Leninism and the Battle of Ideas

A remarkable book to have in English, and not for the reasons its author intended.

Yelena Modrzhinskaya headed the sector for the criticism of anti-communism at the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences from 1953 until her death, and this is that sector's flagship product. Her earlier career explains its method better than her academic one does: she was a foreign intelligence officer, rose to major of state security, was stationed in Warsaw in 1940-41, and after 1941 ran the English sector of the NKGB's analytical directorate - where she wrote the April 1943 report arguing that Philby, Burgess, Blunt and their circle were producing too much good material to be genuine and must therefore be British double agents. She was wrong, and she was promoted.

Read with that in view, this stops being a philosophy book and becomes a rather good target study. Its organising question is not whether an argument is true but who is paying for it, through what institution, and to what end. The longest sustained stretch in the volume is an inventory of the Western apparatus of ideological production - the foundations, the institutes, the corporate money behind them - with names, addresses and funding traced.

The citation apparatus is serious: 1,087 footnote markers across some 128,000 words, with Marcuse, Brzezinski, Daniel Bell, Sidney Hook, Gustav Wetter, Roger Garaudy, Henri Lefebvre and the Yugoslav Praxis philosophers Gajo Petrovic and Mihailo Markovic all cited by title, place and year. She names living opponents at some risk to them, three years before Petrovic and Markovic were driven out of the University of Belgrade.

Translated by Yuri Sdobnikov.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on the one opponent in the book who is never allowed to speak.