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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
Soviet philosophy has no great reputation in the Western philosophical world. Physicists, mathematicians, geographers and geomorphologists, medical scientists and men working in certain branches of history and linguistics have found it profitable to follow the researches of their Soviet counterparts; philosophers have not. Academician Mitin, it is true, told the Soviet Academy of Sciences early in 1943 that ’philosophy has been raised to an unparalleled level in the Soviet Union, making the U.S.S.R. a country of high philosophical culture. Many problems which are being argued by outstanding philosophers abroad have been solved here on the basis of dialectical materialism.”1 To most non-Communists, Mitin's claim
page 1 note * Based on a talk delivered in the University of Melbourne in April, 1962, as part of a series on ‘Contemporary Philosophy’ arranged by the University Philosophical Society.Google Scholar
page 1 note 1 Cited from ‘Twenty-five Years of Philosophy in the U.S.S.R.—excerpts from a paper read by Mitin, Acad M. at the Jubilee Session of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R.’, Philosophy, vol. 21 (1944), p. 76. Italics in the original.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
page 2 note 1 Article by Yu. Alesin, A., published in the journal Voprosy Filosofii, 1954, no. 6, pp. 206–8.Google Scholar
page 2 note 2 By Academician Aleksandrov, G. F., Voprosy Filosofii, 1948, no. 3, pp. 174–192.Google Scholar
page 2 note 3 By Sidorov, M. I., Voprosy Filosofii, 1949, no. 2, pp. 249–272.Google Scholar
page 2 note 4 The philosopher A. A. Maksimov published one of his important (i.e. officially approved) philosophical denunciations in the Literatumaya Gazeta and another in the Navy journal.Google Scholar
page 2 note 5 Professor Bakradze's, K. S.System and Method in the Philosophy of Hegel (Tbilisi, 1958)Google Scholar is one of the best examples of such work. Bakradze, , a Georgian who studied under Husserl in the twenties, writes of Hegel with genuine knowledge and insight, but an insight which never goes beyond the achievements of Hegelian scholarship in Germany, on which Bakradze is patently drawing. The independence of thought displayed in a book like Lukács' Derjunge Hegel is still unthinkable among Russian philosophers of the older generation.Google Scholar
page 4 note 1 Published in Moscow (by the Communist Academy) in 1926. A two-volume German translation appeared in 1929; there is no English translation. Hans, Kelsen'sThe Communist Theory of Law (Stevens & Sons, London, 1955)Google Scholar gives an account of Pashukanis' theory and some brief quotations from his work; John, Hazard has published longer excerpts in his collection Soviet Legal Philosophy (Harvard U.P., 1951).Google Scholar
page 4 note 2 Capital, vol. 3, part 7, chapt. 48, sec. iii.Google Scholar
page 5 note 2 The controversy broke out in 1922, when a fairly primitive materialist, O. Minin, published an article demanding the liquidation of philosophy as a ‘bourgeoissurvival’ and its replacement by the positive sciences. He was supported by a number of scientists, including the biologist E. S. Enchmen, who strove to reduce philosophy to biology. The movement was sharply attacked, as ‘Vulgar Materialism’, by the leading Soviet philosopher of the period, Abram, Deborin, and officially condemned by Bukharin in 1923. In 1925 the attack was renewed by a group of philosophically more sophisticated ‘mechanists’, including I.I. Skvortsov-Stepanov,Google ScholarTimiriazev, A. K. and Akselrod, L. I., whose polemics against Deborin and his followers were chiefly published in what was then the Soviet Union's only philosophical journal, Pod Znameniem Marksizma (Under