Philosophers and the Russian State
Remarks on recent developments
by Alexey Zhavoronkov
During the press conference at the TASS on January 15 2024, a group of philosophers and public figures centred around the Zinoviev club and closely related to far-right ideological circles (among others to Alexander Dugin) called for a ‘purge’ of the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences, one of the most prominent philosophical institutions in Russia. In a direct appeal to Vladimir Putin, they also demanded a radical reform of social sciences and philosophy to form an ideological front against the ‘collective West’. This appeal results from a chain of events since late 2021 that accompanied the radical transformation of the landscape of social sciences and philosophy in Russia.
What is it like to be a philosopher, according to Russian officials and ideologists? Nowadays, it does not suffice to quietly continue their vita contemplativa away from the turbulences of political life. Philosophers are, again, of great interest to the government – which perhaps could seem flattering from the perspective of some colleagues but is ultimately not a good thing. There are, of course, apparent parallels with the situation of philosophers during the Soviet period, such as the so-called philosophers’ ships or the fact that, since the 1930s, more than half of philosophers at Soviet universities and the Academy of Sciences worked in the ideological field. What makes the current situation unique is the aggressive promotion of the idea that the search for the much-needed state ideology that could allegedly resolve social tensions, stabilize the foundations of Russian culture and identity and provide long-term orientation for Russian politics is undermined by ‘non-sovereign’ (pro-Western) philosophy, including specific philosophical institutions like the Institute of Philosophy of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IPhRAS).
Founded back in the early 1920s by Gustav Shpet, initially under the name of the Institute of Scientific Philosophy at the Lomonosov Moscow State University, the Institute was, since 1936, part of the Russian (formerly Soviet) Academy of Sciences. At present, it hosts about 250 scholars, divided between 28 departments. Its members work on a wide range of topics, from the history of Western, Eastern and Russian philosophy to social philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of science, and bioethics. Several of its members and associate fellows, including Evald Ilyenkov, Arseniy Gulyga, Alexander Zinoviev, Sergei Rubinstein, Merab Mamardashvili and many others, were well-known internationally.
Since the 1990s and till the late 2010s, the Institute was a place for people with different political views, serving as a platform for dialogue between various standpoints. However, this balance gradually became fragile because of the government’s increasingly aggressive domestic and international politics. Moreover, the Institute became a thorn in the side of Orthodox thinkers around the so-called Zinoviev circle – and eventually for official ‘philosophers’, such as Aleksandr Dugin and his recently founded Tsargrad institute whose structure loosely resembles the one of the IPhRAS.
The history of the open rivalry between the Institute and its opponents from the Russian government began in late 2021. A formal procedure of approving the Institute’s director, Andrey Smirnov, elected for a second term by the members of the Institute in a democratic procedure that was available to scholars in the Russian academia, turned into a string of unforeseen events. After Smirnov was not approved by the Ministry of Science and Higher Education, the officials appointed another director – Anatoly Chernyaev, a scholar specializing in the history of Soviet and Russian philosophy. In a rare act of academic solidarity in contemporary Russia, members of the Institute almost unanimously challenged this decision, which was subsequently revoked by the Ministry just after a week. However, the officials did not reappoint Adrei Smirnov; instead, they named Abdusalam Guseinov (former director of the Institute between 2006 and 2015) as the new interim director.
Regardless of this brief respite, the IPhRAS was essentially continuing its existence on borrowed time, especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, which prompted several members of the Institute to leave the country and to found an Independent Institute of Philosophy (IPHI) in Paris, in cooperation with many colleagues from other Russian institutions. The pressure from the traditionalist circles and official media grew ever stronger, with regular publications (mostly denunciations) on radical Orthodox platforms, such as Tsargrad TV. In December 2022, one of the leading scholars of the Institute, Professor Ruben Apressian, was labelled a ‘foreign agent’, being the first philosopher on this list. The institute’s administration tried to react, partly by publicly answering the accusations, partly by firing their own colleagues in futile self-censorship, hoping to thereby secure the Institute’s existence.
