Word: zhdanov
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That old Sleeping Beauty, the Communist International,* came back to life last week. At a secret meeting "somewhere in Poland," delegates from nine European Communist Parties met to reorganize "the general staff of the world revolution." The importance of the move was highlighted by the presence of Andrei A. Zhdanov and Georgi M. Malenkov, both members of Russia's ruling Politburo and close advisers of Joseph Stalin. Other top Communist brass who attended: Rumania's Ana Pauker; Yugoslavia's Vice Premier Edward Kardelj; Poland's Vice Premier Wladyslaw Gomulka and Minister of Industry Hilary Mine; Jacques...
...rank philosophers, professors, theoreticians, for a nine-day conference. Assembled, they learned that the subject of discussion was to be Aleksandrov's History of Western European Philosophy. Only a year before, it had been awarded a 100,000 ruble Stalin prize. To this startled group, Zhdanov laid down the Central Committee's charges against Aleksandrov: 1) he had preached a "toothless vegetarianism" toward the philosophical enemies of Marx-Lenin-Stalin; 2) perhaps unsuspectingly, he had become "the prisoner of bourgeois historians of philosophy." The cream of the jest was that such had been the substance of Aleksandrov...
...Charged Zhdanov: "His objectivist conceptions he consistently carried out through the entire book. It is not accidental that Comrade Aleksandrov, before starting to criticize any bourgeois philosopher, pays tribute to his merits, burning incense before...
...that was not the worst of it. Continued Zhdanov: "It so happened that Comrade Aleksandrov's book received recognition from the majority of our top philosophical workers, and received numerous favorable reviews. This means that all these others also share Aleksandrov's mistakes. That bespeaks an unsafe condition on our theoretical front. . . . Such conceptions if developed here would unavoidably lead to objectivism-to slavishness to bourgeois philosophers and overstating of their merits, thus depriving our philosophy of its militant advancing spirit...
...building 'em up before knocking 'em down. He had used this technique on Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, Hegel. But he had also been found guilty of playing with metaphysics, a reprehensible sin in Russia, and he had depicted Marxism as an evolution from earlier philosophy. Thundered Zhdanov: "The origin of Marxism was a real discovery, a revolution in philosophy." In the wake of Zhdanov's thunder, 46 of Aleksandrov's colleagues and coworkers, among them doubtless some who had written rave reviews, slavishly climbed the Zhdanov bandwagon with similar denunciations, and 36 more were awaiting...