were set forth in the November 1938 resolution of the Central Committee through the system that had been in place since 1936. The Central Committee's Department of Propaganda and Agitation was created in 1939 to administer philosophical education and research-the philosophical process on the official surface.