The struggle of A.M. Deborin, FRAS, for scientific and social rehabilitation: the story told via documents and testimonies

Abstract

The article offers a reconstruction, based on documents and historical evidence, of the struggle to abolish the decree of the CPSU Central Committee from the year 1931 declaring the Soviet school of Marxist dialectic philosophy a «menshevik-like idealism», led by the founder of the Institute of Philosophy, Fellow of the Russian Academy of Sciences A.M. Deborin. The authors publish three letters which Deborin wrote on the subject to Khrushchev from 1953 to 1956, through the years of Khrushchev's «Thaw», as well as documents reflecting the resistance with which Stalinist-minded philosophers and party officials met Deborin's attempts to destalinize philosophy. Particularly valuable is the testimony from little-known memoirs of A.M. Necritch and Е.G. Plimak who served as Deborin's secretaries during that period.