Abstract

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.