Abstract

An objective, honest, impartial history of our country's philosophy in the Soviet period—in a word, a history meeting the requirements of the times—is yet to be written. But it is much needed. Its creation is one of the most important, but perhaps also one of the most difficult of our tasks. There are still many superimposed layers that must be peeled away: for example, the bitter truth must be told about those who inscribed in this history—of course honorifically—their own names and those of dogmatists who shared their ideas. But fortunately, it is not only naked emperors and their stooges, not only their subjects with their mutilated destinies, who will figure in a historical narration oriented toward the truth and facts. This grim context makes even brighter the noble role played by those figures—personalities in the highest sense of the word—whose names, works, and very lives were simply "expunged" from history. And by those who remained alive and in philosophy in the direst times, those who despite all the persecution, all the tribulations they endured, abandoned neither their honor nor philosophical truth. The unofficial authority of talented, creatively thinking scholars has always been extremely high. One of those highly authoritative philosophers of our country, one who today has an international name, was Valentin Ferdinandovich Asmus