Foreign News: Toothless Vegetarianism

For years, as head of the Communist Party’s Agitation and Propaganda Section, balding, sharp-eyed Philosopher Georgy Fedorovich Aleksandrov had been Russia’s No. 1 ideological vigilante. In the magazine Bolshevik, and his fortnightly paper, Culture and Life, he had denounced novelists, playwrights, journalists, artists, cinema directors for pernicious ideological errors. Last week his smarting victims could loose a Homeric guffaw—Aleksandrov himself had been popped onto a hot critical griddle.

It was no ordinary Soviet witch-burning, and Aleksandrov no ordinary witch. Ally of Politburo Member Georgy Maksimilianovich Malenkov, son-in-law of Politburo Member Nikita Khrushchev, he had powerful protectors. Himself a member of the Party’s Central Committee, the boss of one of its most important branches, he was close to the Soviet Union’s mightiest. But it was Stalin who ordered the inquisition, and Politburo Member Andrei Zhdanov, sometimes mentioned as Stalin’s probable successor, who carried it out. It was the nearest thing to a public airing of Politburo squabbling since the great purge trials a decade ago.

“Unsafe Condition.” Even the setting was special. To Moscow, the Central Committee summoned a hundred or so top-rank philosophers, professors, theoreticians, for a nine-day conference. Assembled, they learned that the subject of discussion was to be Aleksandrov’s History of Western European Philosophy. Only a year before, it had been awarded a 100,000 ruble Stalin prize. To this startled group, Zhdanov laid down the Central Committee’s charges against Aleksandrov: 1) he had preached a “toothless vegetarianism” toward the philosophical enemies of Marx-Lenin-Stalin; 2) perhaps unsuspectingly, he had become “the prisoner of bourgeois historians of philosophy.” The cream of the jest was that such had been the substance of Aleksandrov’s charges against many another Soviet intellectual.

Charged Zhdanov: “His objectivist conceptions he consistently carried out through the entire book. It is not accidental that Comrade Aleksandrov, before starting to criticize any bourgeois philosopher, pays tribute to his merits, burning incense before him.”

But that was not the worst of it. Continued Zhdanov: “It so happened that Comrade Aleksandrov’s book received recognition from the majority of our top philosophical workers, and received numerous favorable reviews. This means that all these others also share Aleksandrov’s mistakes. That bespeaks an unsafe condition on our theoretical front. . . . Such conceptions if developed here would unavoidably lead to objectivism—to slavishness to bourgeois philosophers and overstating of their merits, thus depriving our philosophy of its militant advancing spirit.”

Objectivism. What was the objectionable “objectivism?” In Aleksandrov’s case, it was merely the familiar polemical device of building ’em up before knocking ’em down. He had used this technique on Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Hegel. But he had also been found guilty of playing with metaphysics, a reprehensible sin in Russia, and he had depicted Marxism as an evolution from earlier philosophy. Thundered Zhdanov: “The origin of Marxism was a real discovery, a revolution in philosophy.” In the wake of Zhdanov’s thunder, 46 of Aleksandrov’s colleagues and coworkers, among them doubtless some who had written rave reviews, slavishly climbed the Zhdanov bandwagon with similar denunciations, and 36 more were awaiting their turns to speak when the meeting closed.

One critic said that Aleksandrov’s “weakness for abstract and vague formulations brings him to the point where correct Marxist theses are drowning in them, and the revolutionary content of Marxism is sometimes replaced by abstract discussions.”

All this was strictly in line with the increasingly intense Soviet campaign to stamp out every trace of Western bourgeois ideas in the Soviet Union. Behind this fantastic effort lay the real dilemma of Soviet philosophy—a contradiction that prevented Communist thinkers from developing any secure philosophy of their own.

Orthodox Marxism holds that society operates in accordance with determined economic laws; this view minimizes the personal element in history. However, the Soviet State that has actually evolved is a dictatorship rooted in the principle of infallible personal leadership. This irreconcilable conflict of ideas prevents Soviet thinkers from agreeing on a definition of what the Soviet State is which leaves the philosophers in the position of being ordered to “militantly advance the spirit” of a thing they cannot define.*

In the 30-year history of the Soviet Union, philosophical quarrels have sometimes had fatal results. Long before he was tried for alleged treason and executed, Nikolai Bukharin had been attacked for philosophical deviation. But Bukharin never recanted. Aleksandrov did, and last week Pravda reported: “Aleksandrov fully agreed with the criticism, acknowledged that his book had serious failures and mistakes, and agreed that the whole organization of a new scientific work in the branch of philosophy should be fundamentally changed.”

In the public confession of ideological error, there is often Communist salvation.

*Samples: “The Soviet State is the Red Army.” —P. F. Yudin. “The Soviet State is the welding of coercion and persuasion.”—Andrei Vishinsky. “Socialism is electrification plus Soviet power.” —Lenin.