A Search for Dialectical Foundations of Science: from the History of Discussions among Soviet Scientists in the 1920s and 1930s

The article examines the discussions of the dialectification of Soviet science in the 1920s and 1930s. Initially, the spread of the ideology of dialectical materialism, identified with Marxism in Soviet Russia, was to a great extant promoted by G.V. Plekhanov's followers: D.B. Ryazanov, A.M. Deborin, and L.I. Axelrod. All of them held leading positions in the Soviet ideological apparatus. D.B. Ryazanov, historian, archivist, political figure, and first director of the Marx-Engels Institute, had an important role in promoting the works of the classics of Marxism. It was thanks to his enthusiasm that the copies of archival documents of German revolutionary actors and thinkers, including Friedrich Engels, were brought to Russia. In 1925, the world's first edition of ‘Dialectics of Nature’ by Engels was published in the USSR in two languages, German and Russian. ‘Dialectics of Nature’ became the focus of close attention for the representatives of both the humanities and natural science disciplines. Its release stirred up a debate between the ‘mechanists’ and the ‘dialecticians’. The mechanists, one of whose leaders was I.I. Stepanov, proposed a reductionist approach to explaining various complex biological processes from the standpoint of physics and chemistry. On the contrary, the leader of the dialecticians A.I. Deborin advocated a holistic approach to understanding the phenomena of nature and their irreducibility to mechanistic explanations. Natural scientists fell into both camps and the scientific dispute spread into the pages of the journal ‘Pod znamenem Marxisma’ (Under the Banner of Marxism).