Eleven Soviet philosophers were asked to describe what their discipline was doing, and this is the answer they gave. That makes Philosophy in the USSR: Problems of Dialectical Materialism different from every other philosophy title in this series. Oizerman's Main Trends in Philosophy is a monograph on the history of philosophy; Dubrovsky's Problem of the Ideal is a technical argument about mind and brain; Sheptulin's Marxist-Leninist Philosophy is a textbook. This book is the profession's self-portrait, commissioned for export, and it can therefore be asked a question the others cannot: when Soviet philosophy narrates its own history, what does it say happened?
The answer is that almost nothing happened before about 1955, and that what did happen was a difficulty, in the passive voice, with no agent and no date.
For once the spine is close to right. The Russian original and the Progress English edition, translated by Robert Daglish, both belong to 1976–77: the newest sources in the apparatus are Marx and Engels's Collected Works volumes 5 and 7 in the Moscow editions of 1976, and the most recent political citation is Documents and Resolutions. 25th Congress of the CPSU (Moscow, 1976), the Congress having met in February of that year. There is no five- or ten-year lag of the kind that makes so many Progress imprints misleading. This is a mid-Brezhnev book published in mid-Brezhnev.
The Foreword says what it is for, and it is worth taking at its word. The reader "will also be able to see for himself how wrong are the assertions that a gap exists between their ideas based on dialectical materialism and the problems of contemporary philosophy" — "their" being Marx, Engels and Lenin. And: "Hence the growing interest that Western scientists and technologists have acquired in materialist dialectics, an interest which the present volume seeks in some measure to satisfy."
So the addressee is a Western scientist or a Western philosopher of science, and the charge to be rebutted is that Soviet philosophy has fallen out of the conversation. This is a détente-era book of respectability, and its authors are the discipline's senior people: P. N. Fedoseyev, Academician; T. I. Oizerman, corresponding member; and nine Doctors of Philosophical Sciences including E. V. Ilyenkov, V. A. Lektorsky, A. N. Leontyev, D. P. Gorsky, A. S. Bogomolov and V. Z. Kelle. It is not a committee product signed by an institute. Each chapter has a named author who can be held to it.
The self-description is Fedoseyev's, in the opening chapter, "Scientific Cognition Today, Its Specific Features and Problems". His organising theme is Lenin's call, in "On the Significance of Militant Materialism", for an alliance between Marxist philosophers and natural scientists, and his argument is that the alliance has worked. Twice, and only twice, he acknowledges that it has not always worked. First:
Whenever these principles were violated difficulties arose that inhibited the fruitful work of both philosophers and natural scientists.
And then, periodising:
As we have already noted, the alliance between natural scientists and Marxist philosophers has assumed different forms at different stages. In the 1950s inquiry into the philosophical aspects of the natural sciences concentrated mainly on well-known and generally acknowledged scientific theories, particularly the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. […] In this period also the difficulties that had accumulated in the preceding years were overcome and mutual understanding was re-established between philosophers and natural scientists.
That is the whole of it. History begins in the 1950s; the 1960s are "a new frontier"; the present is defined by the tasks "set by the 24th and elaborated at the 25th Congress of the CPSU". Before the 1950s there is a period in which difficulties accumulated, and they were overcome by nobody in particular.
Consider what is being described. Search the full text of this volume and the following words do not occur once: Deborin; Mitin; Yudin; Zhdanov; Lysenko; Stalin; 1931; 1947; Menshevising idealism; Pod znamenem marksizma or Under the Banner of Marxism; purge; repression; cult of the individual. The single occurrence of "Alexandrov" is A. D. Alexandrov the mathematician, in a list of scientists, and not G. F. Alexandrov the head of agitprop. The word "genetics" occurs, but always as a term of art in epistemology — "genetic inference", "genetically initial" — except in one neutral aside about biology opening new avenues for research.
"Mutual understanding was re-established between philosophers and natural scientists" is doing extraordinary work in that sentence. What had ruptured the understanding, in the years Fedoseyev will not date, was the destruction of Soviet genetics after the August 1948 session of the Lenin All-Union Academy of Agricultural Sciences; the condemnation of cybernetics as a bourgeois pseudo-science; the campaign against "idealism" in physics that came close to reaching quantum mechanics and relativity; and, in philosophy proper, Zhdanov's intervention at the philosophy conference of June 1947. Men lost laboratories, chairs, liberty and in some cases their lives. In this account they lost mutual understanding.
The evasion is not even consistent, because Fedoseyev then prints the roll of honour:
It should be mentioned that a major contribution to this work has been made by Soviet natural scientists such as S. I. Vavilov, A. F. Joffe, V. A. Fock, M. A. Markov, A. D. Alexandrov, N. N. Semyonov, N. P. Dubinin, V. A. Engelgardt, V. A. Ambartsumyan, A. I. Berg, S. L. Sobolev, and P. K. Anokhin.
