Iosef Stalin fancied himself a great theorist of proletarian struggle. There was just one problem: he was extremely mediocre when it came to theoretical matters. Once, while he was attempting to theorize about economics at a meeting in the mid-1920s, the Marx-Engels Institute head David Riazanov interrupted: “Stop it, Koba! You’re mak­ing a fool of your­self. We all know the­ory isn’t ex­actly your strong suit.” Many years after this insult, in 1937, Stalin would have him executed. Riazanov was not the only widely-respected scholar who would fall victim to his wounded sense of pride, however.

Besides his lack of economic knowledge, Stalin was also notoriously deficient when it came to philosophy. To correct this deficiency, he engaged the services of a precocious young philosopher from within the party ranks, the Latvian Bolshevik Jānis Stens or Jan Sten. Despite being twenty-one years Stalin’s junior, Sten had already secured an editorial position on the premier theoretical journal of the Soviet Union, Under the Banner of Marxism, and risen to become deputy head of the Marx-Engels Institute under Riazanov. He had served with distinction in the Red Army during the Civil War.

Sten designed a biweekly course for his much older pupil consisting of both the classical German idealist tradition as well as later commentators. The main thinkers they went over were Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Ludwig Feuerbach along with Marxist theoreticians like Karl Kautsky and Georgii Plekhanov and the British Hegelian Francis Herbert Bradley. Unfortunately, Stalin had little aptitude for such instruction and would regularly ask, “What does this have to do with the class struggle or Marxism?”

Roy Medvedev — an old communist dissident, still alive at 98, though today he is a supporter of the Putin regime — recalled in his landmark text Let History Judge the testimony of the Old Bolshevik Evgenii Frolov:

Hardly anyone knew Stalin better than Sten. Stalin, as we know, received no systematic education. Without success Stalin struggled to understand philosoph­ical questions. And then, in 1925, he called in Jan Sten, one of the leading Marxist philosophers of that time, to direct his study of Hegelian dialectics. Sten drew up a program of study for Stalin and conscientiously, twice a week, dinned Hegelian wisdom into his illustrious pupil. (In those years dialectics was studied by a system that [Mikhail] Pokrovsky had worked out at the Institute of Red Professors, a parallel study of Marx’s Capital and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.) Often Sten told me in confidence about these lessons, about the difficulties he, as the teacher, was having because of his student’s inability to master Hegelian dialec­tics. Jan often dropped in to see me after a lesson with Stalin, in a depressed and gloomy state, and despite his naturally cheerful disposition, he found it difficult to regain his equilibrium. Sten was not only a leading philosopher but also a political activist, an outstanding member of the Leninist cohort of old Bolsheviks.

The meetings with Stalin, the conversations with him on philosophical matters, during which Jan would always bring up contemporary political problems, opened his eyes more and more to Stalin’s true nature, his striving for one-man rule, his crafty schemes and methods for putting them into effect… As early as 1928, in a small circle of his personal friends, Sten said: “Koba will do things that will put the trials of Dreyfus and of Beilis in the shade.” This was his answer to his comrades’ request for a prognosis of Stalin’s leadership over ten years’ time. Thus, Sten was not wrong either in his characterization of Stalin’s rule or in the time schedule for the realization of his bloody schemes.

Sten’s lessons with Stalin ended in 1928. Several years later he was expelled from the party for a year and exiled to Akmolinsk. In 1937 he was seized on the direct order of Stalin, who declared him one of the chiefs of the Menshevizing idealists. At the time the printer had just finished a volume of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia that contained a major article by Sten, “Dialectical Materialism.” The ordinary solution — and such problems were ordinary in those years — was to destroy the entire printing. But in this case the editors of the encyclopedia found a cheaper solution. Only one page of the whole printing was changed, the one with the signature of Jan Sten. “Dialectical Materialism” appeared over the name of M.B. Mitin, the future academician and editor in chief of Problems of Philosophy (Вопросы философии), thus adding to his list the one publication that is really interesting. On June 19, 1937, Sten was put to death in Lefortovo prison.

To be clear, Sten’s brand of Hegelianism was not the only one available to international Marxism in the period immediately following the October Revolution. In fact, his particular school of Hegelian Marxism stood in direct opposition to a version that I personally find much more convincing, that of Georg Lukács, Karl Korsch, Béla Fogarasi, and Jozsef Revai. For Sten belonged to the philosophical current led by the former Menshevik Abram Deborin, which also included representatives such as Nikolai Karev and Israel Vainshtein. But Stalinism would ultimately reject both possible Hegelianisms.

Lukács and Korsch had released their epochal works History and Class Consciousness and Marxism and Philosophy within months of each other in 1923. They would be denounced along two main fronts in the years that followed. Grigorii Zinoviev, the leader of the Comintern, began with a mostly ad hominem attack, remarking at the Fifth Congress: “Korsch is a professor [voices from the crowd: ‘Lukács is also a professor!’]… If we get a few more of these professors spinning out their Marxist theories, we shall be lost. We cannot tolerate such theoretical revisionism in our Communist International.”

