At the beginning of the twentieth century, Russian Marxism, which was rapidly gaining intellectual and political influence, faced the need to develop its ethical concepts, since the “atheistic ethics,” represented by the philosophy of Russian narodniki and European social democrats, were found to be ideologically unacceptable. The subject of this article is an attempt to comprehend the moral problems addressed in the heterogeneous circles of Russian Marxism in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The concepts introduced by A. (...) Bogdanov, L. Aksel’rod, and A. Lunacharsky played a critical role in this context. If Bogdanov proclaimed historical legality and morality as such to be forms of ideological consciousness that would be abolished in the course of social evolution, then Aksel’rod sought to defend and justify a universalist understanding of morality, faced with the need to reconcile this understanding with the key provisions of historical materialism. Lunacharsky, finally, found himself in an equally difficult situation, trying to reconcile the position of the self-sufficiency of the Marxist worldview with the obvious, as it seemed to him, need for its “ethical supplement” and finding a solution in peculiar identification of the ethical and the aesthetic. These attempts reflect a peculiarity of the development of Russian Marxism. In the field of ethics, in particular, it followed a path that could be described as one of narrowing interpretations‚ as a result of which a more heuristically simple and unambiguous version of the theory was created. (shrink)

At the beginning of 20th century, there was a problem of establishing which version of the association of Kant’s and Marx’s ideas is correct. If some Legal Marxists more or less combined Kant and Marx, most Russian Social Democrats, especially Bolsheviks, were against such an association. Under the influence of G. V. Plekhanov, Russian Marxists announced a sharply critical attitude toward Kant’s philosophy. This position was reinforced by Russian philosophers, poets, and slavophiles who accused Kant of being militarist. During the (...) World War I, both tendencies faced each other. Plekhanov’s desperate appeal to „the simple laws or morals and justice” and Kant’s “Critique of Practical Reason”, which was supported by L. I. Axelrod, failed. It was rejected by the majority of Marxists both during the World War I and after the triumph of the 1917 October Revolution. (shrink)