Menshevizing Idealism

The Deborin school

Soviet philosophy in the 1920s was structured by a dispute between two currents. On one side the mechanists sought to reduce philosophy to a generalization of natural science; on the other the dialecticians around Deborin stressed the materialist appropriation of Hegelian dialectics. Until 1929 the Deborin school held the upper hand in this dispute and controlled the Institute of Philosophy and the principal journals.

What characterized the school was making the systematic study of Hegel's logic the foundational work of Marxist philosophy. The approach treated philosophy as a relatively autonomous theoretical field and did not require a direct connection to immediate political tasks.

The turn of 1930

In 1930 a new generation of philosophers attacked the Deborin school. The criticism led by Mitin and Yudin advanced three charges: separation of theory from practice, identification of Hegelian with Marxist dialectics, and underestimation of Lenin's philosophical contribution. When Stalin supplied the name menshevizing idealism the criticism became the official line.

The name itself compresses the structure of the dispute. Idealism was the charge against the study of Hegel, while menshevizing was a political charge against an attitude that separated theory from practice. In combining the two, a difference of philosophical position was converted into a matter of political deviation.

The decree and its effects

The Central Committee decree of January 1931, On the Journal Under the Banner of Marxism, removed Deborin from the directorship of the Institute of Philosophy and from his editorial post and established the leadership of Mitin and Yudin. Deborin himself kept his academy membership after self-criticism but lost influence, and several members of the school were arrested during the 1930s.

The episode changed the character of Soviet philosophy. The task of philosophy was redefined as supplying philosophical grounds for the party line, and with the establishment of Dialectical and Historical Materialism as the standard text in 1938 the space for dispute disappeared altogether. Hegel scholarship contracted for decades and recovered only in part after the late 1950s. The Deborin affair is treated as a case of political removal conducted in the form of a philosophical debate.