Philosophy in the Soviet Union

Philosophy in the Soviet Union was officially confined to Marxist–Leninist thinking, which theoretically was the basis of objective and ultimate philosophical truth.

From the beginning of Bolshevik regime, the aim of official Soviet philosophy (which was taught as an obligatory subject for every course[citation needed]), was the theoretical justification of communist ideas.

Evald Vasilevich Ilyenkov was one of the main philosophers of the 1960s, who revisited the 1920s debate between "mechanicists" and "dialecticians" in Leninist Dialectics and Metaphysics of Positivism (1979).

It was elaborated by Vladimir Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1908) around three axes: the "materialist inversion" of Hegelian dialectics; the historicity of ethical principles ordered to class struggle; and the convergence of "laws of evolution" in physics (Helmholtz), biology (Darwin) and political economy (Marx).

Mechanism was finally condemned as undermining dialectical materialism and for vulgar evolutionism at the 1929 meeting of the Second All-Union Conference of Marxist–Leninist Scientific Institutions.

Two years later, Stalin settled by fiat the debate between the mechanist and the dialectician tendencies by issuing a decree which identified dialectical materialism as the philosophical basis of Marxism–Leninism.

Henceforth, the possibilities for philosophical research independent of official dogmatics virtually vanished, while Lysenkoism was enforced in the scientific fields (in 1948, genetics were declared a "bourgeois pseudoscience").

During the Fifth Comintern Congress, Grigory Zinoviev condemned for "revisionism" the works of Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (1923) and of Karl Korsch, Marxism and Philosophy.

History and Class Consciousness was disavowed by its author, who made his self-criticism for political reasons (he thought that, for a revolutionary, being part of the party was the priority).

The works of the young Marx, such as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, which had been first published in 1932 but suppressed under Stalin because of its incomplete break with German Idealism, also started being discussed.