Soviet Marxism and the Self-Consciousness of Russian Philosophy

Abstract

Did the Soviet period in the history of the national philosophy turn into a failure in the intellectual tradition, a time without serious research activity, when philosophy only catered for the needs of ideology without yielding any fundamental results in the humanities? The author of the article tries to answer this question; her thoughts are based on two books devoted to a landmark event in the history of Soviet philosophy, the so-called case of epistemologists. The discussion makes it possible to oppose the ideology-ridden pseudophilosophy for the development of the Marxist tradition by young philosophers who began their professional career in the early 1950s at the Faculty of Philosophy at Moscow State University and the Institute of Philosophy of the USSR Academy of Sciences. In her article, by considering the example of E.V. Ilyenkov’s creative work, the author shows that the Soviet reception of Marxism, which emerged in the second half of the 1950s and is referred to as the thaw in Soviet philosophy, gave rise to a number of concepts and ideas that followed the lead of the world’s philosophical endeavors of the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries.