From a Man of Institutions to the Institute of Man: Ivan Frolov’s Scientific Humanism and Pursuit of a 'Humane, Democratic Socialism' Under Gorbachev

• In Event: Developments of the Marxist Tradition in Soviet Intellectual History

Abstract

This paper will examine the professional writings and political activity of Soviet philosopher Ivan Frolov (1929-1999), an influential yet lesser-known figure within the Communist Party hierarchy during Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform campaigns of the 1980s. A contemporary of Gorbachev’s at Moscow State University, Frolov built a successful academic career at various Soviet institutions and Eastern Bloc publications before his rapid ascent during Perestroika, which saw him named editor-in-chief of Pravda and appointed to the Politburo in 1989. Frolov’s ideological influence is reflected most clearly in the CPSU’s final draft Party Program, “Towards a Humane, Democratic Socialism” (1990), which Gorbachev tasked the philosopher with overseeing. Nearer and dearer to Frolov’s heart, however, was the Institute of Man (institut cheloveka) he had long dreamed of establishing within the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a dream that was finally realized just as the Soviet Union itself was collapsing in 1991. Both the draft Party Program and the Institute of Man were, in their own ways, efforts to concretize ideas that Frolov had been articulating for decades in his many specialist and popular works: a variation on the socialist humanism of Soviet official ideology, informed by advances in cognitive and biological science and their ethical implications. By analyzing the emergence of this “scientific humanism” and its influence on Gorbachev’s “new thinking” during Perestroika, this paper will shed new light on Frolov’s role as a major ideological figure and public intellectual in the waning years of the USSR.

Author

• Alexander James McConnell, North Carolina State U