Read that list against the history it is suppressing. S. I. Vavilov, the physicist who became President of the Academy of Sciences in 1945, was the younger brother of N. I. Vavilov, the geneticist Lysenko destroyed, who died in Saratov prison in 1943. N. P. Dubinin was one of the geneticists whose work was stopped in 1948 and who returned to the field only after Lysenko's fall. A. I. Berg was the admiral and radio engineer under whom cybernetics was rehabilitated in the USSR after having been denounced. Fedoseyev's honour roll is, in substantial part, a list of the survivors of the events his periodisation declines to name. He is not concealing the people. He is concealing what was done to them.
And then there is Fedoseyev himself, whose position in this history is harder than that of a man merely looking away from it.
The Party's principal theoretical journal was called Bolshevik until 1952 and Kommunist — The Communist in the English of the period — thereafter; it is one journal and one editor's chair. Zhdanov's speech to the June 1947 philosophy conference, instructing the "philosophic workers" that criticism and self-criticism constituted "a new dialectical law", was printed in Voprosy filosofii no. 1 for 1947 and in Bolshevik no. 16 of 30 August 1947. Fedoseyev held that chair. He also lost it. Writing in July 1953, Michel Pablo noted the reappearance of his byline and explained what it meant. (The piece is "The Post-Stalin 'New Course'", Fourth International vol. XIV no. 2, whole no. 121, pp. 35–39; the issue carries the date March–April 1953, which cannot be right for an article discussing 25 June, and the reader should take the composition date as the reliable one.)
The most striking example in this sphere was undoubtedly the article by P.N. Fedoseev, which appeared in The Communist, June 25, 1953, principal theoretical organ of the Russian CP. Fedoseev had been removed from his position as editor of The Communist last December after a bitter criticism by M. Suslov, a Stalinist flunkey, who had accused him of having at one time propagated the ideas of N. Voznossensky.
Removed in December 1952; publishing again in the same journal by June 1953. N. A. Voznesensky, the economic planner whose ideas were the charge against him, had fallen in 1949 and was shot in 1950. Pablo's third footnote reads the signal as such: "Voznossensky was the economic brain of the Politburo until 1949 when he fell into disgrace. Fedoseev's rehabilitation may signify an early rehabilitation of Voznossensky himself."
What Fedoseyev then wrote, in the article Pablo is describing, is the position he still holds in the volume in front of us. He protested in 1953 against attempts to "fence off the Soviet people from the culture of foreign lands", and added that "the culture of any people, great or small, is viewed by us as a contribution to world culture". Six years earlier, G. F. Alexandrov had been broken for "servile adulation toward Western European thought". Fedoseyev was arguing, at the first moment it became sayable, against the doctrine that had disgraced Alexandrov and very nearly ended his own career.
So the author of "the difficulties that had accumulated in the preceding years were overcome" was not a bystander to those difficulties. He was removed and restored by the same machinery, on a charge connected to a man who had been shot, and he knew precisely what he had survived. That is a hard thing to hold against him and an impossible thing to excuse. He had the standing to write the paragraph nobody else in this book could have written, and he wrote it in the passive voice instead. (What he cannot be accused of, on this evidence, is having handled or commissioned Zhdanov's text; nothing available here shows that, and it should not be implied.)
Trotsky is named three times in this book and Bukharin five, and every occurrence is in the same two paragraphs of D. P. Gorsky's chapter, "Social Practice and Scientific Knowledge". Gorsky is making a point in the theory of definition, using the trade union controversy of 1920–21 as his worked example, and he reports the positions straight:
Trotsky defined the trade unions as an administrative[-]technical apparatus for directing production and ignored the political function of the trade unions. Bukharin protested against the one-sidedness of all the definitions formulated by those taking part in the discussion and in his own definition combined elements from the various definitions that had been proposed.
(The bracketed hyphen is an editorial repair: the scanned text reads "administrativetechnical", a word broken across a line in the original setting.)
There is no epithet attached to either man — no "renegade", no "enemy of the people", no reference to what happened to Bukharin in 1938 or to Trotsky in 1940. They are simply two people who defined a thing badly, and Lenin defined it well. Readers of the more strident volumes in this catalogue, such as Basmanov's Where Are Trotskyites Leading the Youth?, should notice the difference in register. By 1977 an academic philosopher could mention Trotsky as an ordinary participant in a party debate, provided he mentioned nothing else. That is a real change from 1939, and it is a very small one.
