The Philosophy of the Russian Enlightenment in Soviet Historiography : Names and Problems

Neither in Imperial Russia nor in the Soviet Union was the Philosophy of the Russian Enlightenment an object of systematic research. There were very few figures in the Russian Enlightenment who received attention in this respect. Moreover, the interest in them depended not on a possibile positive evaluation of their thought but rather on their being either of non-noble origin (such as Mixail Lomonosov) or victims of persecution on the part of the authorities (such as Aleksandr Radiˇsˇcev). In particular, during the Soviet era, the Enlightenment was not understood as a specific epoch. In their research, Soviet historians of philosophy applied the Marxist classification of socio-economic formations and thus described that period as part of the feudal era. In the USSR, the dominating perspective was socio-economic, and this posed limits to the understanding of the logic of philosophical processes.

This is why Enlightenment studies were more successful outside the discipline of philosophy, for example, in the sphere of history or philology. [Publishers' text].