Interview with Igor Solomadin (original) (raw)

2009, Journal of Russian and East European Psychology

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Interview with Sergey Horujy

Studies in East European Thought, 2016

We are presently preparing, here at the Institute for Human Sciences, the translation of several essays by Bibikhin (2017). One of them is the essay ''For Official Use Only'' from the book Another Beginning (2003). In this essay, Bibikhin describes the mechanism of scholarly production in the context of the INION, the Institute for Social Sciences, during the late Soviet period. The essay starts with a somewhat mysterious phrase: ''The authorities began to look for an alternative ideology to Marxism very early. Already in 1973, we knew that the military political strategists were planning to abandon Marxism and replace it with Orthodoxy as the ideological support of the Soviet army.'' Could you say the same about yourself, namely, that you ''knew'', at that time, that the Soviet nomenclature was conducting this exploration of alternatives to Marxism? SH: I am not part of this ''we''. I knew nothing of such plans by the Soviet authorities or top military leaders, and, moreover, I don't believe that there were such plans. Immediately after the fall of the communist regime a big part of the soviet nomenclature started to proclaim themselves to be champions of Orthodoxy and the Church. But this took place following five years of perestroika and sharp criticism of soviet ideology, when the demise of the latter was evident. However, in the 70s this was hardly a real perspective, and I think that as a rule, members of the nomenclature were still convinced of the strength and stability of soviet ideology, even if many of them were not enthusiastic adepts. They could not see any serious need to look for an alternative to this ideology; on the contrary, they had serious reasons to hold on to it. For instance, the role and activity of the USSR on the world scene was strongly dependent on the close ties with Marxist parties and movements all over the world. Could they reject all this? As for my views at that time, around 1973, I also didn't doubt that the nomenclature and, in particular, ''military political strategists'' are in overwhelming majority loyal adepts of soviet ideology and therefore very far from planning any radical alternatives to it. And I'm sure this view was largely shared in the milieu of the Church people and Christian intellectuals, to which both Bibikhin and I belonged.

URBANI, B.-SUCH-GUTIÉRREZ, M.

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