the Banner of Marxism). In the years of dispute (1925-9) Deborin's political victory was becoming evident: he directed the Institute of Philosophy of the Communist Academy, was appointed to be in charge of the philosophical sections of the first Soviet Encyclopaedia (publ. 1926f.) and in 1929 confirmed as Editor-in-Chief of Under the Banner of Marxism at the great second All-Union conference of Marxist-Leninist research institutes.Google Scholar Two years later he had fallen from grace, having been characterised by Stalin, as a ‘Menshevising idealist’.Google ScholarAdoratski, V. V., Academician Mitin and P. F. Yudin replaced him as editors of Under the Banner of Marxism. Deborin, who is still alive and living in semi-retirement, recanted. But while Deborin's disgrace meant the tightening of political controls over philosophy, it did not mean any repudiation of the view that Marxism-Leninism was a. philosophy, the philosophy of dialectical materialism. For a fuller account of the Deborin controversy, from which much of the above is drawn,Google Scholarsee René, Ahlberg's contribution in Leopold, Labedz, Revisionism (Allen & Unwin, London, 1962), p. 126f.Google Scholar
page 6 note 1 Mitin, , op. tit., p. 78.Google Scholar
page 6 note 2 Cited by Bochenski, J. M., ‘Philosophy Studies’, in Survey, no. 31, p. 67.Google Scholar
page 7 note 1 ‘In the Soviet Union a university course lasts 4-6 years. The academic year consists of two terms, from 1 September to 23 January and from 7 February to 30 June. The student has to take examinations at the end of each year, otherwise he is not allowed to carry on for another year. Two ‘unsatisfactory's’ entail automatic exclusion. At the end of his course the student takes an examination. Then, if he has received good marks, he can become an ‘aspirant’. As such he acts as assistant to a professor and prepares a thesis for the degree of Candidate of Science (in our case ‘philosophical science’). This thesis is then submitted after three years’ probation and must now (since 1957) be printed before it is submitted. The thesis must display new knowledge and the standard required is that of a doctoral thesis at a German university.'— Bochenski, J. M., Philosophical Studies, loc. cit., p. 64,Google Scholar drawing on Gallin, K. G., Higher Education and the Training of Cadres in the U.S.S.R. (in Russian, Moscow, 1958).Google Scholar Although Russian students take considerably more time to submit their first post-graduate thesis, those I have seen certainly do not rise above the standard of a reasonable M.A. Only very few—such as Bogomolov's, A. S. thesis on The Theory of ‘Creative’ Evolution in Contemporary Anglo-American Philosophy, submitted to Moscow State University in 1958—suggest a very good M.A.Google Scholar thesis verging on the English, Australian or good American Ph.D. The Soviet degree entitled ‘doctor of philosophical sciences’ is a very high degree involving the public defence of a substantial work; usually only the older, established professors gain this degree.
page 8 note 1 Bochenski, , Philosophical Studies, vol. cit. p. 65. Most of the figures given here are drawn from the valuable reports compiled by Professor Bochenski and his colleagues in the University of Fribourg/Switzerland, where he has built up the major centre of research into Soviet philosophy.Google Scholar
page 9 note 1 Bibliographie der sowjetischen Philosophh, Heft 2 (D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht, 1959), pp. 1–81. The section devoted to publications in 1957 and 1958 includes philosophical articles, which I have discounted in the figures given above.Google Scholar
page 11 note 1 Law and jurisprudence, on the other hand, saw a marked development just before the revolution, when Petrajitsky held the chair at St Petersburg.