The book's only direct engagement with the charge that Soviet philosophy had become doctrinal comes in G. A. Kursanov's chapter on truth, and it is a refusal:
So, the charges against Marxists-Leninists, accusing them of "dogmatism", "abstract approach", and "standard criteria", coming particularly from revisionists (from Bernstein to Garaudy) clearly have no foundation in the facts of Marxist theory.
The charge is disposed of by identifying its source. Bernstein and Garaudy make it; Bernstein was a revisionist and Garaudy was expelled from the French Communist Party in 1970; therefore the charge has no foundation. Nothing in the chapter examines whether Soviet philosophy had in fact been dogmatic between 1931 and 1953 — a question on which the evidence is not scarce.
A reader told only the above would be badly misled, and this series does not exist to mislead. Roughly two-thirds of Philosophy in the USSR is real philosophical work, and some of it is good.
The most important chapter is Ilyenkov's "The Concept of the Ideal", and readers of this series should know what they have in front of them. This is the position that David Dubrovsky spent a book attacking, and which our edition of Dubrovsky's The Problem of the Ideal (Progress, 1988) reproduces the other half of. Here Ilyenkov states it himself, in his own compressed prose, arguing from Capital: the value-form is "purely ideal" not because it exists in the head of the commodity-owner but on precisely the opposite ground, because it is distinct from the corporeal form of the commodity in which it appears. "In other words, the form of value is IDEAL, although it exists outside human consciousness and independently of it." He anticipates the obvious objection — that this is Hegelian hypostatisation, "quite unforgivable in a materialist" — and answers it. Ilyenkov was pushed out of his positions and killed himself two years after this book appeared. Dubrovsky's 1988 volume says only that he "died in 1979". This chapter is his voice while he still had one, and the two books should be read together.
Elsewhere the standard is high and the manner is unexpectedly open. S. T. Melukhin argues, against what a reader might expect from a chapter called "The Dialectical-Materialist Conception of Matter", that the universe as a whole may not be a system at all, because "the infinite universe has no common quality (or quantity), no common universal measure" — and that the known dialectical laws therefore cannot be assumed to hold across it. That is a Soviet philosopher declining to extend the doctrine where he thinks the argument will not carry it. A. S. Bogomolov's chapter on dialectical contradiction works through the set-theoretic antinomies and Zeno's flying arrow, citing Alonzo Church, Fraenkel and Bar-Hillel, Łukasiewicz on many-valued logic and — a detail worth noting — A. A. Zinovyev's survey of many-valued logic, published by Moscow University Press in 1968. Zinovyev was stripped of his citizenship and expelled from the USSR in 1978, the year after this book went out in English; in 1977 he was still a citable Soviet logician. A. N. Leontyev's "Activity and Consciousness" is a statement of activity theory by its principal author, and it is read outside Russia to this day on its merits.
There is also a genuine curiosity of tone. Fedoseyev devotes a passage to the search for extraterrestrial civilisations and "the possibility of establishing contact with them", footnoted to Carl Sagan's Communication with Extraterrestrial Intelligence (CETI) (MIT Press, 1973); he raises the irreversibility of environmental damage and says plainly that "certain changes in the natural environment are irreversible and may permanently worsen people's natural conditions of life". These are not the preoccupations of a closed mind.
And the citation apparatus tells its own story. The footnotes of this book are dominated by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Hegel, Aristotle — and by Popper, Bradley, William James, G. E. Moore, Nicolai Hartmann, Max Born, Lucio Colletti, Raymond Aron, Daniel Bell, Werner Stark, Ernst Fischer. Soviet philosophers are cited perhaps half a dozen times in the entire volume: Akhmanov on Aristotle, Yanovskaya on Marx's mathematical manuscripts, Kopnin on Lenin and logic, Zinovyev, Rubinstein. A discipline that had been ordered in 1947 to purge itself of "servile adulation toward Western European thought" was, thirty years later, reading Popper in the original and arguing with him at length. That distance was travelled by the people in this book, and they are owed the credit for it — even as they decline to say what it was they travelled from.
The last chapter, V. Z. Kelle's "Ideology as a Phenomenon of Social Consciousness", is the one that undoes the volume, and it does so entirely by accident.
Kelle's problem is the classic one: Marx and Engels treated all ideology as illusory, so how can Marxism itself be an ideology and also be scientific? His solution is a mechanism, and it is stated with precision:
Thus the logical basis of the distortion of consciousness in ideology is the presentation of the particular (particular interests, aspirations, aims, etc.) as the universal, i.e., their definition as universal social interests and social being.
A class whose interest really is universal has no need of the operation. Hence "the proletariat, in contrast to previous classes, so Marx and Engels argued, requires no illusions as to its position or tasks and its class consciousness must and can be scientific." Illusory ideology, by contrast, "adapts itself to the level of mass consciousness and speculates on ignorance, prejudice and popular fallacies", and is "imposed upon the masses by every available means of suggestion".
