The Question of Autonomy in the Late-Stalin-Era Humanities

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Research on the Stalin-era humanities has mainly focused on questions of political and ideological control. This panel, in contrast, attempts to evaluate the degrees of autonomy of late Soviet humanities. We explore the political strategies of Soviet humanities in their struggle for autonomy from political control. The panel suggests that the political aspects of humanities during the Stalin era were not reducible only to the role they assumed through their actors and ideas in conventional state-led politics. To test this premise, we offer a concept of ‘culture’s politics’ by which we refer to a struggle for power to define and rule one’s own cultural existence. The question of relative autonomy follows from the simple fact that to be effective, political instrumentalization cannot totally wipe out scholarly autonomy; otherwise, scholarship would no longer be useful for politics. This raises a question: whether the systemic creation of relative autonomy in Soviet humanities was really built into the system of control in late Stalinism. Paradoxically to ‘culture’s politics’ then, it seems that individual artists and scholars did not have to struggle for ‘isles of autonomy’ too hard, if the state would have granted it or at least tolerated them anyway. The papers provide a complex picture of the situation in the late-Stalin-era humanities by focusing on philosophy, which was at the center of political attention, and musicology, which remained relatively independent. The presenters will reflect, too, on the historical significance of the overall phenomenon under discussion.

Sub Unit

• Religion, Philosophy

Chair

• Cynthia A. Ruder, U of Kentucky

Papers

• Autonomy within Heteronomy: Doing Marxist Philosophy in Late Stalinism - Ivan Landa, Inst of Philosophy CAS (Czech Republic)

• Autonomy in Post-1947 Soviet Philosophy? - Liisa Bourgeot, U of Helsinki (Finland)

• Autonomism in the late Stalin Era Musicology - Elina Kristiina Viljanen, U of Turku (Finland)

Discussant

• David Brandenberger, U of Richmond