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Articles

The Strange Story of The Soviet Spinoza

Lesley Chamberlain on the Spinozists’ dangerous dance with the Bolsheviks.

When after 1991 the Soviet archives were briefly opened, a surprising suicide note was found among the papers of the Defence Ministry. One of the country’s leading philosophers had planned to kill himself in 1931 under pressure from Stalin, and the cause of his despair was that he had preferred Spinoza to Lenin as a teacher. His name was Abram Moiseievich Deborin, and, had history taken a different course, Spinoza might have become the Soviet Union’s default thinker. It might not have changed the political reality, but philosophy itself would have survived as something more than explicating Marxist-Leninist fantasy.

Spinoza in Russia

Deborin left an interesting story behind him, hardly known in the West.

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