Interview with Sergey Horujy

Kristina Stoeckl

Alexander Michailowski

pp. 343-350

in: Andrey Maidansky, Vesa Oittinen (eds), Mikhail Lifshits, Studies in East European Thought 68 (4), 2016.

Abstract

AM: We are presently preparing, here at the Institute for Human Sciences, the translation of several essays by Bibikhin (2017). One of them is the essay “For Official Use Only” from the book Another Beginning (2003). In this essay, Bibikhin describes the mechanism of scholarly production in the context of the INION, the Institute for Social Sciences, during the late Soviet period. The essay starts with a somewhat mysterious phrase: “The authorities began to look for an alternative ideology to Marxism very early. Already in 1973, we knew that the military political strategists were planning to abandon Marxism and replace it with Orthodoxy as the ideological support of the Soviet army.” Could you say the same about yourself, namely, that you “knew”, at that time, that the Soviet nomenclature was conducting this exploration of alternatives to Marxism?