The End of Philosophical Plurality - The Central Committee Resolution of January 25, 1931
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Political Context: Stalin’s Consolidation
The years 1929-1931 marked the transition from relative plurality to monolithic dictatorship. Stalin had eliminated his opponents within the Party - Trotsky had already been expelled from the Soviet Union in 1929, the “Right” around Bukharin and Rykov was stripped of power in 1929-1930. The First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932), with its forced industrialization, and the violent collectivization of agriculture, which cost millions of lives, required an ideological justification that tolerated no contradiction.
In this climate, the philosophical landscape too was “purged.” The Mechanists had already been condemned as heretics in 1929. But the victorious Dialecticians were too independent for Stalin, too “intellectual,” too committed to the legacy of Plekhanov - a man who had been a Menshevik and whose philosophical authority rivaled Lenin’s.
The Attack on the Deborin School
In June 1930, an article appeared in Pravda that marked the beginning of the end. Three young philosophers - Mark Mitin, Vladimir Ralzevich, and Pavel Yudin - attacked Deborin and his school head-on. The charges were:
- The Deborinists did not correctly recognize the “connection between philosophy and practice”
- They did not understand the “partisanship” (partiinost’) of philosophy
- They made philosophy into an “apolitical or extra-political sphere”
- They did not adequately honor the “philosophical heritage of Lenin”
- They overvalued Plekhanov and - even worse - Hegel
This last point was decisive. The Deborinists were accused of “scholastically flirting with the role of dialectics in philosophy.” Their “materialism” was in reality “Menshevik idealism” - a term Stalin himself had coined, one that combined the two worst charges: political unreliability (Menshevism) and philosophical heresy (idealism).
On December 9, 1930, Stalin personally intervened. In a speech to the Institute of Red Professors he “decreed” - Michalchev’s formulation is precise - the new line: the Deborin school had merits in the struggle against Mechanism, but its own position was flawed. Its errors consisted of “underestimating the Leninist stage of Marxist philosophy,” of “a certain separation of philosophy and practice,” and of “attempts to combine Marx’s dialectic with Hegel’s idealist dialectic.”
The Resolution of January 25, 1931
On January 25, 1931, the Central Committee of the Communist Party passed a formal resolution “On the Journal Pod znamenem marksizma.” It stated that the Deborin group had, “on a number of highly important philosophical questions,” adopted the standpoint of “Menshevik idealism.”[1]
The concrete charges were:
- Underestimating the “Leninist stage” in philosophy
- Separation of theory and practice
- Insufficient criticism of Plekhanov’s errors
- Too close a connection between Marxist dialectics and Hegel’s idealist dialectics
- Transformation of philosophy into an “apolitical” sphere
Deborin was removed as editor-in-chief. The journal received a new editorial board under the leadership of Mitin and Yudin. A new era had begun.
Deborin’s Fate: Suicide Letter and Recantation
The archives, which became partly accessible after 1991, revealed a dramatic detail. Among the papers of the Ministry of Defense, an unexecuted suicide letter by Deborin was found, dated January 20, 1931 - five days before the Central Committee resolution:
“I am weakened, exhausted, destroyed. Life has lost all meaning for me. A voluntary end is the best way out of what has arisen. I do not have the strength to sign a document about my anti-Marxism and my Menshevik idealism. I broke with Menshevism, essentially, already in October 1917. I am unable to bear the shameful expulsion from the Party that awaits me.”[2]
Deborin did not take his life. Publicly, he capitulated, much like Galileo before the Inquisition. He declared that he now realized that Plekhanov’s understanding of Spinoza had been misleading. He confessed to having “forgotten” to urge his followers to fight against Trotskyism. He admitted that Lenin was the greatest philosopher of the Soviet Union - no, actually it was Stalin.
This self-criticism saved his life. Deborin survived the purges of the 1930s and died a natural death in 1963. But many of his students did not have this fortune. Nikolai Karev, Jan Sten, and others vanished into the camps and never returned.
The New Generation: Mitin, Yudin, and the Stalinist Style
The victors of 1931 represented a new generation - “free from the traditions of the Plekhanov era,” as Michalchev observed, “and independent of the influence of personal friendship with the great teacher of Marxist philosophy.”[3]
Mark Borisovich Mitin (1901-1987) became Stalin’s philosophical favorite. He took over the editorship of the most important philosophical publications and in 1939 became director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute. His textbook Dialectical Materialism (1934) became the standard reference. Pavel Fyodorovich Yudin (1899-1968) became co-editor of the Philosophical Encyclopedia and later a Soviet ambassador.
What characterized this generation was less intellectual substance than institutional loyalty. They were “less cultivated” (Michalchev) - that is, less educated in the philosophical tradition, less capable of differentiated argumentation, but all the more reliable in reproducing the Party line. Philosophy became, for them, exegesis of the classics, defense of orthodoxy, denunciation of deviants.
Systematic Significance: The Transition from Philosophy to Ideology
The Central Committee resolution of 1931 marks a transition whose significance reaches beyond the Soviet Union. It shows what happens when philosophy becomes political - not in the sense that it deals with political questions, but in the sense that its truth is decided politically.
Hegel’s insight that spirit is essentially self-reflection - that it must be able to relate to itself, to examine its own presuppositions - was institutionally blocked. “Dialectics” was henceforth to be applied to everything - except Marxism-Leninism itself. Every phenomenon could be “dialectically analyzed” - except the Party line. The method that was supposed to set everything in motion itself became an immovable dogma.
This is the deepest contradiction of Soviet “dialectics”: a philosophy that understood itself as the science of movement froze into a catechism. A method that was supposed to “sublate” all positions itself became an unsublatable position. A thinking that was supposed to criticize all authority itself became the highest authority - because it fused with state power.
From 1931 on, Soviet philosophy was state philosophy in the worst sense: not reflection upon the state, but reflection for the state, in the service of the state, under the control of the state. What followed was consistent with this.
“O žurnale Pod znamenem marksizma” (On the Journal “Under the Banner of Marxism”), resolution of the Central Committee of the CPSU(B) of January 25, 1931, printed in: O partiinoi i sovetskoi pechati (On the Party and Soviet Press). Collection of documents, Moscow 1954, p. 407. ↩︎
Quoted in: Lesley Chamberlain: “The Strange Story of The Soviet Spinoza,” in: Philosophy Now, Issue 152, 2022. ↩︎
Michalchev 1932, pp. 402-403. ↩︎