marxist sociology

[Chris Doss]

I have a 1974 children's textbook on the history of the CPSU (being used in
the Soviet educationl system, however, it reads like an American first- or
second-year university textbook). It manages to treat the forced
collectivization of the 30s without mentioning that a) Stalin or b) that it
was forced. The 800-odd-page book also mentions Stalin a whopping four times
and Trotsky not once.

Chris Doss
The Russia Journal
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As for Soviet philosophy, ptowee, there was no such thing after Stalin 
killed almost anyone with a brain in the USSR. I have had the misfortune to 
have actually read a lot of Soviet so-called dialectical materialism, and a 
drearer lot of glock I never tried to slog through. (I feel sorry for my 
former OSU colleague Jim Scanlan, who actually wrote a book (quite a good 
one, very fair and sympathetic, though for that reason all the more 
devastating) about Marxism in the USSR.) No wonder Marxism had such a weak 
grip on the peoples of the FSU: their exposure to it, such as it was, was 
largely through diamat textbooks of leaden orthodozy and obvious dishonesty.

The comments of most official Soviet philosophy about Kant were basically 
predictable, unininteresting, and largely wrong.

jks