The Meaning of Soviet Philosophy

Dear all,

The intention of this blog is to introduce to a wider audience and invite for a discussion on the heritage of the unknown tradition of Soviet Philosophy in todays rapidly evolving world. One of the most paradoxical facts related to the Cold War is the total ignorance of Western academics of the intellectual development in the Soviet Union after the Second World War. This fact got evident to me during the work on my thesis "The Reception of Western Postpositivism in The Soviet Union. The Dissolution of Marxism-Leninism from Within" which was successfully defended at the University of Oslo, Norway in the autumn of 1999. The western research in this Soviet development showed extremely scarce. The monograph "Science, Philosophy and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union" by the Boston-based American scholar Loren Graham from 1987, remains one of very few western academic openings to the internal philosophical development in the Soviet Union during the Cold war. The Sovietological School of the Catholic Father Joseph M. Bochenskij and the quarterly Studies in Soviet Thought represented the resistance of the Catolich church against the Soviet challenge, but also opened up for a more symphatetic attitude towards Soviet ideology as, in their view, a failed atheistic religion. This openess was made use of by the Soviet philosopher in US-exile David B. Zilberman, when his general analysis of Soviet society "The postsociological society" was printed in the journal posthumously in 1978. Zilberman, who died shortly before in a car-accident in Boston, presented the methodological turn in postwar marxist thought as a major achievement in modern philosophy, making the true role of marxism in late Soviet society invisible to westerners and also to the Soviets themselves. The most important development of Marxism in the postwar period took place neither in Frankfurt nor in Paris, but in Moscow, he claimed.

Zilberman explains: "Perhaps a radical change of culture, plus reassesments from a "displaced position" can be particularly helpful in finding these latent regularitites. For instance, the author of this study always was very far from Marxism. I deliberately (perhaps a bit snobbishly) tried to ignore Marxism. When I was living in the USSR, it never could have come to my mind to consider Marx seriously as a social theorist of living relevance. For me it was a matter of principle not to quote Marx at all in my dissertation which contained a critical analysis of practically all prominent social theorists. Perhaps I did not even feel the above phenomenon properly: as a body does not normally feel the pressure of the surrounding atmosphere. But, after coming to the West and thus aquiring an "external purchase", it did not take me long to understand two basic things. First, that Soviet Marxism is very much alive and creative, even though it speaks different languages and thinks about non-conventional subjects. Second, that Soviet Marxism has developed important symbolic qualities and thereby changed from a normatively imposed formal system of ideology (not unlike the normatively enforced system of formal law in the US) to a somewhat informal system of culture (not unlike those based on custom and tradition)." (End of quote.)

This charachter of Soviet intellectual life should be widely recognized by western specialists on the former Soviet Union. The Western relation towards Soviet Union during the Cold war was highly politicized. An open and symphatetic attitude towards the Soviet project was suspicious in the eyes of rank and file western anticommunists. On the other hand the KGB and the Soviet regime was overeager to make use of any signs of sympathy, making it hard for open western scholars to pursue a truly balanced position. The loosening up in the eighties and the end of the powermonopoly of the Soviet Communist Party was a necessary precondition to ease relations between east and west. Unfortunately, the development since the fall of the Soviet Union has not been particularly favourable for a the necessary grand scale information-exchange between the former antagonistic blocs. The economic superiour Western countries has made use of their power to impose their prejudices on the former Soviet Union. This means that the Western countries should take a large part of the responsibility for the harsh brutalizing of former Soviet Society, related to the privatization of former state property, the destruction of the public sector and the deprivation of social and economic rights of the former Soviet population.