Deborin and his lieutenants added philosophical weight to these denunciations, authoring full-length articles against Lukács and Korsch. The piece by Deborin, “Georg Lukács and His Criticism of Marxism” is fairly disappointing, mostly taking issue with Lukács’ passing criticisms of Engels as well as his incorporation of ideas from bourgeois theorists like Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Heinrich Rickert, and Henri Bergson. He does not seem to appreciate the fact that Lukács mainly brings up these figures in order to criticize them or ground their ideas in Marx’s concept of the commodity fetish.

Israel Vainshtein’s critique of “Georg Lukács and His Theory of ‘Reification’,” from 1924, is far more substantial. But Sten also contributed a polemic to this discussion in 1925, trying to connect Lukács’ supposed philosophical deviations to infantile political disorders of the sort described by Lenin:

In the atmosphere of these major tasks [for the party] and in the absence of deep-seated and extensive tradi­tions in the area of dialectical materialism in the Communist parties, a distorted and falsified Marxism begins to form in their ranks. The philo­sophical works of Lukács, Korsch, Fogarasi, and others will serve as examples of these distortions and diseased attitudes.

The philosophical structures of Lukács are undoubtedly rooted in a specific period in the development of the Communist parties. This philosophy, which represents an idealistic distortion of dialectical materialistic, Marxist philosophy, and in very many respects falls back on old-Hegelian idealism, reveals in certain of its theses a direct relation­ ship with the leftwing childhood diseases with which political practice is fraught. The process of development of self-consciousness in the work­ing class begins with Lukács and is derived from the objective laws of historical development. The same false notion of the interrelationship between economy and ideology… is found in the dialectical deviation of Lukács when he explains the history of the development of the work­ ing class.

The article which Lukács published in 1921 in the theoretical organ of the German Communist Party Die Internationale on the theme of “Spontaneity of the Masses and Party Activity” reveals with absolute clarity the relationship between Lukács’ philosophy and a subjectivist trend, that is, the left-wing childhood diseases in politics… we see how the false political deviation is reflected in philosophical terms.

It is true that some of Lukács’ earlier essays from 1919-1922, including “Spontaneity of the Masses and the Activity of the Party,” somewhat fall prey to the sort of ultraleftism Sten is describing. Lenin was particularly displeased with one article Lukács wrote on “The Question of Parliamentarism,” from 1920. Nevertheless, Lukács later remarked that even before Lenin made this criticism, he had already read Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder and come around to its arguments by 1921, before the publication of History and Class Consciousness:

My article [on parliamentarism] was completely misguided, and I abandoned its theses without hesitation. But I should add that I had read Lenin’s “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder before his critique of my own article, and I had already been wholly convinced by his arguments on the question of parliamentary participation there: so his criticism of my article did not change anything very much for me. I already knew it was wrong. You remember what Lenin said in “Left-Wing” Communism — that bourgeois parliaments were completely superseded in a world-historical sense, with the birth of the revolutionary organs of proletarian power, the soviets, but that this absolutely did not mean that they were superseded in an immediate political sense — in particular that the masses in the West did not believe in them. Therefore Communists had to work in them, as well as outside them .

You can read both of these earlier ultraleft pieces in the Tactics and Ethics collection, which also has some of his stuff from the end of the twenties. But it’s worth also checking out Lukács’ response to Deborin and his Hungarian equivalent, László Rudas, in his unpublished text Tailism and the Dialectic, which was only unearthed in a Moscow archive fifteen or so years ago. Their Lukács takes aim at what he believed was the Menshevik political logic behind Deborin’s approach. Ironically, this would be reminiscent of the charge eventually leveled against Deborin by Stalin (for much dumber reasons).

After the — largely Hungarian — Teutophone Hegelian Marxist current of Lukács, Korsch, et al. was defeated, the main opposition to Deborinite Hegelian Marxism was the so-called “mechanist” school led by Lyubov Akselrod, who had criticized Lenin, Bogdanov, and even Engels for their attachment to the dialectic. Near the end of 1920s, however, Stalin and his functionaries decided to split the difference philosophically (much as they had politically, between the Left and Right Oppositions). The meeting minutes from the political bureau of the Institute of Red Professors in December 1930 record:

STALIN: We have to turn upside down and dig over the whole pile of manure that has accumulated in philosophy and the natural sciences. Everything written by the Deborin group has to be smashed. Sten and Karen can be chucked out. Sten boasts a lot, but he’s just a pupil of Karev’s. Sten is a desperate sluggard. All he can do is talk. Karev’s got a swelled head and struts about like an inflated bladder. In my view, Deborin is a hopeless case, but he should remain as editor of [Under the Banner of Marxism] so we’ll have someone to beat. The editorial board will have two fronts. but we’ll have the majority.

