On February 24-25, 1956, in a closed session of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Nikita S. Khrushchev made his now famous speech on the crimes of the Stalin era. That speech marked a break with the past and it marked the end of what J.M. Bochenski dubbed the "dead period" of Soviet philosophy. Soviet philosophy changed abruptly after 1956, especially in the area of dialectical materialism. Yet most philosophers in the West neither noticed nor (...) cared. For them, the resurrection of Soviet philosophy, even if believable, was of little interest. The reasons for the lack of belief and interest were multiple. Soviet philosophy had been dull for so long that subtle differences made little difference. The Cold War was in a frigid period and reinforced the attitude of avoiding anything Soviet. Phenomenology and exis tentialism were booming in Europe and analytic philosophy was king on the Anglo-American philosophical scene. Moreover, not many philosophers in the West knew or could read Russian or were motivated to learn it to be able to read Soviet philosophical works. The launching of Sputnik awakened the West from its self complacent slumbers. Academic interest in the Soviet Union grew. (shrink)

Rapidly changing estimates on the Soviet régime''s ability to survive show how difficult it is for American Sovietologists to grasp what is going on.

Rapidly changing estimates on the Soviet régime's ability to survive show how difficult it is for American Sovietologists to grasp what is going on.

Josef Bocheski, pioneer of the discipline ofphilosophical sovietology and one of the firstto criticize Eurocentric attitudes, emphasizedthe central role of logic and sound argument inacademic philosophy. This helped him todemonstrate both the general flaws of and thedifferences in quality within Sovietphilosophy. His endeavors and results areindispensable for the yet-to-be-written historyof Soviet philosophy. By the same token, itmade him less perceptive of the centralpolitical, not just philosophical, role of thepartijnost'-principle. More recent developmentshave shown both Soviet philosophy andBocheski's own, Neo-Thomist position (...) to bepart of a fundamentally outdated idea ofscientific philosophy. However, the criteria oflogical scrutiny and sound argument have notlost their force within globalizingphilosophical culture. (shrink)

The decline of communism in Eastern Europe in years 1989-1991 was a big surprise for Western Sovietology. The sudden disappearance of the object of research would undermine the reason of existence of the whole science. For this reason, in the first half of the 90s Western scientists tried to answer following question: why Sovietology was not able to predict the demise of communism. The purpose of my paper is not to make one more analysis of factors responsible for (...) this failure of social sciences but reconstruction of theories which accurately predicted the demise of communism. It is possible to point out two scholars whopredicted the collapse of communism at the turn of the 70s and 80s. One of them is Randall Collins, an American sociologist who elaborated in 1978 Geopolitical Theory. The second of them is Leszek Nowak, Polish philosopher, who in 1979 elaborated theory of historical process – non-Marxian historical materialism. In the last part of my paper I compare these two theories. Despite obvious differences, these theories share striking similarities: model status, antagonistic vision of society, grand scope of applicability and belonging to the periphery rather than to mainstream of social sciences. Maybe, this last feature is one of the necessary conditions of making accurate predictions in social and historical sciences. (shrink)

Cohen is well known as the author of the 1973 biography, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution. We learn more about Bukharin in the pivotal chapter of his new “revisionist” overview of sovietology, which illustrates how the man became a myth, and which serves also to justify Cohen's own analysis. The chapter is literally povital: it comes after two chapters which explain both the failures of American sovietology and the possibility of a better — if not more democratic — (...) Soviet Union in the post-Stalin age characterized by a choice between reformism and conservatism. The scholarly “revisionism” Cohen champions is thus also political — although the political implications are found more directly in his recently published collection of columns from The Nation titled Sovieticus: Soviet Realities and American Perceptions (Norton, 1985). (shrink)

The article is devoted to the political philosophy of Father Jozef Maria Bochenski. One of Poland’s best-known Polish philosophers and logicians of the twentieth century, he represented the Thomistic, and later, the analytic tradition. His concept of totalitarianism is first presented on the ontological level and then in the context of the theory of ideology and Weltanschauung, worldview, which he rigorously distinguished from scientific philosophy. Finally, his thinking on the topic is set out as a subject of Sovietological studies, an (...) interdisciplinary branch of scholarship examining communism as an ideology and as an organisation. (shrink)