DEBORIN (Joffe), ABRAM MOISEYEVICH

DEBORIN (Joffe), ABRAM MOISEYEVICH (1881–1963), Russian Marxist philosopher. Born into a poor family in Lithuania, Deborin found employment as a metalworker and got caught up in the revolutionary spirit of the time. In 1903 he sided with Lenin's Bolsheviks against the Menshevik faction. As a student in Switzerland he came under the influence of the founder of Russian Marxism, Georgi Plekhanov, and became a Menshevik. With the success of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, he quit the Mensheviks and turned again to Lenin, offering the regime his services as a philosopher. Lenin cautiously approved Deborin's appointment to the Sverdlov Communist University in 1921. By 1925 he controlled both the leading Soviet journal, Pod znamenem marksizma ("Under the Banner of Marxism"), and the philosophy section of the Institute of Red Professorship, the leading graduate school. In 1928 he joined the Communist Party, and became the most influential Soviet academic philosopher. However, in 1929 the second conference of Marxist-Leninist scholarly institutions adjudged Deborin's views "incorrect and un-Marxist." This, the first Soviet instance of the legislation of philosophic truth by party decree, came in the wake of a split – festering since 1924 – between the "mechanists," headed by L.I. Akselrod, who emphasized materialism, and what Stalin slightingly called the "Menshevizing idealists" headed by Deborin, who stressed Hegelian dialectics. In a sense, the Deborinists had been arguing for the integrity of dialectical materialism, and Deborin was condemned for failing to adjust from Leninism to Stalinism. After 1931 he played a modest role as philosophy member at Moscow's Academy of Science, which directed the work of some 260 Russian institutes. In 1937 many who were accused of "Menshevik idealism" were arrested and perished in camps and prisons. Deborin was spared this fate.

Deborin's earliest important work is Vvedeniye v filosofiyu dialekticheskogo materializma ("Introduction to the Philosophy of Dialectical Materialism," 1922). His later publications include the first volume of Sotsialno-politicheskiye ucheniye novogo i noveyshego vremeni ("Socio-political Doctrines of Modern Times," 1958; Sp. trans. Las doctrinas político-sociales de la época moderna y contemporanea, 1960), and a collection of articles, Filosofiya i politika (1961). In 1928, together with August Thalheimer, he published a volume for the 250^th anniversary of *Spinoza's death, Spinozas Stellung in der Vorgeschichte des dialektischen Materialismus.

bibliography:

D. Joravsky, Soviet Marxism and Natural Science, 1917–1932 (1961), 119–29, 170–84; Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2 (1967), 164–5, 309; 7 (1967), 266.