The "Short Course" and the End of Philosophy (1938-1953)
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Canonical Document
In September 1938 a book appeared that was to become the philosophical bible of the communist world movement for a decade and a half: the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks). Short Course. Officially it was published by the Central Committee. In fact, Stalin himself had written and personally edited the core philosophical chapter - Chapter IV, Section 2: “On Dialectical and Historical Materialism.”
This chapter was later published as a separate pamphlet and translated into dozens of languages. It became required reading in every communist party, in every party school, in every Marxist-Leninist educational institution worldwide. From Beijing to Havana, from East Berlin to Hanoi, Stalin’s few pages defined what “dialectics” was to mean.
The text was remarkably simple - deliberately so, because Stalin distrusted “intellectuals.” A survey from 1937 had found that three-quarters of all Party functionaries at the provincial, regional, city, and local levels had only elementary schooling. The Short Course was written for them - clear, memorable, unambiguous. Complexity was treason.
The Content: Systematization as Simplification
Stalin defined “dialectical materialism” as the “world outlook of the Marxist-Leninist Party.” It was “dialectical” in its method, “materialist” in its theory. “Historical materialism” was the “extension of the principles of dialectical materialism to the study of social life.”
These definitions were not false - but they were empty. They said nothing about why the method had to be dialectical, what it meant to be materialist, how the two were connected. They presupposed what would have needed to be established.
The presentation followed a scholastic scheme: first the four “basic features” of dialectics were listed (see above), then the three “basic features” of philosophical materialism:
- The world is by its nature material
- Matter is an objective reality, independent of consciousness
- Consciousness is a product of matter
Finally it was shown how these principles were to be applied to history - productive forces and relations of production, base and superstructure, class struggle as the motor of history, the five social formations (primitive communism, slaveholding society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism).
What the Text Did Not Do
The Short Course developed no arguments - it proclaimed truths. It examined no objections - it denounced opponents. It did not differentiate - it schematized.
Hegel was reduced to a footnote: Marx and Engels had taken over the “rational kernel” of his dialectics and “freed it from its idealist shell.” What exactly this “rational kernel” was and why the “idealist shell” had to be discarded, the reader was not told.
The question of how matter could be dialectical was not raised. For Hegel, dialectics meant the self-movement of the concept - but matter is precisely that which has no concept, which does not “relate to itself.” How could it then be dialectical? Raising this question would have meant questioning the whole system.
The possibility of self-application - that dialectics should have to examine its own presuppositions - was systematically blocked. Dialectics was to be applied to nature, history, and society - never to Marxism-Leninism itself. The method that was supposed to set everything in motion was itself consigned to stasis.
The Zhdanov Doctrine and the Postwar Hardening
After the Second World War, the regime tightened once again. Andrei Alexandrovich Zhdanov (1896-1948), Stalin’s chief ideologue, formulated the new line in a programmatic speech in 1947: “Philosophy is a weapon in the class struggle.”[1]
The occasion was telling: G.F. Alexandrov had published a History of Western European Philosophy that was too “objective” - it treated Kant, Hegel, and other “bourgeois” philosophers with too much respect, presenting their arguments too fairly. Zhdanov corrected him: even the history of philosophy had to be “partisan.” It was not about understanding what Hegel really thought - it was about showing how Marxism-Leninism triumphed over all earlier philosophies.
The consequences were far-reaching. “Cosmopolitanism” - a term with antisemitic undertones - became a charge. Whoever portrayed Western philosophers too positively was a “cosmopolitan.” Whoever criticized Soviet philosophy was an “enemy of the people.” The isolation from the West that the war had brought was ideologically cemented.
The Final Years: 1947-1953
The period from 1947 to Stalin’s death in 1953 was the darkest time of Soviet philosophy. Philosophy still existed as an institution - there were professorships, journals, dissertations - but as thinking it had ceased to exist.
Philosophical “work” consisted of:
- Endless commentaries on the “classics” (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin)
- Denunciation of “bourgeois” philosophies (without understanding them)
- “Campaigns” against alleged deviations (Lysenkoism in biology, criticism of relativity theory and quantum mechanics, condemnation of cybernetics)
- Defense of Soviet “priorities” (the claim that all important discoveries had actually been made by Russians)
Originality was deadly. Whoever had a new thought risked being denounced as a “revisionist” or “deviator.” The safest strategy was literal repetition of authorized texts - but even that offered no protection against the suspicion of having “wrongly” contextualized the quotations.
Systematic Balance
The Short Course and the Zhdanov Doctrine represent the endpoint of a development: the complete transformation of philosophy into ideology.
Philosophy in the proper sense is thinking for oneself - the examination of reasons, the development of arguments, the readiness to revise one’s own positions when better arguments are presented. Ideology is the opposite: the proclamation of fixed truths, immunization against criticism, denunciation of deviation.
Stalinist “philosophy” was ideology in pure form. It claimed to be science - but it refused the basic scientific attitude: openness to refutation. It claimed to be dialectical - but it refused the basic principle of dialectics: self-application, the examination of one’s own presuppositions. It claimed to be materialist - but it ignored material reality in favor of ideological constructs (Lysenkoism).
The paradox was complete: a philosophy that understood itself as the highest form of rationality became irrational. A dialectic that preaches movement froze solid. A materialism that wanted to grasp reality lost all contact with it.
Sources for 14.6 and 14.7:
- History of the CPSU(B): Short Course, Moscow 1938, Chapter IV, Section 2 (German edition: Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1939/1946)
- Zhdanov, Andrei A.: On the History of Philosophy, speech of June 24, 1947
- Gustav A. Wetter: Der dialektische Materialismus, Freiburg: Herder, 1952, Chapters IX-X
- David Brandenberger/Mikhail V. Zelenov (eds.): Stalin’s Master Narrative. A Critical Edition of the History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019
Andrei A. Zhdanov: “On the History of Philosophy” (speech of June 24, 1947, before the Philosophy Section of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR), in: Sowjetwissenschaft. Gesellschaftswissenschaftliche Beiträge, issue 1, 1947. ↩︎