The test is Kelle's own, and it is a good one. It asks: is there a group here presenting its particular interest as the universal interest? The answer his readers in Moscow could not print, and which had been in print abroad since 1936, is in chapter 9 of Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed. The Soviet bureaucracy, Trotsky wrote, "is in the full sense of the word the sole privileged and commanding stratum in the Soviet society"; it "enjoys its privileges under the form of an abuse of power. It conceals its income; it pretends that as a special social group it does not even exist."
A stratum that pretends it does not exist is a stratum performing exactly the operation Kelle describes. And its philosophy — a philosophy that dates the beginning of its own history to the 1950s, that renders a decade of coercion as accumulated difficulty, and that answers the charge of dogmatism by naming the accusers — is that operation in its purest form. Kelle supplies the instrument. He is not permitted to point it at the floor he is standing on.
The anti-Stalinist left did not review this book, and no useful purpose is served by pretending otherwise. A search of the complete English Trotsky, the Bulletin of the Opposition, the run of Fourth International from 1940 to 1956, Intercontinental Press, International Viewpoint and the collected George Novack finds not one mention of Fedoseyev, Oizerman, Ilyenkov, Lektorsky, Kelle or any other contributor. The tradition did not track Soviet academic philosophy as a field and did not read its monographs. What it tracked was the moments when the state broke into science, and those it caught while they were happening.
In September 1948 — fifteen months after the event — Raya Dunayevskaya, writing as "Freddie Forrest" in Fourth International, gave over a section of "Stalinists Falsify Marxism Anew" to the philosophy conference, under the heading "Soviet Philosophy and Soviet Reality". "No Soviet philosopher," she wrote, "missed the significance of Zhdanov's appearance at their conference in June 1947." Zhdanov "spoke with the authority of the Polburo when he assigned the 'philosophic workers' their new task" — the misspelling is the printed text's — and she quoted the new task in full: criticism and self-criticism as "a new form of movement, a new type of development, a new dialectical law". The following year, in "Purge of Soviet Culture", Ernest Germain — Ernest Mandel — recorded that "even in philosophy, Alexandrov, although in charge of the agitation-propaganda section of the Russian CP, under whose direction the purge of the Russian intelligentsia was conducted, was severely taken to task for having shown a servile adulation toward Western European thought" in his history of philosophy. In January 1951 the same journal published R. H. Monroe and Joseph Hansen's two-part "The Lysenko Case", tracing the campaign back to "a Ukrainian plant breeder, T. D. Lysenko, and a professor of philosophy, I. I. Prezent" in the early 1930s.
That is the material Fedoseyev's paragraph is written over: three articles in one journal, published while the events were current, naming the people, the dates and the instruments.
The tradition does not come to this with clean hands, and an introduction that implied otherwise would be worth nothing. On 16 June 1933, two years after the Central Committee resolution that broke Deborin's school, Trotsky wrote "The Party in the Field of Art and Philosophy", and what he wrote was not a defence of philosophical liberty. He held that "philosophical activity lies between art and politics, closer to politics than to art"; that "In philosophy, the party itself occupies a distinct militant position, which is not the case—at least not to the same extent—in the field of art"; and that complaints about the "dogmatization" and "canonization" of dialectical materialism "do not deserve serious attention". He wanted liberty for the novelists and a line for the philosophers, and he does not appear to have registered what had been done in Moscow under that principle two years before.
But he added the sentence that makes the whole passage usable, and it is the standard this book fails:
But least of all does this signify that in the sphere of philosophy the party can act as if all questions have already been resolved for it, and that it has nothing to expect from the further development of scientific thought.
Authority in a live argument is one thing; authority over an argument that has been closed is another. George Novack, in Is Nature Dialectical?, described the closure with the image he took from Henri Lefebvre — a French Communist Party official assuring Lefebvre that the house of dialectical thought "is finished; there is nothing left to do but put up the tapestries" — and observed that under Stalin dialectical materialism "became scholasticised and ossified".
By that test Philosophy in the USSR splits down the middle, and the split is the reason to read it. In Ilyenkov's chapter, in Melukhin's refusal to extend the laws of dialectics past the evidence, in Bogomolov's antinomies, the house is manifestly not finished and nobody is hanging tapestries. In Fedoseyev's opening survey and Kursanov's dismissal of the dogmatism charge, the tapestries are already up and the argument is over. The same eleven men, between the same covers, in the same year.
The discipline could think about matter, truth, logic and the ideal. It could not think about itself. That is not a small limitation in a philosophy, and this is the book in which it can be seen most exactly, because this is the book where the discipline was asked to try.