What is the role of Russian philosophers in the revolution?

Answer 1

To get a feel of how Russian philosophers played a role in the revolution one can find in their contributions various responses to the intellectual atmosphere the five to seven decades prior.

Kant's rejection of metaphysics and Hegel's effective materialization of noumena continued the overall trend in philosophy: how it should specify the "problem at hand". (Which is historically considered a progressive process by the majority of cannonized "philosophers", a circular process by a growing number of philosopher and laymen alike especially with its popularization by Wittgenstein, and a regressive process by still others, for instance Al Gh - especially those at the far materialist or spiritualist poles of the spectrum. Big questions such as the meaning of life (axiology, ethics, existentialism...) and what can be held as primitive certainties (epistemology, ontology, logic...) are still the major themes even where the process is deemed ultimately circular or self-outmoding.)

Kant's project remained intact though the taste for treatise philosophy changed after Hegel. Especially with Schopenhauer's attack on Hegel and Nietzsche's on Kant, the next era would see a resistence to the "style" of a grand unification of knowledge inherent to "treatise" work. With the intent still intact the philosophical climate engendered and promoted a more dissecting approach which attacked in bursts and from multiple angles. This style continues today and is mostly due to the development of phenomenology and its own history.

As such, the gradual emancipation of reification from philosophy reached its peak with a host of new technical problems. Aside from economy-regulating changes which proceeded from influences by German or Prussian philosophers, there were questions on how to reformulate the social fabric - religion and society - were addressed by Russian philosophers which would radically influence the shape the revolution would take. Elsewhere, there were many contributions to the less grand and more technical attempts of breaking up the ambitious nature of philosophy into more manageable problems and branches.

Vladimir Solovyov would shape the positive vision for the development and "progress" history could take in his systematic and poetic revitalization of sobernost. Because he participated directly with the emerging philosophical trends of the time, namely positivism, he differs from previous sobornost writers.

The system's theoretic and utopian aim would continue brightly through the work of others such as Bogdanov. Both these artists would influence the art circles which fed the social circles which gave the revolution arms and legs.

Aside from Solovyov and Bogdanov were philosophers who shaped cosmism, which extends the lines of the sobornost beyond its modest revitalization for the purposes of responding to the "systematic lull" in philosophy and beyond the typical reaches of positivism and phenomenology. This creative leap had at times both a religious element, as with Nikolai Fyodorov, and a nonreligious sheerly scientific element, as with Vladimir Vernadsky. Either way, the futurist drive shows up clearly in the culture of the Revolution and its artifacts beyond the cybernetic and utopian streams. Altogether, philosophy in Russia was not simply about "following Marx" but was a complex response to the historical situation in philosophy after Hegel, on the one hand, and with the rise of positivism in Europe and America on the other.

Though this is a very generic overview, but the answer, nevertheless, has its advantages in being summarized in this way. Many today see the "collapse" of the Soviet Union and yet even outside Russia the strong continuance of communist philosophy (Badiou, Jameson, Zizek...), science-fiction, cybernetics, unification theories... as strong indicators that communism's still-birth was due primarily to the cult element and party politics of Lenin and Stalin. Kruschev's secret speech repudiating Stalin cult-worship is, like Gorbachev's and Putin's reforms, a step toward freeing the revolution from a cult-orientation and returning it back to its cultural roots and its philosophical originality. This has been a fairly gradual process successfully avoiding the rapid Westernerization that many other countries of the East experienced during modernization. Many academics in Russia understand this intuitively today and needs little explanation.