The last act began in December 2023, with the departure of Anatoly Chernyaev – a symbolic act of severing ties with an institution that needed to be cured of a deeply rooted pro-Western ‘disease’. His departure and the resumed media campaign against the Institute were followed by a cyberattack that erased all data on the Russian version of the internet portal of IPhRAS. Just a few days before the attack, a compendium of anti-war posts written by various members of the Institute of Philosophy after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was published on a recently launched internet site and subsequently referenced by many state media. At approximately the same time, there was a conclusion to the story with the official investigation of publication of the anti-war volume of collected papers Перед лицом катастрофы, as Moscow’s Tagansky District court has banned the distribution of the volume in Russia – although without taking action against its authors (with several scholars from the Institute of Philosophy among them). Finally, on January 15 2024, members of the Zinoviev club, together with Anatoly Chernyaev and some scholars representing the institutions of Russian academia (among them the Financial University and the Higher School of Economics) organized a large press conference at the TASS, calling for a radical reform of philosophy and social sciences, with particular emphasis on the much-needed ‘purge’ of the Institute of Philosophy as a ‘thought factory’ working in the interests of the enemies of Russia.
The speeches at the press conference offer us valuable insights into crucial concepts of Russian political vocabulary, from ‘sovereignty’ and ‘spiritual values’ to ‘colonialism’, ‘falsification’ and ‘[ideological] terrorism’. Speakers have touched upon many topics that could interest Russian officials, from cultural war with the ‘collective West’ to technological breakthroughs due to the newfound ‘sovereign’ state of Russian science. According to them, ‘non-sovereign’ philosophy popularized by the enemies of the state working at various academic institutions plays an extremely important, albeit destructive, role, significantly influencing the country’s economic and demographic situation (a view that could be flattering for those who worry about contemporary philosophy becoming too detached from real life). To switch the ideological poles to make philosophical institutions useful for the Russian government, there is allegedly no other option than a large-scale reform that would include recertification of all scholars and teaching programmes and a radical change in the funding, as the system of research grants should be abolished in favour of research tasks directly provided by the government. The desired result would be the formation of an ‘ideological army’ of philosophers and social scientists who provide sufficient resistance to any foreign ideological influence.
There is little doubt that such a call for action, as radical as it looks even under current political circumstances, will not go completely unanswered by the Russian government. Similar calls for reforms of the Russian science and education system can recently be heard from various Russian officials – mainly in the light of the abolishment of the Bologna system and the idea of building a new state ideology that should, at long last, fill the void caused by the fall of the Soviet Union. Many scholars at various Russian universities (among them many who have greatly profited from the emigration or dismissal of their former colleagues) also express the need to take a clearer distance from ‘Western thought’. This distance is also to be institutionalised by greatly expanding the number of institutions in the field of Russian philosophy. The question is not whether such reform will take place but how much resources would the Russian government be willing to spend to implement the proposed changes.
From a more general perspective, the boundaries between philosophy and state ideology in Russia are, once again, becoming very thin. Those who advocate a ‘purge’ of Russian academia (including those who remain silent in political matters), explicitly mentioning those who work in philosophy, argue that philosophers are essentially civil servants, working for the state and paid by it. Thus, their dismissal and persecution are supposedly a logical consequence of their inability to do their work properly. Their tasks would include unconditional support of the actions of the Russian government, a detailed legitimization of these actions, and, last but not least, significant contribution to a new state ideology which is still a work in progress. This argumentation leaves no room for critical thought and, consequently, to philosophy itself – since a philosopher who cannot openly discuss her/his opinions, as unfavourable as they may be for the government, is no philosopher at all.
The idea that a philosopher without freedom cannot be a proper philosopher (and, in the broader sense, an active citizen, according to Immanuel Kant) is undoubtedly alien to those in the Russian government who dream of a ‘sovereign’ philosophy for a ‘new’ world, without being able to see that the philosophical agora is not the Senate Palace in Kremlin but the world in its entirety. Instead of building and preserving bridges between the Russian philosophical tradition and other traditions that are not solely those of Western philosophy, Russian officials aim to build a Great Wall that preserves their worldview from foreign incursions. This project, which even their Chinese colleagues had not yet implemented in such form, was doomed from the start, as a real thinker and scholar cannot entirely sever all intellectual contacts to colleagues worldwide, making the concept of any ‘sovereign’ scientific activity an oxymoron. In consequence, the idea of a sovereign Russian philosophy is destined to remain vague, devoid of a stable theoretical foundation and long-term goals, limiting itself to reactive slogans like those on the ‘Great War’ with the West. While studying Russian philosophy in greater depth seems a necessary first step in this direction, its much-discussed implementation can reveal many unpleasant criticisms against the idea of a state-governed philosophy and the persecution of free thought. Ironically, these criticisms are often voiced by those who, according to Russian ideologists, can be deemed worthy of belonging to the new philosophical canon.