Diderot scholar and Deborinite philosopher; Soviet academician who died in a labour camp
Born in Rostov-on-Don in 1896, he served as a Red Army propagandist in the Civil War and joined the Communist Party in 1920. In the first intake of the Institute of Red Professors he wrote on Diderot, and in the philosophical debates of the 1920s he followed Abram Deborin on the side of the "dialecticians" against the Soviet mechanists. He headed the science administration Glavnauka in 1929–1933, directed the Gorky Institute of World Literature in 1935–1941 and became a full academician in 1939. Arrested in 1940 and sentenced to death, he shared a death cell in Saratov with Nikolai Vavilov before his sentence was commuted to twenty years. He died of exhaustion in a Mordovian camp in 1943 and was rehabilitated in 1956.
Activities and affiliations
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1919–1921
Soviet Union state institutionsRed Army propagandist and political worker
Ideology and propaganda -
1920–1940
Soviet Communist Party and Bolsheviks
Scholarship and theory -
1924–1940
Soviet Union state institutionsHead of philosophy, Institute of Red Professors; director, Gorky InstituteMain
Scholarship and theory -
1929–1933
Soviet Union state institutionsHead of Glavnauka (science sector of the education commissariat)
Government and administration
Career Timeline
- 1919Graduated in law from Moscow University
- 1919–1921Red Army propagandist in the Civil War
- 1920Joined the RCP(b)
- 1921–1924First intake, philosophy department, Institute of Red Professors
- 1924Denis Diderot
- 1924–1927Head of the philosophy room, Marx-Engels Institute
- 1925–1938Professor, then head of Marxist-Leninist philosophy, Institute of Red Professors
- 1929Spoke against mechanism at the conference of Marxist-Leninist research institutions
- 1929–1933Head of Glavnauka
- 1933Corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1935–1941Director of the Gorky Institute of World Literature
- 1939Full member of the USSR Academy of Sciences
- 1940Arrested
- 1941Sentenced to death (commuted in 1942 to twenty years in the camps)
- 1956Posthumously rehabilitated