On Thu, 21 Feb 2002 16:04:39 +0000 "Justin Schwartz" <jkschw at hotmail.com>
writes:
> >
> >^^^^^^
> >
>
> You make a big mistake, btw, if you think that all of them were. In
> fact,
> Marxism was pretty roundly hated in Soviet philosophical circles,
> largely
> because it was obligatory and because the official stuff was so
> awful and
> dull. This hatred did not find wide expression until perestroika and
>
> democratization. Then the dominant trends that emerged with the
> neo-mystical
> religious-nationalist existentialism in the tradition of Nicholas
> Berdyayev
> and Western style libertarianism (Nozick, etc.). Marxism of the sort
> that
> Western Marxism would find congenial, e.g., Boris Kagarlitsky and
> Roy
> Medvedev, simply never caught on. Among serious Soviet scholars of
> intellectual history, I would be surprised if very many were
> Marxists any
> more than they had to be.
Perhaps, Justin and Chris Doss might wish to do us the favor of analyzing the political role of Russian academics and intellectuals in the post-soviet era. I get the impression that many of them have simply continued to play the role of apparatchiks, except instead of kowtowing to diamat and "official Marxism" they now kowtow to either free market liberalism or to right-wing nationalism. They seemed for the most part to have been noticeably silent when Yeltsin's cronies were robbing the country blind, and I am not aware of too much significant opposition from them to Putin either.
Jim F.
>
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