Abram Moiseevič Deborin: Weltanschauung and role in the development of Soviet philosophy

Abstract

Born in 1881, a Bolshevik in 1905 but a Menshevik by 1907, influenced by Lenin but a Plekhanovite, Abram Moissevii Deborin developed Plekhanov's philosophical Weltanschauung into a complete philosophical system which won for itself by 1929 a hegemonic position in Soviet philosophy. Deborin, basing himself on Plekhanov's standpoint, believed himself a proponent of dialectical materialism, but an investigation into Deborinism reveals that Deborin's impressive performance in installing Plekhanov as the pre-eminent philosopher in Soviet philosophy and of the Communist Party resulted in a consequence he had not intended and in an achievement he had not antici pated. Deborin's first published article, with a style from which he never deviated and a content which would reach maturity only after the passing of a score and three years, was published in Die Neue Zeit at the time of the Russian Revolution of 1905. Though a Bolshevik, Deborin was on the road, in the realm of politics, to becoming a Menshevik. The Marxian party, he argued, had to support the Kadet Party, the party of the liberal bourgeoisie, in so far as it stood in opposition to the tsarist government, but as the Kadet Party more and more began to occupy an intermediate position between the reac tion and the revolution, the Socialist Revolutionary Party became more and more the party of democracy. The Marxian revolutionaries could have but this object in the revolution: to push forward the Socialist Revolutionaries and the left wing of the Kadet Party into decisive opposition to the tsarist state and to the pom???ik, or landlord, class. The conflict between the people, among which Deborin put the bourgeoisie, and the tsarist state could not be solved with the logic of argumentation in the Duma, since it had been estab lished only as a 'medicine against the revolution',1 but rather with open struggle and the logic of force. Speaking ? la Bolshevik, Deborin declared that the proletariat needed an ally which could be found only in the peasantry; but, speaking now ? la Menshevik, he defended the tactic of supporting and pushing forward the Kadet Party. Caught between Menshevism and Bolshev ism, between seeing the necessity of having the peasantry as an ally and of