The Institutionalization of Soviet Philosophy (1918-1928) - Between Aspiration and Reality
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
An Unprecedented Experiment
What made the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 philosophically unique was not the violence or the expropriation - such things had occurred in earlier revolutions too. What was unique lay in the aspiration to establish a state, for the first time, not on a religious but on a philosophical foundation. The Soviet Union was to be the first state in history to derive its legitimation from a systematic worldview that understood itself as scientific philosophy.
This aspiration materialized with remarkable speed into an entire system of institutions. As early as 1918 - in the midst of civil war, collapsing economy, and rampant hunger - the new government founded the Communist Academy with its own Institute of Philosophy. In 1919 came the Sverdlov Communist University, in 1921 the Institute of Red Professors for philosophy and natural science, along with the Academy for Communist Education (later the Krupskaya Academy) with its own philosophical department. The Marx-Engels Institute collected and edited the works of the “classics”; the Lenin Institute (from 1924) did the same for the deceased revolutionary leader.
The Bulgarian philosopher Dimitar Michalchev, who as editor of the journal Filosofski pregled closely observed Soviet developments, noted with astonishment in 1932: “In no other country of the cultured world are there as many philosophizing people as in today’s Soviet Union.” Philosophical works appeared in print runs of 10,000 to 100,000 copies - by comparison, German philosophical journals at the time reached 2,000 to 3,000. Michalchev further observed: “One virtually feels that in today’s Soviet Union every more or less cultured person, whether biologist or zoologist, astronomer or philologist, writer or artist, already philosophizes.”[1]
The Paradox: Quantity without Quality?
Michalchev was astute enough to see the paradox. He noted all the negative features of Soviet philosophy: its “official” character, the “extraordinary self-certainty combined with the complete dependence of scholarship on party dictatorship,” the “authoritarian, almost religious relationship of the writing world to what Lenin said… no one dares to think that Lenin could have erred… there can be no talk of a genuinely critical attitude.”[2]
But then he added what Western critics rarely acknowledge: “For all their naivety, the philosophical endeavors of the Bolsheviks are free of any conscious mysticism and do not attempt to mask fundamental philosophical difficulties with obscure phrases.”[3] The Soviet philosophers, according to Michalchev, “do not regard their philosophy in any way as a subjectively colored worldview that one must preach to others and that others may or may not like. No! For them the philosophy of dialectical materialism is an objective, general, and fundamental science… As objective, scientific knowledge, philosophy claims the same certainty and validity as physics, chemistry, zoology.”[3:1]
This observation deserves attention. The problem of Soviet philosophy was not - as critics often claimed - that it merely feigned “science.” The problem was more profound: it really believed in its scientific character, but the institutional conditions of its production prevented this claim from ever being redeemed. Knowledge that is declared true by party resolution ceases to be knowledge in the proper sense - even if its proponents fail to notice this.
The Hegel Translation Project
In the midst of this contradictory development arose an undertaking of lasting significance: the first systematic Russian complete edition of Hegel. The first volume appeared in 1929, edited by Abram Deborin and David Ryazanov, translated by Boris Stolpner. It contained the “Lesser Logic” from the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences - precisely that part of the Hegelian system which Marx had called the most important.
The editorial preface shows remarkable methodological awareness. The editors decided on a systematic rather than chronological arrangement: “We consider it more correct to adhere to the systematic principle and to neglect chronology… From both a pedagogical and a systematic standpoint, it seems to us more expedient to place the Encyclopedia at the beginning of the Russian edition,” since it “represents a complete, self-contained system of philosophy in every respect… The remaining writings of Hegel are nothing other than the further development of individual parts of the Encyclopedia.”[4]
This decision corresponded precisely to the inner logic of the Hegelian system. It testifies to an understanding that was lacking in many Western editions. Fifteen volumes were planned - an undertaking that at the time only Germany, and later Japan, carried out on a comparable scale. The final volume, the Phenomenology of Spirit, appeared in 1959 - thirty years after the project began, through all the storms of the Stalinist period.
