Abstract

In this issue, Russian philosophers look back at the seventy-year Soviet period of their discipline and try to sort out its main achievements, key turning points, and patterns of development. All of them realize that their involvement in the period that they are assessing—they were all recognized Soviet philosophers—and the temporal closeness of the period—only a decade has passed since the period's official ending—makes it impossible for them to offer anything more than subjectively tinted, tentative judgments. But at the same time, they are well situated to fix the telling details, the special atmosphere, and the memorable figures of this period, facts that, otherwise, will become inaccessible to future historians. The strength of the accounts presented here lies in their immediacy, their rootedness in personal experience.