Comrade Hegel: Absolute Spirit Goes East

When the Soviet state finally won the Civil War against its multiple external and internal enemies, it found itself in a difficult (almost impossible) economic and political situation. Theoretically unified around Plekhanov's interpretation of Marxism, Soviet leaders struggled to fit the new existing reality of the success of their revolution and the old philosophical debates about its ultimate theoretical justification. The role of Hegel (and his understanding of the philosophy of history and dialectics) and his connection to Marx and Lenin emerged as one of the most important theoretical aspects of the emerging Soviet school of philosophy. Initially engaged as part of the so-called " mechanists versus dialecticians " debate, Hegel's dialectical heritage slowly but surely came to mean the inevitability of history's movement away from capitalism toward socialism. By the time Stalin and his supporters succeeded in their struggle for power, this notion of history and its dialectics became prevalent and was finally codified in the peculiarly un-dialectical presentation in the infamous theoretical insertion in the Party's official history published in 1938. This section – " On dialectical and historical materialism " – written by Stalin himself, represented the final word in the long and still considerably understudied history of Hegel's adventures in the early Russian and Soviet Marxist tradition.