The October Revolution (1917) as a Second Rupture
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
In the midst of the First World War, a second philosophical rupture occurred: the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia. It abruptly ended the pluralistic, vibrant Russian reception of Hegel and installed an orthodoxy that permitted Hegel to count only as a “precursor of Marx.”
The End of Pluralistic Reception
The religious philosophers—Berdyaev, Bulgakov, Frank—were expelled from Russia in 1922 on the “Philosophers’ Ship.” Their works disappeared from the libraries. Idealist positions were condemned as “reactionary.” Only the materialist, Marxist reading was permitted.
The Stalinization of Dialectic
Under Stalin (from 1928), dialectic was fully dogmatized. The Short Course on the history of the CPSU (1938) reduced dialectic to four mechanical “basic features.” Andrei Zhdanov formulated the official party line in 1947: philosophy is a “weapon in the class struggle.” Deviant interpretations were not only theoretically criticized, but politically persecuted.
The Deborin school, which in the 1920s had still represented a differentiated interpretation of Hegel, was liquidated. Books disappeared from the libraries, people from public life—and often from life itself.
Philosophical Consequences
The Soviet Union created its own form of Hegel reception: Hegel as precursor, whose merit consisted in having “idealistically mystified” the dialectic, which Marx then “put back on its feet.” This formula became orthodoxy.
The productive approaches of the pre-revolutionary Russian reception (see Chapter 17) were lost. Soviet reception of Hegel froze into state ideology. Only after Stalin’s death (1953) did a cautious loosening begin.
On the pre-revolutionary reception, see Chapter 17. On the Soviet reception after 1920, see Chapter 21.