page 12 note 1 Zenkovsky, , A History of Russian Philosophy, transl. by Kline, George L. (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1953), vol. 1, p. 4.Google Scholar
page 13 note 1 In other words, the critical intellectual has been cut off from ‘the people’. Philosophically this seems to me more of a strength than a weakness. It has encouraged the intellectual to substitute commitment to ‘intellectual life’ or ‘intellectual traditions’ for the earlier commitment to pan-Slavonic destiny and the people of Russia. The change in climate is clear enough if we compare Doctor Zhivago and the poems of Yevgeni Yevtushenko with the writings of Lunacharsky and Mayakovsky 30-40 years earlier.Google ScholarA philosophically important counterpart to Zhivago is the ‘Free Philosophical Treatise: an instantaneous exposition of my philosophical views’ by the Soviet mathematical logicianGoogle ScholarYesenin-Volpin, A. S., smuggled out of the Soviet Union and published in England and America under the title A Leaf of Spring (Thames & Hudson, London, Frederick A. Praeger, New York, 1961).Google Scholar The publishers—who print a bad English translation facing the Russian text—tell us that the I author was born in 1925, the natural son of the poet Yesenin. He gained his Candidate's degree in 1949, but was arrested soon after and spent the next five in years in a prison mental hospital and a labour camp. Released in the amnesty of 1954 he earned his living by writing on mathematics and logic and abstracting from foreign scientific periodicals in six languages. For a. period he conducted seminars in Moscow State University, but without having a staff appointment. In 1959, after having been arrested and released several times, he was invited to read a paper to the International Mathematics Symposium in Warsaw, but wasrefused an exit visa. Convinced that his renewed detention was imminent, he set down his ‘free philosophical treatise’ in one day, combined it with some 30 poems—critical of the régime—written between 1941 and 1951, and handed it over for publication in the West. He specifically asked that they should be published under his real name. He was arrested soon after and is still under detention, officially on the grounds of mental instability. His last published article to appear in the Soviet Union was a note ‘On The Axiomatic Method’ in Voprosy Filosqfii for July, 1959, pp. 121-6. The interest of the free philosophic treatise—marred as the arguments are by their hurried and fragmentary character—lies in its rejection of the Marxist claim that philosophy must be systematic and its use of techniques deriving from the Vienna Circle and the Polish school of logicians to present an alternative view of what Marxists regard as leading philosophical issues.Google Scholar Thus Yesenin-Volpin classifies the reality of being, the categories of necessity, law and causality, and the proclamation of monism as ‘pseudo-problems’, arising from the imperfections of language and thought. ‘Much that is written here’, he notes, ‘is not new, but in Russia every student who has arrived at philosophical scepticism by his own thinking may consider himself a Columbus.’ Some of the arguments display a mind of considerable acuteness. (A brief review of the book by Miller, J., Soviet Studies, vol. 13 (1962), pp. 335–9, lists some very necessary corrections to the English translation.)Google Scholar
page 14 note 1 For a study of the new Soviet intelligentsia and its relation to the old Russian intelligentsia, see the Winter, , 1960, issue of Daedalus (vol. 89, pp. 437–670),Google Scholar which was specially devoted to the subject. For briefer comments see Eugene, Kamenka, ‘Marxism and the Soviet Intelligentsia’, in The Listener for 01 12, 1961 (no. 1659), pp. 60–1.Google Scholar
page 15 note 1 John, Anderson, ‘arxist Philosophy’, in the Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy, vol. 13 (1935), p. 24.Google Scholar
page 15 note 2 Acton, H. B., The Illusion of the Epoch (Cohen & West, London, 1955), p. 271.Google Scholar
page 16 note 1 Consider, e.g. this passage from the philosopher P. A. Sharia's reasonably serious work, the book Concerning Some Questions of Communist Morality: ‘True moral evaluation cannot take place on the basis of the purely objective criterion of the usefulness of an action for the development of society, neither can it take place on the basis of the purely subjective criterion of personal pleasure—only the bringing together of both these criteria gives us the underlying morality of an action.Google Scholar Priority always belongs to the objective content of behaviour. This Marxist thesis refutes both the apriorism of moral norms and creeping empiricism, i.e., the actual denial of moral principles altogether. In this Marxist thesis the dialectical-materialist principle of the unity of subject and object finds its concrelisation in the field of morality.'—Google ScholarSharia, , O Nekototykh uoprosakh kommunislicheskoi morali (Gospolitizdat, Moscow, 1951), p. 62; my translation, Sharia's italics.Google Scholar
page 16 note 2 Wetter, Gustav A., Dialectical Materialism: A Historical and Systematic Survey of Philosophy in the Soviet Union (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1958), pp. 556–7.Google Scholar