In my view, the democratic movement in the former Soviet Union, now in control of power in the second largest of the former Soviet republics Ukraine, Georgia and Kirgistan and pressing the neototalitarian regime in Russia and elsewhere, represents a confirmation of the insight of David B. Zilberman. Zilberman in many ways foresaw todays development in the former Soviet Union, when he wrote: "As a feedback from "ideational isolationism", the Soviet population will keep the idealized picture of the West. That is why, if one day all the ideological barriers were broken down, many would perhaps be disappointed - that is how the principle of "future reliability" works. Some critical symptoms of this kind are revealed by the unsuccessfull dissident movement and by the limited emigration from the USSR. These two "social experiments" turn out to be rather eufunctional for the system, as they actually trigger the process of formation of the "new historical community" and thereby contribute to the development of the corresponding "metamorphosis" of mass consciousness. Perhaps never before in all its history has the country been heading so quickly toward a congruence between power-structure and subjective public feelings."

"The congruence of power-structure and subjective public feelings" anticipated by Zilberman was manifested by the millions enforcing the orange revolution and bringing forth Viktor Jushchenko as the new president of Ukraine. Zilbermans insight show this development to be first and foremost a postsoviet phenomenon, made possible through the liberalizing effort by Soviet philosophers throughout the post-war era. These philosophical circles belongs to the Soviet equivalent of the Western generation of 68, and are still in full activity in research institutes all over the former Soviet Union. During my two stays in Moscow for fieldwork on my dissertation I made contact with several representatives of this, for us, unknown philosophical tradition. I would like to mention in special todays director of the Institute of philosophy of the Russian academy of sciences, Vjacheslav Semenovich Stepin, as an oustanding representative of Soviet philosophy. Stepin is originally from Minsk in Belorussia, where he as a young scholar started his methodological inquiries in close cooperation with the most advanced Belorussian nuclear scientists. Stepin is an typical advocate of the Soviet strive to bridge postpositivist relativism and the belief in rationality, and has developed a complex model of scientific activity in a historical perspective. In his last book, the monumental study "Scientific theory" from 2000, Stepin even argues for the possibility of a unified scientific theory bridging the gap between the humanitarian and the natural sciences, known as the science wars. This synthetical approach and awareness of the necessity of wholeness in science, stressed by the controversial western epistemologist Michael Polanyj in the 60ties, is typical for the Soviet philosophical effort, and makes it an important corrective to postmodern fragmentary western philosopy, still under the spell of logical positivism.

Stepin may in fact be seen as a leading charachter within the philosophical movement known as critical rationalism, connected to western capacities like Karl R. Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend. If Stepins works were available in english he would for sure have had a broad audience in the West. Like Popper and Feyerabend he has shown eager, when it got possible after the liberalizationprocess, to transfer his philosophical insights to the general debates of political and social issues. His little pamphflet "The Epoch of Changes and Scenarios for the Future" from 1996 is an enlightening discussion of the relevance of the Marxist and Soviet philosophical heritage under the new circumstances: "There exists a lot of primitive conclusions and myths regarding the history of Soviet philosophy. For instance, it is held, that since philosophy was under hard ideological control, it represented a dogmatic form of Marxism. Further it is presupposed, that nothing new or of interest could appear in the frames of such a dogmatic and ideologized philosophy. The whole Soviet period is conceived nothing but a mess, a cleavage from the worlds philosophical thought, out of which we need a long time to crawl. This construction of myths in regard of our philosophy is one of the ideological components of the pesudodemocratizm, which is charachterized by a primitive inversion of the perspective on the Soviet past, making the achievements of yesterday appear as failures. "

- Those who in the Soviet era proclaimed "the one and only correct philosophy of dialectical materialism" and the crisis of western philosophy, while drawing both ideas and texts from the very western philosophy unregarding quotes or notes, today cry out the critical state of Russian philosophy, Stepin pointed out in his pamphlet of 1996, presenting a criticism of postsoviet Russian reality only to have become even more justified under todays truly pseudeodemocratic regime of the authoritarian Russian president Vladimir Putin.

The insight of Zilberman, confirmed by Stepin as one of the most outstanding representatives of Soviet philosophy, shows Soviet philosophy, not CIA, to be a leading moving force of the democraticationsprocess of the former Soviet Union.

This blog is intended for networkbuilding and cooperation of Soviet philosophers all over the world, for our blessed cause of realizing a democratic and sustainable future.

Lets rock!

Best regards
Sigurd Lydersen