Bolshevik intellectual who brought Capital into Russian and served as the first People's Commissar of Finance
"A passively starving and silently dying countryside — no, that is not a lever that could move social development" — recalling the impact of the 1891–1892 famine on his generation, from his 1919 memoirs
An early Bolshevik who joined the party in 1898. He led the Russian translation of Marx's Capital, producing the edition Lenin praised as the best. Appointed the first People's Commissar of Finance of the RSFSR in October 1917, he later served as editor-in-chief of Izvestia and Leningradskaya Pravda, and as director of the Lenin Institute. In the 1920s Soviet philosophical debates he led the 'mechanist' camp, and alongside Yaroslavsky he was a major theorist of the militant atheist movement. He served on the Central Committee from 1925 until his death.
Career Timeline
- 1895Arrested on suspicion of plotting to assassinate the Tsar; turned social democrat in Tula exile
- 1901Arrested while organizing Moscow SD committee; exiled to Achinsk, Siberia
- 1907–1909Published Russian translation of Marx's Capital with Bogdanov and Bazarov
- 1917.10Appointed first People's Commissar of Finance of the RSFSR (did not take office); member of Moscow MRC
- 1920Soviet-Polish War; member of the Provisional Revolutionary Committee of Poland
- 1925–1928Editor-in-chief of Izvestia; later deputy editor of Pravda and director of the Lenin Institute
- 1926–1928Editor of Leningradskaya Pravda; led the mechanist camp in philosophical debates
Related historical events
Leader of the Mechanist Camp — the 1920s Soviet Philosophical Debate
After Lenin's death in 1924, Soviet philosophy split into two irreconcilable camps, 'mechanists' and 'dialecticians', and plunged into a fierce, Union-wide debate. Skvortsov-Stepanov led the mechanist camp alongside Lyubov Akselrod-Ortodoks, Arkady Timiryazev, Vladimir Sarabianov, and others. They argued that Marxist philosophy could not be separated from the conclusions of the natural sciences, especially physics and biology, and that there was no such thing as 'a domain of philosophizing' standing apart from science. In his 1925 book Historical Materialism and Modern Natural Science, Skvortsov-Stepanov wrote: 'For Marxists there exists no area of some kind of philosophizing, separate and isolated from science, with some supposedly special, specific methods of investigation.' The opposing dialectician camp centered on Abram Deborin and his pupils, Yan Sten, Nikolai Karev, Ivan Luppol, and others, who insisted that Marxist philosophy possessed an autonomous status and its own specific content, not reducible to generalizations from the natural sciences. The dispute was as political as it was scholarly; both sides accused each other of idealism, revisionism, and anti-Marxism. In 1929 the Second All-Union Conference of Marxist-Leninist Scientific Institutions formally defeated the mechanists, branding their position a 'vulgar evolutionism' and 'positivism' that marked a departure from Marxist-Leninist philosophy. In a bitter irony, the Deborinites themselves were purged in the early 1930s after Stalin's intervention condemned them for 'Menshevizing idealism,' bringing the era of autonomous philosophical debate in the Soviet Union to a close.