Metastalinizm: dialectics of partisanship and party dialectics

Soviet philosophy went through a paradoxical transformation - from denial of philosophy as such (with the replacement of it by natural sciences) in the 1920s through the victory of traditional philosophy in the debates between mechanists and Deborin’s school in late 1920 to the complete collapse of philosophical discourse by the end of the Stalin era. The coming to power of the "new leadership in philosophy" at the turn of the 1930s led to a sharp increase in the role of ideology in philosophy. Philosophy was regarded as a commissar of sciences. Dialectical and historical materialism became dominant. Only at the end of the 1930s, with the advent of the new head of Agitprop Georgi Alexandrov interest in the history of philosophy was renewed. During the war, the ideological component was beginning to prevail in Party’s decisions regarding the philosophy, taking a distinctly political form (negation of German classical philosophy, the invention of "Russian revolutionary-democratic philosophy," etc.). The pinnacle of the campaign was the so-called "Philosophical discussion" of 1947 about Alexandrov’s "History of Western European philosophy." During this debate, Stalin solved not only institutional problems, but also ideological. As a result of the discussion, the role of the history of philosophy was marginalized. In the face of fierce ideological confrontation with the West in the early years of the Cold War central place was occupied by the "critique of bourgeois philosophy," which was carried out in line with the counter-propaganda that led to factual disintegration of philosophical discourse.

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