QUESTION: Can one link the struggle over theory with the political deviations?

STALIN: Not only can one, but one absolutely must.

QUESTION: What about the “leftists”? You’ve dealt with the “rightists.”

STALIN: Formalism is coming out under leftist camouflage. It is serving up its dishes with leftist sauce. The young have a weakness of leftishness. And these gentlemen are good cooks.

QUESTION: What should the Institute concentrate on in the area of philosophy?

STALIN: To beat [Бить], that’s the main issue. To beat on all sides and where there hasn’t been been any beating before. The Deborinites regard Hegel as an icon. Plekhanov has to be unmasked. He always looked down on Lenin. Even Engels was not right about everything. There is a place in his commentary about growing into socialism; Bukharin tried to use it. It wouldn’t be a bad thing if we could implicate Engels somewhere in Bukharin’s writings.

Thus did Stalin attack his former tutor, along with the rest of the Deborinites. Mark Mitin, Stalin’s philosophical favorite, went on to upbraid Deborin and his followers in his 1934 textbook Dialectical Materialism as “Menshevizing idealists”:

In the face of reactionary mysticism appealing to Hegel, the harm that has been done on the ideological front of us, in the Soviet Union, is especially aggravated by a group of philosophers led by Abram Deborin who dragged Soviet philosophical thought from Marx and Lenin to Hegel. Despite the well-known achievements of this group of philosophers in the struggle against mechanism, this struggle cannot be considered satisfactory, since it was conducted from the wrong positions. Menshevizing idealists completely misguidedly solved the problem of studying Hegel’s dialectics, without being “materialistic” friends of Hegelian dialectics. If Western Neo-Hegelianism is a reactionary perversion of Hegel’s teaching, then Menshevizing idealism is a Hegelian revision of Marxism.

Deborin narrowly managed to survive the purges, living into the 1960s, but Sten and Karev were not so fortunate. Sten was shot in the summer of 1937 and Karev was executed the previous autumn. In the famous chapter on “Dialectical and Historical Materialism” from the 1938 Short Course, likely ghostwritten by Mitin, Stalin gave only the most perfunctory treatment of Hegel and dialectics. Interestingly, Lukács sympathized with Stalinist criticisms of the Deborinites, even after 1953 when he was no longer required to publicly reconcile himself to the cult of personality:

[I]n 1930, during my first extended stay in the Soviet Union, the so-called philosophical debate took place in which Stalin opposed Deborin and his school. Of course a number of the later features of Stalinism did manifest themselves in this debate, but for all that, Stalin defended an extremely important point of view which played a very positive role in my own development. For what he did was to launch an attack on the so-called Plekhanov orthodoxy which was so prominent in Russia at the time. He protested against the need to view Plekhanov as a great theoretician who provided the main mediating link with Marx. Stalin maintained that it was instead the Marx-Lenin tradition… which had to be considered valid.

Following the Second World War, the matter of Hegel’s relationship to Marxism was seen as more or less a closed book. Andrei Zhdanov, Stalin’s chief propagandist, summed up the general consensus of the Stalinized party in a June 1947 lecture “On Philosophy.” He reflected on the experience of Under the Banner of Marxism and the expulsion of the Deborin faction, warning against “a certain revival of scholasticism. From this point of view the dispute about Hegel that took place here appears strange… The question of Hegel was settled long ago. There is no reason whatsoever to pose it anew.”

Louis Althusser actually used Zhdanov’s line — “The question of Hegel was settled long ago” — as an epigraph to his 1950 essay, “The Return To Hegel: The Latest Word in Academic Revisionism,” a polemic against Jean Hyppolite and Jean Wahl. Writing to Jean Lacroix about the composition of this essay, Althusser explained that he “had forgotten Zhdanov. I happened to reread him two months ago: I found, in Zhdanov, the essence of my conclusions and a great deal more, formulated in much more solid, powerful terms.” This essay can be seen as presaging his later, more robust anti-Hegelianism.

Over and above the murder of his Hegel tutor, Jan Sten, Stalin’s and Stalinism’s denigration of the Hegelian dimensions of the Marxian dialectic cannot be denied. Even the Dengoid Stalinist philosopher, Domenico Losurdo, took issue with the portrayal of Hegel by Stalin and Zhdanov as a reactionary Prussian monarchist in his book Hegel and the Freedom of the Moderns. And Losurdo, a longtime apologist for the “black legend,” can hardly be suspected of unfairness on the matter. So it is curious to me to see latter-day Stalinists glossing over this antipathy in proclaiming their own fidelity to Hegel.

You can read some of Sten’s Russian essays here: Я.Э. СТЭН «СТАТЬИ И ВЫСТУПЛЕНИЯ ПО ФИЛОСОФИИ»