On the first experience of de-stalinization philo­sophically speaking of the “national issue” (1957)

Appendix: Horen G. Ajemyan. The critique of so called “bourgeois” nation

Abstract

The article considers the situation in the USSR after the XX Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, when some ideological prohibitions had fallen and it became possible to discuss various philosophical problems without the fear that of punishment. This did not mean that freedom of speech became full-scale – no, it was limited by the decisions of the same XX Congress of the party, which, having debunked the cult of Stalin, nevertheless forbade to think that the entire ideology of the communist leadership was false, the entire policy of the Soviet power was violent. Already during the war, it had become possible to speak not only from the standpoint of class struggle, but also from the standpoint of national priority in the assessment of certain events. After Stalin’s death, who was the main theorist of the national question, there was a need to question some of Stalin’s fundamental theses about the nature of nations – the reasons for their emergence. In 1957, H.G. Ajemyan, a talented publicist and philosopher, made possible a public discussion of the talk he had given at the Department of Historical Sciences of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. The discussion was not broad, but the surviving transcript of the participants’ speeches gives an idea of how philosophical thought in the era of the XX Congress freed itself from the dogmatic attitudes. Ajemyan’s provocative talk revealed the inner consciousness of the humanities, which metaphorically conceived of itself as located at the intersection of a number of roads. The article further explores the described state of history and philosophy as a crisis.