KYIV PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOL AND THE DESTRUCTION OF MARXISM-LENINISM AT T. G. SHEVCHENKO KYIV STATE UNIVERSITY (SECOND HALF OF THE 1960S – 1970S)
Authors:   Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Kyiv, Ukraine, VDOVYCHENKO Heorhii 
Published: December 2024

B a c k g r o u n d . Kyiv philosophical school of the second half of the 20th century was presented, first of all, by its creators in the 1960s, namely graduates of the Faculty of Philosophy of the said university and employees of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, headed by its director in 1962–1968, Academician of this Academy of Sciences P. Kopnin. It was under his leadership this school began and made a major contribution to the professional but censored revaluation and destruction of Marxism-Leninism in the Ukrainian SSR. Throughout the 1940s – 1980s, namely since the end of Stalinism to the end of Gorbachev's "perestroika" and the collapse of the USSR, three generations of the creators of this school critically rethought and destructured the Stalinist and other official paradigms of Marxism-Leninism. This problem in their scholarly works and courses of lectures on philosophical subjects was solved mainly by P. Kopnin's students and apologists, his colleagues at the institute and academicians of the said Academy S. Krymskyi, M. Popovych and M. Honcharenko, as well as their colleagues and students, for example A. Yermolenko, Y. Bystrycky, A. Loy, V. Malakhov and S. Proleiev.

The purpose of our article is to assess the contribution of the Kyiv philosophical school, namely graduates and professors of the Faculty of Philosophy of Taras Shevchenko Kyiv State University to the destruction of Marxist-Leninist philosophy both in the said university and in philosophical education, science and culture of the Ukrainian SSR since the second half of the 1960s till the end of the 1970s.

M e t h o d s . To study this problem, classical and modern methods of both philosophical and historical and philosophical analysis and other humanities were used. In addition to such principles of scientific knowledge as historicism, objectivity and consistency, the author also used historical and logical general methods. Together with the method of biographical analysis of the figures of the said school and the method of sociocultural analysis of the educational, scientific and socio-political processes in the second half of the 20th century in the Ukrainian SSR and the world, methods of comparative historical and structural and functional analysis of the Ukrainian philosophical progress of that time were also used.

R e s u l t s . Four main conditional stages of the process of destruction and crisis of the official paradigms of Marxism-Leninism in the Ukrainian SSR, carried out by the creators of the Kyiv philosophical school of the second half of the 20th century, are classified in our preliminary study of this topic in (Vdovychenko, 2023). In that article we systematically examined the first two of these stages for the first time: 1) the initial stage or origins of the critical revision of Stalin's version of Marxism-Leninism (late 1940s – 1950s); 2) the second stage or emergence of a systematic censored critical reassessment of this version and its official successors in the USSR from the Khrushchev "thaw" to the beginning of the "stagnation" (late 1950s – mid 1960s). This article begins the study of the two final stages of this process, namely the third one or the period of public criticism and destruction of a number of official versions of Marxism-Leninism by the sixties philosophers of the Ukrainian SSR (mid-1960s – mid-1980s). It was established that this period was the time of active involvement and, in fact, real integration of philosophical education, science and culture of the Ukrainian SSR into the European and world Postmodern philosophical process, thanks mainly to P. Kopnin and the entire Kyiv philosophical circle.

C o n c l u s i o n s . On the basis of rare publications by the participants of the events and the newest projects from the Ukrainian oral history of philosophy, the contribution of the three first generations of the Kyiv philosophical school of the second half of the 20th century to the neo- Marxist and already post-Marxist destruction of Marxism-Leninism during the era of "stagnation" has been systematically revealed for the first time. It was established, that the participation of P. Kopnin and a number of his colleagues from the Ukrainian SSR both in the World Philosophical Congresses since the late 1950s till the mid-1970s, primarily from the XII one in Venice (1958) to the XV in Varna (1973), as well as in many others international forums of these decades, led to serious ideological shifts in Ukrainian philosophy. This Europeanization of it led to a fruitful considering and elaboration by the Kyiv philosophical circle of that time ideas of neo-Marxist revisionism in the context of studies on German classical philosophy and modern European philosophy under the influence of the contemporary "linguistic turn" and "existential neo-Hegelianism". Relying on the neo-Marxist reassessment of Stalinism, the creators of the mentioned school, professors of the Faculty of Philosophy of T. G. Shevchenko Kyiv State University, first of all P. Kopnin and V. Shynkaruk, as it deans, introduced the newest standards of really Europeanized learning of a wide range of philosophical disciplines, in particular the history of foreign Modern and Postmodern philosophy.