Developments of the Marxist Tradition in Soviet Intellectual History

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

The Soviet state was founded by social democratic revolutionaries aiming to realize the Marxist international revolutionary program. The Marxist tradition on which the Bolsheviks and the Soviet government founded their authority, however, remained a living and changing tradition subject to competing interpretations and open to the elaboration of new ideas based on theoretical precedent. Terms, concepts, and categories from that tradition were transformed, invoked, reworked, and rediscovered in Soviet thought, under Soviet political and intellectual conditions, over the course of the existence of the Soviet state. Such transformations and developments occurred in political theory, economic thought, cultural policy, literary theory, history, Party doctrine, state policy, and in the Soviet study of texts by Marx and Engels themselves. This panel presents a range of intellectual histories tracing how Soviet thinkers and leaders adapted and transformed elements from within the Marxist tradition across a broad temporal span. The panel will include papers on the work of Opposition and Trotskyist thinkers in the 1920s and 1930s, the problem of interstate politics in Marxist thought and Soviet policy, the development of the Third Party Program and plans for the Communist future, and the late-Soviet Marxist humanism of philosopher and Gorbachev advisor Ivan Frolov. The panel aims to restore attention to the unfolding of Soviet intellectual history and the variety of Soviet thinkers’ borrowing from, and innovation within, the material of the Marxist tradition.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Lars Thomas Lih, Independent Scholar

Papers

• The Stalinist Party's Plans for the Communist Future (A Case Study on the Unfinished 1938-1947 Third Party Program) - David Brandenberger, U of Richmond

• The Great Power Tradition in Marxism, Soviet Thought, and Soviet Policy - Samuel Coggeshall, UNC at Wilmington

• From a Man of Institutions to the Institute of Man: Ivan Frolov’s Scientific Humanism and Pursuit of a 'Humane, Democratic Socialism' Under Gorbachev - Alexander James McConnell, North Carolina State U

• Trotskyist Theorists of the 1920s and 1930s: The Cases of Polina Vinogradskaia and Grigory Yakovin - Veronique Mickisch, New York U

Discussant

• Lars Thomas Lih, Independent Scholar