The Publication of Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks (1929)
In that same year, 1929, a document appeared that could have revolutionized the Soviet reception of Hegel: Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks, in the ninth volume of the Leninskii Sbornik (Lenin Miscellany). These notes from 1914-1916, in which Lenin had systematically worked through Hegel’s Science of Logic, showed a quite different Lenin from the polemical author of Materialism and Empirio-criticism.
The Lenin of the Philosophical Notebooks was fascinated by Hegel’s dialectic, recognized the inadequacy of “vulgar materialism,” emphasized the unity of dialectics, logic, and epistemology, and arrived at the explosive insight: “It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!”[5]
This sentence could have shaken the foundation of Soviet orthodoxy. It implied that the entire prior Marxist tradition - Kautsky, Plekhanov, even Engels’s late writings - had missed the essential point. It implied that serious study of Hegel was no academic hobby but a necessary precondition for understanding Marxism itself.
But the publication came too late and at the wrong time. Lenin had been dead for five years. His writings were being canonized, but selectively. Materialism and Empirio-criticism, with its polemical sharpness, fit the emerging orthodoxy better than the tentative, searching, often self-critical notes of the Philosophical Notebooks. These were indeed published but never productively received. The “Leninist phase” of philosophy, which was to be proclaimed in 1931, invoked the Lenin of 1908, not the Lenin of 1914.
Systematic Assessment: What the Paradox Means
The Soviet institutionalization of philosophy between 1918 and 1928 was marked by a fundamental contradiction that can be analyzed using Hegel’s own tools.
The aspiration was genuine: philosophy was no longer to be the affair of a small elite, but the foundation of the whole of social life. Everyone was to have access to the highest forms of thought. The print runs of philosophical works, the number of philosophical institutions, the breadth of philosophical education - all this far exceeded what the West had to offer.
But the realization was deficient: philosophy declared true by decree is no longer philosophy. Thinking that is not allowed to question its own presuppositions loses its character as thinking. Logic that cannot apply itself to itself - cannot ask whether it itself fulfills the conditions of truth - is not logic.
Hegel’s insight that spirit is essentially self-reflection was institutionally blocked. One could think about everything - except the foundations of Marxism-Leninism itself. One could criticize everything - except the Party line. This restriction was not accidental but structural. It made the whole undertaking self-contradictory from the start.
The paradox can be formulated as follows: the Soviet Union created the institutional preconditions for a broad philosophical culture - and simultaneously destroyed the conditions under which philosophy can flourish. It produced millions of “philosophizers” - and systematically prevented them from becoming philosophers.
This tension - between enormous institutional effort and the structural impossibility of success - shaped all subsequent development. The Mechanist-Dialectician debate, the Deborin school, the Stalinist terror against philosophy - all of this can be understood as the unfolding of this original contradiction.
Further sources:
- Gustav A. Wetter: Der dialektische Materialismus. Seine Geschichte und sein System in der Sowjetunion, Freiburg: Herder, 1952 (4th ed. 1958). The standard work on Soviet philosophy.
- David Joravsky: Soviet Marxism and Natural Science 1917-1932, New York: Columbia University Press, 1961.
- On Lenin’s Hegel studies, see Chapter 21.1.
Dimitar Michalchev: “Filosofskijat život i filosofskata knižnina v Săvetska Rusija” (Philosophical Life and Philosophical Literature in Soviet Russia), in: Filosofski pregled, 1932, no. 5, pp. 408-409. Michalchev was no sympathizer of the Bolsheviks but maintained close contacts with the Russian religious émigrés (Berdyaev, Frank, Lossky); precisely for this reason his testimony is valuable. ↩︎
Michalchev 1932, p. 416. ↩︎
“Ot redakcii” (From the editors), in: G.W.F. Hegel: Sočinenija, vol. 1, Moscow-Leningrad 1929, pp. IX-X. ↩︎
V.I. Lenin: Philosophical Notebooks, in: Werke, vol. 38, Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1964, p. 165. ↩︎