One of the most interesting developments in Russian studies since the collapse of Communism has been studies of the political, social, and cultural realms of the early Soviet state, and in particular, the search for answers to this question: Were there alternatives to the Stalinism that took hold in the country in the early 1930s, and that caused untold chaos and misery for the next twenty years?

Yehoshua Yakhot's The Suppression of Philosophy in the USSR (The 1920s and 1930s) is one in a series of new scholarly works to shed light on the rich dialogue-debates that consumed early thinker-philosophers of the Soviet state, but which were relegated to the dustbin of history by later monologue-ideologies that stifled—and strangled—alternate points of view.

In Suppression—first published in Russian by Chalidze Publishers in New York in 1981, and then serialized in the journal Problems of Philosophy in Moscow in 1991—Yakhot focuses on the struggle between the “mechanists,” led by Liubov Axelrod, and the “dialecticians,” headed by Abram Deborin, over the form and function of Marxist philosophy in the 1920s and early 1930s. As Yakhot shows, the task could not have been more urgent. With a particular eye to proletarian youth, the two groups debated “who should teach what, when, where, why, and how.” Marx, Engels, and Lenin had not written textbooks on their views; early Soviet scholars who did so encountered criticism, even condemnation. Indeed, the quest for the theoretical underpinnings for the new Soviet state was particularly crucial, especially when Lenin and company had retreated into the New Economic Policy (1921–1928), a program of state-sponsored capitalism to rebuild the country after the revolution and civil war.

As detailed by Yakhot, the argument was this: the Deborin-led “dialecticians” were self-styled philosophers who sought abstract, universal categories and forms vis-à-vis Hegelian logic.

The “mechanists” were scientists who strove to reduce life to physical and chemical processes.

The debates and discussions between the two groups featured a heady—and often freewheeling—clash of observations and opinions on society and life. Attempts to define early Soviet thinking moved freely between “quantitative” science and “qualitative” philosophy. Issues of “mechanics” joined with discussions on “contingency” and “cause.” “Materialism” and “idealism” were seen as “abstract” and “academic”; as “deviant” and “dialectical”; and as “objective” and “ontological.” They were also labeled “orthodox,” “heretical,” and “revisionist”; “scientific,” “romantic,” and “realist”; and “mechanical,” “modern,” and “Menshevizing.”

Included in Yakhot's analysis is a wealth of information on individuals, movements, and events. Spinoza, Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Engels take their place with Plekhanov, Lenin, Bukharin, Trotsky, and Stalin. Members of the Society of Militant Materialists vie with editors of Pravda and Under the Banner of Marxism. Congresses and conventions proclaim heroes and villains, on one hand, and programs and plans, on the other.

It is a measure of the overriding philosophical cast-concern of the times that by 1929, “dialectians” had triumphed over “mechanists” (and inadvertently paved the way for the later disaster of Lysenko and Soviet genetics). A year later, however, the “dialecticians” also fell from grace, courtesy of “youngster” Stalinists who, concerned with “practical socialist construction” and politicized philosophy, censured them as “formalists,” “scholastics,” “Menshevized idealists,” and “Hegelianized Marxists.” For them the “dialecticians” were little more than “outgrowths of NEP bourgeois counter-revolutionary philosophy” who could “disarm the proletariat theoretically” by separating theory from practice, and by failing to expose Trotskyism and other perceived heresies (53). The “relatively free discussion” of the 1920s continued to June 1930; but by fall 1931, it had come to an inglorious end. No longer would “partisanship,” that is, the discourse of competing parties and views, be tolerated by the Central Committee. Indeed, as Yakhot makes clear, not only “dialecticians” and “materialists,” but also Marx, Engels, Plekhanov, and even Lenin disappeared in the growing cult of Stalin.

To the question as to alternatives to Stalinism in Soviet history, Yakhot unwittingly answers no. By defining the state ideology of the 1930s as a “religion,” he brings one to recall similar episodes in human history, for example, the “closing of the western mind” in which beleaguered emperors called church councils to define theologies to safeguard their unwieldy and rebellious empires. Indeed, it is not implausible to claim that if, right or wrong, Stalin had not ended the debates and discussions between “dialecticians” and “materialists,” he would have faced a dangerous void as to the raison d'être of the triumph of the Revolution, the victory of the civil war, the role of the Party, the emergence of five-year plans, and the very existence of the new Soviet state. Simply put, Stalin saw that political necessity was the mother of intellectual invention—and repression of all other views. What he did not see, though, was that political necessity would also destroy the religion-ideology he had labored to create.